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Front Matter
Title Page and Credits
The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBOIS

A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century

International Publishers

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First Edition

Sixth Printing, 1979

Dedicated to

My Great Grandfather: James Du Bois

My Grandfather: Alexander Du Bois

My Parents: Alfred Du Bois and Mary Burghardt

My Children: Burghardt Gomer Du Bois

Yolande Du Bois

David Graham Du Bois

My Granddaughter: Du Bois McFarlane

SBN (cloth) 7178-0235-3; (paperback) 7178-0234-5

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-14103

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Editor's Preface
Relatively rare are those whose autobiographies are published; very rare are those who live so long and so consequentially that two autobiographies see the printed page. But surely a rarity of rarities -- if not quite unique in literature -- is one to whom it is given to produce three autobiographies and have all three published.

It is this rarity that the reader now holds. In his 50th year -- 1918-1919 -- Dr. Du Bois wrote Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, copyrighted in 1920 and published in 1921 by Harcourt, Brace; in his 70th year -- 1938-1939 -- he wrote Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, issued in 1940 by the same publisher. And in his 90th year -- 1958-1959 -- he wrote the basic draft (somewhat revised by him in 1960) of this present book. The manuscript was carried by the Doctor to Ghana late in 1961 and published, in somewhat shortened versions, in 1964 and 1965, in China, the USSR, and the German Democratic Republic. Rescued from Accra, after the military coup of early 1966, the manuscript is now published for the first time in the language of its composition and in full. It is published as Dr. Du Bois wrote it; changes have been few and only of a technical nature -- correcting a date, completing a name, and the like.

In the "Apology," introducing his Dusk of Dawn, Dr. Du Bois wrote, "in my own experience, autobiographies have had little lure"; hence, that book was, as its subtitle indicated, not so much a conventional autobiography as an essay on the concept of race as illuminated by his own life. And his earlier Darkwater tried, through impressionistic essays and impassioned poetry, to lift the veil and illuminate life within and without from that vantage point.

The present volume is quite different from the other two not only because of its additional two-decade span, and the significantly altered outlook of its author, but also because

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in it -- unlike the others -- he seeks, as he writes, "to review my life as frankly and fully as I can." Of course, with the directness and honesty which so decisively characterized him, he reminds the reader of this book of the intense subjectivity that inevitably permeates autobiography; hence, he writes, he offers this account of his life as he understood it and as he "would like others to believe" it to have been.

Certainly, while Dr. Du Bois was deep in his ninth decade when he died, longevity was the least remarkable feature of this Promethean life. As editor, author, lecturer, scholar, organizer, inspirer, and fighter, he was among the most consequential figures of the century. Necessarily, therefore, the full and final accounting of that life and his times -- by the man who lived it and experienced them -- becomes an indispensable volume for all to whom Life itself has any meaning.

The editor provided occasional translations in square brackets in the text, as well as the reference notes, selected bibliography, and biographical calendar to be found in the appendices of the book.

October, 1967

Herbert Aptheker

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Contents
Editor's Preface 5

PART ONE I. My 15th Trip Abroad 11
II. Western Europe 14
III. The Pawned Peoples 22
IV. The Soviet Union 29
V. China 44
INTERLUDE: Communism 57

PART TWO VI. My Birth and Family 61
VII. Boyhood in Great Barrington 78
VIII. I Go South 101
IX. Harvard in the Last Decades of the 19th Century 132
X. Europe 1892-1894 154
XI. Wilberforce 183
XII. University of Pennsylvania 194
XIII. Atlanta University 205
XIV. The Niagara Movement 236
XV. The NAACP 254
XVI. My Character 277
XVII. The Depression 289
XVIII. New Deal for Negroes 308
XIX. I Return to the NAACP 326

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PART THREE XX. Work for Peace 343
XXI. An Indicted Criminal 361
XXII. The Trial 380
XXIII. My Tenth Decade 396
POSTLUDE 409

APPENDICES Reference Notes 427
Selected Bibliography of Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois 431
A Calendar of the Public Life of W. E. B. Du Bois 438
Index 441

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Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois
Part One
Chapter I: My 15th Trip Abroad
August 8 was a day of warm and beautiful sunshine, and many friends with flowers and wine were at the dock to bid me and my wife goodbye. For the 15th time I was going abroad. I felt like a released prisoner, because since 1951, I had been refused a passport by my government, on the excuse that it was not considered to be "to the best interests of the United States" that I go abroad. It assumed that if I did, I would probably criticize the United States for its attitude toward American Negroes. This was certainly true.

Later the State Department changed its reasons, and refused to issue a passport unless I declared in writing that I was not a member of the Communist Party. As a matter of fact, I was not a member of that party. Yet I refused to make any statement on the ground that the government had no legal right to question me concerning my political beliefs.

Then unexpectedly the Supreme Court of the United states handed down a decision in 1958 which said that "Congress had never given the Department of State any authority to demand a political affidavit as prerequisite to issuing a passport." The Department of State in July issued passports to several persons who previously had been denied the right to travel, including Paul Robeson and his wife, and me and my wife, Shirley Graham. Paul and his wife went abroad immediately, and we prepared to follow in September, but since the President of the United States rushed a special message to Congress asking for new legislation, we hurried and sailed early in August.

The sea was calm throughout the trip. The ship was well arranged; although the air conditioning on our inside cabin did not function well. The passengers were rather more courteous that I expect Americans to be, and we had pleasant social relationships with the Rumanian ambassador to the United Nations and his family.

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On arriving in London, our luggage was subjected to more careful examination than we have ever been used to, but finally we were courteously released, and with our good friend Cedric Belfrage drove from Southampton to London, through New Forest, and near Bedales, where my daughter attended high school. We stopped three weeks in Paul Robeson's apartment while he was singing in Moscow.

During August and September, I saw something of Britain, Holland and France; then in the Fall and early Winter, I lived in the Soviet Union, resting a part of the time in a sanatorium. In the Winter and Spring I was three months in China, and then returned to Moscow for May Day. I visited the tenth session of the World Council of Peace in Stockholm, and finally stayed a month in England. On July 1, 1959, I came home.

I mention this trip in some detail because it was one of the most important trips that I had ever taken, and had wide influence on my thought. To explain this influence, my Soliloquy becomes an autobiography. Autobiographies do not form indisputable authorities. They are always incomplete, and often unreliable. Eager as I am to put down the truth, there are difficulties; memory fails especially in small details, so that it becomes finally but a theory of my life, with much forgotten and misconceived, with valuable testimony but often less than absolutely true, despite my intention to be frank and fair.

Who and what is this I, which in the last year looked on a torn world and tried to judge it? Prejudiced I certainly am by my twisted life; by the way in which I have been treated by my fellows; by what I myself have thought and done. I have passed through changes by reason of my growth and willing; by my surroundings without; by knowledge and ignorance. What I think of myself, now and in the past, furnishes no certain document proving what I really am. Mostly my life today is a mass of memories with vast omissions, matters which are forgotten accidentally or by deep design.

Forty years ago when at the age of 50, I first essayed a

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brief autobiography, my memories furnished many details and conclusions which now disappear or return as quite strange. There are of course some fixed documents, like that memorandum on my 25th birthday, some letters to my mother, and that priceless letter to former President Hayes. In Dusk of Dawn I wrote much about my life as I saw it at the age of 70, which differs much from what I think at the age of 91. One must then see these varying views as contradictions to truth, and not as final and complete authority. This book then is the Soliloquy of an old man on what he dreams his life has been as he sees it slowly drifting away; and what he would like others to believe.

The century in which was mine to live is now in its last decade. In all probability I shall not finish it, since life seldom goes by logical completeness, but I shall be near enough its end to speak with a certain sense of unity. In all my plans and dreaming, I do not remember ever thinking of a long life. The people of my family on both sides usually reached the 70's, but I know none of 90; and my immediate parents died in their 50's.

I remember writing a sort of semi-biography on my 50th birthday in my book called Darkwater. I was not thinking of immediate death, but I was sure that by far the largest part of my life had passed. Indeed, it characterized my day that most men thought their work would be about done at 60 and they would be dead or practically dead at 70.

Yet, I had no thought of dying. At 65 I had accepted a life-time job at Atlanta University without a moment's pause to ask what was to happen when I was judged too old to work. That neglect to worry about my old age was peculiar and contradicted my complete surroundings. In my own family old folk found a home with relatives; but in the surrounding community the first worry of the average citizen was for provision for his old age. Personally this problem never bothered me until suddenly at 75 I was retired from work with practically no savings, and no pension in view sufficient to support me. Failure to give attention to this part of my future was due to no laziness or neglect. I was eager to work and work continuously.

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Chapter II: Western Europe
I know Western Europe through a repeated series of visits covering the years 1892 until the present. I knew Germany as a student and traveler before the world wars, and as a traveler since. I had lived at times in various places in England and Scotland, in France, and in Holland and Belgium. I have been more briefly in Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Portugal; in Greece, Turkey and in the old Austro-Hungarian empire. During my earlier visits, Europe seemed very much like America, but older, with a longer history, and with inspiring memories of the past, in buildings and monuments, and in cultural differences.

This time I noticed more because here was a group of countries which had been through the terrible experiences of world war. Revolution had shaken the world, and now mankind in this center of Western civilization was trying to rebuild itself into something new. I, on the other hand, represented something old which had projected itself into a new America, and clothed in slavery and poverty had begun a modern race problem. I looked therefore upon this world, as I had looked before, as a member of the darker race, which had suffered from the oppression of the white European world.

As a student, I had learned of the struggle between races; of the way in which the slave trade had been stopped, slavery abolished, colonial imperialism begun, until finally in the 20th century the nations of Europe had fallen to fighting each other over the problem as to who should dominate Asia and Africa. I came to Europe to learn if now European imperialism was about to disappear, and what hope we had of a future. Was a world of peace and racial equality about to emerge?

I was disappointed. London was a clean and comfortable city, with parks, trees and flowers. England was still a leading

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nation. Holland was clean and respectable; yet both these nations frightened me. I knew the restraint and correct manners of the British; their excellent newspapers, studious magazines and thoughtful books. But today, in streets and gatherings, in shops and factories, there lurked a great fear. The British empire was falling. The domination which Englishmen had so long exercised over the world was approaching an end, and nothing could stop it; and this the British knew. They were leaning with increased dependence on the wealth and technique of the United States, which could be seen in the vast American investment in buildings and business, and in the increasing, even if sullen, respect for American manners and opinion.

I knew that in the past, to put the matter bluntly and simply, the British empire had built its prosperity on cheap labor, which the colored peoples of the world were forced to do, and on lands and materials which had been seized without just compensation by the British throughout the world. Granted that in the past the British had been morally no worse in their exploitation of labor and wealth than other peoples, and had even worked more efficiently and scientifically than most, and thus had become more wealthy and powerful; nevertheless, the terrible result of all this had been world war, universal murder and destruction, maiming and disease to an extent that made many men despair of the future.

I came therefore to Europe in 1958, to try to learn if possible how far the lessons of the past were guiding the future, and what the hope of that future was. I came to the conclusion that the people of Britain were determined to proceed on the whole along the same paths which they had followed in the past -- that they were determined to maintain their comforts and civilization by using cheap labor and raw materials, seized without rightful compensation, and to change their treatment of other people only if this required no essential yielding of comfort or even luxury.

This system had been in use during the last half of the 19th century. It worked so well that in the 20th century

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Britain and France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the Netherlands and Belgium fought each other in terrible wars for a redivision of the spoils of colonial exploitation. This fighting complicated the situation by increasing the demands of home labor for higher wages and by arousing the consciousness of the colonial peoples who were brought in to assist in the fighting, and who began to demand increased income for work, larger use of land, and even political power. The second half of the century faced a free India and China; a struggling Indonesia; growing demand for autonomy all over the rest of Asia and Africa; with repercussions in South and Central America, and the islands of the sea.

Leading and encouraging this revolt and unrest, is Russia, transformed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which denies the right of private ownership of capital, the profit motive in industry, and colonial imperialism.

Girding itself against this is the United States of America, which arose 200 years ago as a free-thinking democracy, with limitless land and resources; but which sank into dependence on slave labor, transformed itself into a vast center of capital monopolized by closed corporations, and now seeks to replace the British empire by stopping socialism with force, and ruling the world by private capital and newly invented technique.

Western Europe views this duel with frightened amazement. I see in Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium, the utter and desperately-held belief of the ruling classes in these lands that their culture and comfort depend absolutely on cheap labor, seized land and materials belonging to defenseless peoples; some of these workers are their own "lower classes," most of whom are the "lesser breeds without the law." Western Europe hopes that without essential alteration in its way of life an accommodation can be made between their demands and the upsurging of the lower classes and peoples.

They see this chance in four ways: home labor appeased by elementary education and some political power; with higher wages paid out of profit from investment in foreign

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lands, which the home labor makes sure by fighting in world wars. They hope to make the alteration in their way of life minor, by the rise of a small class among the backward peoples who will join them in exploiting their own people for the profit of both themselves and the imperialists. Their home labor may through trade union activity win increasing wages out of the large profit of the employers; their taxes and military service abroad will make such grants agreeable to investors. If the colonial peoples grow impatient revolt may ensue and war start; this imperialists with atom bombs can win unless the communist countries join in fighting, and if neutrals like India and Egypt stand aside.

On the other hand, what seemed to me absolutely certain was that if the majority of the world's people who are unsheltered, with starvation and poverty, can in reasonable time obtain a minimum supply of food, clothing and shelter, and the beginning of modern culture, imperialism cannot maintain itself unless Western acquisitive society pays for it with less comfort, less luxury, and goods and privileges more equally divided. This price, as it seems to me, Britain, France, Holland and Belgium, refuse to pay, and here lies the problem of the modern world. No country of Western Europe is ready for such sacrifice. No labor party will risk lower wages in order to improve the condition of colonial labor.

I realized this most startlingly in Holland. It was a Dutchman who in the early 18th century kidnapped my great grandfather on the coast of West Africa, and sold him into slavery in the valley of the Hudson. This was the century in which the Dutch began to take part in that stealing of labor in Africa, started by Portugal and Spain. The British in the 18th century succeeded in displacing them as the world's greatest slave traders, and established slavery in their American colonies. This commercial rivalry between the Dutch and British resulted finally in a system of Dutch colonies which covered Southeast Asia.

The center of this colonial empire was Indonesia, whose land, materials and cheap labor made the Dutch people rich

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and comfortable, and their land became famous for cleanliness and beautiful flowers. Then the Indonesians revolted, and I visited Holland just at the time when the full realization of the meaning of this blow was being felt. Colored people of mixed Dutch and Indonesian blood had begun to pour into Holland, bringing problems of race and class. Incomes of the well-to-do were being reduced. The impact of the Second World War was now being realized. I made the mistake of speaking on peace at a Hague cultural club, composed of teachers and professional men -- social workers and the white collar class. They did not want to hear about peace, and least of all about peace between America and the Soviet Union, because it was the Soviet Union that kept Holland from regaining Indonesia, and it was America which was the Soviet Union's great rival for domination of the world.

Therefore in a Europe which had suffered grievously from war and destruction, a prosperous and intelligent people did not want to hear about peace. To me this was a surprise and disappointment; to those who listened to me the occasion was a disappointment and an insult. They wanted comfort and civilization even if that involved the same imperial control of land and labor on which the civilization of the Dutch had long been based.

I turned from Holland and went swiftly to France, passing by Belgium and its current exposition. I had a feeling that what I might say in Brussels concerning the Belgian Congo would not be pleasant for the Belgians to hear. I came to France at the time when De Gaulle was making his great bid for domination. I had seen France first in 1892, and last in 1950. I sensed the crucifixion through which the French people had lived. All my life, France had been close to me. My name was French, my blood was part French. I knew Paris better than any city in the world outside America. I spoke a little of "the most beautiful language in the world." I had experienced on French soil less prejudice of color and race than anywhere else in the world. I would

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have gladly made France my home, if that had seemed consonant with my duty to American Negroes.

Here, in 1949, I had seen the greatest demonstration for peace, for the total abolition of war that I had ever imagined possible. Now ten years later all this was being overthrown. France again was at war and preparing for war. France under a great but strangely mistaken idealist was searching for a glory that could never be regained. There was death in her eyes, in her speech, in her gestures. The gates of my most loved of public parks, the Luxembourg Gardens, were guarded by police armed with machine guns. I saw Algerian boys searched on the public streets. Fear, hate and despair rode the streets of Paris.

I have looked upon this quivering of France; the dark death which shadows its life today. I have seen the sting of new grim poverty, and the concentrated power of its great wealth. Here loom French genius and taste along with ruthless will and drunken beauty. The beautiful wine of France has in its way been its undoing. I remember my friend [John] Hope, 1 somewhat naive and unsophisticated in the ways of the wicked world, once said to me in France, as he was working for the Young Mens' Christian Association, "Du Bois, the French do not get drunk, they stay drunk!" When the French went to Algeria and the blight came to French vineyards, the colonies stopped planting the wheat which fed the Algerian people, and planted grapes instead. Cheap Algerian wine poured into France and undersold French wines, while the people of Algeria starved. Then came more drunkenness, revolt and war. There is the eternal struggle and endless contradiction within a people who can never die, so long as men remember Roland, the kings called Louis, Napoleon and Alexander Dumas.

Sweden was a sort of last glimpse of Western Europe before I returned home. I had long known of the Scandinavian nations. Socialists called them the "middle way" between private capitalism and communism. They saw the increase of social control of the welfare state over the anarchy

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of individual profit. The new housing intrigued me; the pension system, the schools. This was the way Socialists hoped to ward off revolution and save rugged individualism. My recent visit was symbolic. Ten years ago in 1949, I had sat in on the formation of the World Council of Peace after that marvelous Paris meeting. Then for nine years I missed the meetings for lack of a passport. I could not attend that meeting which adopted the great "Stockholm Appeal," which America called a "Communist trick" to disarm the West. The meetings continued, and most of the world joined, but I was not present. Then came 1959, and I could attend. I gave up visits to Hungary and the Balkans, which I would have loved to make. I saw Sweden, that beautiful Northern light nesting on its 14 islands. I saw what is perhaps the finest popular housing in the world.

Sweden had avoided war, but she was not welcoming world peace. I was amazed as I realized this. She did not want this World Council of Peace to meet in Stockholm. She would not repulse it, but she gave it no welcome. Her press and pulpit ignored it. Her homes, with a few exceptions, closed their doors in the face of many men and women of world leadership, because they met to promote world peace, and because they met together with nations who did not believe in private capitalism, but did hate war. It was astonishing. Was Sweden afraid, and if so, of what? Did peace encourage communism, and if so, what an admission! Was Sweden frightened of America and Britain? If so, what an accusation! I saw an Indian author whose books, never printed in the United States, I was just reading. He looked a bit upset; he said, "My Swedish publisher asks me not to call on him until this Council meeting is over." Only a few citizens of Stockholm attended the service in honor of Frederic Joliot-Curie. Few met Eugenie Cotton, the white-haired leader of the women of France, and Madame Isabelle Blume of Belgium, who helped keep me out of an American jail. 2

Today, to my mind, Western Europe is not prepared to surrender colonial imperialism. It clings desperately to the

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wealth and power which comes from cheap colonial labor, held in serfdom by modern technique. There is no European labor party ready to help emancipate the workers of Asia and Africa. On the contrary, all are willing to take higher wages based on colonial profits; and to fight wars waged to defend those profits. Back of this attitude of Western Europe is the United States: ready with funds to help Europe; ready to assist any European power to keep control of colonial peoples, or to supplant it as colonial ruler.

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Chapter III: The Pawned Peoples
In the center of Europe lies Germany, long a pawn of France, then a plaything of Napoleon; but under the Hohenzollerns, a mighty empire seeking European leadership. Overreaching itself, it was overthrown in the First World War, groveled in bankruptcy and distress until Hitler roused it to frenzy and drove it to attempt world domination on a scale that frightened humanity. The Soviet Union and the allies overthrew him but, refusing further alliance after the war, the allies tore Germany in two. The United States led. France eagerly cooperated and Britain could not hesitate for fear of offending the United States.

But center and spark of the whole scheme was big business: the German cartels, the great French manufacturing and mining corporations and the interlocked banks of Britain and America were united in imperial enterprise and determined to make a new Germany which would restore the plan to dominate the world under Western control. To these great corporations were added the trade unions of Britain and the United States who believed that their high wage depended on the profits of big business from exploitation of labor and seizure of materials in colonies. They tried to take control of the new colonial unions at the Paris meeting of trade unions in 1945, but failed. Eventually, however, they split the unions into two groups of capitalistic and communistic organizations, while the African unions called a fifth Pan-African Congress in England. This meeting I attended and presided over.

The British unions and the American Federation of Labor united to divide Germany and to restore the Nazis to power in West Germany. Naturally, the military joined the movement led by General Clay, who was the head of corporations making immense profits in North and South Africa, and collecting money in America for a "Crusade for

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Freedom" to overthrow communism. A former president of Harvard became High Commissioner of West Germany, representing not only American intellectuals but also the corporate wealth which was supporting the great universities of the United States. The Marshall Plan furnished new capital to West Europe, dominated by America, and strengthened the fight against labor. Thus the same forces which at one time sought to overthrow the Soviet Union, now were united to build a great capitalist state in West Germany and, bypassing the United Nations, formed NATO with military might led by the officers who once followed Hitler. The mass of the West German people were the Social Democrats who once fought the Hohenzollern monarchy.

East Germany, known as the German Democratic Republic, was led by the heirs of social democracy and manned by socialist workers. It is developing the faith of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and becoming a socialist state, after the pattern of the Soviet Union. This was the Germany where I attended the University in 1892, and here I went in 1959. It looked familiar. It had dropped its old name "Friederich Wilhelm" and was now the Humboldt University of Berlin, named after the great scholar. I walked down Unter den Linden to the Brandenburger Thor. There I stopped. I could not visit again my old lodging on the Schöneberger Ufer. That lay in "West" Berlin, and if I had entered, American soldiers might arrest me on any pretext they invented. I turned back and traversed a city with new buildings and enterprises, along with ghosts of war and destruction. In the great hall of the University, with women students now common but in 1892 never admitted, I sat in the office where in my day Rudolph Virchow had presided as Rector Magnificus. A group played the soft music of Sebastian Bach, and the faculty of economics bestowed on me the honorary degree of Doctor of Economics. I had coveted this degree 65 years before, but then the University of Berlin would not recognize my graduate study at Harvard, and I was not allowed to take the examination.

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Between Western Europe and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, lie a number of nations: the Baltic states; Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary; and to the Southwest, the Balkan states of Albania, Bulgaria and Rumania. These peoples differ in race and composition, but have had a history with many resemblances. Most of their territory has long been ruled by a hereditary aristocracy of conquerors, invaders and great landholders. They have been annexed by neighbors, and have fought each other. During the world wars, most of this territory came to be looked upon as a Cordon Sanitaire; nations which would be used eventually by the West to reconquer Russia, or at least to recover lost investments; and by the new Soviet Union, it was looked on as territory which it must neutralize in sheer self-defense against expanding Western capitalism.

These are the folk whom the Americans call, "The Captive Peoples," and they include the Baltic states of Esthonia, Latvia and Lithuania; Poland, which for centuries has been raped and torn by Europe; Bohemia and Slovakia, long a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire; and the Hungarian part of that alliance. Many of these lands have been the center of the political ambitions of the Roman Catholic church. Beyond these lie the Balkans, including today Bulgaria and Rumania, and portions of what once belonged to Turkey and Greece.

I have seen some of these countries on this trip and during former journeys. I was in Poland in 1893 and 1950. I was in Czechoslovakia in 1893, 1950, and 1951. Save my sojourn in Germany, these trips were not long enough for intensive study and observation, but taken together they tell an interesting story. For one thing, there is no doubt in my mind but that the people in these lands are far better off in 1959 than in 1893 or in 1950. They are better fed and better dressed, and they look more content. I shall never forget the abject groveling of the Polish church worshippers in 1893; and how that year my Berlin classmate, Stanislaus Ritter von Estreicher, begged me to visit him in Krakow, so as to show me how much more Poles were oppressed than

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Negroes in the United States. His father, librarian of the University, opened my doubting eyes. In 1950, Poland showed the horrible crucifixion which she had suffered under Hitler, but she showed also the beginnings of mighty resurrection.

Czechoslovakia is a prosperous nation. The people are busy and decidedly more hopeful than when I had previously seen the nation. Prague has spilled over into the neighboring valleys, and is growing. Socialism is making a normal growth; even Slovakia, which when I had spoken there in 1950 seemed sullen if not discontented, is now humming with new hope and housing. I remember my lovely girl guide and interpreter of 1951, and her enthusiasm for socialism.

