DOES THE HIGHER EDUCATION LEAD AWAY FROM THE RACE?
It is often charged that the higher education lifts the Negro above the needs of his race. The thousands of graduates of Negro Schools and Colleges all over the land are a living refutation of this charge. After the mind has been stored with knowledge it is transmitted to the place where the need is greatest and the call is loudest, and transmuted into whatever mode of energy may be necessary to accomplish the imposed task.
The issues involved in the race question are as intricate in their relations and far reaching in their consequences as any that have ever taxed human wisdom for solution. No one can be too learned or too profound in whose hands are entrusted the temporal and eternal destiny of a human soul. Even if the educated Negro desired to flee from his race, he soon learns by bitter experience that he will be thrown back upon himself by the expulsive power of prejudice. He soon learns that the Newtonian formula has a social application: “The force of attraction varies directly as the mass.”
A CONCRETE ILLUSTRATION.
But Wisdom is justified of her children. As an illustration of the value of the higher education of the Negro race, I point to Howard University, which is the largest and best equipped institution of its class. The establishment and maintenance of this institution during the past 35 years has cost between two and three millions of dollars. As returns on this investment it has sent into the world 200 ministers of the Gospel, 700 physicians, pharmacists and dentists, 300 lawyers, and 600 persons with a general academic and collegiate training, together with thousands of some time pupils who have shared the partial benefits of its courses. These graduates and some time pupils are to be found in every country and district where the Negro population resides and are filling places of usefulness, honor and distinction, as well as performing works of mercy and sacrificial service. They serve as inspiration and stimulus, quickening the dormant energies of the people and urging them to loftier ideals and nobler modes of life. It devolves upon the complainant to present some plan by which a like sum of money, in a like space of time, can be spent upon an institution of whatever designation so as to produce a more wholesome and more wide-spread effect upon the general social uplift.