Alexander Crummell: An Apostle of Negro Culture / The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 20

by William Henry Ferris

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.

At the same time, they encouraged the Negro churches and looked with favor upon laboring men and washerwomen using their hard earned savings to erect costly churches. Why did they look cross-eyed at and frown at the higher education of the Negro, which they said made him impractical, while they smiled and looked with satisfaction at his religion, which they didn’t take seriously, but regarded as a dope? Why did they emphasize education and minimize religion for white men, and on the other hand minimize education and emphasize religion for black men? Why did they set up Yale and Harvard Universities as the white’s ideal of education and Hampton and Tuskegee as the colored man’s ideal?

These Bourbons of the south and their northern sympathizers had a definite propaganda and programme regarding the Negro. Their plan was to reduce the colored race to a race of hewers of wood and drawers of water, to disfranchise the Negro, run him out of Congress and lucrative political jobs in the south, to jim-crow him and segregate him. They knew that religion would act as a narcotic and opiate and that it would keep his eyes and mind centered upon the golden streets, jeweled pavements, sapphire walls and white-robed angels of the New Jerusalem, while they were robbing him of the civil and political rights which were won on the battlefields of the Civil War and guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.

They knew that to educate him would be to open his eyes, to cause him to think and to prevent his being camouflaged. They knew that to educate him would be to make him dissatisfied with his lot at the bottom of the ladder. They knew that to educate him would introduce the leaven of divine discontent into his being. They knew that to educate him would cause him to aspire to something higher than hard labor or menial service. They knew that to educate him would cause him to know that robbing him of the ballot was reducing him to a pariah in American life and society and making him a political outcast. They knew that to educate the Negro would cause him to know that when he was being jim-crowed and segregated, a caste system based on the color of the skin was being established in America. In a word, those Americans who desired to rob the Negro of the fruits of the Civil War and to reduce him as far as possible to his previous status as a slave, knew that to educate the Negro was to open his eyes to the fact that the restrictions which they were trying to impose upon him were giving him a social, civil, political and economic status which was lower than that of the illiterate emigrant from Europe, lower than that of the Japanese, Chinese, Hindoo, Indian and Filipino. In a word, they knew that to educate the Negro would open his eyes to the fact that the color of his skin was a mark of shame and a badge of dishonor and that a caste prejudice based upon color, was contrary to the spirit of Christianity and to the democratic principles underlying this government. In a word, they knew that it would be more difficult for them to carry out their programme with the Negro educated. And these are the reasons why twenty years ago, it was regarded as unwise and dangerous to give the Negro any higher education above the three R’s and a training in the trades. And most of the leaders of the Negro race were asleep at the switch twenty years ago. They eagerly swallowed the sugar-coated and chocolate-coated pills. They took the medicine which their Anglo-Saxon friends offered because it was honeyed and sugared with a few fat jobs and contributions to churches and schools. And while they slept, as Samson slept on the lap of Delilah, they were shorn of their political and civil locks, and awoke one bright morning to find that their strength was gone.

It was a rude awakening that they experienced in the summer of 1917, when the edict went forth that all American citizens, black as well as white men, were subject to the selective draft. It was a rude awakening that they experienced, when they discovered that their sons must cross the ocean and give their lives to bring a freedom to war-ridden Europe, which was denied their race in this country. It was a rude awakening that they experienced when they realized that they who only experienced partial citizenship in this country were called upon to make the same sacrifice in blood and treasure as their fairer-skinned brothers, who had experienced the full blessings of citizenship.

A Baptist preacher whom I met in St. Louis a year ago voiced the thought of the entire colored race when he said, “Ferris, what a mighty big price we have to pay for a little freedom.”

It was a rude awakening, when Hog Island was calling for riveters and the Remington Company at Eddystone for machinists, and yet would turn down colored men who were capable. It was a rude awakening, when colored men and women who passed the Civil Service in Washington, D. C., during war times and were certified, were turned down because of their color. It was a rude awakening, when colored soldiers could fight and die side by side with white soldiers in France, and yet couldn’t visit the same service camps in America. And it was a still ruder awakening, when the Y. M. C. A. carried color prejudice to France where it had never existed before and attempted to jim-crow and segregate the very colored soldiers who were fighting to save France and to make the world safe for democracy.

Such was the state of the American mind twenty-two years, when Dr. Alexander Crummell gathered his colored friends around him and formed the Academy. The same reason that led the American mind to discountenance the Negro’s higher aspirations and strivings and longings caused Dr. Crummell to encourage them. He realized that living in the same country with the American white man, facing the same problems and conditions, the Negro needed the same kind of education and training that the white man needed, or he would lag hopelessly behind in the race of life. General Armstrong once triumphantly told a class of colored students at Hampton, “Hampton will give you enough education to cope with any colored men you may meet.” But Dr. Alexander Crummell saw deeper. He saw that the Negro needed also an education that would enable him to cope on equal intellectual terms with any white men that he might meet. For that reason the Negro needed to dip into literature, history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, sciences, anthropology and ethnology; needed in a word to be kept in touch with the trend of modern science and the tendencies of modern thought.

Dr. Crummell was right. If there ever was a time in the Negro’s history when he needed trained and well-equipped leadership, it is now, when the recent world war has brought about a new earth, when new problems affecting Europe, America and Africa are pressing for solution, and when a readjustment of social, political and industrial conditions will be made, not only in Europe and Africa but in America. If there was ever a time in the Negro’s history when he needed trained and well-equipped leadership, it is now when tens of thousands of black Africans and black Americans have demonstrated on scores of bloodstained battlefields in France that heroism can wear a sable hue and be clothed in ebony; when the American Negro proved his patriotism and loyalty by subscribing to the Liberty Loan, the War Chest, War Savings Stamps and by Red Cross service, and when by reason of his helping to lay low the Prussian menace to civilization, he has established his title clear to recognition and respectful consideration.