In Prague I had one surprise which lifted my spirits. Charles University was founded 100 years before Columbus discovered America. It was a great center of learning in the Middle Ages, and after the First World War many persons in the West hoped that Charles University would lead the resistance against communism. It did not. It accepted communism, and now in addition it honored me in the face of the known attitude of the United States toward Negroes. No American university (except Negro institutions in understandable self-defense) has ever recognized that I had any claim to scholarship. I had no reason to think that Charles University even knew my name. But I was summoned to the restored beauty of the old Caroleum, and amid the fanfare of medieval trumpets, marched in procession with rector and faculties of the University to the high rostrum. I was given the degree of Doctor of the Science of History, honoris causa, while the "Star-Spangled Banner" was played in honor of my American citizenship. This gesture of a communist nation doubtless prejudiced me in favor of socialism. But I do not think it was alone decisive.

In neighboring Hungary I sensed the age-old strife between the Roman Catholic church and landholding aristocracy in one group; the rising bourgeoisie supported by Western enterprise and capital in another group; and the

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great mass of degraded peasants who, as I saw them in 1893, were distinctly below the level of American Negro serfs. I was not surprised when the pushing businessmen and artisans, calling themselves "Commons" and despising laborers and serfs, rebelled against communism in 1956. I was glad when the Soviet Union intervened and thus served notice on all reactionaries that the Russian revolution was still unwilling to yield its gains before a show of force. The Hungarian Academy made me a corresponding member.

I did not see the Balkans in 1959, but I met many of their folk. I knew what their petty aristocrats, joined with American money, had made their masses endure in the last century. I cannot imagine that the people of the Balkans are worse off today than they were in the 19th century. I think they are much better off. The University of Sofia gave me a degree, before I left America.

Today the majority of intelligent people who work for a living in the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Balkans seem to me quite evidently to want communism. It was quite true a generation ago that most of the landholders, capitalists and aristocracy in these lands opposed communism, and being the only ones with political power could truly say that their countries, as they represented them, did not want to be socialized. But these classes did not represent the mass of people, and when this mass obtained political power, they built and held communist states.

Between the First and Second World Wars, Western capitalism and Soviet socialism sought to increase their influence in these states. The First World War broke up the anomalous Austro-Hungarian empire with the vast political backing of the Roman Catholic church. Germany seized Austria. Poland became independent, with the landlords in control and a dictatorship under Pilsudski from 1926 to 1935. In Czechoslovakia, land was distributed widely among the peasants, and a bourgeoisie under Masaryk and Benes took control, helped by Western investors. The First World War left the rich Ukraine independent, but it was later fought over by the Soviets, then Germans and by the bandit

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Denikin, backed by the West. By 1920 the Soviets were in control.

To call these peoples "captive" is misleading. The great mass of them were the pawns of privilege and exploitation. They reeled helplessly under the blows and beckonings of their masters. Their upper classes represented the rich and privileged among them who called the nation their property, and sought to dominate it for their own personal advantage, assuming that what was good for the ruling classes was best for all. On the other hand, there was the doctrine of communism being tried out under great difficulties in the Soviet Union. This system would be in continual danger and attack, partly because they believed that the masses of people in the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Balkans needed for their own good, just the system which the Soviet Union was trying with much success to install.

Then came the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, threatening war in order to redistribute not only the colonies of Asia, Africa, South and Central America, but to add to this exploited area Eastern Europe, which their rivals had hitherto monopolized. A series of political moves ensued. Hitler threatened the Soviet Union. Stalin sought alliance with the West against Hitler, and was repulsed. The West, ignoring the Soviet Union, joined with Hitler at Munich in opposition to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union in counter-movement accepted a non-aggression pact with Hitler. Dropping his mask suddenly, Hitler now attacked the Soviet Union, and the West, certain that the vast German war power would wipe out communism, stood aside. Let Nazis and Communists kill each other off, said Truman. Help either when the other weakens.

The world watched with bated breath. The United States and Britain helped the struggling Soviet Union as it tottered; but the help was slow, and at no time did it form a decisive part of what this sorely beset nation needed. Finally, to the surprise of mankind, David overpowered Goliath, and the Soviet Union won the war over Germany at Stalingrad. Western capitalism instead of seeing communism

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destroyed, found itself in 1945 allied with triumphant communism.

The Pawned People whose future depended so absolutely on the outcome of this war were in a curious situation. Poland was at various times on both sides; now fighting the Soviet Union; now fighting the Germans; but to the very end refusing to treat the Soviets as trusted allies. When at last the Poles led a premature attack on Warsaw, the Soviet army suspicious of where the Poles stood, refused to take part. The end of the war left Poland in doubt between the Soviet Union and Germany, which was backed by Britain, France and America. The political power of Roman Catholicism tried to compel a decision, but communism held. It was the Soviet armies in the end that rescued Poland from their cruel captors. Hungary fought against the allies and was punished by the wretched treaty of 1947. Frustrated land reforms, false democracy, foreign investors and anti-communist revolt led to the effort to overthrow communism which was stopped by the intervention of the Soviet Union. Czechoslovakia fought with the Allies, but her bourgeois leaders bitterly opposed communism, until the rising political power of the workers proved that further opposition was useless.

Thus, these states, whose former rulers wished to ally themselves with the West, were opposed by the mass of their people who had long suffered from exploitation and disfranchisement. To the disgust of the ruling classes the working classes and peasants gradually gained control and introduced socialism on the Soviet model. The Baltic, Polish and Slav immigrants to the United States had left for the most part before the success of socialism in the Soviet Union and were led by American propaganda to oppose socialism in their native countries. They used their political power against the socialist regimes and gave money and refuge to counter-revolutionists. There is no doubt that the present condition of the peoples of these countries is improving and is far better than 50 years ago. They have the support of the overwhelming mass of their inhabitants.

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Chapter IV: The Soviet Union
I have in a sense seen the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics grow, not as a casual visitor, nor hurried tourist. In 1926, I saw a Russia just emerging from war with the world. The people were poor and ill-clothed; food was scarce, and long lines stood hours to get their share. Orphan children, ragged and dirty, crawled in and out of sewers. The nation faced foreign force, and Russian traitors. Yet, despite this, I saw a land of hope and hard work. Schools were multiplying; books were being printed and widely read; workers were being protected with a living wage, nurseries for children, night schools, trade unions and wide discussion.

Indeed this wide discussion and criticism intrigued me. Never had I seen such public interest in social matters on the part of men, women and children. Here was a people seeking a new way of life through learning the truth, and cooperating with each other and by willing sacrifice. Not everybody was happy, but most Russians saw a bitter past being succeeded by a great future, not swiftly, but surely. I visited Kronstadt, Leningrad, Moscow, Nizhni Novgorod, Kiev and Odessa. There were no signs of prostitution or unusual crime. There was some drunkenness, but little gambling. Priests were plentiful, and tarnished gold-domed churches abounded, but dogma was being driven from the schools. Above all, the spirit of the people was high, the officials were working desperately hard and with efficiency.

I had known that Tsarist Russia naturally resisted the revolution. But of the extent of that counter-revolution and of the active help in manpower, material and arms supplied by the civilized world; of the spying and intrigue from all Europe which had accompanied and inspired this war of reaction, I had but the vaguest information. Indeed I did not learn the whole story until Michael Sayers and Albert Kahn published their Great Conspiracy in 1946.

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What amazed and uplifted me in 1926, was to see a nation stoutly facing a problem which most other modern nations did not dare even to admit was real: the abolition of poverty. Taking inspiration directly out of the mouths and dreams of the world's savants and prophets, who had inveighed against modern industrial methods and against the co-existence of progress and poverty, this new Russia founded by Lenin and inspired by Marx and Engels, proposed to build a socialist state with production for use and not for private profit; with ownership of land and capital goods by the state, and with state control of public services, including education and health. It was enough for me to see this mighty attempt. It might fail, I knew, but the effort in itself was social progress and neither foolishness nor crime.

Russia was handicapped by 90 per cent illiteracy among her peasants, and nearly as much among her working classes; by a religion led by a largely immoral priesthood, dealing in superstition and deception, and rich with the loot of groveling followers. Most of her industrial capital was owned by foreigners, whose only interest was the 50 or 75 per cent profit which they reaped from merciless exploitation. Her government had long been shot through with dishonesty and graft under dissolute nobles and fawning lackeys. Her punishment of crime and independent thought had long affronted the civilized world. Yet the best people of Europe and America seldom raised a finger of protest, but fawned on Russian royalty and aristocracy, receiving them with open arms and expressing loud sympathy when they were repudiated.

There is no question but that governments can carry on business. Every government does. Whether governmental industry compares in efficiency with private industry depends entirely upon what we call efficiency. And here it is, not elsewhere, that the Russian experiment is astonishing and new, and of fateful importance to the future of civilization. What we call efficiency in America is judged primarily by the resultant profit to the rich and only secondarily by the results to the workers. The face of industrial

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Europe and America is set toward increase of private wealth; that is, toward the people who have large incomes. We recognize the economic value of small incomes mainly as a means of profit for great incomes. Russia seeks another psychology. The Soviet Union is trying to make the workingman the main object of industry. His well-being and his income are deliberately set as the chief ends of organized industry, directed by the state.

It is by its economic progress that the Soviet Union must primarily be judged. Russia had established a socialistic state. The world had long been veering toward socialism. We had made essays toward socialism; but when the socialist state appeared full-fledged, most of us called it by other names and refused to judge it by its socialism; but rather we insisted on investigating the ethics of the methods accompanying its establishment.

What had the Soviet Union done in 1926, to establish a socialistic state? First, it had nationalized the land. Every inch of land in Russia -- the air above it and the resources beneath -- belong to the Soviet state. Persons who wished to till the soil could have as much land as they might successfully till with the labor of their own family. The mineral and oil rights at that time could be farmed out by the government for a term of years, but the government retained ownership of mines and wells and the terms of the leases were limited.

Ten years later in 1936, I rode across the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Otpur, Manchuria. The trip of 4,000 miles was slow and took ten days and nights. But it traversed the main part of the Soviet Union. It went through cities, climbed the Urals and crossed lakes and rivers. The change in ten years was remarkable. This was no longer a people struggling for survival, it was a nation sure of itself. In Moscow the streets were widening and the city had crossed the river. Old buildings remained, but great new buildings were crowding them. The golden domes of churches were not so numerous and tall office buildings were taking their place. Few priests were visible, and few

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beggars. The folk were better dressed and food was much more plentiful. There were no unemployed, and all children were in school; factories, shops and libraries had multiplied, and there was evidence of law and order everywhere. Industry was moving west and crossing the Urals.

Military might was evident and we saw the massing of soldiers toward the East to meet the threat of Japan. Great dams, canals and waterworks were building. The peasant was in close cooperation with, and not in revolt against, the factory worker. Here was a self-confident nation ready to fight for existence. The people of the nation did not have all they wanted or planned to have, but much more than ever before. They did not fear poverty or old age; they were not slaves, not ready for revolt.

Thirteen years later in 1949, after the Peace Congress in Paris, 25 Americans were invited to attend a Peace Congress in the Soviet Union. I was the only one who accepted the invitation. In the Hall of the Nobles, Moscow, where the Russian aristocrats used to gamble, I met a cross-section of the Soviet people -- workers, writers, officials -- and visitors from neighboring lands. It was an inspiring body and I tried to convince them that most Americans did not desire war with them, but strove for peace. I saw the continued growth of Moscow, and the increased confidence of the Soviet Union in itself and in socialism as a path to a communist state. I was shown where, on Lenin Hills, a new university would be built.

Ten more years passed. I was not allowed to visit Europe until 1958, and, commencing late the next year I again saw the Soviet Union and spent five months in its borders. Its growth in size and building, in industry and trade, in science and education was marvelous. In November of 1959, as I rode into Moscow, I saw above the city the great sickle and star which crowns the University and blesses the city. Later this Lomonosov State University, "Member of the Order of Lenin" and of the "Workers' Order of the Red Star," called me to its halls and made me honorary doctor of historical science.

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I was on Red Square at the great Seventh of November celebration with a half-million spectators. A uniformed major escorted me to the hotel, and on the way we stopped and saluted Khrushchev and the government, and Khrushchev raised his hat.

Next I went to a sanitarium. I was weary from travel. It is a great solemn place with tall pines and snow. We had servants for every wish, and all were as kind as can be. I was there a month, and had every probe and test possible. My heart was measured a dozen times, my blood tested, my blood pressure taken, and I was poked inside and out.

I was granted an interview with Prime Minister Khrushchev at my request. For about two hours, I and my wife, Shirley Graham, discussed with him the peace movement in the United States and the Pan-African movement.

I told him of my indictment and acquittal in 1951 of the charge of not registering as a foreign agent, because I secured signers for the Stockholm Appeal. We discussed the tenth anniversary of the World Peace Council. I talked about African independence and unity, and of establishing in Moscow an institute under the Academy of Sciences to study African history and culture.

I said Africa has just taken a decisive step at the conference at Accra toward independence, union and free cultural development. The first effort of Africans will be in political lines and then for industrial progress and economic organization; I said education will receive attention, but resources will be limited, and teachers scarce. I said that here the Soviet Union can be of great assistance to new Africa. The scientific study of Africans and their continent was necessary for the guidance of their education and the organization of their culture. This was one of the ways in which the progressive world could help its lagging parts and one in which there were fewest causes for friction and diversity of interest.

I suggested, therefore, that the Soviet Academy of Sciences establish an institute for the study of Pan-African history, sociology, ethnography, anthropology and all cognate studies.

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This institute of the Academy would aim at promotion of scientific research into all the activities, past and present, of the peoples of Africa, together with a study of their physical and biological environment. This series of studies would be carried on with the central idea of the unity of the whole subject and the conviction that history is not separate from sociology, or culture from biology, but that all research in such related fields seek the one end of unified scientific knowledge. While this enterprise would start and center in the Soviet Union, its object would be the welfare and progress of Africa, and from the first, it should seek cooperation wherever it could be found, and especially among Africans.

The institute should try, by offer of scholarships to Africans, and by cooperation with African students and institutions of learning, eventually to build within Africa a center of scientific study, which would lead in world study and in the promotion of world peace.

Realizing how in modern history the exploitation and almost universal underestimation of Africans have led to wide denial of the very existence of their history and culture, it would be a first duty of this institute to make known the history of the African peoples and to distribute knowledge of this in libraries and museums, in textbooks and university studies, and as common knowledge. No greater work for world peace can be conceived, no quicker way to convince mankind that no part of it must exist for the exploitation and comfort of the rest at the cost of suffering black folk. Already this institute has been established, with my friend Ivan Potekhin at its head.

The Soviets are making a new people, a disciplined people. This is not a matter of police; few police are in evidence, and there is little giving of orders. Secret dread? I sense none. But let me illustrate: Out from my hotel window I look on two great squares; the furthest is Red Square with the towers of the Kremlin walls and the brown tomb where Lenin sleeps his last long sleep. Across these squares yesterday a half-million people marched, walked, and danced; they ate and sang, they laughed and cheered. This morning

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when I arose and looked out, there was not a scrap of paper or sign of dirt. That meant work in the night I'm sure, but it meant much more than this: it meant that most of this half-million people dropped no dirt and threw away no paper, and they did this not under orders, but because they felt these squares were theirs, and they must not soil their own. These people feel a vested interest in this nation such as few Americans feel for the United States.

Why? I do not know, and yet it may be because they are consulted about it. They are asked, continually asked; they sit and sit and talk and talk, and vote and vote; if this is all a mirage, it is a perfect one. They believe it as I used to believe in the Spring Town Meeting in my village. There is power rivalry and personal jealousy; all things in the Soviet Union are not perfect. Mails miscarry, cables come a day late, styles are often queer; the world problem of domestic service has not been settled. The question of life careers and the decision between what one wants to do and what one is fitted to do, and what efforts are needed -- these matters have not yet found final answers; but they are being frankly faced, and experiments are making.

The Soviet Union is great and growing greater, and, as it seems to believe, it belongs to this two hundred million folk about me. I am strongly inclined to agree with them.

Nowhere are public questions so thoroughly and exhaustively discussed. Russians sit and listen long to talks, lectures, expositions; they read books, magazines and newspapers, not just picture books. Each problem of existence is discussed in village and factory. Comments, spoken and written, are welcomed, until every aspect, every opinion has been expressed and listened to, and the matter rises to higher echelons, and is discussed again. Gradually agreement is approached, until when the thrashed-out result reaches the All-Soviet height, there is usually but one opinion and decision.

This is not unexpected. How many right answers to each of our problems are there? This is a sifting of democracy which the West has lost. In America there is little real

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political discussion. It is discouraged in every way; by stopping meetings, refusing use of halls, closing columns of newspapers, refusing radio time, and even by police interference and jail. In Britain there is freer discussion, but it is limited by convention and prestige; by aristocratic influence and the money and leisure of the dominant class. In France, parliamentary debate is directed by the powerful interests who work the puppets and pull the strings. In Italy, the church stands always in the shadow, keeping watch above its own. The church represents wealth, and wealth rules.

In the Soviet Union the overwhelming power of the working class as representing the nation is always decisive. Above this and rising out of it and expressing its thoughts and ideals, rises the real aristocracy of the Soviet Union, the writers and scientists. They get the highest wage, they enjoy such privileges as the law and public opinion allow. How free are they? Science is free from religious dogma and vested interests. The writer has a wide leeway and rich applause, but he is limited by the aims of socialism to serve all and not a few, and by the fear of foreign attack which in the past has nearly ruined the Soviet Union. The recalcitrant writer, the idealists and dreamers disagree, but variety of opinion is becoming reassuringly common and open. As the Soviet Union becomes stronger and more self-confident, and less sensitive to that Western opinion which has so long ruled the world with a rod of gold, it will become freer. Never, I hope, so free as to betray the ideals of the land as French writers have betrayed France, and as American writers distort truth today.

For years most American leaders regarded the figures on Russian progress as exaggerations or lies. The Teachers' Union once begged me not to say in answer to a citation that the schools of Moscow were better than those of New York. Ex-President Conant of Harvard declared that the Communist party would not allow promotion to higher schools by examination; presumably only by favor. Then came Sputnik. Then followed unanswerable proof of Soviet superiority

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in science. There were revealed the startling figures as to education in schools and colleges.

What I saw in the Soviet Union was more than triumph in physics; it was the growth of a nation's soul, the confidence of a great people in its plan and future. And beyond that the realization around the world that the Seven Year Plan was not boasting, but knowledge shared by 200 million people. Around these millions were gathered even greater millions in China, Vietnam and Korea, who believed in socialism, and sought communism.

Is it possible to conduct a great modern government without autocratic leadership of the rich? The answer is: this is exactly what the Soviet Union is doing today. But can she continue to do this? This is not a question of ethics or economics; it is a question of psychology. Can Russia continue to think of the state in terms of the workers? This can happen only if the Russian people believe and idealize the workingman as the chief citizen. In America we do not. The ideal of every American is the millionaire -- or at least the man of "independent" means of income. We regard the laborers as the unfortunate part of the community, and even liberal thought is directed toward "emancipating" the workingman by relieving him in part, if not entirely, of the necessity for work. The Soviet Union, on the contrary, is seeking to make a nation believe that work, and work that is hard and in some respects even disagreeable, and to a large extent physical, is a necessity of human life at present and likely to be in any conceivable future world; that the people who do this work are the ones who should determine how the national income from their combined efforts should be distributed; in fine, that the workingman is the state; that he makes civilization possible and should determine what civilization is to be.

For this purpose he must be a workingman of skill and intelligence, and to this, Russian education is being organized. This is what the dictatorship of the proletariat means. This dictatorship does not stop there. As the workingman is today neither skilled nor intelligent to any such extent as

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his responsibilities demand, there is within his ranks the Communist party directing the proletariat toward their future duties. This is nothing new. In the governments "of the people," we have elaborate and many-sided arrangements for guiding the rulers. The test is, are we and Russia really preparing future rulers? Insofar as I could see in the Soviet Union, in shop and school, in the press and on the radio, in books and lectures, in trade unions and national congresses, the Soviet Union is; we are not.

It is the organized private capital of America, England, France and Germany which is chiefly instrumental in preventing the realization of the Russian workingman's psychology. It has used every modern weapon to crush Russia. It sent against Russia every scoundrel who could lead a mob, and has given him money, guns and praise; and when Russia nearly committed suicide in crushing this civil war, modern industry began the industrial boycott, the refusal of capital and credit, which is being carried on today just as far as international jealousy and greed will allow. And can we wonder? If modern capital is owned by the rich and handled for their power and benefit, can the rich be expected to hand it over to their avowed and actual enemies? On the contrary, if modern industry is really for the benefit of the people, and if there is an effort to make the people the chief beneficiaries of industry, why is it that this same people is powerless today to help this experiment, or at least give it a clear way? On the other hand, so long as the most powerful nations in the world are determined that the Soviet Union must fall, there can be but a minimum of free discussion and democratic difference of opinion in the Soviet Union.

There is world struggle then in and about Russia; but it is not simply an ethical problem, as to whether or not Russia can conduct industry on a national scale. She is doing it today and in so doing she differs only in quantity, not in quality, from every other modern country. It is not a question merely of "dictatorship." We are all subject to this form of government.

There is under communism a use of women for more than

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pleasure and physical reproduction; but primarily for their talent in work and thought. This has made possible the increase of medical facilities, since 60 per cent of the Soviet physicians today are women. With this goes a socialization of the family group. It is no longer customary to regard babies as playthings or nursery jobs; or as means of prolonging the father's cultural patterns, or to inherit his wealth or privileges. The child is becoming a recognized ward of the state to be raised and educated for the welfare of the people of the state and not merely for the privilege of a family group or of a special class. For this purpose nurseries, kindergartens and schools are provided; cooperative kitchens and dining rooms. The masses of communist women are being released from household drudgery, and the state has a tremendously widened reservoir of ability to serve its needs.

The Soviet Union which I see in 1959 is power and faith and not simply hope. When the Seven Year Plan was announced, not only Soviet citizens but the world knew that this nation could do what it planned, and barring no unexpected difficulties would reach these enormous goals. It is only a matter of time and a comparatively short time when the Soviet Union will lead the world in industry.

The Russian question is: Can you make the worker and not the millionaire the center of modern power and culture? If you can, the Russian Revolution will sweep the world. One can stand on the streets of Moscow and Kiev and see clearly that Russia has struck at the citadels of power that rule modern countries. Not manhood suffrage, women's suffrage, state regulation of industry, social reforms, nor religious and moral teaching in any modern country have shorn organized wealth of its power, as the Bolshevik Revolution has done in Russia. The Soviet Union seems to me the only European country where people are not more or less taught and encouraged to despise and look down on some class, group or race. I know countries where race and color prejudice show only slight manifestations, but no white country where race and color prejudice seems so absolutely absent. In Paris, I attract some attention; in London I meet

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elaborate blankness; anywhere in America I get anything from complete ignoring to curiosity, and often insult. In Moscow, I pass unheeded. Russians quite naturally ask me information; women sit beside me quite confidently and unconsciously. Children are uniformly courteous.

We had just finished our trip through Western Europe, when a cable came inviting us to a conference of Asiatic and African writers at Tashkent. I had heard nothing of this meeting, but had wanted very much to attend the conference at Bandung in 1955. Again my government had prevented me, and the message which I had sent by an American Negro reporter reached nobody. Further correspondence made our attendance upon this Congress at Tashkent seem of real importance. It was 2,000 miles southeast of Moscow, with five hours difference in time. The passage branched from my trip in 1936, veering toward the South. We heard the blood of Stalingrad far to the West, where Stalin conquered Hitler and saved Europe. After leaving Kazan, we crossed Kazakhistan and entered Uzbekistan. We were near the storied Samarkand; where:

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan,
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

But today there is sunshine over the 150,000 square miles of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Over seven million brunette and curly-haired folk of Asiatic descent live here speaking a language differing from the Russian, and inheriting an old culture. Tashkent, a city of over 600,000, founded in the seventh century on the trade route between Samarkand and Peking, welcomed its guests with banners and applause. They filled the festooned streets. Their fields were growing tall, long-staple cotton, which an American Negro from Tuskegee first planted. New housing was replacing the old compounds, and schools were spreading.

The huge square with its fountain had a new modern

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hotel on one side, and on the other a great conference hall with facilities for translating into Russian, Arabic, Chinese and English. This choice of languages was significant. The city was adorned, and the square filled with people greeting the visitors, and besieging the stalls, where books were on sale, and not chewing gum and hot dogs. One stall sold in a day ten thousand rubles worth of books in the Tartar language alone.

