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EDITORIAL 113


On the boards which control the administration of funds for the colored public schools the colored race must be represented. They must have a voice in their own education.


PHILANTHROPY.

THE Negro race in America owes a mighty debt, first, to that army of teachers that followed the emancipating hosts of the Civil War and taught the colored people until they were able in a measure to teach themselves; secondly, to the many millions of people, some rich and some poor, who now for a half-century have been giving monies to support Negro education. It is not strange that the time is approaching and practically is upon us when the stream of financial help from this source is beginning to cease. We must frankly face the prospect that after the war when new calls for help and rehabilitation pour in from all sides and ask aid and succor from an impoverished world that the flow of Northern wealth to Southern colored schools will definitely diminish.

This is natural. No system of higher education for twelve million people can expect to be supported indefinitely by charity. If turning from individual donors we look to the great educational boards, foundations and endowments there is little to hope for. For the most part these foundations are either such as are hard-pressed for funds, as in the case of the church boards, or have ideas with regard to the education of Negroes with which thinking Negroes do not agree.

What, then, is the future of higher education among Negroes to be? Three universities Howard, Fisk and Lincoln, are probably upon an the assured basis; the last two by reason of small endowments, the first because the Negro vote in the United States will probably insure continued appropriations by Congress. Three universities however, are ridiculously inadequate. We may then turn to those colleges under the control of the various denominational boards. - The Congregationalists can, if they wish, use enough of their endowment funds to support Talladega and Straight as higher institutions, and they may do so. The colored constituency of the Methodist Episcopal Church will probably compel the maintenance at a fair state of efficiency of some schools like Claflin, Bennett and Clark. The Baptists are in a more debatable condition. Their Negro constituency has for the most part withdrawn to itself and is supporting its own schools, leaving white Baptists with a small Negro constituency to support schools like Morehouse, Shaw and Virginia Union.


SELF-HELP.

NEGRO universities and schools of higher training have got to be supported by Negroes or, for the most part, they will not be supported at all. If we black folk want college training for our children, we have got to furnish it out of our own pockets. This is a harsh conclusion and in many respects an unfair burden. If men were wise and if sociology were a science, it would be easy for Negroes to show the people of the United States that the safest and greatest investment that this country could make of a thousand millions of dollars during the next decade would be the establishment of a series of Negro universities and higher technical schools throughout the United States. But the nation does not see it and it will not see it for one hundred years. Human beings today have been educated to the point where they recognize the need of philanthropy for the hungry, the cripple, the grossly ignorant. Many have been educated also to see the just demand of philanthropy for the diseased, the weak and the half-trained. Beyond