And the whole slavery debate hinged on the question of the humanity of the Negro, hinged upon the question as to whether he possessed the intellectual, ethical, aesthetical and religious potentialities and possibilities which white men possessed, hinged upon the question as to whether the Negro did or did not possess a soul. The South said that the Negro was a beast and not a man, and was not capable of intellectual or moral improvement. In Georgia and other states, they took particular pains to see that the Negro had no chance or opportunity for mental improvement. In Georgia they would fine and imprison a white man and whip and imprison a colored man who was caught teaching a slave to read and write. The great Calhoun said that "The Negro race was so inferior that it had never produced a single individual who could conjugate a Greek verb." Dr. Crummell in his paper before the American Negro Academy upon "The Attitude of the American Mind Towards the Negro Intellect," wittily said that Calhoun must have expected Greek verbs to grow in Negro brains by some process of spontaneous generation, as he never had tried the experiment of putting a Greek grammar in the hands of a Negro student. But ere long arose Dr. Blyden, the linguist and Arabic scholar; Prof. Scarborough, who wrote a Greek text book and "The Bird of Aristophanes" and the "Thematic Vowel in the Greek Verb;" Dr. Grimke, the theologian; Prof. Kelly Miller, the mathematician, arose. Colored students of Harvard like Greener, Grimke, DuBois, Trotter, Stewart, Bruce, Hill and Locke, and Bouchet, McGuinn, Faduma, Baker, Crawford and Pickens of Yale arose, who demonstrated every kind of intellectual capacity. Then Trumbull of Brown, Forbes and Lewis of Amherst, Wright of the University of Pennsylvania, and Hoffman and Wilkinson of Ann Arbor University, also won honors. Dr. Daniel Williams distinguished himself as a surgeon, Dunbar as a poet, Chestnut as a novelist, Tanner as an artist, and Coleridge Taylor as a musician. So in the days when the American Negro Academy came into existence, the Bourbons of the south and their northern sympathizers realized that the Negro had achieved distinction in intellectual fields, where they said he would be like fish out of water. So then they changed their tack. They then said that the Negro could be educated, but education made him "a builder of air castles," in the words of their colored spokesman, and made him useless to his own people. They barred the educated Negro from employment in keeping with his natural tastes and aptitudes and previous training and inclination, and then said that he couldn't make a living. They said the Negro was mentally inferior to the Anglo-Saxons and then reduced the curriculum in the state colleges and high schools to keep him mentally inferior.