One hundred and forty writers from 36 countries and 45 writers from the Soviet Republics were present. We saw and heard of men whose works are read by millions, and yet whose names most of us Westerners had never heard. I was surprised to find my work known to many of the delegates, and the Congress gave me a standing ovation when I entered. I was shown to the platform, where I sat as a member of the directing committee. The discussion and the papers were mainly on cultural matters, although politics, and especially colonialism continually forced themselves to the front. The interrelation of all cultures was stressed, and the contribution of the West, despite its aggression against Asia and Africa. As one poet from the mountains of Daghestan said, "We must not confuse colonialism with culture, nor Dreiser with Dulles." Efua Sutherland, a black woman from Ghana, called the conference "A step toward unification of the disrupted soul of man." A permanent Afro-Asian writers' bureau was set up, with headquarters in Ceylon, to publish books, a journal, and an encyclopedia, and to promote translations.

I leave one subject to the last, as I leave the Soviet Union -- religion. I lived two months opposite the inscription on the Second House of the Soviets, written by Marx: "Religion is the opium of the people!" Whatever was true of other lands, this was certainly true in Russia in 1926 and before. Symbols of religion ruled Moscow, the vast five domes of the Cathedral of Christ and the 350 other churches of the city dominated the landscape, as they loomed and glowed. There were gems of beautiful bejewelled churches; hordes of priests intoning litanies, begging alms, forgiving sins. There were thousands of shrines. Only one who has heard the chant of

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a Russian service, seen its color and genuflections; only those who know the gorgeous litany and the beauty of Russian churches can realize what Lenin, agreeing with Marx, meant when he called the Russian religion "opium."

But is was worse than opium. It was a Russian priest, Father Petrov, 3 who said of Russia in 1908, "There is no Christian Tsar and no Christian government. Conditions of life are not Christian. The upper classes rule the lower classes. A little group keeps the rest of the population enslaved. This little group has robbed the working people of wealth, power, science, art and religion, which they have also subjected; they have left them only ignorance and misery. In the place of pleasure they have given the people drunkenness; in the place of religion, gross superstition; and beside the work of a convict, a work without rest or reward. The ruling clergy with its cold, heartless bony fingers, has stifled the Russian church, killed its creative spirit, chained the Gospel itself, and `sold' the church to the government. There is not an outrage, no crime, no perfidy of the state authorities, which the monks who rule the church would not cover with the mantle of the church, would not bless, would not seal with their own hands."

The British Trade Union report of 1925 said: "A very strong propaganda in the Press, the schools, colleges and Trade Union clubs is, however, carried on against religion generally, and especially as practised by the old Orthodox Church. The former Government-controlled licensed houses of prostitution where girls were exposed for hire at recognized fee, have been closed. In Tsarist days these houses were a recognized government institution; the opening ceremony was undertaken by a police officer and the premises blessed by Russian Orthodox Priests." 4

All this has gone and none regrets that the Russian Orthodox religion has been dethroned. But the Russian church remains and other churches still carry on in the Soviet Union. However, the Soviet Union does not allow any church of any kind to interfere with education, and religion is not taught in the public schools. It seems to me that this

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is the greatest gift of the Russian Revolution to the modern world. Most educated modern men no longer believe in religious dogma. If questioned they will usually resort to double-talk before admitting the fact. But who today actually believes that this world is ruled and directed by a benevolent person of great power who, on humble appeal, will change the course of events at our request? Who believes in miracles? Many folk follow religious ceremonies and services; and allow their children to learn fairy tales and so-called religious truth, which in time the children come to recognize as conventional lies told by their parents and teachers for the children's good. One can hardly exaggerate the moral disaster of this custom. We have to thank the Soviet Union for the courage to stop it.

The United States has moved from the hysteria of calling all Soviet women prostitutes, all Russian workers slaves and the whole Russian people ready for revolt, of regarding all Soviet rulers as criminals conspiring to conquer the United States and rule the world; of breaking every treaty they made. From this false and utterly ridiculous position, we have begun to recognize the Soviet Socialist Republic as giving its people the best education of any in the world, of excelling in science, and organizing industry to its highest levels. Our increasing number of visitors to Russia see a contented people who do not hate the United States, but fear its war-making, and are eager to cooperate with us. From such a nation we can learn.

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Chapter V: China
I saw China first in 1936, on my trip from the Soviet Union to Japan. I was struck by its myriads of people. This amorphous mass of men, with age-old monuments of human power, beauty and glory; with its helpless, undefended welter of misery and toil, has an organization of life and impenetrable will to survive that neither imperial tyranny, nor industrial exploitation, nor famine, starvation and pestilence can kill -- it is eternal life, facing disaster and triumphing imperturbably.

There passed a glory from the earth when Imperial China fell. Built as it was on skulls, it was bravely built and the remains are magnificent. In all essential respects they surpass the Stones of Europe. Where Europe counts its years in hundreds, Asia counts its in thousands. There is absent that all too apparent European effort to dramatize and exaggerate the past; to emphasize war and personal glory. China shows a finer effort to let the past stand silent, frank and unadorned; to tell the truth simply about men and fully; and to record the triumphs of education, family life and literature far more than murder.

I write this now as things were in 1936. I am standing on the Great Wall of China, with 23 centuries beneath my feet. The purple crags of Manchuria lie beyond the valley, while behind are the yellow and brown mountains of China. For 70 cents I have been carried up on the shoulders of four men and down again. And here I stand on what has been called the only work of man visible from Mars. It is no mud fence or pile of cobbles. It surpasses that mighty bastion of Constantinople, which for so many centuries saved Mediterranean civilization from German barbarism. This is a wall of carefully cut stone, fitted and laid with perfect matching and eternal mortar, from 20 to 50 feet high and 2,500 miles long; built by a million men, castellated with perfect brick, and

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standing mute and immutable for more than 2,000 years. Such is China.

Shanghai was an epitome of the racial strife, the economic struggle, the human paradox of modern life. Here was the greatest city of the most populous nation on earth, with the large part of it owned, governed and policed by foreign nations. With Europe largely controlling its capital, commerce, mines, rivers and manufactures; with a vast welter of the greatest working class in the world, paid less than an average of 25 cents a day; with a glittering modern life of skyscrapers, majestic hotels, theatres and night clubs. In this city of nations were 19,000 Japanese, 11,000 British, 10,000 Russians, 4,000 Americans, and 10,000 foreigners of other nationalities living in the midst of 3,000,000 Chinese. The city was divided openly by nations; black-bearded Sikhs under British orders policed its streets, foreign warships sat calmly at her wharfs; foreigners told this city what it may and may not do.

Even at that, matters were not as bad as they once had been. In 1936, foreigners acknowledged that Chinese had some rights in China. Chinese who could afford it might even visit the city race track from which they and dogs were long excluded. It was no longer common to kick a coolie or throw a rickshaw's driver on the ground. Yet, the afternoon before I saw a little English boy of perhaps four years order three Chinese children out of his imperial way on the sidewalk of the Bund; and they meekly obeyed and walked in the gutter. It looked quite like Mississippi. And, too, I met a "missionary" from Mississippi, teaching in the Baptist University of Shanghai!

I went by invitation to the American-supported University of Shanghai and I said to the president that I should like to talk to a group of Chinese and discuss frankly racial and social matters. He arranged a luncheon at the Chinese Banker's Club. There were present one of the editors of the China press, the secretary-general of the Bank of China, the general manager of the China Publishing Company, the director of the Chinese Schools for Shanghai, and the executive

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secretary of the China Institute of International Relations.

We talked nearly three hours. I plunged in recklessly. I told them of my slave ancestors, of my education and travels; of the Negro problem. Then I turned on them and said, "How far do you think Europe can continue to dominate the world, or how far do you envisage a world whose spiritual center is Asia and the colored races? You have escaped from the domination of Europe politically since the World War -- at least in part; but how do you propose to escape from the domination of European capital? How are your working classes progressing? Why is it that you hate Japan more than Europe when you have suffered more from England, France, and Germany than from Japan?"

There ensued a considerable silence, in which I joined. Then we talked. They said, "Asia is still under the spell of Europe, although not as completely as a while back. It is not our ideal simply to ape Europe. We know little of India or Africa, or Africa in America. We see the danger of European capital and are slowly extricating ourselves, by seeking to establish control of capital by the political power of taxation and regulation. We have stabilized our currency -- no longer do English Hong Kong notes from our chief circulating medium. Our wages are too low but slowly rising; labor legislation is appearing; we have 16 million children in school with short terms and inadequate equipment, but a beginning of the fight against our 90 per cent illiteracy."

We talked three hours but it was nearly a quarter of a century before I realized how much we did not say. The Soviet Union was scarcely mentioned, although I knew how the Soviet Union was teaching the Chinese. Nothing was said of the Long March which had just ended its 6,000 miles from Kiangsi to Yenan, led by Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh. We mentioned America only for its benefactions and scarcely for its exploitation. Of the Kuomintang and Chiang Kaishek, almost nothing was said, but hatred of Japan for its betrayal of Asia was amply pointed out.

In 1959 I came again to China. I wanted to re-visit China

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because it is a land of colored people; and again because in 1956 China had officially invited me to visit and lecture, but the United States had refused to permit me. My passport stated that it was "not good for travel to China." It was a fair conclusion that if I did not use this passport to secure entrance to China and made no claim on the United States for protection, the State Department had no legal right to forbid me to visit China. Certainly the United States could give me no less protection in China than it could in Mississippi. On the other hand by legal fiction, the United States was still "at war" with China, since the Korean War had never been legally finished. It was possible then if I went to China, to jail me for "trading with the enemy." This risk I thought it my duty to take, since my invitation to visit had been renewed by the cultural minister, Kuo Mo-jo and by Madame Soong Ching-ling.

I left Moscow February 9 and returned April 6. It was the most fascinating eight weeks of travel and sight-seeing I have ever experienced. We remember Peking; a city of six million; its hard workers, its building and re-building; that great avenue which passes the former forbidden city, and is as wide as Central Park; the bicycles and pedicycles, the carts and barrows. There was the university where I lectured on Africa, and a college of the 50 or more races of China. We looked out from our hotel window at the workers. They all wore raincoats beneath the drizzle. We saw the planning of a nation and a system of work rising over the entrails of dead empire.

I have traveled widely on this earth since my first trip to Europe 67 years ago. Save South America and India, I have seen most of the civilized world and much of its backward regions. Many leading nations I have visited repeatedly. But I have never seen a nation which so amazed and touched me as China in 1959.

I traveled 5,000 miles, by railway, boat, plane and auto. I saw all the great cities: Peking, Shanghai, Hankow and its sisters; Canton, Chungking, Chengtu, Junming and Nanking. I rode its vast rivers, passed through its villages and

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sat in its communes. I visited its schools and colleges, lectured and broadcast to the world. I visited its minority groups. I spent four hours with Mao Tse-tung and dined twice with Chou En-lai, the tireless Prime Minister of this nation of 680 million souls.

We come to Chengtu. We ride about this farthest Western stopping place, close to the crowds and the workers and the homes, old and new. We visit a commune of 60,000 members. We climb the mountain to see irrigation being widened today, yet started 2,200 years ago. There is a glorious temple on its summit, and below a wide lake between winding roads. Four rivers roll down from the Himalayas, out of Tibet into the Yangtze.

Then we fly to Kunmin, the end of the American Burma Road. It is warm and quiet, and at the state school the minorities dance and sing welcome, and among them are Tibetans. There are more Tibetans in China than in Tibet. In Tibet while we were on its border in Szechuan, the landholders and slave drivers and the religious fanatics revolted against the Chinese, and failed as they deserved to. Tibet has belonged to China for centuries. The Communists linked the two by roads and began reforms in landholding, schools and trade, which now move quickly. At Kunmin we were at the end of the Burma Road and near the Great Mekong River. Below lay Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. The nest of grafters, whoremongers and gamblers at Saigon, helped by Americans, have broken the Geneva treaty which closed the French Indo-Chinese War, and are attacking the Communists. That is called "communist aggression." It is the attempt of American business and the American Navy to supplant France as colonial ruler in Southeast Asia.

There is at Canton a marble commercial building where the import and export exposition was recently opened. There are five floors of exhibits. I am convinced that America cannot make anything which is not today being made by China, or which cannot be made cheaper, and for the most part made quite as well; for out of the things that China makes come no profits for private exploiters. Most nations of the

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world are beginning to buy China's goods, except the United States. China sells increasingly to Europe, to Asia and South America; to India, Burma, Ceylon, Indonesia, and Malaya; to Africa and the West Indies; to Australia and New Zealand. And such goods: silk and woolen clothing, watches, clocks, radios and television sets; looms, machinery and lamps, shoes and hats, pottery and dishes. All Chinese seem to be at work, and not afraid of unemployment, and welcoming every suggestion that displaces muscle with machinery.

In every town and city we went to the opera, and can never forget the assault of the Monkey King on the hosts of Heaven, facing God and the angels. A night sleeping train took us over the 30-hour trip from Peking to Wuhan. There I saw the bridge that had been miraculously thrown across the Yangtze. We rested in a little hotel adorned with flowering cabbages. We visited the great steel mills and shook hands with welcoming workers. The colored American prisoner of war who stayed in China rather than return to America and is happy with his wife and baby, came to visit us.

My birthday was given national notice in China, and celebrated as never before; and we who all our lives have been liable to insult and discrimination on account of our race and color, in China have met universal goodwill and love, such as we never expected. As we leave may we thank them humbly for all they have done for us, and for teaching us what communism means.

The people of the land I saw: the workers, the factory hands, the farmers and laborers, scrubwomen and servants. I went to parks and restaurants, sat in the homes of the high and the low; and always I saw a happy people; people with faith that needs no church or priest, and who laugh gaily when the Monkey King overthrows the angels. In all my wandering, I never felt the touch or breath of insult or even dislike -- I who for 90 years in Amerca scarcely ever saw a day without some expression of hate for "niggers."

What is the secret of China in the second half of the 20th century? It is that the vast majority of a billion human beings have been convinced that human nature in some of its darkest

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recesses can be changed, if change is necessary. China knows, as no other people know, to what depths human meanness can go. I used to weep for American Negroes, as I saw what indignities and repressions and cruelties they had passed; but as I read Chinese history in these last months and had it explained to me stripped of Anglo-Saxon lies, I know that no depths of Negro slavery in America have plumbed such abysses as the Chinese have seen for 2,000 years and more. They have seen starvation and murder; rape and prostitution; sale and slavery of children; and religion cloaked in opium and gin, for converting the "heathen." This oppression and contempt came not only from Tartars, Mongolians, British, French, Germans and Americans, but from the Chinese themselves: Mandarins and warlords, capitalists and murdering thieves like Chiang Kai-shek; Kuomintang socialists and intellectuals educated abroad.

Despite all this, China lives, and has been transformed and marches on. She is not ignored by the United States. She ignores the United States and leaps forward. What did it? What furnished the motive power and how was it applied? First it was the belief in himself and in his people by a man like Sun Yat-sen. He plunged on blind and unaided, repulsed by Britain and America, but welcomed by Russia. Then efforts toward socialism, which wobbled forward, erred and lost, and at last was bribed by America and Britain and betrayed by Chiang Kai-shek, with its leaders murdered and its aims misunderstood, when not deliberately lied about.

Then came the Long March from feudalism, past capitalism and socialism to communism in our day. Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, Chu Teh and a half dozen others undertook to lead a nation by example, by starving and fighting; by infinite patience and above all by making a nation believe that the people and not merely the elite -- that on the contrary the workers in factory, street and field -- composed the real nation. Others have said this often, but no nation has tried it like the Soviet Union and China. And on the staggering and bitter effort of the Soviets, beleaguered by all Western civilization, and yet far-seeing enough to help weaker

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China even before a still weak Russia was safe -- on this vast pyramid has arisen the saving nation of this stumbling, murdering, hating world.

In China the people -- the laboring people, the people who in most lands are the doormats on which the reigning thieves and murdering rulers walk, leading their painted and jeweled prostitutes -- the people walk and boast. These people of the slums and gutters and kitchens are the Chinese nation today. This the Chinese believe and on this belief they toil and sweat and cheer.

They believe this and for the last ten years their belief has been strengthened until today they follow their leaders because these leaders have never deceived them. Their officials are incorruptible, their merchants are honest, their artisans are reliable, their workers who dig and haul and lift do an honest day's work and even work overtime if their state asks it, for they are the state; they are China.

A kindergarten, meeting in the once Forbidden City, was shown the magnificence of this palace and told: "Your fathers built this, but did not enjoy it; but now it is yours; preserve it." And then, pointing across the Tien an Men Square to the vast building of the new Halls of Assembly, the speaker added: "Your fathers are building new palaces for you; enjoy them and guard them for yourselves and your children. They belong to you!"

China has no rank or classes; her universities grant no degrees; her government awards no medals. She has no blue book of "society." But she has leaders of learning and genius, scientists of renown, artisans of skill and millions who know and believe this and follow where these men lead. This is the joy of this nation, its high belief and its unfaltering hope.

China is no utopia. Fifth Avenue has better shops where the rich can buy and the whores parade. Detroit has more and better cars. The best American housing outstrips the Chinese, and Chinese women are not nearly as well-dressed as the guests of the Waldorf-Astoria. But the Chinese worker is happy. He has exorcised the Great Fear that haunts the West; the fear of losing his job; the fear of falling sick; the

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fear of accident; the fear of inability to educate his children; the fear of daring to take a vacation. To guard against such catastrophe Americans skimp and save, cheat and steal, gamble and arm for murder. The Soviet citizen, the Czech, the Pole, the Hungarian have kicked out the stooges of America and the hoodlums set to exploit the peasants. They and the East Germans no longer fear these disasters; and above all the Chinese sit high above these fears and laugh with joy. They will not be rich in old age, but they will eat. They will not enjoy sickness but they will be given care. They will not starve as thousands of Chinese did only a generation ago. They fear neither flood nor epidemic. They do not even fear war; as Mao Tse-tung told me, war for China is a "paper tiger." China can defend itself and back of China stands the unassailable might of the Soviet Union.

Envy and class hate are disappearing in China. Does your neighbor have better pay and higher position than you? He has this because of greater ability or better education, and more education is open to you and compulsory for your children. The young married couple do not fear children. The mother has pre-natal care. Her wage and job are safe. Nursery and kindergarten take care of the child and it is welcome, not to pampered luxury but to good food, constant medical care and education for his highest ability. All this is not yet perfect. Here and there it fails, falls short and falters; but it is so often and so widely true, that China believes, lives on realized hope, follows its leaders and sings: "O, Mourner, get up off your knees."

The women of China are becoming free. They wear pants so that they can walk, climb and dig; and climb and dig they do. They are not dressed simply for sex indulgence or beauty parades. They occupy positions from ministers of state to locomotive engineers, lawyers, doctors, clerks and laborers. They are escaping "household drudgery"; they are strong and healthy and beautiful not simply of leg and false bosom, but of brain, brawn, and rich emotion. In Wuhan I stood in one of the greatest steelworks of the world. A crane which moved a hundred tons loomed above. I said, "My God, Shirley, look

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up there!" Alone in the engine-room sat a girl with ribboned braids, running the vast machine.

You won't believe this, because you never saw anything like it; and if the State Department has its way, you never will. Let Life lie about communes; and the State Department shed crocodile tears over ancestral tombs. Let Hong Kong wire its lies abroad. Let "Divine Slavery" persist in Tibet until China kills it. The truth is there and I saw it.

Fifteen times I have crossed the Atlantic and once the Pacific. I have seen the world. But never so vast and glorious a miracle as China. This monster is a nation with a darktinted billion born at the beginning of time, and facing its end; this struggle from starved degradation and murder and suffering to the triumph of that Long March to world leadership. Oh beautiful, patient, self-sacrificing China, despised and unforgettable, victorious and forgiving, crucified and risen from the dead.

-- NA --

Interlude: Communism

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COMMUNISM

I have studied socialism and communism long and carefully in lands where they are practiced and in conversation with their adherents, and with wide reading. I now state my conclusion frankly and clearly: I believe in communism. I mean by communism, a planned way of life in the production of wealth and work designed for building a state whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely the profit of a part. I believe that all men should be employed according to their ability and that wealth and services should be distributed according to need. Once I thought that these ends could be attained under capitalism, means of production privately owned, and used in accord with free individual initiative. After earnest observation I now believe that private ownership of capital and free enterprise are leading the world to disaster. I do not believe that so-called "people's capitalism" has in the United States or anywhere replaced the ills of private capitalism and shown an answer to socialism. The corporation is but the legal mask behind which the individual owner of wealth hides. Democratic government in the United States has almost ceased to function. A fourth of the adults are disfranchised, half the legal voters do not go to the polls. We are ruled by those who control wealth and who by that power buy or coerce public opinion.

I resent the charge that communism is a conspiracy: Communists often conspire as do capitalists. But it is false that all Communists are criminals and that communism speaks and exists mainly by means of force and fraud. I shall therefore hereafter help the triumph of communism in every honest way that I can: without deceit or hurt; and in any way possible, without war; and with goodwill to all men of all colors, classes and creeds. If, because of this belief and such action, I become the victim of attack and calumny, I will react in the way that seems to me best for the world in which

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I live and which I have tried earnestly to serve. I know well that the triumph of communism will be a slow and difficult task, involving mistakes of every sort. It will call for progressive change in human nature and a better type of manhood than is common today. I believe this possible, or otherwise we will continue to lie, steal and kill as we are doing today.

Who now am I to have come to these conclusions? And of what if any significance are my deductions? What has been my life and work and of what meaning to mankind? The final answer to these questions, time and posterity must make. But perhaps it is my duty to contribute whatever enlightenment I can. This is the excuse for this writing which I call a Soliloquy.

-- NA --

Part Two

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Chapter VI: My Birth and Family
I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, which began the freeing of American Negro slaves. The valley was wreathed in grass and trees and crowned to the eastward by the huge bulk of East Mountain, with crag and cave and dark forests. Westward the hill was gentler, rolling up to gorgeous sunsets and cloud-swept storms. The town of Great Barrington, which lay between these mountains in Berkshire County, Western Massachusetts, had a broad Main Street, lined with maples and elms, with white picket fences before the homes. The climate was to our thought quite perfect.

In 1868 on the day after the birth of George Washington was celebrated, I was born on Church Street, which branched east from Main in midtown. The year of my birth was the year that the freedmen of the South were enfranchised, and for the first time as a mass took part in government. Conventions with black delegates voted new constitutions all over the South, and two groups of laborers -- freed slaves and poor whites -- dominated the former slave states. It was an extraordinary experiment in democracy. Thaddeus Stevens, the clearest-headed leader of this attempt at industrial democracy, made his last speech, impeaching Andrew Johnson on February 16, and on February 23 I was born.

The house of my birth was quaint, with clapboards running up and down, neatly trimmed; there were five rooms, a tiny porch, a rosy front yard, and unbelievably delicious strawberries in the rear. A South Carolinian, lately come to the Berkshire Hills, owned all this -- tall, thin and black, with golden earrings, and given to religious trances. Here my mother, Mary Burghardt, and my father, Alfred Du Bois, came to live temporarily after their marriage ceremony in the village of Housatonic, which adjoined Great

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Barrington on the north. Then after a few years my father went east into Connecticut to build a life and home for mother and me. We meantime went to live on the lands of my mother's clan on South Egremont Plain in the southern part of our town.

The black Burghardts were a group of African Negroes descended from Tom, who was born in West Africa about 1730. He was stolen by Dutch slave traders and brought to the valley of the Hudson as a small child. Legally, Tom was not a slave, but practically, by the custom of the day, he grew up as either slave or serf, and in the service of the Burghardts, a white family of Dutch descent. Early in the 18th century, "Coonraet Borghardt" and Tom came east from the Hudson Valley and settled in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, which was described as a "howling wilderness." When the Revolutionary War broke out, Tom Burghardt "appears with the rank of private on the muster and payroll of Captain John Spoors company, Colonel John Ashley's Berkshire county regiment."

Tom "was reported a Negr." He enlisted to serve for three years; but how long or where he served the records do not show. At any rate this war service definitely freed him and his family from slavery; and later the Bill of Rights of 1780 declared all slaves in Massachusetts free.

Tom's mother or wife was a little black Bantu woman, who never became reconciled to this strange land; she clasped her knees and rocked and crooned:

Do bana coba -- gene me, gene me,
Ben d' nuli, ben d' le --

The song came down the years and I heard it sung at my grandfather's fireside. Tom died about 1787, but of him came many sons; one Jack, who took part in Shays' rebellion; and a daughter named Nancy Pratt. Jack is said to have married the celebrated Mom Bett as his first wife. Violet was Jack's second wife, and from these two were born a mighty family, splendidly named: Harlow and Ira, Chloe, Lucinda, Maria and Othello!

