of the Negro race.' Mr. Patterson would have Congress apportion funds to the states on the basis of illiteracy.

As for the kind of education needed by the Negro, Mr. Patterson favors the public common schools, side by side with manual training of the sort given at Hampton and Tuskegee. He says that the higher education of the Negro at the present time "seems like an attempt to put on the roof before the work is begun on the foundation." He would abolish all but a few of the so-called Negro colleges and universities.2

Ex-President Taft has been very greatly interested in Negro education and he is president of the Hampton Institute board of trustees. In a bulletin of the Institute he makes the following statements: "The result has demonstrated that in the principles that Armstrong taught is to be found the solution of our race problem in this country. Here is to be found the explanation of the marvelous progress which the statistics show has been made by the negro race in the half century of 'up from slavery.' Among the chief factors in this, so far as it represents real progress of the negro, are to be counted Samuel C. Armstrong, Hollis B. Frissell, and the greatest and most distinguished graduate of Hampton, the founder of Tuskegee, that great American, Dr. Booker T. Washington.

"The Hampton of to-day in material growth is far beyond what Armstrong left it. There is a great plant on an inlet of Chesapeake Bay and there is a handsome endowment, not large enough for all the purposes of the institution, but one far beyond the dreams of the founder.

"The influence of Hampton upon its students is one of the most striking instances of personal inspiration that the writer has ever seen. Each year a company of men and women deeply interested in the cause of negro education and uplift meet at Hampton's commencement and drink into their souls the spirit that the atmosphere and the environment and the attitude of the students and faculty give.

"Hampton is a place for pessimists to visit that they may be cured of their unhappy state of mind. It is a place for materialists to go that their hearts may be opened and that they may be taught the value of unselfish help to others in securing happiness for the helper. It is a place for statesmen to visit in order that there may be revealed to them a way of creating citizens who shall strengthen a State. It is a place 'Patterson, The Negro and His Needs, p. 197.

'Ibid., p. 199.

for him who would seek evidence of the great moral returns to this country from the sacrifices of the Civil War to find them at Hampton in palpable form. It is a place for the southern white man, anxious for the promotion of his section of the country, to go that he may realize, as so many of his fellows now do, how essential and how possible it is to make his black fellow citizens of the fair South a source of profit, of peace, of law and order, and of general community happiness.

"Upon the southern white man depends the solution of the race problem, and one of the hopeful signs is his growing interest in the method of solving it at Hampton and Tuskegee and the other great negro educational institutions of the South."

A. H. Merriam, another Northern man, also regards education as a proper solution of the Negro problem.

"The interests at stake," says he, "are common to us all. The backlying cause of the trouble,-slavery and its accompaniments-was in a sense our common responsibility; we all ought to have united to get rid of it peaceably, and the North ought to have paid its share. For this dereliction the South has paid a terrible price. The North, too, suffered woefully, yet in far less measure. Would it not be the part of patriotism and statesmanship of wisdom and good will-that all should now take some share in lifting the load which weighs heaviest on the South, but hurts us all? . . . The South is carrying more than its share of national expense, and without complaint. Our tariff system presses far heavier on the agricultural South than on the manufacturing North. Of our payment of pensions, running up to $130,000,000.00 a year, the South bears its proportion, though it is paid to men for fighting against her, and the South makes no remonstrance. Is it not simple justice, is it not a matter of national conscience and honor, that the whole nation should help her in educating the future citizens of the republic?" 3

William H. H. Hart, a quadroon lawyer and philanthropist of Washington, D. C., agrees with the views of Merriam. "The great pity of it all," remarks Hart, "is that the South has not the means to provide school facilities which shall approach in completeness those of the East and the great West. The war did two terrible things to the South. It exhausted its resources, and it destroyed its most promising manhood. Poverty retards progress, and poverty enforces and continues the illiteracy of the South. Senator Blair was the one statesman since Lin'Merriam, The Negro and the Nation, p. 406.

coln who proposed an adequate and certain means of relief which should put the South on an equal footing with the rest of the country.

