The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial IssueVarious
History
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue
Various
African Americans -- Social conditions -- To 1964; Civil rights movements; Martin Luther King, Jr., Day; United States -- History
With all their larger vision and deeper sensibility, these men have
usually been conservative, careful leaders. They have seldom been
agitators, have withstood the temptation to head the mob, and have
worked steadily and faithfully in a thousand communities in the South.
As teachers they have given the South a commendable system of city
schools and large numbers of private normal schools and academies.
Colored college-bred men have worked side by side with white college
graduates at Hampton; almost from the beginning the backbone of
Tuskegee's teaching force has been formed of graduates from Fisk and
Atlanta. And to-day the institute is filled with college graduates, from
the energetic wife of the principal down to the teacher of agriculture,
including nearly half of the executive council and a majority of the
heads of departments. In the professions, college men are slowly but
surely leavening the Negro church, are healing and preventing the
devastations of disease, and beginning to furnish legal protection for
the liberty and property of the toiling masses. All this is needful
work. Who would do it if Negroes did not? How could Negroes do it if
they were not trained carefully for it? If white people need colleges to
furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need
nothing of the sort?
If it be true that there are an appreciable number of Negro youth in the
land capable by character and talent to receive that higher training,
the end of which is culture, and if the two and a half thousand who
have had something of this training in the past have in the main proved
themselves useful to their race and generation, the question then
comes, What place in the future development of the South might the
Negro college and college-bred man to occupy? That the present social
separation and acute race sensitiveness must eventually yield to the
influences of culture as the South grows civilized is clear. But such
transformation calls for singular wisdom and patience. If, while the
healing of this vast sore is progressing, the races are to live for
many years side by side, united in economic effort, obeying a common
government, sensitive to mutual thought and feeling, yet subtly and
silently separate in many matters of deeper human intimacy--if this
unusual and dangerous development is to progress amid peace and order,
mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call for social surgery
at once the delicatest and nicest in modern history. It will demand
broad-minded, upright men both white and black, and in its final
accomplishment American civilization will triumph. So far as white men
are concerned, this fact is to-day being recognized in the South, and a
happy renaissance of university education seems imminent. But the very
voices that cry Hail! to this good work are, strange to relate, largely
silent or antagonistic to the higher education of the Negro.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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