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These Burghardts lived on South Egremont Plain for near 200 years. The last piece of their land was bought from a cousin of mine and given to me in 1930 by a group of friends. Among them were Jane Addams, Clarence Darrow, Mrs. Jacob Schiff and Moorfield Storey. I planned eventually to make it my country home, but the old home was dilapidated; the boundaries of the land had been encroached upon by neighbors, and the cost of restoration was beyond my means. I sold it in 1955.

Here in the late 18th and early 19th centuries the black Burghardts lived. I remember three of those houses and a small pond. These were homes of Harlow and Ira; and of my own grandfather, Othello, which he had inherited from his sister Lucinda. There were 21 persons in these three families by the Census of 1830. Here as farmers they long earned a comfortable living, consorting usually with each other, but also with some of their white neighbors.

The living to be earned on the farms gradually became less satisfying, and the group began to disintegrate; some went to the Connecticut Valley; some went West; many moved to town and city and found work as laborers and servants. Usually their children went to school long enough to learn to read and write, but few went further. I was the first of the clan to finish high school.

Work for black folk which would lead to a more prosperous future was not easy to come by. Just why this was so it is difficult to say; it was not solely race prejudice, although this played its part; it was lack of training and understanding, reluctance to venture into unknown surroundings, and fear of a land still strange to family mores which pictured travel as disaster. In my family, I remember farmers, barbers, waiters, cooks, housemaids and laborers. In these callings a few prospered. My cousins, the Crispels of West Stockbridge, owned one of the best homes in town, and had the only barber shop; my Uncle Jim long had a paying barber business in Amherst; several hotel cooks and waiters were in charge of dining rooms, did well and were held in esteem; a cousin in Lenox was a sexton in the most prominent church,

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and his wife and four daughters ran an exclusive laundry; the family was well-to-do, but they worked hard and unceasingly. Few of my folk entered the trades or went into mercantile business or the professions. My cousin Ned Gardner, a nice-looking and well-bred man, worked his whole life at the Berkshire Hotel; honest, prompt, courteous; but he died a waiter. One uncle became the lifelong servant of the Kellogg family, and the legend was that his unpaid wages kept that family from suffering until one daughter married the Hopkins who helped build the Pacific Railroad. She was left a rich widow and returned to Great Barrington in 1880. This circumstance helped me enter the profession of teaching.

My mother's ancestral home on Egremont Plain, the house of my grandfather, Othello, one of three farming brothers, was sturdy, small and old-fashioned. There was a great fire-place, whose wrought-iron tongs stand now before my fire-place as I write. My immediate family, which I remember as a young child, included a very dark grandfather, Othello Burghardt. I dimly remember him, "Uncle Tallow," strong-voiced and redolent with tobacco, who sat stiffly in a great high chair beside the open fire, because his hip was broken. He was good-natured but not energetic. The energy was in my grandmother, Sally, a thin, tall, yellow and hawk-faced woman, certainly beautiful in her youth, and efficient and managing in her age. She had Dutch and perhaps Indian blood, but the rest of the family were black.

Othello and Sally had ten or more children. Many of these had moved away before I was old enough to know them; but I remember my Aunt Lucinda, who married a Gardner, and after his death a Jackson; then my Aunt Minerva, whose married name was Newport. The youngest children were my Uncle Jim and my mother, Mary Silvina. She was born in 1831, and died in 1885, at the age of 54 years. Mother was dark shining bronze, with smooth skin and lovely eyes; there was a tiny ripple in her black hair, and she had a heavy, kind face. She gave one the impression of infinite patience, but a curious determination was concealed in her softness.

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As a young woman she had a son, Idelbert, born of a love affair between her and her first cousin, John Burghardt. The circumstances of this romance I never knew. No one talked of it in the family. Probably the mating was broken up on account of the consanguinity of the cousins. My mother became a silent, repressed woman, working at household duties at home, helping now and then in the neighbors' homes, and finally going into town where her married sisters lived and where she worked as a housemaid. When she was 35, Alfred Du Bois came to town.

In the early 17th century, two French Huguenots, sons of Crétian Du Bois, migrated from Flanders to America. Perhaps a third son who spelled his name Du Bose went South. Louis and Jacques Du Bois settled in Ulster County, New York State. They were in all probability artisans descended from peasants; but the white American family declares they were aristocrats, and has found a coat of arms which they say belongs to them.

From Jacques in the fifth generation was descended James Du Bois, born about 1750, who became a physician in Poughkeepsie, New York, and migrated to the Bahamas. Lord Dunmore, Governor of New York and later of Virginia and the Bahamas, had given grants of land to various members of the Du Bois family, who were loyalists, and young Dr. James Du Bois went to the Bahamas soon after the Revolution and took over several plantations and one lake of salt which still bears his name. He prospered after some vicissitudes, and founded a family.

Whether, as is probable, he took a slave as a concubine, or married a free Negro woman -- in either case two sons were born, my grandfather Alexander in 1803 and a younger brother, John. After their mother's death, Dr. James Du Bois brought both boys to New York in 1810. Both were white enough to "pass," and their father entered them in the private Cheshire School in Connecticut. He visited them regularly, but on one visit, about 1820, he suddenly fell dead.

The white New York family removed the boys from school and took charge of their father's property. My grandfather

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was apprenticed to a shoemaker. Just what happened to John, I do not know. Probably he continued as white, and his descendants, if any, know nothing of their colored ancestry. Alexander was of stern character. His movements between 1820 and 1840 are not clear. As the son of a "gentleman," with the beginnings of a gentleman's education, he refused to become a shoemaker and went to Haiti at the age of perhaps 18. Boyer had become President just after the suicide of Christophe, and held power until 1843, bringing the whole island under his control and making a costly peace with France.

Of grandfather's life in Haiti from about 1821 to 1830, I know few details. From his 18th to his 27th year he formed acquaintanceships, earned a living, married and had a son, my father, Alfred, born in 1825. I do not know what work grandfather did, but probably he ran a plantation and engaged in the growing shipping trade to the United States. Who he married I do not know, nor her relatives. He may have married into the family of Elie Du Bois, the great Haitian educator. Also why he left Haiti in 1830 is not clear. It may have been because of the threat of war with France during the Revolution of 1830 and the fall of Charles X.

England soon recognized the independence of Haiti; but the United States while recognizing South American republics which Haiti had helped to free, refused to recognize a Negro nation. Because of this turmoil, grandfather may have lost faith in the possibility of real independence for Haiti. Again trade with the United States was at this period exceeding the trade of England or France and amounting to more than a million dollars a year. This trade was carried on with Northern cities like New Haven, but it was also demanded by the rapidly growing Cotton Kingdom in the South. Also, perhaps domestic difficulties with his wife's family and over family property may have arisen. For any or all of these reasons my grandfather left Haiti and settled with his son, now five years of age, in New Haven.

He arrived from the West Indies at a critical time: David

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Walker had published his bitter Appeal to Negroes against submission to slavery, in 1829; Nat Turner led his bloody Virginia slave revolt in 1831; slavery was abolished in the British West Indies in 1833; the rebelling slaves of the ship Amistad landed in Connecticut in 1839, and their trial took place in New Haven. Riots against Negroes occurred in New England cities, in New York and Philadelphia in this decade, and Negroes held conventions in Philadelphia. Among other things these Negroes determined to build an industrial college in New Haven, and later Prudence Crandall tried there to let Negro girls enter her seminary, to the disgust of the whites. In New Haven, the abolitionists Simeon Jocelyn and Arthur Tappan worked, and here Garrison visited.

In New Haven my grandfather settled. He opened a grocery store at 43 Washington Street. The color line was sharp in New Haven and abolitionists were stirring up dissension. In Trinity parish of the Episcopal church were a few colored communicants, including my grandfather. But the rector, Harry Croswell, was reactionary and openly condemned the abolition movement. Soon the colored communicants of Trinity were given to understand that they would be happier in their own racial church. Alexander Crummell, the great Negro minister, encouraged this move, and the example of Amos Beman who was building the Temple Street Negro Congregational Church, made the move inevitable.

This must have infuriated my grandfather, and yet his very pride drove him into joining this segregated church. He was made treasurer probably because he owned property; eventually he became the first senior warden of St. Luke's, as this "jim-crow" church was called. It still exists. Also, he and certain other Negroes with property were permitted to buy lots at the rear of the new Grove Street Cemetery, opposite the Yale campus. Years later when this cemetery was enlarged, those Negro lots lay on the center path. Here my grandfather lies buried and here I shall one day lie. 5

Alexander, in addition to his grocery, now became steward

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on the passenger boat which ran between New Haven and New York. Here he reformed the treatment of the servants, kept the boats in first-class order, and achieved a degree of independence. He was in charge of repairing and hiring. He had charge of the workers and saw to it that the Negro servants were served their meals regularly at a table. But race segregation in New Haven and New York was growing, and grandfather, after a time, determined that Springfield, Massachusetts, offered a better place for him and his family to live. In 1856 he removed to Springfield. He bought a farm not far from the city, down the Connecticut River, and established his family in the city of Springfield. He spent the winters there, but in Spring and Summer kept his stewardship of the New York-New Haven boats. He lived well: "bought a silk vest at Laws Clothing Store for $6.75. . . . Had a few invited guests at supper, one-half past six o'clock, champagne, a rather poor quality from Webster's . . . dedication ball at city hall." He joined the white Episcopal church and notes attendance at lectures. "Finished reading Shakespear's Othello," he writes one day.

Suddenly, in late May 1861, my grandfather took a trip to Haiti. This may have been caused by the outbreak of the Civil War. Perhaps he had just lost an American wife. In March, 11 American slave states had seceded and formed the Confederacy. In April, Southern ports were blockaded, and on May 14, Lee became Brigadier-General. The relation of colored folk to the war was uncertain, and my father, Alfred, was eligible for drafting. The future of colored folks in the United States was a problem; then, too, the rector of St. Luke's was Theodore Holly, who early in 1861 had led a migration of Negroes to Haiti, and painted a future for them there. It is possible also that grandfather was seeking property either of his father, Dr. James Du Bois, in the Bahamas, which was but a few hundred miles north from Haiti; or, perhaps, especially in Long Key, his birthplace; or from the family of his former Haitian wife. But he was a reticent man, and even his diary is silent on the most important points.

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"Thursday, May 9. Have thoughts of leaving the vessel, but want resolution to do so. Wrote to friends we should sail on Friday the 10th. Feel ashamed to back out, will wait a day or two longer but feel like one rushing on his fate. If God forsakes me, I am undone forever. `There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew as we will.'

May 15. Sun rose clear, wind west. Hove anchor, got under way 20 minutes past six o'clock. God speed the ship, and grant me deliverance from my enemy that I may conquer before I die." (Who was this enemy? The white Du Boises? The colored Haitians?)

On his lonely trip grandfather writes poetry, not very good, but indicating deep emotion. On May 19:

A single soul, One! Only one!
Of all I know or ever knew
My star by night, by day the sun
Now guide my bark, now bound my view.
It may be right, perchance tis wrong
To love without the priestly ken,
Such things are often known among
The disappointed Sons of Men.
Bodies may be joined together
By priestly craft and laws, so strong
In vain you try the bonds to sever
Yet love in laughter breaks the thong.

(Was grandfather confessing desertion of a Haitian wife whom he had not married and excusing his marriages in the United States?)

"Monday, June 3: Landed in Port Au Prince, took board at Mr. Fredd's, Rue Caserne; rain clearing; mosquitoes, jackasses, Negroes, mud water, soldiers, universal filth.

Saw emigrants at the emigrant house in a condition that if not changed soon will send many to the grave. Poor men and women, I am sorry, heart sorry for them. They put on an air of cheerfulness, which I am satisfied there is not one

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of them, but would give all they had in the world if they could stand where I did a few weeks ago."

Boyer had ruled Haiti. He had united the whole island under Haitian rule and had finally made peace with France, albeit on almost fatal terms. Four Presidents succeeded in the next four years; and then for ten years came the Emperor Faustin, who had been the slave Soulouque. The regime had an impressive magnificence, but was an economic failure.

The empire was overthrown in 1859 and Geffrard, a progressive and hard-working man, became President, from 1859 to 1867. He promoted education and industry and tried to cooperate with American abolitionists and colored leaders like Holly in encouraging the immigration of American Negroes. It was under Geffrard that my grandfather arrived. He "saw the President, Baron Dennis, August Elie; invited me to take passage in government steamer to St. Mark." It was in the vicinity of St. Mark that he had resided when he formerly lived in Haiti, and here his son Alfred had been born. Perhaps here were his strongest ties to Haiti. He stayed from June 4 to June 9. He says no word of what he did or whom he saw. We only know that on June 10 he was bound home on a British steamer "just eight days after I went ashore; I felt happy to arrive. I am more than happy to leave."

The ship loaded 6,000 tons of salt, the commodity which was the basis of Alexander's father's wealth, but Alexander does not mention the fact; nor apparently does he stop at Long Key where he himself was born. He is silent until Monday, June 24, when he lands in the United States. It is possible that in Haiti he received funds which gave him greater independence, or again it may be that he had left Alfred in Haiti, when he left in 1830; that his wife had died and that in 1861 he returned to get his son and bring him to America. This is conjecture.

Soon after returning he seems to have given up his New Haven work and connections and taken up a new career in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he had been living for

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some time. On July 12, 1861, "Du Bois and Thomas rented a shop on Main Street of W. W. Parsons at $150 a year."

I saw grandfather but once, when I was 15 and he 77. Always he held his head high, took no insults, made few friends. He was not a "Negro"; he was a man! Yet the current was too strong even for him. Then even more than now a colored man had colored friends or none at all, lived in a colored world or lived alone. A few fine, strong, black men gained the heart of this silent, bitter man in New York and New Haven. If he had scant sympathy with their social clannishness, he was with them fighting discrimination.

Beneath his sternness was a very human man. Slyly he wrote poetry -- stilted, pleading things from a soul astray. He loved women in his masterful way, marrying after his Haitian experience three beautiful wives in succession, in the United States, clinging to each with a certain desperate, even if unsympathetic affection. As a father he was naturally a failure -- hard, domineering, unyielding. His four children reacted characteristically: one was until past middle life a thin spinster, the mental image of her father; one died; one passed over into the white world, and her children's children are now white, with no knowledge of their Negro blood; the fourth, my father, bent before grandfather, but did not break -- better if he had. He yielded and flared back, asked forgiveness and forgot why, became the harshly-bold favorite, who ran away and rioted and roamed, and loved and married my brown mother.

He arrived in Great Barrington in 1867. He was small and beautiful of face and feature, just tinted with the sun, his wavy hair chiefly revealing his kinship to Africa. In nature, I think, he was a dreamer -- romantic, indolent, kind, unreliable. He had in him the making of a poet, an adventurer, or a Beloved Vagabond, according to the life that closed round him; and that life gave him all too little.

I really know very little of my father. He had been brought from Haiti by his father. How he was schooled, I do not know. New Haven then had separate schools and all public

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schools were poor. Perhaps he was put into one of the better private Negro schools, which existed in New Haven at times. What he did between the ages of 15 and 35, I do not know. He probably worked and wandered here and there. There is no hint of his marrying during this time. But his picture which he gave mother showed him in the uniform of a Civil War private. How long he served or where, I do not know, nor whether he enlisted as colored or white. Connecticut raised two Negro regiments.

When my father came to Great Barrington in 1867, the black Burghardts did not like him. He was too good-looking, too white. He had apparently no property and no job, so far as they knew; and they had never heard of the Du Bois family in New York. Then suddenly in a runaway marriage, but one duly attested and published in the Berkshire Courier, Alfred married Mary Burghardt and they went to live in the house of Jefferson McKinley. Here they lived for a year or two and against them the black Burghardt family carried on a more or less open feud, until my birth.

I was of great interest to the whole town. The whites waited to see "when my hair was going to curl," and all my Burghardt relatives admired me extravagantly. They still looked askance at my father and he was not attracted by them. There loomed the question as to where we were going to live and what my father was going to do for a living. He must have had some money on hand when he came, and he recoiled from grandfather Burghardt's home where Mary and her baby were expected eventually to live. After a year or more of hesitation, father went away to establish a home for his family. He would write for mother to come. Mother and I went to live on Egremont Plain with the Burghardts. In a few months father wrote from New Milford, a small town in Connecticut about 40 miles south of Great Barrington on the Housatonic River. Mother hesitated. She had seldom been out of her hometown. Once as a girl she had taken an excursion to New York. The family objected to her leaving and expressed more and more doubt as to father. The result was in the end that mother never went and my father

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never came back to Great Barrington. If he wrote, the letters were not delivered. I never saw him, and know not where or when he died.

My mother worried and sank into depression. The family closed about her as a protecting guardian. The town folk who knew the Burghardts took her and me into a sort of overseeing custody. We lived in simple comfort, and living was cheap. And yet as I look back I cannot see how mother accomplished what she did. Her brother and sisters, her cousins and relatives always stood by. My silent older half-brother early went to work as a waiter and was seldom home, but always he was ready to help.

My mother seldom mentioned my father. She was silent before family criticism. She uttered no word of criticism or blame. I do not remember asking much about him. Why, I am not sure; but I think that I knew instinctively that this was a subject which hurt my mother too much even to mention.

As I look back now, I can see that the little family of my mother and myself must often have been near the edge of poverty. Yet I was not hungry or in lack of suitable clothing and shoes, or made to feel unfortunate in company with my fellow students. That was partly because most village folk were poor or middle class. There were but few rich families. Most of my schoolmates belonged to families of small farmers, artisans, or shopkeepers. When special expenditures were called for, new shoes or school books, the money often came from gifts from my uncle or aunts or less frequently from white families, long closely connected with the Burghardts. There may have been other gifts but they were never conspicuous. I never wore cast-off clothes. I never asked folk outside the family for money. Our landlord, Mrs. Cass, received no rent, I am sure, for long intervals. I think the rent was four dollars a month, and finally it was accounted for by settlement as a gift when I went to college.

We continued to live with grandfather Burghardt until I was about five, and grandfather died. The family then moved into town. We lived on the Sumner estate on south Main

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Street, where we had rooms over what was once the stables. There was a nice wide yard and a running brook which afforded me infinite pleasure. Right opposite the front gate was the long lane leading down to the public school grounds. I suspect this nearness to school induced mother to choose this home. Then after grandmother died, we moved up to Railroad Street, right next to the station. We lived with a poor white family, kindly, but the wife was near insanity.

Soon after, my worrying mother had a paralytic stroke from which she never entirely recovered. As I remember her, she was always lame in her left leg, with a withered left hand. We always walked arm in arm. The misfortune never seemed to me to hurt us. I continued in school and had plenty to eat. Aunts and cousins did our mending and neighbors were always ready to help out. Sometimes mother went out for a day's work and people seemed to like to have her. I always went to bring her home at night and was never left alone.

We soon moved to the Cass home which mother and I occupied during my high school days. It was on Church Street and stood back of the Cass residence and next to the horse-sheds of the Congregational church, which was empty except on Sunday. We occupied two rooms and a pantry on the ground floor and two bedrooms on the second half-story.

None of these successive homes had modern conveniences: the "back house" and running water were outdoors; our heat came from stoves. Usually the houses were weatherproof and we had furniture enough for health and comfort. We had no gardens, but sometimes a border bit of land. Always after I was 12, I had a bedchamber to myself, a luxury which I never dreamed was so rare until I was much older.

In the public schools of this town, I was trained from the age of six to 16, and in the town schools, churches, and general social life, I learned my patterns of living. I had, as a child, almost no experience of segregation or color discrimination. My schoolmates were invariably white; I joined quite naturally all games, excursions, church festivals; recreations like coasting, swimming, hiking and games. I was in and out of the homes of nearly all my mates, and ate and played with

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them. I was as a boy long unconscious of color discrimination in any obvious and specific way.

I knew nevertheless that I was exceptional in appearance and that this riveted attention upon me. Less clearly, I early realized that most of the colored persons I saw, including my own folk, were poorer than the well-to-do whites; lived in humbler houses, and did not own stores. None of the colored folk I knew were so poor, drunken and sloven as some of the lower class Americans and Irish. I did not then associate poverty or ignorance with color, but rather with lack of opportunity; or more often with lack of thrift, which was in strict accord with the philosophy of New England and of the 19th century.

On the other hand, much of my philosophy of the color line must have come from my family group and their friends' experience. My immediate family eventually consisted of my mother and her brother. Near to us in space and intimacy were two married aunts with older children; and a number of cousins, in various degrees removed, lived scattered through the town and county. Most of these had been small farmers, artisans, laborers and servants. With few exceptions all could read and write, but few had training beyond this. These talked of their work and experiences, of hindrances which colored people especially encountered, of better chances in other towns and cities. In this way I must have gotten indirectly a pretty clear outline of color bars which I myself did not experience. Moreover, I couldn't rationalize my own case, because I found it easy to excel most of my classmates in studies, if not in games. The secret of life and the loosing of the color bar, then, lay in excellence, in accomplishment. If others of my family, of my colored kin, had stayed in school instead of quitting early for small jobs, they could have risen to equal whites. On this my mother quietly insisted. There was no real discrimination on account of color -- it was all a matter of ability and hard work.

This philosophy saved me from conceit and vainglory by rigorous self-testing, which doubtless cloaked some half-conscious misgivings on my part. If visitors to school saw and

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remarked on my brown face, I waited in quiet confidence. When my turn came, I recited glibly and usually correctly because I studied hard. Some of my mates did not care, some were stupid, some excelled, but at any rate I gave the best a hard run, and then sat back complacently.

I entered public school at the age of about five or six. For ten years I went regularly to school, from nine o'clock until noon, and one o'clock until four each day, five days a week, ten months a year. The teachers were mature women, most of them trained in State Normal Schools and invariably white American Protestants. Miss Cross, my first primary teacher, was stern and inflexible, but with an inward kindliness and sense of fairness which made her a favorite of mine; and since I was a bright boy who got his lessons, I became a favorite of hers.

The school grounds were not particularly attractive or large, and yet they were ample for the play of children at recess. A great choke-cherry tree with bared roots gave shade in the summer, and fences hemmed us in from the private homes at the side and the low meadows beyond. The primary schoolhouse was wooden, with wooden hand-made furniture, and usually pretty well crowded. The grammar and high school building was brick. We had short devotions and singing each morning and there my clear young voice brought some initial distinction.

Gradually I became conscious that in most of the school work my natural gifts and regular attendance made me rank among the best, so that my promotions were regular and expected. I look back upon my classmates with interest and sharpened memory. They were boys and girls of town and country, with a few Irish and never but once another colored child. My rapid advancement made me usually younger than my classmates, and this fact remained true in high school and at college and even when I began my life work it influenced my attitudes in many ways. I was often too young to lead in enterprises even when I was fitted to do so, but I was always advising and correcting older folk.

Of course, I was too honest with myself not to see things

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which desert and even hard work did not explain or solve. I recognized ingrained difference in gift. Art Benham could draw pictures better than I; but I could express meaning in words better than he; Mike Gibbons was a perfect marble player, but dumb in Latin. I came to see and admit all this, but I hugged my own gifts and put them to test.

As playmate of the children I saw the homes of nearly everyone. The homes I saw impressed me, but did not overwhelm me. Many were bigger than mine, with newer and shinier things, but they did not seem to differ in kind. One class of rich folk with whom I came in contact were summer boarders who made yearly incursions from New York. I think I was mostly impressed by their clothes. Outside of that there was little reason so far as I could see to envy them. The children were not very strong and rather too well dressed to have a good time playing. I think I probably surprised them more than they me, for I was easily at home with them and happy. They looked to me just like ordinary people, while my brown face and frizzled hair must have seemed strange to them.

The schools of Great Barrington were simple but good, well-taught; and truant laws were enforced. I started on one school ground, and continued there until I was graduated from high school. I was seldom absent or tardy. The curriculum was simple: reading, writing, spelling and arithmetic; grammar, geography and history. We learned the alphabet; we were drilled vigorously on the multiplication tables and we drew accurate maps. We could spell correctly and read with understanding.

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Chapter VII: Boyhood in Great Barrington
Great Barrington was a town of middle-class people, mostly native white Americans of English and Dutch descent. There were differences of property and income and yet all the men worked and seemed at least to be earning their living. Naturally the income was not proportioned to the effort; some men worked three hours a day and earned several thousand dollars a year; carpenters worked 12 hours a day for a dollar, and servants toiled day and night for two dollars a week. But we did not dream of a day when a man doing nothing could be a millionaire at 35, while his fellow broke back and heart and starved.