"Our institutions demand the education of the masses, and the whole country must, in the nature of things, provide the common school for the great ignorant masses of the colored population in the South. It is unfair to expect the whites of the Southern States to bear the entire burden." 4

Quoted by Patterson, op. cit., p. 172.

CHAPTER 65

DIFFERENT NEGRO POINTS OF VIEW

Interest in Social Equality and in Political Measures among Northern NegroesIdeas of DuBois and Booker Washington Contrasted-Denunciation of Roosevelt and Harding by Northern Negroes for Their Remarks on the Race Problem-Evidence That the Negroes Are Losing Ground Because of Their Radical Leadership

IN reference to nearly everything which concerns the welfare of their race, the Negroes of our country are divided into two opposing camps. One group seeks the interest of their race through law enforcement, and the enactment of more legislation designed to protect the Negroes against unfair discriminations, and its general attitude towards the whites, especially the Southern whites, is one of antagonism. The other seeks the interest of their race through the elevation of its economic, educational, and moral status, with the view of preparing it for the exercise of whatever rights and privileges belong to free men. And this latter group, in all of its policies, seeks a better understanding and coöperation between the races.

The Negroes of the first group are generally mulattoes who reside in the Northern states where there are relatively few pure Negroes. They do not feel at home with the blacks, and, unable to find a place among the whites, they have a constricted and unsatisfying social life which causes them to feel isolated, lonely, and sometimes bitter. Being generally better educated than the mass of Negroes, they all aspire to leadership, but there are few careers open to them in the line of service to their own race, owing to the smallness of the Negro population. They find their most inviting field in politics or in journalism. The business of corralling the Negro vote is a fascinating one, and offers prospects of appointment to a job under the national government, or some city government. As editors of newspapers, they all aspire to be spokesman for the mass of Negroes in both sections of our country. But they are handicapped as leaders by lack of contact and familiarity with the darker mass of their race, and they are apt to emphasize phases of the Negro problem which are of particular interest to the mulatto

only. The question they are more interested in than any other is that of social equality, and their main efforts are directed to the abolition of all laws or arrangements which would prevent the free intermixture of the whites and blacks in schools, vehicles of transportation, hotels, restaurants, theaters, parks, etcetera, and to building up a public sentiment which would do away with every form of discrimination on account of color. They assume that the Negro is equal to the white man, and that whatever interferes with the free intermingling of the two races is merely the result of narrow prejudice. They look with disfavor on any author who makes a plea for any kind of racial integrity. A recent reviewer in the Journal of Negro History refers to "the idea of racial integrity" as "the fundamental cause of race hate." "" 1

The other group of Negroes are residents of the Southern states in which there are large masses of their race. The leaders among them are largely mulattoes, but include also a number of men of rather dark complexion. The Southern mulattoes generally find a satisfying social life among their own people, and consequently have no craving for social intermixture with the whites. They care nothing for what is called "social equality," and do not understand why anybody wants to discuss it. They know intimately the characteristics and conditions. of the mass of their people, and they realize that the greatest need of the race is a rise in its level of culture through advancement in industry, education, and morals.

They are decidedly interested in politics, and aggressive in their ** demands for justice before the law and in the courts, but they emphasize duties and responsibilities, and economic and moral efficiency more than civil rights, and believe that the surest means of acquiring any right is by demonstrating one's fitness to exercise it. The Southern Negro leaders generally feel that the fate of the blacks and the whites is indissolubly bound together, and they therefore seek friendly relations and coöperation with the whites.

The mulatto leaders of the North, knowing little of the Southern → Negro and less of the Southern white man, do not understand why a Southern Negro can feel friendly toward the Southern white man. They therefore assume that the popularity of a Southern Negro leader among white people must be due to a truculent spirit, or to hypocritical diplomacy. One of the chief objections they raised against Booker Washington was his popularity with the Southern whites. He was ac1 Jan., 1925, p. 103.