The women were housekeepers, with a few exceptions, like teachers, the postmistress, and a clerk now and then in stores like Fassett's shop for women's apparel. The ownership of property, of homes and stores, of a few mills of various sorts, was fundamental, and the basis of social prestige. Most families owned their homes. There was some inherited wealth but not in very large amounts. There were no idle rich and no outstanding "society." I dimly remember one rich old man who was apparently retired and did no work. He rode about town now and then in a carriage with a liveried coachman. I recall my astonishment when I learned that the splendid gentleman on the high front seat, with beaver hat, shining boots and gold braid, was not the owner. The owner was the little fat man crouched in the rear seat.

This, however, was exceptional. The Russell brothers, middle-aged men whom I knew quite well, went to work every day, superintending the Berkshire Woolen Mills in the upper part of town. The Whitings, an old well-to-do family, ran a drugstore, and a white Burghardt who spelled his name Burgett had the leading grocery store. The Girlings had a clothing store, and the Brewers dealt in hardware

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and fuel. There were two hotels; the Berkshire catered to summer visitors, chiefly from New York; the Miller House depended on local trade. There was for a time a steam bakery which turned out delicious food until the National Biscuit Company swallowed it up and it disappeared. There was a bank, the Mahaiwe National.

Of course there was also the usual contradiction: while property and income were the main bases of social status, at the same time the facts concerning them were a carefully guarded secret. No one knew exactly how rich the Russells were or just what was the financial status of the Coffins and Churches. There were, of course, rumors and general estimates which were in all probability not far from the truth, but few knew with any exactitude the economic status of the important persons of the town.

There was no great exhibition of wealth. The homes of the Russells, the Churches and Dr. Collins were comparatively large with perhaps eight or ten rooms and built of wood or, more rarely, of stone. There was an abundance of cheap blue granite in the neighboring mountains. Most of the houses were of wood, four to six rooms, and all of them were furnished according to a common pattern: horse-hair sofas and chairs in the "parlors," with old-fashioned wooden furniture and corner "what-nots." They were usually heated by coal stove; one in each room, anthracite coal and wood from the vicinity were used. Bathrooms and indoor toilets were rare; each home had its outdoor privy, often nicely arranged.

In general living, the contrast between the well-to-do and the poor was not great. Living was cheap and there was little real poverty. Some food like local fruit was almost common property; vegetables like potatoes, navy beans and cabbage were grown in small home gardens; corned beef and chickens fetched low prices and eggs could often be raised at home; "greens" and rhubarb grew in back yards and in the Fall canning and preserving cost only the sugar. There were no flashy carriages and the social life was quite private. When the Berkshire Courier, our local weekly newspaper,

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made social announcements it was usually marriages, births, and deaths, visiting relatives from out of town, and trips to New York or the West by local residents.

I grew up in the midst of definite ideas as to wealth and poverty, work and charity. Wealth was the result of work and saving and the rich rightly inherited the earth. The poor, on the whole, were themselves to be blamed. They were unfortunate and if so their fortunes could easily be mended with care. But chiefly, they were "shiftless," and "shiftlessness" was unforgivable.

The chief criterion of local social standing was property and ancestry; but the ancestors were never magnates like the patroons of the manors along the Hudson to the west; nor were they persons of great prestige and learning with aristocratic connections like the residents of Boston and eastern Massachusetts. They were usually ordinary folk of solid respectability, farm owners, or artisans merging into industry. Standing did not depend on what the ancestor did, or who he was, but rather that he existed, lived decently and thus linked the individual to the community. Physically and socially our community belonged to the Dutch valley of the Hudson rather than to Puritan New England, and travel went south to New York more often and more easily than east to Boston.

The stores dealt chiefly in staples for ordinary living -- food, clothes, medicines, and so forth. Most of them originally catered to a large farmer trade between country and town. The surrounding farmers brought in their produce and traded it for manufactured goods and certain luxuries. But this type of trading in my boyhood was being gradually reduced in extent. Western farm produce was underselling local efforts except in the case of milk, butter and fresh vegetables. There were one or two good jewelry and watch-repairing stores, a confectionery store and a number of tropical fruit stands.

One of our citizens impressed me greatly. C. C. Taylor was a little white-haired man who was writing a history of the town: he was an official of the bank and, what was of

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closer interest to me, he lived on a beautiful hill on lower Main Street. He kept a herd of cattle. They gave so much milk that he told my mother that anytime she wanted skimmed milk, to send me down and get all we wanted. I remember those morning walks up to the great elm on our corner; down the vast expanse of Main Street; past the Town Hall and the watering trough opposite; then by the Kellogg meadow and home and Mike Gibbons' cottage and up to the Taylor home and the delicious fresh milk.

There were one or two liquor saloons, which the town did not like to recognize, but had to. George Briggs, a native American, used to run such a saloon, but got out of the business when I was quite small and went into the more respectable business of selling meat; but the townspeople never forgot his former calling. The most prosperous saloon in my boyhood was on Railroad Street, which led from Main Street to the railroad station. It was run by a man of foreign descent named Brazie. Here was a center of drinking and carousing and perhaps some gambling. My mother laid down here one of her few strict commands; she was not talkative, but listened well. She gave few commands; but she said firmly that I was never to go into a liquor saloon or even near it. I never did, and indeed, so strong was the expression of her wishes that never in my life since have I felt at ease drinking at a bar.

The reason for my mother's attitude was clear. Great Barrington had few places of amusement or means for recreation. Community social life centered in entertainments in Town Hall; the "Bohemian glass blowers," or, as I vividly remember, the Sam Lucas singers; but for the ordinary man, including both hard-working merchant and busy artisan, not to mention laborers and visitors passing through, the liquor saloon was recreation and drunkenness was escapism. Numbers of the most respectable townsfolk were sometimes openly seen the worse for overindulgence in liquor. My own Uncle Jim, a reputable and hard-working barber, came home now and then walking very straight because of liquor. When the Murphy crusade for total abstinence swept the

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valley, I as a boy was one of the first to don the blue ribbon. I kept the pledge until I went as a student to Germany.

Over against this general basic community of white Americans were two groups. One was composed of a mass of Irish peasants who began to reach this town in the early 50's after the well-known famine. They were Catholics and came in increasing numbers as house servants and workers in the local woolen mills. The older Irish families became laborers on the railroads and artisans of various sorts. They formed a group of the respectable poor. They were followed by poorer and more ignorant peasants, ill-trained and ragged and given to drink. They became herded in slum areas in the upper part of the town surrounding the mills. They received low wages and were exploited in the usual ways, not as much as in the cities, but more than was necessary in a town like Great Barrington. As a boy, I was afraid of the Irish and kept away from their part of town as much as possible. Sometimes they called me "nigger" or tried to attack me. On the other hand, the older and better class of them had children in school whom I knew quite well.

The mass of the Irish, however, were separated from the townfolk by their religion and their monopoly of house service. The Catholic church was perched across the river beyond the mills, and thither the girl servants trudged faithfully early mornings to mass. This and other traits of the Irish became the basis of jokes and ridicule in town and throughout New England. Indeed, I was struck in later years when I came back from the South to New England, to find that the "nigger" jokes of Tennessee were replaced at Harvard by tales of the "two Irishmen" and songs like "mush-mush-mush turaliady."

My own attitude toward this hard-working Irish minority was naturally complicated. They did not belong to my traditional community and consequently I felt no comradeship with them. I think I rather assumed, along with most of the townfolk, that the dirty, stinking Irish slums were something that the Irish themselves preferred and made. Certainly in school and church and on the street, I got no idea

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that the town was responsible for the slums. My Housatonic River, for instance, was "golden" because of the waste which the paper and woolen mills poured into it and because more and more the river became a public sewer into which town and slum poured their filth.

The other minority in my town were my own colored people, but they were few in number. In Great Barrington there were perhaps 25, certainly not more than 50, colored folk in a population of 5,000. My family was among the oldest inhabitants of the valley. The family had spread slowly through the county intermarrying among cousins and other black folk, with some, but limited, infiltration of white blood. Other dark families had come in and there was some intermingling with local Indians. In one or two cases there were groups of apparently later black immigrants from Africa, near Sheffield for instance. Surviving also was an isolated group of black folk whose origin was obscure. We knew little of them but felt above them because of our education and economic status.

The colored population of the town had been increased a little by "contrabands," freed Negroes from the South, who on the whole were well received by the colored group; although the older group held some of its social distinctions and the newcomers astonished us by forming a little Negro Methodist Zion church, which we sometimes attended. There were the Masons, a family of six, a little uncouth and very religious; but good-hearted, hard workers and so jolly. I came to like them very much. There were visitors from neighboring towns. I remember a lovely little plump, brown girl who appeared out of nowhere, and smiled at me demurely; and there were always strange cousins. The colored folk were not set aside in the sense that the Irish were, but were a part of the community of long-standing; and in my case as a child, I felt no sense of difference or separation from the main mass of townspeople.

After I entered high school, I began to feel the pressure of the "veil of color"; in little matters at first and then in larger. There were always certain compensations. For instance,

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George Beebe was a handsome classmate in high school, two or three years older than I, and extravagantly dressed. My own clothes were never ragged, but seldom new and certainly not in current style. Yet George and I were excellent friends because with all his clothes he was rather dumb in class and knew it, while I was bright and just this side of shabby, so that we balanced each other. The Sabins, Clarence and Ralph, lived near me on the opposite street. Clarence was serious and studious, and Ralph a little devil. We were friends and playmates. Art Benham, whose father was a railroad engineer, was a pixie, red-haired, ugly and gifted. He and I were joint editors of the only paper that was ever published during my day. It was the high school Howler, gotten out by hand, and lasting only for two or three issues.

The boy who lived nearest me was Jim Parker, son of a watchmaker. He and Fred Sanford used to go hunting with firearms in the forest. This repelled me a little, as I did not like killing things, but they were all good pals whom I could easily outdistance in class. Other boys of my group were Boardman Tobey, son of a jeweler, who came to school once with shoes said to have cost four dollars. We did not believe such a price possible. George Phelps, the tinner's son, lived next door and we met daily. Ned Hollister's father had his large grocery store near the watering-trough for horses; his stock of tropical fruit introduced me to dozens of oranges which Ned forced on me when accidentally his stone hit me instead of the "duck on the rock" at which he was aiming. He attained fame by bringing the first high-wheeled bicycle to town.

One girl, Mary Dewey, eldest daughter of our most distinguished lawyer, surpassed me in arithmetic. She could add up columns of figures with astonishing rapidity, but my grasp of history and ability to write were better than hers. The other girls in my classes were not to me notable. Edith Pixley and Lottie Doolittle were pretty but did not know much. Sabra Taylor and Minnie Crissy were sober country girls and good students whom I liked. Agnes O'Neil was a

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newcomer to town whose ancestors nobody knew. She dressed quite gorgeously and George Beebe escorted her about. But otherwise she was negligible.

In our day and school, because we were younger and less sophisticated, our chief business was studying or playing. I can remember when the new school principal, Frank Hosmer of Amherst, tried to introduce a uniform cap with gilt lettering, G.B.H.S. on the front, to indicate the "Great Barrington High School." We were almost unanimously against it, and called it "The Great Big Hosmer Speculation." As a matter of fact, we students for the most part and particularly myself, did not have the money to pay for this unnecessary expense. On the other hand, we did have some interesting group activities. Hosmer and young Frank Wright, who was reading law in Judge Dewey's office, put on a play at Town Hall, Scott's Lady of the Lake, and most high school students took some part. There was a folk play, Old John Brown Had a Little Indian, in which I was one of the participants. For recreation we played games: "marbles," "hi-spy," "duck on a rock," and "Indians." We went mountain climbing and explored caves. We swam, and coasted the long hill from far up Castle Street, across the railroad tracks down to Main Street. Most of the children used to skate; but not I for two reasons: skates cost too much, and mother was afraid of the water.

Our chief holidays were Fourth of July, Cattle-show and Christmas. Fourth of July was a romp for children, with a few but not many casualties. Once in a while we had fireworks as a treat from some philanthropist. Usually we only set off our individual packs of small crackers. Christmas was a festival of church and home, and there was no public illumination, and no frantic buying of presents. We played baseball but it had not yet become a national game and consisted of "one old cat" or at most two chosen sides. We tried football sometimes. I was not particularly good at these games but joined gaily in the fun.

Of other schoolmates, there were two Irish boys whom I liked -- Mike Gibbons had marvelous facility at playing "marbles,"

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and Ned Kelly who was fat and jolly. Later he became town clerk. An older fellow student of long English ancestry, Walter Sanford, became local judge. Will Beckwith lived on a farm near town, where sometimes my mother went as temporary "help." I always came out over week-ends, played with Will, and ate with the family. Mother always had a rich cake ready for me. Later, Will was one of the few Great Barrington boys who went to college.

Three other boys I knew quite well, but they did not go to the public school. Charles and John Church went to Edward Van Lennep's private school, where numbers of rich young people from out of town were taught. Our own opinion in the high school was that these students did not have brains enough to go to public school. We were probably prejudiced. Mr. Van Lennep tried to have good relations between the town boys and his pupils. The Church family had considerable inherited wealth from their ancestors, the Coffins. The Coffins had taken advantage of the war tariffs and manufactured paper. The young Churches were educated to become a part of the idle rich, but Charles did not take to this role kindly. He and I were quite good friends. The younger, John, on the other hand, was a little exclusive. I remember him especially because he married May Loop, an orphaned hoyden of an old but poor family. She lived next door to me, and was one of the group with which I played on Church Street, where I lived. Later, when I had left town and gone South to school, she had married John. She wrote me and asked if I could find her a colored servant. I couldn't.

There was one little boy to whom I was closely drawn. He was Louis Russell, the son of Farley Russell, the mill owner, who had married a second wife. This Mrs. Russell, whom I knew and who was well acquainted with my family, was a lovely lady who tried to rear young Louis. He was frail, good-hearted, but slow-witted, and did not go to public school. Mostly he was kept at home, and Mrs. Russell made special effort to find companions for him, and she especially chose me. So that quite often I went across the railroad

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tracks and up the wide and flowered meadow which led to the Russell home. It was one of the most imposing in the village, isolated, and surrounded with grass, flower, and fruit. There were stables in the rear, and outhouses for farming.

I always had a good time when I went to play with Louis. We were welcomed in the house; we ate bread and milk together in the big kitchen; and the Irish servants were kind. Once or twice Mrs. Russell insisted on my taking home certain of Louis' toys. The one which gave me most pleasure was an old wooden bicycle. It was Mrs. Russell to whom my high school principal turned when he wanted me to take up Greek, and my mother and I hesitated because of the cost of the books. She bought all my Greek books.

Of the other town folk outside my schoolmates, I remember especially Johnny Morgan. He was a small man, I think of Welsh descent, and ran a bookstore in the front part of the little shop where the village post office occupied the rear. I went to the post office daily, not because I was expecting mail or often got any, but because of the intriguing exhibition of periodicals and books in Johnny Morgan's store. He became interested in me and very sympathetic. He did not repel me by asking too many questions or trying to find out my plans and ideas. But he made little suggestions and did not object to my looking at the illustrations in Puck and Judge. I looked them over each week.

I remember one momentous transaction. From early days I had been intrigued by books as books. In our living room I took possession of an old "secretary" which had come down in the family and gathered together in it a number of stray volumes which I found about the house. One I distinctly remember, Opie on Lying. There were a few others. I did not read them, but they formed my library. Then one Fall -- it was in 1882 and I was in my second year in high school -- I saw in Johnny Morgan's window a gorgeous edition of Macaulay's History of England, in five volumes, and I wanted it fiercely. Its price was, of course, far beyond my ability to pay, but Johnny Morgan suggested that I buy it on installments. This was not a usual method at that time

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in Great Barrington. It was our rule to "pay as you go." But I seized on Morgan's suggestion and for several months paid installments of, I think, 25 cents a week. At Christmas time I took my precious purchase home and it still stands in my library.

The first glimpse in the outer and wider world was through Johnny Morgan's store. There I remember very early seeing pictures of U. S. Grant and Tweed, who was beginning his extraordinary career in New York; and later of Hayes and the smooth and rather cruel face of Tilden. Johnny Morgan made other suggestions to me. He arranged while I was in high school that I become the local Great Barrington correspondent of the Springfield Republican, which was the most influential and widely circulated paper in western Massachusetts. I sent it from time to time some items of interest, but not many, as I was soon graduated from high school.

Outside my school, my chief communication with the people of the town was through the church. In Great Barrington there were three leading Protestant churches, and later a fourth. The most important church was the Congregational. It had the largest attendance of all the churches, including merchants and farmers, and professional men of the town. My own family on both sides had been Episcopalians, but because we lived near the Congregational church, and because my mother had many acquaintances there, and because the minister, Scudder, was especially friendly, my mother early joined this church. I think we were the only colored communicants. But I grew up in this church and its Sunday School, and it was there that one of the lady members, looking down on a chubby little brown child walking beside his mother, saw me take off my hat. My rather stiff long curls were revealed, and with considerate kindness she said sweetly: "Little girls keep their hats on in church." This of course precipitated at home a wild fight on my part to have my curls cut off, and of course in time, and to my mother's grief, off they came.

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In the festivities of the whole year, when strawberries became ripe, when harvest brought in fruit and vegetables, and at Christmas time, there were celebrations in Sunday School, and I was always there. I felt absolutely no discrimination, and I do not think there was any, or any thought of it. When the great church was burned down, I was a sensitive mourner and oversaw at every period its pretentious rebuilding. I remember the altar, whose Greek inscription I was proudly able to read: "He alethia eleutherosi humas." (The truth shall make you free.) I heard the dedicatory sermon: "For thus said the High and Mighty One, who inhabiteth eternity, Whose Name is Holy. I dwell in the high and lofty place. With him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit to revive the spirit of the humble, to revive the heart of the contrite ones."

The new Sunday School building was my chief pride and joy. It had climbed out of the basement and had broad and beautiful rooms with sunlit windows looking out on lawn and flowers. The carpet, the chairs, the tables, were all new, and the teachers were inspired to new efforts with their growing classes. I was quite in my element and led in discussions, with embarrassing questions, and long disquisitions. I learned much of the Hebrew scriptures. I think I must have been both popular and a little dreaded, but I was very happy.

The other leading church was the Episcopalian, a little more heavy in architecture and aristocratic in concept. The older families and the more well-to-do attended. I remember one incident which characterized the religious situation in town. Our leading lawyer had been made a county judge. Judge Dewey lived on the corner of my street, and in a house with which I was very familiar. As a little boy there lived in one of the upper chambers there, overlooking both Main and Church Streets, a young lady who was sick. My mother used to take me there once in a while and I would spend an hour or so in this chamber talking to the lady. Of what we talked, I have not now the faintest idea, but apparently

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we both were much interested. My mother explained that the lady had cancer, which was the first I had heard of this dread disease. Then visits ceased.

In this house, Judge Dewey and his family lived, his eldest daughter Mary, who had the phenomenal mathematical ability which I have mentioned, a second daughter Sarah, and little Margaret. In the Congregational church, of which Judge Dewey was a high official, the governing board decided to use at Communions individual wine cups instead of the one great silver beaker. Judge Dewey was outraged. He declared that the decision was against the Bible, and he led his flock from Church Street down to the Episcopal church, where thereafter he became a communicant. It was a town sensation.

In the upper part of the town, toward the mill, was a small white wooden Methodist church. It had a small congregation of the less well-known inhabitants of the town. They met quietly and regularly. Then of course across the river, and uncounted by the mass of town folk, was the Catholic church, with a large attendance of Irish working people, and a cemetery nearby. Later, and while I was in high school, the colored folk of the town, mostly newcomers, and not old families like the Burghardts, organized a small branch of the A.M.E. Zion church, which had been formed in New York late in the 18th century. The colored people had long owned a small plot of land in the lower part of the town on Main Street. They were induced to sell this for a small plot on a side street, and there they built a little chapel. The older Negroes were not at all happy about this segregated institution, but now and then we used to attend the services, which became an inconspicuous part of the religious organization of the community.

There was little crime or misdemeanor in our town. We had a single policeman, a little old man named Abe who wore a badge and carried a club. We boys used to make sly fun of him. But there was a little one-roomed "lock-up" and once in a while it had an occupant for a night. In school there were the usual youthful disputes and arguments; but

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seldom were there fights, and never gangs or feuds. I remember being principal of one fight when I was in grammar school. It was with a strong country boy, but what it was about I have quite forgotten; it had no racial cause I am sure. We left school at noon and instead of going home to lunch, we went up back of the railway station. There before cheering schoolmates we slugged it out manfully. I was pretty thoroughly trounced, but we were both able to report to class at one o'clock looking fairly presentable with our "honor" vindicated. It was as I learned in later life, quite a usual human culture pattern.

Once while I was in high school, a number of us students stole some grapes from a tempting arbor. Now, taking fruit had never been regarded by us as more than the right of town boys and we knew all the best orchards. But in this case we filched some choice and carefully tended grapes from a prominent citizen. There was considerable indignation and Judge Dewey suggested that I and the others might be better off in Reform School. We had a very good one in the eastern part of the State with which the judge was connected. The victim of the theft, however, refused to press any charge and nothing more was heard of Judge Dewey's proposal. But I was considerably disturbed. During my ten years of boyhood life there was in the county one murder; once the bank was robbed of a small sum; there were minor cases of stealing and trespass and some drunkenness which called for arrest.

In government, Great Barrington was in theory and largely in practice a democracy of the New England type. In general politics we were nearly all Republicans. Indeed, it was not respectable to be anything else; one of our prominent lawyers, Joyner, a thin, tall swarthy man, was a Democrat and we suspected him of low origin and questionable designs.

From early years, I attended the town meeting every Spring and in the upper room in that little red brick Town Hall, fronted by a Roman "victory" commemorating the Civil War, I listened to the citizens discuss things about

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which I knew and had opinions: streets and bridges and schools, and particularly the high school, an institution comparatively new. We had in the town several picturesque hermits, usually retrograde Americans of old families. There was Crosby, the gunsmith, who lived in a lovely dale with brook, waterfall and water wheel. He was a frightful apparition but we boys often ventured to visit him. Particularly there was Baretown Beebe, who came from forest fastnesses which I never penetrated. He was a particularly dirty, ragged, fat old man, who used to come down regularly from his rocks and woods and denounce high school education and expense.

I was 13 or 14 years of age and a student in the small high school with two teachers and perhaps 25 pupils. The high school was not too popular in this rural part of New England and received from the town a much too small appropriation. But the thing that exasperated me was that every Spring at Town Meeting, which I religiously attended, this huge, ragged old man came down from the hills and for an hour or more reviled the high school and demanded its discontinuance.

I remember distinctly how furious I used to get at the stolid town folk, who sat and listened to him. He was nothing and nobody. Yet the town heard him gravely because he was a citizen and property-holder on a small scale and when he was through, they calmly voted the usual funds for the high school. Gradually as I grew up, I began to see that this was the essence of democracy: listening to the other man's opinion and then voting your own, honestly and intelligently.

While without conscious socialist tendencies the town owned its own water supply which poured into the homes from a dark and secret lake hidden in the hills; our charity looked after the few paupers who were "on the town" and we cared for our streets and sewers. On the other hand, our fire department was volunteer and we had no public park save the square around the Town Hall. Indeed what with our meadows and mountains, we needed none.

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We made no social arrangements for sickness. That was mainly a matter of friendly charity among relatives and neighbors. There was but one hospital in the county, and that was at Pittsfield and called the "House of Mercy." We had a few physicians in town and they in attending my family were very considerate in their charges. I was seldom sick: whooping cough and measles I remember, but little else. Fortunately I have never broken a bone.

In general thought and conduct I became quite thoroughly New England. It was not good form in Great Barrington to express one's thoughts volubly, or to give way to excessive emotion. We were even sparing in our daily greetings. There was on the street only a curt "good morning" to those whom you knew well and no greetings at all from others. I am quite sure that in a less restrained and conventional atmosphere I should have easily learned to express my emotions with far greater and more unrestrained intensity; but as it was I had the social heritage not only of a New England clan but Dutch taciturnity. This was later reinforced and strengthened by inner withdrawals in the face of real and imagined discriminations. The result was that I was early thrown in upon myself. I found it difficult and even unnecessary to approach other people and by that same token my own inner life perhaps grew the richer; but the habit of repression often returned to plague me in after years, for so early a habit could not easily be unlearned. The Negroes in the South, when I came to know them, could never understand why I did not naturally greet everyone I passed on the street or slap my friends on the back.

Of course our democracy was not full and free. Certain well-known and well-to-do citizens were always elected to office -- not the richest or most noted but just as surely not the poorest or the Irish Catholics.

The town and its surroundings were a boy's paradise: there were mountains to climb and rivers to wade and swim; lakes to freeze and hills for coasting. There were orchards and caves and wide green fields; and all of it was apparently property of the children of the town. My earlier contacts

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with playmates and other human beings were normal and pleasant. Sometimes there was a dearth of available playmates but that was peculiar to the conventions of the town where families were small and children must go to bed early and not loaf on the streets or congregate in miscellaneous crowds. Later, in the high school, there came some rather puzzling distinctions which I can see now were social and racial; but the racial angle was more clearly defined against the Irish than against me. It was a matter of income and ancestry more than color. I have written elsewhere of the case of our exchanging visiting cards when one girl, a newcomer, did not seem to want mine, to my vast surprise.

I presume I was saved evidences of a good deal of actual discrimination by my own keen sensitiveness. My companions did not have a chance to refuse me invitations; they must seek me out and urge me to come as indeed they often did. When my presence was not wanted they had only to refrain from asking. But in the ordinary social affairs of the village -- the Sunday School with its picnics and festivals; the temporary skating rink in the Town Hall; the coasting in crowds on all the hills -- in all of these, I took part with no thought of discrimination on the part of my fellows, for that I would have been the first to notice.

Indeed, even in high school it was not regarded as good form for the boys to pair about with the girls. They did not walk together on the streets. They did not talk with each other too often on the grounds. I suppose that this fact explains much that bothers us today. Today, high schools with their higher age level, and retarded pupils, have become social centers and even matrimonial agencies, particularly in the South. It is this concept of the high school which partially explains the fanatical resistance to desegregation as at Little Rock.

Later, I was protected in part by the fact that there was little social activity in the high school; there were no fraternities; there were no school dances; there were no honor societies. Whatever of racial feeling gradually crept into my life, its effect upon me in these earlier days was rather one

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of exaltation and high disdain. They were the losers who did not ardently court me, and not I, which seemed to be proven by the fact that I had no difficulty in outdoing them in nearly all competition, especially intellectual. In athletics I was not outstanding. I was only moderately good at baseball and football; but at running, exploring, story-telling and planning of intricate games, I was often if not always the leader.

After I entered the high school, economic problems and questions of the future began to loom. They were partly settled by my own activities. My mother's limited sources of income were helped through boarding the barber, my uncle, supplemented infrequently by her own day's work, and by some kindly unobtrusive charity. But I was keen and eager to eke out this income by various jobs; splitting kindling, mowing lawns, doing chores. I early came to understand that to be "on the town," the recipient of public charity, was the depth not only of misfortune but of a certain guilt. I presume some of my folk sank to that, but not to my knowledge. We earned our way. I have a little postcard dated in 1883 in which Miss Smith on September 19 writes, "We would like to have you come certainly next Saturday as you did last week to do some splitting for us." This was a matter of splitting up kindling for two maiden ladies and this was one of the first of my economic enterprises.

My first regular wage began as I entered the high school: I went early of mornings and filled with coal one or two of the new so-called "base burning" stoves in the millinery shop of Madame L'Hommedieu. From then on, all through my high school course, I worked after school and on Saturdays.

For some time too I sent weekly letters to a colored weekly New York Age and sold copies, and before the A&P stores dealt in groceries and simply were selling tea, I was one of their local agents. Thus in all sorts of little ways I managed to earn some money and never asked or thought of gifts.

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Of the great things happening in the United States at that time we were touched only by the Panic of 1873, when my uncle in 1876 came home from the little town east of us where he was a leading barber. He brought me, I remember, a silver dollar, which was an extraordinary thing. Up to that time I had seen nothing but paper money.

The United States in the decades 1870-1890 was an extraordinary country. Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur and Grover Cleveland were presidents. James G. Blaine was an aspirant who barely missed the highest office, and the country was reckless and prosperous; squandering its seemingly endless resources; tying East and West with railways; exploiting iron and coal and oil and making fortunes for a new and ruthless caste of businessmen who were cashing in on the cost of the Civil War. Many results of this I could see in my town.

On the other hand, the inner social group of my own relatives and colored friends always had furnished me as a boy most interesting and satisfying company. The color line was manifest and yet not absolutely drawn. I remember a cousin of mine who brought home a white wife. The chief objection was that he was not able to support her and nobody knew her family; and knowledge of family history was counted as highly important. Many of the colored people had some white blood from unions several generations past. That colored folk congregated together in their own social life was natural because that was the rule in the town. There were little social knots of people, but not much that today would be called social life, save that which centered about the churches; and there the colored folk often took part.

The fate of my various relatives among the black Burghardts I do not know very well. One cousin, Jimmie Burghardt, lived near Williams College and always wanted to enter. But he never did. He lacked both money and Greek and worked as college janitor. But his granddaughter is stenographer in a large New York corporation. Others have prospered as western farmers, one became a singer and teacher of music and another was head of the home economics

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department in the colored school system of a large border state city. Of course it is probably true that there are hundreds of black Burghardt descendants working as ordinary citizens -- teachers and a few others in the professions, civil servants, artisans and skilled laborers; and plain hard workers on street and in home. I greet them all.

Now and then I made little trips to neighboring towns: to my cousins, the Pipers in Sheffield, five miles south, to play with John and his sisters; to Pittsfield, two long miles north, where my cousins Mary and Lizzie Potter lived and where I saw the lovely Rita Tredwell. Once I stayed with my uncle in Amherst who lived with a niece and owned a barber shop. He bought me a new suit of beautiful "navyblue" cloth.

But my greatest boyhood trip came in 1883, when I was 15 and in third-year high school. In 1874 my grandfather having lost his third wife was proposing to marry a widow, Mrs. Green, and assured her of a home in New Bedford whither he had moved from Springfield. He writes: "I have bought of the Petomska Mills Corporation the house and lot southwest corner of Landby and Third streets. The lot is the whole width of what the corporation owns on Landby and runs south far enough to comprise 20 roods for $2,000 -- one half to be paid in cash -- and the rest either over a year or with 7% interest and secured by mortgage on the premises."

Grandfather then adds: "Entreat me not to leave thee or to return from following after thee, for whither thou goest, I will go, where thou lodgest will I lodge, thy people shall by my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried."

"I like you better as our acquaintance extends, my dear Anna. Come to my house as soon as it shall please you so to do, there shall be but one home, one purse, one affection, one God."

They were eventually married, and in 1883 my grandfather's last wife wrote my mother. She had known and liked my father and understood his difficulties with his

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father. When he had left us and was presumably dead, she heard of me and wanted me to come and let my grandfather see and know me. My mother was excited and determined that I should make the trip. How she managed to raise the money, I do not know. But always, Mother, in her resourceful way, got for me whatever she thought I needed. She got together money for my trip, hoping that grandfather might eventually help in my education. So off I went to my first great excursion into the world.

I went down the Housatonic railroad to Bridgeport and missed my train to New Haven because of the contradiction of clocks with the new standard time. I traded my ticket for another route by way of Hartford. There I saw the capitol building and wrote about signing the register for "distinguished guests!" -- was late in reaching Providence and a bit put out because my grandmother's friend was not promptly on hand to meet me.

One incident during my stay was unforgettable. One afternoon the center table in the parlor was decorated with a festive cloth, cut-glass decanter of wine and two wineglasses. Grandfather expected a visitor, and so I hovered in the background.

The visitor proved to be a large black man, with pleasant countenance, and well-dressed. My grandfather in long black coat, received Mr. Freedom with grave courtesy. They sat down and talked seriously; finally my grandfather arose, filled the wineglasses and raised his glass and touched the glass of his friend, murmuring a toast. I had never before seen such ceremony: I had read about it in books, but in Great Barrington both white and black avoided ceremony. To them it smacked of pretense. We went to the other extreme of casual greetings, sprawling posture and curt rejoinder. The black Burghardts indulged in jokes and backslapping. I suddenly sensed in my grandfather's parlor what manners meant and how people of breeding behaved and were able to express what we in Great Barrington were loath to give act to, or unable. I never forgot that toast.

The house in New Bedford was sold after grandfather's

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death in 1887 for $2,110. He is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery near the Yale Campus, New Haven, in a lot which he owned, and which is next to that of Jehudi Ashmun of Liberian fame. His eldest daughter married a light mulatto and their descendants are now passing for white and probably quite unaware of their colored blood. My Aunt Henrietta married a man named Bates, of Cumberland, Allegheny County, Maryland.

On my return from New Bedford I had another stirring experience. I stopped again with grandmother's friend in Providence and he took me to the annual picnic at Rocky Point on Narragansett Bay where the colored people of three states were wont to assemble. I viewed with astonishment ten thousand Negroes of every hue and bearing, saw in open-mouthed astonishment the whole gorgeous gamut of the American Negro world; the swaggering men, the beautiful girls, the laughter and gaiety, the unhampered self-expression. I was astonished and inspired. I apparently noted nothing of poverty or degradation, but only extraordinary beauty of skin-color and utter equality of mien, with absence so far as I could see of even the shadow of the line of race. I came home by way of Springfield and Albany where I was a guest of my elder half-brother and saw my first electric street light blink and sputter.

I was graduated from high school in 1884 and was of course the only colored student. Once during my course another dark boy had attended the school for a short time, but I was very much ashamed of him because he did not excel the whites as I was quite used to doing. All 13 of us graduates had orations, and mine was on Wendell Phillips. The great anti-slavery agitator had just died in February and I presume that some of my teachers must have suggested the subject, although it is quite possible that I chose it myself. But I was fascinated by his life and his work and took a long step toward a wider conception of what I was going to do.

Most of the short speeches were fairly conventional essays; but I thought the talk of Minnie Crissey on reading was

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especially good and I envied her knowledge of books. My own essay brought loud applause from the audience because of my race and subject. I was born in a community which conceived itself as having helped put down a wicked rebellion for the purpose of freeing four million slaves. They deeply admired Phillips despite the fact that recently he had adopted socialism. My mother was in the audience and was filled with pride.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world there were stirring and change which were to mean so much in my life: In Japan the Meiji Emperors rose to power the year I was born; in China the intrepid Empress Dowager was fighting strangulation by England and France; Prussia had fought with Austria and France, and the German Empire arose in 1871. In England, Victoria opened her eighth parliament and the duel of Disraeli and Gladstone began; while in Africa came the Abyssinian expedition and opening of the Suez Canal, so fateful for all my people.

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Chapter VIII: I Go South
In the Summer of 1884, after my graduation from high school, there loomed the problem as to where I was to go to college. The fact that I was going had been settled in my own mind from the time that my school principal, Frank Hosmer, had recommended my high school course. Hosmer was a graduate of Amherst and later in life he became president of Oahu College, Hawaii. He suggested, quite as a matter of course, that I ought to take the college preparatory course which involved algebra, geometry, Latin and Greek. If Hosmer had been another sort of man, with definite ideas as to a Negro's "place," and had recommended agriculture or domestic economy, I would doubtless have followed his advice, had such "courses" been available. I did not then realize that Hosmer was quietly opening college doors to me, for in those days they were barred with ancient tongues.

This meant a considerable expenditure for books which were not free in those days, and were more costly than my own folk could afford; but Mrs. Russell, the wife of one of the mill owners, or rather I ought to describe her as the mother of one of my playmates, after some hesitation offered to furnish all the necessary books. I accepted the offer as something normal and right; only after many years did I realize how critical this gift was for my career. I am not yet sure how she came to do it; perhaps my wise principal suggested it. Comparatively few of my white classmates planned or cared to plan for college -- perhaps two or three in my class of 13. I became therefore a high school student preparing for college and thus occupied an unusual position among whites in the town.

I collected catalogues of colleges and over the claims of Williams and Amherst, nearest my home, or of Yale not much further, I blithely picked Harvard, because it was

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oldest and largest and most widely known. But a question arose in my case, a young and ambitious colored man. What were the possibilities of employment or of any career after such training? I imagine this matter was discussed considerably among my friends, white and black.

However in my mind there was no doubt but that I was going to college. The whole matter was subtly taken out of my hands and a sort of guardianship of family and white friends was quietly established. I was advised that after all I was rather young to go directly to college; and also our high school was below the standard of Harvard entrance requirements. It might then be wise for me to work and study a year and then enter college in the Fall of '85. There followed an unexpected change when in the Fall of 1884 my mother died.

I felt a certain gladness to see her at peace at last, for she had worried all her life. Of my own loss I had then little realization. That came only in after years. Now it was the choking gladness and solemn feel of wings! At last, I was going beyond the hills and into the world that beckoned steadily. There followed the half-guilty feeling that now I could begin life without forsaking my mother. I had realized all along that even college would not have induced me to leave my mother in want. I somehow argued that the family would support mother in my absence, yet I must have known this was impossible; that what she would always need was for me to be near. Now I was free and unencumbered and at the same time more alone than I had ever dreamed of being. This very grief was a challenge. Now especially I must succeed as my mother so desperately wanted me to.

I was, however, an orphan, without a cent of property, and with no relative who could for a moment think of undertaking the burden of my further education. My grandfather was growing old, and had little. But the family at home could and did help out; and the town in its quiet and unemotional way was satisfied with my record and silently began to plan.

There were three white men in Great Barrington who seemed to have clear ideas as to my future. The first was the

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high school principal, whom I have mentioned. The second was Edward Van Lennep, principal of the only local private school, and very active in the Congregational church, where he was superintendent of the Sunday School, which I attended. Whether or not he consulted with Mr. Hosmer, I do not know, but he probably did. At any rate he was satisfied that I ought to go to college and that the fact that my skin was colored was of no importance. When, then, a suggestion was made which involved the raising of a scholarship for me, Mr. Lennep and his pastor, Mr. Scudder, were eager to cooperate.

The third man was the Rev. C. C. Painter, whose son Charles was a schoolmate of mine during the high school course. Mr. Painter was a Congregational minister and for a time served in the Federal Indian Bureau. There and elsewhere he saw the problem of the reconstructed South, and conceived the idea that this was the place for me to be educated and that in the South lay my future field of work.

Meantime my family contributed an unexpected piece of good fortune. There had been a great-uncle of mine, Tom Burghardt, son of Jack, whose tombstone I had often seen in the town graveyard. My family used to say in undertones that the unpaid wage of Tom Burghardt helped to build the Pacific Railroad. Nearly all his life Tom Burghardt had been a servant in the Kellog family, only the family usually forgot to pay him any wage. Finally when he died they did give him a handsome burial and a white tombstone. Then Mark Hopkins, a son or relative of the great Mark, appeared on the scene and married a daughter of the Kellogs. He became one of the Huntington-Stanford-Crocker Pacific Associates who built, manipulated and cornered the Pacific railroads and with the help of the Kellog nest-egg, Hopkins made 19 million dollars in the West by methods not to be too strictly inquired into.

His widow came back to Great Barrington in the 80's and took up residence in the old family mansion on Main Street, overlooking the wide meadows and great East Mountain beyond, with its wealth of blue granite. I know the old white

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house well and its picket fence. I passed it almost daily when as a little boy I went to get milk from the Taylor home on the opposite hill. Mrs. Hopkins brought with her to Great Barrington from San Francisco a young man named Dennis who became my friend. He was a well educated young mulatto, quick, competent and in complete charge of Mrs. Hopkins' local business affairs. I used to meet him almost daily on my way to school and we had most interesting conversations. He was perhaps the first to tell me of his employer's plan to build a new mansion of blue granite, between the old home and the school yard and rising above the lovely stretch of meadows. I think it was Dennis in consultation with my family who saw to it that I was offered a place as timekeeper on the new project, at what seemed to me the fabulous wage of a dollar a day. I had never before earned more than a dollar a week.

Norcross Brothers of Worcester were the contractors; stone-cutter, masons and carpenters came to town. I was duly installed in one of the temporary work sheds, with desk and high chair, fronting a window, by which passed all the yardfull of workers each day. My superior was a pleasant Frenchman, who liked my French name and whose home I visited now and then.

It was a most interesting experience and had new and intriguing bits of reality and romance. As timekeeper and the obviously young and inexperienced agent of superiors, I was the one who handed the discharged workers their last wage envelopes. I talked with contractors and saw the problems of employers. I poured over the plans and specifications and even came in some contact with the distinguished English architect, Searles, who finally came to direct the work after the American architect failed to meet the expanding ideas of Mrs. Hopkins. Searles had the glamour and the clothes of an English gentleman and soon the whole direction and control of the Hopkins fortune passed into his hands. Dennis, the steward, was gradually pushed aside and down into "his place." The architect eventually married the widow and her wealth, and the steward killed himself.

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So the Hopkins millions passed strangely into foreign hands, and after the death of Mrs. Hopkins and Searles himself, went to his nephew, an utter stranger to the town and its people. This posed for me my first problem of inheritance. Meantime the fabrication and growth of this marvelous palace, beautiful beyond anything that Great Barrington had seen, went slowly and majestically on, and always I could sit and watch it grow. Eventually its grounds occupied my old school site; the school buildings were torn down and new grounds were found across the river.

Here I worked through the Summer of 1885. I boarded with my Aunt Minerva at a nominal charge. I bought a new wardrobe, visited my cousins now and then in the county, and then in September came the plan which Mr. Painter had evolved for a scholarship. He induced my mother's Congregational church and three other churches which he had once pastored in Connecticut, each to furnish me $25 a year for the length of my college course. This would be enough to support me at Fisk University, a college for Negroes in Nashville, Tennessee, which was said to do excellent work.

Disappointed though I was at not being able to go immediately to Harvard, I regarded this merely as a temporary change of plan; I would of course go to Harvard in the end. But here and now was adventure. I was going into the South; the South of slavery, rebellion and black folk; above all, I was going to meet colored people of my own age and education, of my own ambitions.

My family and colored friends rather resented the idea. Their Northern free Negro prejudice naturally revolted at the idea of sending me to the former land of slavery, either for education or for living. I am rather proud of myself that I did not agree with them. Whether or not I should always live and work in the South, I did not then stop to decide; that I would give up the idea of graduating from Harvard, did not occur to me. But I wanted to go to Fisk, not simply because it was at least a beginning of my dream of college, but also, I suspect, because I was beginning to feel lonesome in New England. Unconsciously, I realized that as I grew

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older, and especially now that I had finished the public school, the close cordial intermingling with my white fellows would grow more restricted. There would be meetings, parties, clubs, to which I would not be invited. Especially in the case of strangers, visitors, newcomers to the town would my presence and friendship become a matter of explanation or even embarrassment to my schoolmates. I became aware, once a chance to go to a group of young people of my own race was opened up for me, of the spiritual isolation in which I was living.

I heard too in these days for the first time the Negro folk songs. A Hampton Quartet had sung them in the Congregational church. I was thrilled and moved to tears and seemed to recognize something inherently and deeply my own. I was glad to go to Fisk. On the other hand, my people had clung to a more unromantic view of the situation. They said frankly that it was a shame to send me South. I was Northern born and bred and instead of preparing me for work and giving me an opportunity right there in my own town and state, they were bundling me off to the South. This was undoubtedly true. The educated young white folk of Great Barrington became clerks in stores, bookkeepers and teachers, and a few went into professions. Others went to the cities or the West where they were welcome. Great Barrington was not able to conceive of me in such local positions. It was not so much that they were opposed to it, but it did not occur to them as a possibility.

On the other hand, there was the call of the black South; teachers were needed. The crusade of the New England schoolmarm had done a fine work. The freed slaves, if properly led, had a great future. Temporarily they were deprived of their full voting privileges, but this was but a passing setback. Black folk were bound in time to play a large role in the South. They needed trained leadership. I was sent to help furnish it.

Meantime I was learning something of industry. I began to see the workers as human beings and to know how hard a task stonecutting by hand was; I began to realize what discharge

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from a job meant when there was no union and no funds for supporting the unemployed; but all this was vague in my mind.

I went into Tennessee at the age of 17 to enter Fisk University. I collected all my personal property which I could take with me: my books; my grandfather's wrought iron tongs and shovel; I kept a few pieces of the blue china which all my life had graced the Thanksgiving and Christmas table. I longed for the great brass kettle in which Grandmother Burghardt had washed and made soap, but I was dissuaded. Nor could I carry the family Bible which went to cousin Ines. Mrs. Cass remitted the rent due so as to cover my railway fare. I left no other debts.

Then came the fascinating railroad ride to New York; the ferry ride up the Hudson past the great city, and transfer to Grand Central. Next day as I was riding through Kentucky, a brown boy from Bowling Green sat down beside me. He was Otho Porter and was also going to Fisk University. I liked his frank face and very neat appearance and when he proposed that we be roommates I eagerly consented. Roommates we were for all my college course. He became the leading colored physician in Kentucky, whom I often visited in after years. Ah! the wonder of that journey, with its faint spice of adventure, as I entered the land of slaves.

I was thrilled to be for the first time among so many people of my own color or rather of such various and such extraordinary colors, which I had only glimpsed before, but who it seemed were bound to me by new and exciting and eternal ties. Never before had I seen young men so self-assured and who gave themselves such airs, and colored men at that; and above all for the first time I saw beautiful girls. At my home among my white schoolmates there were a few pretty girls; but either they were not entrancing or because I had known them all my life, I did not notice them; but at Fisk the never-to-be-forgotten marvel of that first supper came with me opposite two of the most beautiful beings God ever revealed to the eyes of 17. I promptly lost my appetite, but I was deliriously happy! Of one of these girls I have often said, no

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human being could possibly have been as beautiful as she seemed to my young eyes in that far-off September night of 1885. She was the great-aunt of Lena Horne and fair as Lena Horne is, Lena Calhoun was far more beautiful.

So I came to a region where the world was split into white and black halves, and where the darker half was held back by race prejudice and legal bonds, as well as by deep ignorance and dire poverty. But facing this was not a lost group, but at Fisk a microcosm of a world and a civilization in potentiality. Into this world I leapt with enthusiasm. A new loyalty and allegiance replaced my Americanism: henceforward I was a Negro.

To support this was the teaching and culture background of Fisk of the latter 19th century. All of its teachers but one were white, from New England or from the New Englandized Middle West. My own culture background thus suffered no change or hiatus. Its application only was new. This point d'appui was not simply Tennessee, which was never a typical slave state, but Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, whence our students came; and who as mature men and women, could paint from their own experience a wide and vivid picture of the postwar South and of its black millions. There were men and women who had faced mobs and seen lynchings; who knew every phase of insult and repression; and too there were sons, daughters and clients of every class of white Southerner. A relative of a future president of the nation had his dark son driven to school each day.

I arrived on the Fisk campus in September and in October was struck down by a severe attack of typhoid fever which was too prevalent in Nashville. This was a campus crisis. First I was from New England, a rare phenomenon at Fisk. Second my excellent public school training landed me in the sophomore class, an unheard of thing, especially for a lad of 17 when my college mates averaged five to ten years older. I was a campus curiosity even for the teachers. As I lay deathly sick, an orphan in a strange land, the whole school hung on the bulletins. When I at last crept out, thin and pale, I was the school favorite.

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Then in a few weeks came the annual school-wide English examination, which induced poorly trained students to review reading, writing and arithmetic. I stood second with only Mary Bennett, the white German teacher's daughter, outranking me. I could not quite forgive her as a girl and a white one at that. I also knew that the test was unfair to most of the students who had never had decent elementary school training in the colored public schools of the South. Nevertheless my popularity rather went to my head. I was bright, but sharp-tongued and given to joking hard with my fellows. Some resented this and I remember C. O. Hunter, a big, black, earnest boy near twice my size who resented some quip of mine. He took me so firmly by the arm that I winced. He said, "Don't you do that again!" I didn't.

Proctor was a tall, rail-like lad in the class below me. We were rivals in debate, and 20 years later, I met him again in Atlanta, swollen physically to huge proportions and pastor of the leading Negro church for intelligent social work. We worked together after the Atlanta riot [of 1906]. G. D. Field was a little black man, serious, who knew and hated the white South. He always carried a pistol. "No," he answered as I expressed surprise, "You don't need it often, but when you do, it comes in handy!" L. B. Moore was tall and dark, with a scintillating mind. He was always a leader in jokes and study. He married a Methodist bishop's daughter and eventually became head of a department at Howard University.

One man whom we called "Pop" Miller, I grew cordially to dislike. He was much older than most of the students and had been retarded by poverty in his education. His wife was taking in washing to keep him in school. He was a fat, black man, and exceedingly pious. When I recovered from the fever, quite naturally on the rebound, I joined the college Congregational church. I was not "religious" but I was honest and believed, in our placid New England way, most of the church creed. I wrote of this to the pastor of my church in February 1886:

"You have no doubt expected to hear of my welfare before this, but nevertheless you must know I am very grateful to

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you and the Sunday School for what you have done. In the first place I am glad to tell you that I have united with the Church here and hope that the prayers of my Sunday School may help guide me in the path of Christian duty. During the revival we had nearly forty conversions. The day of prayer for colleges was observed here with two prayer meetings. The Rev. Mr. Aitkin, the Scotch revivalist, spoke to us a short time ago, and tomorrow Mr. Moody will be present at our chapel exercises.

Our University is very nicely situated, overlooking the city, and the family life is very pleasant indeed. Some mornings as I look about upon the two or three hundred of my companions assembled for morning prayers I can hardly realize they are all my people; that this great assembly of youth and intelligence are the representatives of a race which twenty years ago was in bondage. Although this sunny land is very pleasant, notwithstanding its squalor, misery and ignorance spread broadcast; and although it is a bracing thought to know that I stand among those who do not despise me for my color, yet I have not forgotten to love my New England hills, and I often wish I could join some of your pleasant meetings in person as I do in spirit."

But "Pop" Miller did not allow my church membership to progress as placidly as I planned. He was an official of the church and a fundamentalist in religion. He soon had me and others accused before the church for dancing. I was astonished. I had danced all my life quite as naturally as I sang and ran. In Great Barrington there was little chance to dance on the part of anyone but in the small group of colored folk there was always some dancing along with playing games at homes. When I came South and was among my own young folk who not only danced but danced beautifully and with effortless joy, I joined and learned eagerly. I never attended public dance halls, but at the homes of colored friends in the city, we nearly always danced and a more innocent pastime I could not imagine. But Miller was outraged. What kind of dancing he was acquainted with I do not know, but at any rate in his mind dancing figured as a particularly heinous

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form of sin. I resented this and said so in very plain terms. The teachers intervened and tried to reconcile matters in a way which for years afterward made me resentful and led to my eventual refusal to join a religious organization. They admitted that my dancing might well be quite innocent, but said that my example might lead others astray. They quoted Paul: "If meat maketh my brother to offend, I will eat no meat while the world standeth." I tried to accept this for years, and for years I wrestled with this problem. Then I resented this kind of sophistry. I began again to dance and I have never since had much respect for Paul.

I remember quite vividly many others of those schoolmates of long ago. Ransom Edmondson was a handsome man, tall and thin, olive-skinned with a mass of brown hair, wearing spectacles and curiously dignified. He was five or six years older than I and acted as assistant librarian under Professor Morgan who taught Latin. He and a younger brother were sons of a rich white planter. Frank Smith of the class ahead of me was a yellow dandy, faultlessly dressed and a squire of dames. He later married Lena Calhoun with whom I was hopelessly in love; but Smith was over 25 years of age and ready for a wife. I had yet ten years to work and wait. Tom Talley had one of the great bass voices of all time. But he gave his life and strength to teaching and singing for the college and never had sufficient time for the study which his magnificent voice required. Little Sissie Dorsey, a golden fairy with the voice of an angel, sang at all our concerts. Mattie Nichol was a dark cream and gorgeous little person with a fiery temper. John Barber was a handsome smiling playboy, spoiled by his mother. After graduation he married Mattie but two years later he laid his head on the railroad tracks and let a locomotive run over it.

All my schoolmates were not handsome and rich. There was black, coarse-looking Sherrod, poor and slow, who worked his way painfully through college, studied medicine at neighboring Meharry Medical School and became one of the best physicians in Mississippi.

Two girls were rivals of mine and resented my superior

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attitude toward girls; but we did not dislike each other. Maggie Murray crowed over me when I forgot my lines at rhetorical exercises. Later she became the third wife of Booker Washington and survived him. Mamie Steward came from Western New York and was my classmate. We were keen but appreciative rivals. Emma Terry was black, smooth-skinned and kindly, and a favorite with all. Tom Calloway was a pal of mine and remained so for 40 years. He was the executive go-getter, strong and tireless. I was the planner. Together we collected funds for the first Fisk gymnasium. I edited the school paper, the Fisk Herald, and Calloway was business manager. We made it self-supporting during our time.

Other Fiskites who impressed me were William Morris who was the first colored member of our faculty and to my pride as good as any of the whites. The colored Crosthwaite family as students and graduates greatly influenced me. George McClennan was an old graduate, very religious but not dogmatic, who wrote poetry which had merit. He talked earnestly to us about life. Alice Vassar was another of our beautiful voices to whom we listened with joy.

The college curriculum was limited but excellent. Adam Spence was a great Greek scholar by any comparison. Thomas Chase with his ridiculously small laboratory nevertheless taught us not only chemistry and physics but something of science and life. In after years I used Bennett's German in Germany, and with the philosophy and ethics of President Cravath, I later sat under William James and George Palmer at Harvard. The excellent and earnest teaching, the small college classes, the absence of distractions, either in athletics or society, enabled me to arrange and build my program for freedom and progress among Negroes. I replaced my hitherto egocentric world by a world centering and whirling about my race in America.

For this group I built my plan of study and accomplishment. Through the leadership of men like myself and my fellows, we were going to have these enslaved Israelites out of the still enduring bondage in short order. It was a battle

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which might conceivably call for force, but I could think of it mainly as a battle of wits; of knowledge and deed, which by sheer reason and desert, must eventually overwhelm the forces of hate, ignorance and reaction. Consider for a moment our president, Erastus Cravath, whose son became head of one of the nation's leading corporation law firms. When he died in 1901, I said at his memorial exercises in Atlanta:

"He was cast in body and mind of large mold -- one never expected little actions in any work from him either of hand or soul. There was none of that quick nervous energy or hasty action or brilliant deed that have so often seared and marred the world. His was rather a slow well-balanced mind. He knew how to pause in his work and in his speed and gather strength for slow but irrepressible advance. But if his mind worked slowly and calmly it also worked with a logical persistency and far-reaching grasp of thought that was bound to bring results in the long run. I remember that as students it was a standing joke among us that no matter how long President Cravath's sentences might be or how intricate and involved, they were sure at some time to come to a logical and grammatical conclusion -- their construction was never changed -- there were no rhetorical dashes but they moved ponderously and doggedly to the end and the end was usually worth hearing. He was a man of broad sympathies. He appreciated a joke although he was not quick to see one. There was once in school a very small and terribly mischievous boy named Cummings, but I doubt if the grave president ever knew why the school persisted in smiling when he prayed, `Oh Lord forgive us for our shortcomings.'

Erastus Cravath was a man who formed his life ideal when he was yet young; who early came to believe in the possibilities of the Negro race and the reality of the broader humanity taught by the Christian religion. He did not hold this merely as a theory, as an intellectual belief, but as a thing worth living and fighting for -- and for it he lived and fought."

Always in my dreaming, a certain redeeming modicum of common sense has usually come to my rescue and brought

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fantasy down to the light of common day. I was not content to take the South entirely by hearsay; and while I had no funds to travel widely, I did, somewhat to the consternation of both my teachers and fellow-students, determine to go out into the country and teach summer school. I was only 18 and knew nothing of the South at first hand, save what little I had seen in Nashville from the protected vantage ground of a college campus. I had not seen anything of the small Southern town and the countryside, which are the real South. If I could not explore Darkest Mississippi, at least I could see East Tennessee, which was not more than 50 miles from the college. I determined to know something of the Negro in the country districts; to go out and teach during the summer vacation. I was not compelled to do this, for my scholarship was sufficient to support me, but that was not the point. I had heard about the country in the South as the real seat of slavery. I wanted to know it.

Needless to say the experience was invaluable. I travelled not only in space but in time. I touched the very shadow of slavery. I lived and taught school in log cabins built before the Civil War. My first school was the second held in the district since Emancipation. I touched intimately the lives of the commonest of mankind -- people who ranged from barefooted dwellers on dirt floors, with patched rags for clothes, to rough, hard-working farmers, with plain, clean plenty.

First, there was a Teachers' Institute at the county seat; and there distinguished guests of the superintendent taught the teachers fractions and spelling and other mysteries -- white teachers in the morning, Negroes at night. This was to supplement the wretched elementary training of the prospective teachers. A picnic now and then, and a supper, and the rough world of the colored folk was softened by laughter and song.

There came a fine day when all the teachers left the Institute and began the hunt for schools. I learned from hearsay (for my mother was mortally afraid of fire-arms) that the hunting of ducks and bears and men is wonderfully interesting, but I am sure that the man who has never hunted a

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country school in the South has something to learn of the pleasures of the chase. I see now the white, hot roads lazily rise and wind and fall before me under the burning July sun; I feel the deep weariness of heart and limb as ten, eight, six miles stretch relentlessly ahead; I feel my heart sink heavily as I hear again and again "Got a teacher? Yes." So I walked on and on -- horses were too expensive -- until I had wandered beyond railways, beyond stage lines, to a land of "varmints" and rattlesnakes, where the coming of a stranger was an event, and men lived and died in the shadow of one blue hill.

Sprinkled over hill and dale lay cabins and farmhouses, shut out from the world by the forests and the rolling hills toward the east. There I found at last a little school. Josie told me of it; she was a thin, homely girl of 20, with a darkbrown face and thick, hard hair. I had crossed the stream at Watertown, and rested under the great willows; then I had gone to the little cabin in the lot, where Josie was resting on her way to town. The gaunt black farmer made me welcome and Josie, hearing my errand, told me anxiously that they wanted a school over the hill; that but once since the Civil War had a teacher been there; that she herself longed to learn -- and thus she ran on, talking fast and loud, with much earnestness and energy.

Next morning I crossed the tall round hill, lingered to look at the blue and yellow mountains stretching toward the Carolinas, then plunged into the wood, and came out at Josie's home. It was a dull frame cottage with four rooms, perched just below the brow of the hill, amid peach trees. The father was a quiet, simple soul, calmly ignorant, with no touch of vulgarity. The mother was different -- strong, bustling, and energetic, with a quick, restless tongue, and an ambition to live "like folks." There was a crowd of children. Two boys had gone away. There remained two growing girls; a shy midget of eight; John, tall, awkward and 18; Jim, younger, quicker and better looking; and two babies of indefinite age.

Then there was Josie herself. She seemed to be the center

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of the family; always busy at service, or at home, or berrypicking; a little nervous and inclined to scold, like her mother, yet faithful, too, like her father. She had about her a certain fineness, the shadow of an unconscious moral heroism that would willingly give all of life to make life broader, deeper and fuller for her and hers. I saw much of this family afterwards, and grew to love them for their honest efforts to be decent and comfortable, and for their knowledge of their own ignorance. There was with them no affectation. The mother would scold the father for being so "easy"; Josie would roundly berate the boys for carelessness; and all knew that it was a hard thing to dig a living out of a rocky side-hill. I found a place where there had been a Negro public school only once since the Civil War; and there for two successive terms during the summer I taught at 28 and 30 dollars a month.

It was an enthralling experience. I remember the day I rode horseback out to the commissioner's house with a pleasant young white fellow who wanted the white school. The road ran down the bed of a stream; the sun laughed and the water jingled, and we rode on. "Come in," said the commissioner, "come in. Have a seat. Yes, that certificate will do." I was pleasantly surprised when the superintendent invited me to stay for dinner; and he would have been astonished if he had dreamed that I expected to eat at the table with him and not after he was through.

The schoolhouse was a log hut, where Colonel Wheeler used to store his corn. It sat in a lot behind a rail fence and thorn bushes, near the sweetest of springs. There was an entrance where a door once was, and within, a massive rickety fireplace; great chinks between the logs served as windows. Furniture was scarce. My desk was made of three boards reinforced at critical points, and my chair, borrowed from my landlady, had to be returned every night. Seats for the children -- these puzzled me much. I was haunted by a New England vision of neat little desks and chairs, but, alas the reality was rough plank benches without backs, and at

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times without legs. They had the one virtue of making naps dangerous, possibly fatal, for the floor was not to be trusted. All the appointments of my school were primitive: a windowless log cabin; hastily manufactured benches; no blackboards; almost no books, long, long distances to walk. On the other hand, I heard the sorrow songs sung with primitive beauty and grandeur. I saw the hard, ugly drudgery of country life and the writhing of landless, ignorant peasants. I saw the race problem at nearly its lowest terms.

It was a hot morning late in July when the school opened. I trembled when I heard the patter of little feet down the dusty road, and saw the growing row of dark solemn faces and bright eager eyes facing me. First came Josie and her brothers and sisters. The longing to know, to be a student in the great school at Nashville, hovered like a star above this child-woman amid her work and worry, and she studied doggedly. There were the Dowells from their farm toward Alexandria -- Fanny, with her smooth black face and wondering eyes; Martha, brown and dull; the pretty girl-wife of a brother, and the younger brood.

There were the Burkes -- two brown and yellow lads, and a tiny haughty-eyed girl. Fat Reuben's little chubby girl came, with golden face and old-gold hair, faithful and solemn. 'Thonie was on hand early -- a jolly, ugly, good-hearted girl, who slyly dipped snuff and looked after her little bow-legged brother. When her mother could spare her, 'Tildy came -- a midnight beauty, with starry eyes and tapering limbs; and her brother, correspondingly homely. And the big boys -- the hulking Lawrences; the lazy Neills, unfathered sons of mother and daughter; Hickman, with a stoop in his shoulders, and the rest.

There they sat, nearly 30 of them, on the rough benches, their faces shading from a pale cream to a deep brown, the little feet bare and swinging, the eyes full of expectation, with here and there a twinkle of mischief, and the hands grasping Webster's blue-back spelling book. I loved my school, and the fine faith the children had in the wisdom

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of their teacher was truly marvellous. We read and spelled together, wrote a little, picked flowers, sang, and listened to stories of the world beyond the hill.

At times the school would dwindle away, and I would start out. I would visit Mun Eddings, who lived in two very dirty rooms, and ask why little Lugene, whose flaming face seemed ever ablaze with the dark-red hair uncombed, was absent all last week, or why I missed so often the inimitable rags of Mack and Ed. Then the father, who worked Colonel Wheeler's farm on shares, would tell me how the crops needed the boys; and the thin slovenly mother, whose face was pretty when washed, assured me that Lugene must mind the baby. "But we'll start them again next week." When the Lawrences stopped, I knew that the doubts of the old folks about book learning had conquered again, and so, toiling up the hill, and getting as far into the cabin as possible, I put Cicero's [oration] pro Archia Poeta [In Defense of the Poet Archia] into the simplest English with local applications, and usually convinced them -- for a week or so.

On Friday nights I often went home with some of the children -- sometimes to Doc Burke's farm. He was a great, loud, thin black, ever working, and trying to buy the 75 acres of hill and dale where he lived; but people said that he would surely fail, and the "white folks would get it all." His wife was a magnificent Amazon, with saffron face and shining hair, uncorseted and barefooted, and the children were strong and beautiful. They lived in a one-and-a-half-room cabin in the hollow of the farm, near the spring. The front room was full of great fat white beds, scrupulously neat; and there were bad chromos on the walls, and a tired center-table. In the tiny back kitchen I was often invited to "take out and help" myself to fried chicken and wheat biscuits, "meat" and corn pone, string-beans and berries.

On this visit, at first I was a little alarmed at the approach of bedtime in the one lone bedroom, but embarrassment was very deftly avoided. First, all the children nodded and slept, and were stowed away in one great pile of goose feathers; next, the mother and the father discreetly slipped away to

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the kitchen while I went to bed; then, blowing out the dim light, they retired in the dark. In the morning all were up and away before I thought of waking. Across the road, where fat Reuben lived, they all went outdoors while the teacher retired, because they did not boast the luxury of a kitchen.

I liked to stay with the Dowells, for they had four rooms and plenty of good country fare. Uncle Bird had a small, rough farm, all woods and hills, miles from the big road; but he was full of tales -- he preached now and then -- and with his children, berries, horses, and wheat he was happy and prosperous.

Often, to keep the peace, I must go where life was less lovely; for instance, 'Tildy's mother was incorrigibly dirty, Reuben's larder was limited seriously, and herds of untamed insects wandered over the Eddingsos' beds. Best of all I loved to go to Josie's, and sit on the porch, eating peaches, while the mother bustled and talked: how Josie had bought the sewing machine; how Josie worked at house service in winter, but that four dollars a month was "mighty little" wages; how Josie longed to go away to school, but that it "looked like" they never could get far enough ahead to let her; how the crops failed and the well was yet unfinished; and, finally, how "mean" some of the white folks were.

For two summers I lived in this little world; it was dull and humdrum. The girls looked at the hill in wistful longing, and the boys fretted and haunted Alexandria. Alexandria was "town" -- a straggling, lazy village of houses, churches and shops, and an aristocracy of white Toms, Dicks and Captains. Cuddled on the hill to the north was the village of the colored folks, who lived in three- or four-room unpainted cottages, some neat and homelike, and some dirty. The dwellings were scattered rather aimlessly, but they centered about the twin temples of the hamlet, the Methodist and the Hard-Shell Baptist churches. These, in turn, leaned gingerly on a sad-colored schoolhouse. Hither my little world wended its crooked way on Sunday to meet other worlds, and gossip, and wonder, and make the weekly sacrifice with frenzied priest at the altar of the "old-time religion." Then the soft

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melody and mighty cadences of Negro song fluttered and thundered.

I heard the Negro folksong first in Great Barrington, sung by the Hampton Singers. But that was second-hand, sung by youth who never knew slavery. I now heard the Negro songs by those who made them and in the land of their American birth. It was in the village into which my country school district filtered of Saturdays and Sundays. The road wandered from our rambling log-house up the stony bed of a creek, past wheat and corn, until we could hear dimly across the fields a rhythmic cadence of song -- soft, thrilling, powerful, that swelled and died sorrowfully in our ears. I had never seen a Southern Negro revival. To be sure, we in Berkshire were not perhaps as stiff and formal as they in Suffolk of olden time; yet we were very quiet and subdued, and I know not what would have happened those clear Sabbath mornings had someone punctuated the sermon with a scream, or interrupted the long prayer with a loud Amen!

And so most striking to me, as I approached the village and the little plain church perched aloft, was the air of intense excitement that possessed that mass of black folk. A sort of suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to seize them -- a pythian madness, a demoniac possession, that lent terrible reality to song and word. The black and massive form of the preacher swayed and quivered as the words crowded to his lips and flew at us in singular eloquence. The people moaned and fluttered, and then the gaunt-cheeked brown woman beside me suddenly leaped straight into the air and shrieked like a lost soul, while round about came wail and groan and outcry, and a scene of human passion such as I had never conceived before.

I have called my community a world, and so its isolation made it. There was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth or wedding; from a common hardship in poverty, poor land and low wages; and, above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity.

All this caused us to think some thoughts together; but

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these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in various languages. Those whose eyes 25 and more years before had seen "the glory of the coming of the Lord," saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound to bring all things right in His own good time.

The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering. Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado. There were, however, some -- such as Josie, Jim, and Ben -- to whom War, Hell and Slavery were but childhood tales, whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school and story and half-awakened thought. Ill could they be content, born without and beyond the World. And their weak wings beat against their barriers -- barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous moments, against everything that opposed even a whim.

No one but a Negro going into the South without previous experience of color caste can have any conception of its barbarism. It is not a matter of law or ordinance; it is a question of instinctive feeling; of inherited and inborn knowledge. On a Nashville street, 71 years ago, I quite accidently jostled a white woman as I passed. She was not hurt in the slightest, nor even particularly inconvenienced. Immediately in accord with my New England training, I raised my hat and begged her pardon. I acted quite instinctively and with genuine regret for a little mistake. The woman was furious; why I never knew; somehow, I cannot say how, I had transgressed the interracial mores of the South. Was it because I showed no submissiveness? Did I fail to debase myself utterly and eat spiritual dirt? Did I act as equal among equals? I do not know. I only sensed scorn and hate; the kind of despising which a dog might incur. Thereafter for at least half a century I avoided the necessity of showing them courtesy of any sort. If I did them any courtesy which sometimes I must in sheer deference to my

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own standards of decency, I contrived to act as if totally unaware that I saw them or had them in mind.

Murder, killing and maiming Negroes, raping Negro women -- in the 80's and in the southern South, this was not even news; it got no publicity; it caused no arrests; and punishment for such transgression was so unusual that the fact was telegraphed North.

Lynching was a continuing and recurrent horror during my college days: from 1885 through 1894, 1,700 Negroes were lynched in America. Each death was a scar upon my soul, and led me on to conceive the plight of other minority groups; for in my college days Italians were lynched in New Orleans, forcing the Federal government to pay $25,000 in "indemnity," and the anti-Chinese riots in the West culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1892. Some echoes of Jewish segregation and pogroms in Russia came through the magazines; I followed the Dreyfus case; and I began to see something of the struggle between East and West. Yet at this time the full force of legal caste in the South had not yet fallen on Negroes. Streetcars were not yet separate and there was still some Negro voting.

One unforgettable thing Fisk University did for me and that was to guide and enlarge my appreciation of music. In Great Barrington the only music we had was that of the old English hymns, some of them set to German music. The music was often fine, but the words usually illogical or silly. I grew up, therefore, singing lustily bits of real music and paying little or no attention to the words. Then there were the so-called Gospel Hymns, with the rhythm of the Negro spirituals and words of no account at all. Yet I warbled blithely "Hold the Fort, for I am coming!"

At Fisk, little Professor Spence, the great Greek scholar, had a rare appreciation of music and took it upon himself to guide the school. Already Fisk had the tradition of her Jubilee Singers, who once hid in a Brooklyn organ loft, lest pious Congregationalists see their black faces before they heard their heavenly voices. Henry Ward Beecher took them to Plymouth church where the newspaper called them

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"Beecher's Nigger Minstrels"; then the nation listened and the world opened its arms and the Fisk Jubilee Singers literally sang before Kings. They brought back to Nashville enough money to build Jubilee Hall. There I met some of these singers and heard their music.

When I came to Fisk, Spence had organized the Mozart Society and gathered in it all the good voices of the school, some of which were of phenomenal excellence. He trained them in the rendition of the great religious oratorios. They sang The Messiah, the Elijah, and Mozart's Twelfth Mass. I became a member of the Mozart Society and it did great things for my education.

Every year we sang at commencement the Hallelujah Chorus. I can see now the banked mass of faces of every color and hue with no orchestra save the piano; and the little long-coated, white-haired Spence waving his hands in front. And there Ed Bailey stood, a slight black boy whom the average American would have completely ignored, or said that he ought to be plowing instead of singing. His clear tenor voice rose with singular beauty; and we who listened were always near to tears, feeling what he was saying: "Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people!" We there then were the People to whom Jehovah spoke. No student ever left Fisk without a deep and abiding appreciation of real music.

The net result of the Fisk interlude was to broaden the scope of my program of life, not essentially to change it; to center it in a group of educated Negroes, who from their knowledge and experience would lead the mass. I never for a moment dreamed that such leadership could ever be for the sake of the educated group itself, but always for the mass. Nor did I pause to enquire in just what ways and with what technique we would work -- first, broad, exhaustive knowledge of the world; all other wisdom, all method and application would be added unto us.

In essence I combined a social program for a depressed group with the natural demand of youth for "Light, more light." Fisk was a good college; I liked it; but it was small, it was limited in equipment, in laboratories, in books; it

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was not a university. I wanted the largest and best in organized learning. Nothing could be too big and thorough for training the leadership of the American Negro. There must remain no suspicion of part-knowledge, cheap equipment, for this mighty task. The necessity of earning a living scarcely occurred to me. I had no need for or desire for money.

I turned with increased determination to the idea of going to Harvard. There I was going to study the science of sciences -- Philosophy. Vainly did Chase point out, as William James did later, that the world was not in the habit of paying philosophers. In vain did the president offer me a scholarship at Hartford Theological Seminary. I believed too little in Christian dogma to become a minister. I was not without faith: I never stole material nor spiritual things; I not only never lied, but blurted out my conception of truth on the most untoward occasions; I drank no alcohol and knew nothing of women, physically or psychically, to the incredulous amusement of most of my more experienced fellows. I above all believed in work, systematic and tireless.

My early political knowledge came largely from newspapers which I read outside my curriculum. I read of the contests of the Democratic and Republican parties, from the first seating of Hayes, through the administrations of Garfield and Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison and Cleveland again. All this complied with the conventional theory of party government, and while the issues were not as clearcut and the motives as unmixed as they ought to have been, nevertheless the increasing triumph of democratic government was in my mind unquestioned. The Populists as a third party movement, beginning during this time, did not impress me, since I did not know its significance.

The year before I entered college, England killed the arbitrary power of the Justice of the Peace and the County Squire, doubled the number of its voters and was forced into a struggle to yield Ireland home rule; eventually Japan attempted a constitution with elective representatives; Brazil was struggling to become a republic and France fought to curtail the political power of the Catholic church.

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My problem then was how, into the inevitable and logical democracy which was spreading over the world, could black folk in America be openly and effectively admitted; and the colored people of the world allowed their own self-government? I therefore watched, outside my textbooks and without reference to my teachers, the race developments throughout the world. The difficulty here, however, was securing any real and exhaustive knowledge of facts. I could not get any clear picture of the current change in Africa and Asia.

At Fisk I began my writing and public speaking. I edited the Fisk Herald. I became an impassioned orator and developed a belligerent attitude toward the color bar. I was determined to make a scientific conquest of my environment, which would render the emancipation of the Negro race easier and quicker. The persistence which I had learned in New England stood me now in good stead. Because my first college choice had been Harvard, to Harvard I was still resolved to go.

It was a piece of unusual luck, much more than my own determination, that admitted me to Harvard. There had been arising in Harvard at that time a feeling that the institution was becoming too ingrown, too satisfied with a sense of its New England sufficiency. A determined effort was made in 1884 and later to make Harvard a more national institution, with good students from the South and West. I saw advertisements of scholarships which were to be offered and I made application. In my favor were my New England elementary education, and the fact that I was studying in the South and that I was colored. There had been hitherto very few colored students at Harvard.

I was immediately accepted on condition that I enter as a Junior, even after receiving my Fisk A.B. This was not altogether unfair, since my own high school in New England was somewhat behind Harvard's requirements and Fisk, because of the wretched Southern common school system, still further behind. However, all this made little difference to me. I wanted to go to Harvard because of what it offered in opportunity for wide learning. I received the promise of

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$250 Price Greenleaf Aid to cover my expenses for the year 1885-1886.

My class was graduated from Fisk in June 1888. There were five of us -- from Texas, Tennessee, New York, Massachusetts and Mississippi. Edmondson had to leave school before graduation, but we later restored him to the class roll. We all had spoken Commencement orations; others talked of "Anglo-Saxon Influence"; "Women in Public Life"; "Feudalism"; "Thought as the Prime Condition of Progress." I took as my subject "Bismarck." This choice in itself showed the abyss between my education and the truth in the world. Bismarck was my hero. He had made a nation out of a mass of bickering peoples. He had dominated the whole development with his strength until he crowned an emperor at Versailles.

This foreshadowed in my mind the kind of thing that American Negroes must do, marching forth with strength and determination under trained leadership. On the other hand, I did not understand at all, nor had my history course led me to understand, anything of current European intrigue, of the expansion of European power into Africa, of the industrial revolution built on slave trade and now turning into colonial imperialism; of the fierce rivalry among white nations for controlling the profits from colonial raw material and labor; of all this I had no clear conception. I was blithely European and imperialist in outlook; democratic as democracy was conceived in America.

So far my formal education had touched politics and religion, but on the whole had avoided economics. It was the moral aspects of slavery which we stressed, not the economic. I saw serfdom when I taught a rural school, but in class I do not remember ever hearing Karl Marx mentioned nor socialism discussed. We talked about wages and poverty, but little was said of trade unions and that little was unfavorable. The parents of the students almost never belonged to unions, because of the opposition of white workers. Most of us looked forward to the learned professions as a life career. We knew something of land and farming, but nothing of

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transport and manufacturing. Manual labor and house service was the first step of our masses toward income.

At Fisk a very definite attempt was made to see that we did not lose or question our Christian orthodoxy. At first the effort seemed to me entirely superfluous, since I had never questioned my religious upbringing. Its theory had presented no particular difficulties: God ruled the world, Christ loved it, and men did right, or tried to; otherwise they were rightly punished. But the book on "Christian Evidences" which we were compelled to read, affronted my logic. It was to my mind, then and since, a cheap piece of special pleading. Our course in general philosophy under the serious and entirely lovable president was different. It opened vistas. It made me determine to go further in this probing for truth. Eventually it landed me squarely in the arms of William James of Harvard, for which God be praised.

After graduation I must start for Harvard. In order to supplement my scholarship, I had something of the small wage which I earned by teaching at country schools during vacation. This needed to be added to and a scheme to this end was planned by Fortson, a student in the high school department of Fisk. Fortson was a very earnest and austerely religious young man, who had for some time earned money to go to school by serving as waiter in a summer hotel at Lake Minnetonka near Minneapolis. He had risen to the position of second waiter and knowing the demand for music he proposed to several of us that we form a Glee Club and spend the summer at Minnetonka. He selected four boys who had been singing as a Glee Club. They were Calloway, Talley, McClellan and Anthony. They had all had some experience, but not much, at working at hotels.

Finally, I was selected as business manager -- with the idea that I could accompany the group, work with them during the summer, and then toward the end of the season go on ahead to make a series of engagements for them in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Chicago. From there they would return to Fisk and I would go east to Harvard. During college I had developed rather as the executive planner, the natural

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secretary of affairs rather than ornamental president and chairman. The only difficulty about the Minnesota excursion was that I had never worked in a hotel in my life.

In this way I received an impression of American civilization in the Middle West at the age of 20. I knew New England by my birth and elementary education. I had spent three years in the South and now I was having a chance to see the West. The experience was extraordinary. I had never seen a hotel of the type of that at Lake Minnetonka. The Berkshire House in Great Barrington catered to rich people from New York. They were on the whole a quiet and rather stodgy set. They sat on the front porch, took drives into the country, and sometimes played cards.

The crowds at Lake Minnetonka were larger and noisier. They were not as well-bred. They spent a great deal of money and drank a good deal of liquor. Usually during the daytime at least they were fairly respectable in behavior, and had among them a majority of conventional people of good repute. But I began to realize that at night, especially on weekends, their behavior approached an orgy. Husbands arrived with other men's wives and gay women without husbands were in evidence. Poor Fortson was greatly distressed and got us to draw up a protest and revelation for the hotel management. I am sure they did not thank him for it. The head waiter, his superior, was a large, dark man of middle age with impeccable manners, who without doubt knew what to expect at this hotel and was not at all disturbed by it.

Our group of Fisk students were rather carefully guarded and had our own dormitory, where we knew but little of the goings on. Not being experienced waiters, we acted as bus boys, standing around the edge of the dining room and carrying out from time to time the loads of dirty dishes. Those who were alert and watchful could often pick up tips. I never received a cent in this way because I was always looking with astonished curiosity at the actions of the guests and the antics of the waiters. I remember one time overhearing a group of cooks and stewards staggering in bleary eyed in the morning. One of them remarked as he passed: "The sporting

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life's hell!" I was curious to know of just what the sporting life consisted. Then there came the difficulty of getting food. We were supposed to have our meals served before the dining room opened, but I noticed with astonishment that none of the waiters bothered to come to such meals, and I was facing the prospect of starving, when I learned that practically all the help got their food by deftly stealing it. Orders of the choicest viands never reached the guests in numbers of cases, while the waiters were well fed. There-after I didn't steal food, but I ate much that others stole.

It was on the whole a rather disillusioning experience. But the concerts which we gave were fairly successful, and early in September I sorrowfully left my comrades and started South and East. On my success in securing engagements depended the real fate of this summer venture. Here then came another series of adventures. I stopped at Minneapolis and St. Paul, at Madison and Milwaukee, and at Chicago. It was a hot summer and particularly in Chicago I suffered more from the heat than I had in Nashville. It was a hard two weeks' work, and I met all sorts of people. Some were not interested in Negro singers even if they came from Fisk. Others were interested in me and the school. On the whole, my reception was pleasant and courteous. I met some very sympathetic and understanding persons -- ministers, heads of Christian associations, and literary groups. My technique was to present what few letters of introduction I had; to tell them of the work of Fisk University and of the object of this group of singers. Despite rebuffs and disappointments, I succeeded in getting enough engagements so that the group netted about $100 apiece outside of expenses for this part of their summer's work.

Then I started East, and here again in a couple of days' trip, I met a phase of American civilization that I had read about but never before experienced. I had a very small amount of pocket money, which would be supplemented later by remittances from the Glee Club and my Harvard scholarship. I think I had less than $50 in my pocket. Naturally I could not afford a Pullman and so sat up in the coach

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all night. It was, I think, upon the second night when the train made a short stop in Rochester, New York. I was awakened by a young man who was in a great hurry and who asked me if I could possibly do him a favor. He wanted to send a remittance of ten dollars and mail it on this train before it started. He had, however, only small bills. Could I possibly let him have a ten-dollar bill in exchange for them? I aroused myself and said yes. He handed me the bills and asked me to count them. Instead of ten dollars, there were only nine. He apologized profusely and counting the bills again immediately handed me the extra dollar bill, thanked me, hurried to mail his letter and disappeared. By that time I was thoroughly awake and getting a little suspicious. When I counted my bills again I found I had five dollars, not ten dollars. This was almost a catastrophe, which was increased when the college demanded as I registered that my tuition of $150 must be paid in December. I reminded them that I had Price Greenleaf Aid of $250, but was told that that was not payable till later in the year. I had to protest pretty strongly before they agreed to advance enough to cover my tuition. These experiences gave me a new idea of culture in the United States.

For several decades after I was graduated from Fisk, alumni called on me to criticize publicly changes in Fisk University policy which in their opinion threatened the established ideals of the institution. In 1898 Booker Washington was made a member of the Fisk board of trustees following the advice of my schoolmate, Maggie Murray, who had just married him. It was thought that Washington's influence might bring contributions to the dwindling income of this leading Negro college. Industrial courses were substituted for regular studies. At the urging of George Haynes, I spoke at the 1898 Commencement on "Galileo Galilei," blasting the telling of a lie to save the truth. The president, caught unwillingly between two fires, resigned.

Years later another president of Fisk yielded to the widespread idea that influential Southern whites should be induced to help lead Negro college education. He cultivated

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white Nashville, took the Fisk Glee Club, with men and women, into the back doors of white social clubs to sing for white men, and seriously curtailed freedom and initiative among students. As my daughter was then graduating, I was to be present at Fisk and was asked to address the alumni. In a speech entitled "Diuturni Silentiae" [Prolonged Silence] (taken from one of Cicero's orations) I attacked the current policy, with frank and open criticism, and after a long struggle, in which I issued in New York a new Fisk Herald, again a president resigned. 6 This was not easy work and it brought on me much criticism from white and black, but I think I did my clear duty and gave a needed service and helped save the ideals of a great school.

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Chapter IX: Harvard in the Last Decades of the 19th Century
Harvard University in 1888 was a great institution of learning. It was 236 years old and on its governing board were Alexander Agassiz, Phillip Brooks, Henry Cabot Lodge and Charles Francis Adams; and a John Quincy Adams, but not the ex-President. Charles William Eliot, a gentleman by training and a scholar by broad study and travel, was president. Among its teachers emeriti were Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell. Among the active teachers were Francis Child, Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Dunbar, Justin Winsor and John Trowbridge; William Goodwin, Frank Taussig, Nathaniel Shaler, George Palmer, William James, Francis Peabody, Josiah Royce, Barrett Wendell, Edward Channing, and Albert Bushnell Hart. A young instructor who arrived in 1890 was George Santayana. Seldom, if ever, has any American university had such a galaxy of great men and fine teachers as Harvard in the decade between 1885 and 1895.

To make my own attitude toward the Harvard of that day clear, it must be remembered that I went to Harvard as a Negro, not simply by birth, but recognizing myself as a member of a segregated caste whose situation I accepted but was determined to work from within that caste to find my way out.

About the Harvard of which most white students conceived I knew little. Of fraternities I had not even heard of Phi Beta Kappa, and of such important social organizations as the Hasty Pudding Club, I knew nothing. I was in Harvard for education and not for high marks, except as marks would insure my staying. I did not pick out "snap" courses. I was there to enlarge my grasp of the meaning of the universe. We

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had for instance no chemical laboratory at Fisk. Our mathematical courses were limited; above all I wanted to study philosophy! I wanted to get hold of the basis of knowledge, and explore foundations and beginnings. I chose, therefore, Palmer's course in ethics, but he being on Sabbatical for the year, William James replaced him, and I became a devoted follower of James at the time he was developing his pragmatic philosophy.

Fortunately I did not fall into the mistake of regarding Harvard as the beginning rather than the continuing of my college training. I did not find better teachers at Harvard, but teachers better known, who had had wider facilities for gaining knowledge and had a broader atmosphere for approaching truth.

I hoped to pursue philosophy as my life career, with teaching for support. With this program I studied at Harvard from the Fall of 1888 to 1890, as undergraduate. I took a varied course in chemistry, geology, social science and philosophy. My salvation here was the type of teacher I met rather than the content of the courses. William James guided me out of the sterilities of scholastic philosophy to realist pragmatism; from Peabody's social reform with a religious tinge, I turned to Albert Bushnell Hart to study history with documentary research; and from Taussig with his reactionary British economics of the Ricardo school, I approached what was later to become sociology. Meantime Karl Marx was mentioned but only incidentally and as one whose doubtful theories had long since been refuted. Socialism as dream of philanthropy or as will-o-wisp of hotheads was dismissed as unimportant.

When I arrived at Harvard, the question of board and lodging was of first importance. Naturally, I could not afford a room in the college yard in the old and venerable buildings which housed most of the well-to-do students under the magnificent elms. Neither did I think of looking for lodgings among white families, where numbers of the ordinary students lived. I tried to find a colored home, and finally at 20 Flagg Street, I came upon the neat home of a colored woman

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from Nova Scotia, a descendant of those black Jamaican Maroons whom Britain deported after solemnly promising them peace if they would surrender. For a very reasonable sum, I rented the second story front room and for four years this was my home. I wrote of this abode at the time: "My room is, for a college man's abode, very ordinary indeed. It is quite pleasantly situated -- second floor, front, with a bay window and one other window. The door is on the southwest corner. As you enter you will perceive the bed in the opposite corner, small and decorated with floral designs calculated to puzzle a botanist. It is a good comfortable bed, however, and my landlady keeps it neat. On the left hand is a bureau with a mirror of doubtful accuracy. In front of the bay window is a stand with three shelves of books, and on the left of the bureau is an improvised bookcase made of unpainted boards and uprights, containing most of my library of which I am growing quite proud. Over the heat register, near the door, is a mantle with a plaster of Paris pug-dog and a calendar, and the usual array of odds and ends. A sofa, commode, trunk, table and chairs complete the floor furniture. On the wall are a few quite ordinary pictures. In this commonplace den I am quite content."

Later I became a boarder at Memorial Hall, which was the great dining hall of the University, and after that a member of the Foxcraft Club, where many students of moderate means boarded.

Following the attitudes which I had adopted in the South, I sought no friendships among my white fellow students, nor even acquaintanceships. Of course I wanted friends, but I could not seek them. My class was large, with some 300 students. I doubt if I knew a dozen of them. I did not seek them, and naturally they did not seek me. I made no attempt to contribute to the college periodicals, since the editors were not interested in my major interests. Only one organization did I try to enter, and I ought to have known better than to make this attempt. But I did have a good singing voice and loved music, so I entered the competition for the Glee Club. I ought to have known that Harvard could not afford to have

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a Negro on its Glee Club traveling about the country. Quite naturally I was rejected.

I was happy at Harvard, but for unusual reasons. One of these circumstances was my acceptance of racial segregation. Had I gone from Great Barrington high school directly to Harvard, I would have sought companionship with my white fellows and been disappointed and embittered by a discovery of social limitations to which I had not been used. But I came by way of Fisk and the South and there I had accepted color caste and embraced eagerly the companionship of those of my own color. This was, of course, no final solution. Eventually with them and in mass assault, led by culture, we Negroes were going to break down the boundaries of race; but at present we were banded together in a great crusade and happily so. Indeed, I suspect that the prospect of ultimate full human intercourse without reservations and annoying distinctions, made me all too willing to consort now with my own and to disdain and forget as far as was possible that outer, whiter world.

In general, I asked nothing of Harvard but the tutelage of teachers and the freedom of the laboratory and library. I was quite voluntarily and willingly outside its social life. I sought only such contacts with white teachers as lay directly in the line of my work. I joined certain clubs like the Philosophical Club; I was a member of the Foxcraft dining club because it was cheap. James and one or two other teachers had me at their homes at meal and reception. I found friends, and most interesting and inspiring friends, among the colored folk of Boston and surrounding places. Naturally social intercourse with whites could not be entirely forgotten, so that now and then I joined its currents and rose or fell with them. I escorted colored girls to various gatherings, and as pretty ones as I could find to the vesper exercises, and later to the class day and commencement social functions. Naturally we attracted attention and the Crimson noted my girl friends; on the other part came sometimes the shadow of insult, as when at one reception a white woman seemed determined to mistake me for a waiter.

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In general, I was encased in a completely colored world, self-sufficient and provincial, and ignoring just as far as possible the white world which conditioned it. This was self-protective coloration, with perhaps an inferiority complex, but with belief in the ability and future of black folk.

My friends and companions were taken mainly from the colored students of Harvard and neighboring institutions, and the colored folk of Boston and surrounding towns. With them I led a happy and inspiring life. There were among them many educated and well-to-do folk; many young people studying or planning to study; many charming young women. We met and ate, danced and argued and planned a new world.

Toward whites I was not arrogant; I was simply not obsequious, and to a white Harvard student of my day, a Negro student who did not seek recognition was trying to be more than a Negro. The same Harvard man had much the same attitude toward Jews and Irishmen.

I was, however, exceptional among Negroes in my ideas on voluntary race segregation; they for the most part saw salvation only in integration at the earliest moment and on almost any terms in white culture; I was firm in my criticism of white folk and in my dream of a Negro self-sufficient culture even in America.

This cutting off of myself from my white fellows, or being cut off, did not mean unhappiness or resentment. I was in my early manhood, unusually full of high spirits and humor. I thoroughly enjoyed life. I was conscious of understanding and power, and conceited enough still to imagine, as in high school, that they who did not know me were the losers, not I. On the other hand, I do not think that my white classmates found me personally objectionable. I was clean, not welldressed but decently clothed. Manners I regarded as more or less superfluous, and deliberately cultivated a certain brusquerie. Personal adornment I regarded as pleasant but not important. I was in Harvard, but not of it, and realized all the irony of my singing "Fair Harvard." I sang it because I liked the music, and not from any pride in the Pilgrims.

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With my colored friends I carried on lively social intercourse, but necessarily one which involved little expenditure of money. I called at their homes and ate at their tables. We danced at private parties. We went on excursions down the Bay. Once, with a group of colored students gathered from surrounding institutions, we gave Aristophanes' The Birds in a Boston colored church. The rendition was good, but not outstanding; not quite appreciated by the colored audience, but well worth doing. Even though it worked me near to death, I was proud of it.

Thus this group of professional men, students, white collar workers and upper servants, whose common bond was color of skin in themselves or in their fathers, together with a common history and current experience of discrimination, formed a unit which like many tens of thousands of like units across the nation had or were getting to have a common culture pattern which made them an interlocking mass; so that increasingly a colored person in Boston was more neighbor to a colored person in Chicago than to the white person across the street.

Mrs. Ruffin of Charles Street, Boston, and her daughter Birdie were often hostesses to this colored group. She was a widow of the first colored judge appointed in Massachusetts, an aristocratic lady, with olive skin and high piled masses of white hair. Once a Boston white lady said to Mrs. Ruffin ingratiatingly: "I have always been interested in your race." Mrs. Ruffin flared: "Which race?" She began a national organization of colored women and published the Courant, a type of small colored weekly paper which was spreading over the nation. In this I published many of my Harvard daily themes.

Naturally in this close group there grew up among the young people friendships ending in marriages. I myself, outgrowing the youthful attractions of Fisk, began serious dreams of love and marriage. There, however, were still my study plans to hold me back and there were curious other reasons. For instance, it happened that two of the girls whom I particularly liked had what was to me then the insuperable

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handicap of looking like whites; while they had enough black ancestry to make them "Negroes" in America. Yet these girls were intelligent and companionable. One went to Vassar College which then refused entrance to Negroes. Years later when I went there to lecture I remember disagreeing violently with a teacher who thought the girl ought not to have "deceived" the college by graduating before it knew her Negro descent! Another favorite of mine was Deenie Pindell. She was a fine forthright woman, blonde, blue-eyed and fragile. In the end I had no chance to choose her, for she married Monroe Trotter.

Trotter was the son of a well-to-do colored father and entered Harvard in my first year in the Graduate School. He was thick-set, yellow, with close-cut dark hair. He was stubborn and straight-laced and an influential member of his class. He organized the first Total Abstinence club in the Yard. I came to know him and joined the company when he and other colored students took a trip to Amherst to see George Forbes and William H. Lewis graduate in the class with Calvin Coolidge.

Lewis afterward entered the Harvard Law School and became the celebrated center of the Harvard football team. He married the beautiful Bessie Baker who had been with us on that Amherst trip. Forbes, a brilliant, cynical dark man, later joined with Trotter in publishing the Guardian, the first Negro paper to attack Booker T. Washington with open opposition. Washington's friends retorted by sending Trotter to jail when he dared to heckle Washington in a public Boston meeting on his political views. I was not present nor privy to this occurrence, but the unfairness of the jail sentence helped lead me eventually to form the Niagara Movement, which later became a founding part of the NAACP.

Thus I lived near to life, love and tragedy; and when I met Maud Cuney, I became doubly interested. She was a tall imperious brunette, with gold-bronze skin, brilliant eyes and coils of black hair; daughter of the Collector of Customs at Galveston, Texas. She came to study music and was a skilled

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performer. When the New England Conservatory of Music tried to "jim-crow" her in the dormitory, we students rushed to her defense and we won. I fell deeply in love with her, and we were engaged.

Thus it is clear how in the general social intercourse on the campus I consciously missed nothing. Some white students made themselves known to me and a few, a very few, became life-long friends. Most of my classmates, I knew neither by sight nor name. Among them many made their mark in life: Norman Hapgood, Robert Herrick, Herbert Croly, George Dorsey, Homer Folks, Augustus Hand, James Brown Scott and others. I knew none of these intimately. For the most part I do not doubt that I was voted a somewhat selfish and self-centered "grind" with a chip on my shoulder and a sharp tongue.

Something of a certain inferiority complex was possibly a cause of this. I was desperately afraid of intruding where I was not wanted; appearing without invitation; of showing a desire for the company of those who had no desire for me. I should in fact have been pleased if most of my fellow students had wanted to associate with me; if I had been popular and envied. But the absence of this made me neither unhappy nor morose. I had my "island within" and it was a fair country.

Only once or twice did I come to the surface of college life. First I found by careful calculation that I needed the cash of one of the Boylston prizes in oratory to piece out my year's expenses. I got it through winning a second oratorical prize. The occasion was noteworthy by the fact that another black student, Clement Morgan, got first prize at the same contest.

With the new increase at Harvard of students who grew up outside of New England, there arose at this time a certain resentment at the way New England students were dominating and conducting college affairs. The class marshal on commencement day was always a Saltonstall, a Cabot, a Lowell, or some such New England family. The crew and most of the other heads of athletic teams were selected from similarly limited social groups. The class poet, class orator and other

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commencement officials invariably were selected because of family and not for merit. It so happened that when the officials of the class of 1890 were being selected in early spring, a plot ripened. Personally, I knew nothing of it, and was not greatly interested. But in Boston and in the Harvard Yard the result of the elections was of tremendous significance; for this conspiratorial clique selected Clement Morgan as class orator. New England and indeed the whole country reverberated.

Morgan was a black man. He was working in a barber shop in St. Louis at the time when he ought to have been in school. With the encouragement and help of a colored teacher whom he later married, he came to Boston and entered the Latin School. This meant that when he finally entered Harvard, he entered as freshman in the orthodox way and was well acquainted with his classmates. He was fairly well received, considering his color. He was a pleasant unassuming person and one of the best speakers of clearly enunciated English on the campus. In his junior year, he had earned the first Boylston prize for oratory, in the same contest where I won second prize. It was, then, logical for him to become class orator and yet this was against all the traditions of America. There were editorials in the leading newspapers, and the South especially raged and sneered at the audience of "black washerwomen" who would replace Boston society at the next Harvard commencement.

At the same time, the action was contagious and that year and the next in several leading Northern colleges colored students became the class orators. Ex-President Hayes, as I shall relate later, sneered at this fact. While, as I have said, I had nothing to do with this plot, and was not even present at the election which chose Morgan, I was greatly pleased at this breaking of the color line. Morgan and I became fast friends and spent a summer giving readings along the North Shore to help our college costs.

Harvard of this day was a great opportunity for a young man and a young American Negro and I realized it. I formed habits of work rather different from those of most of the

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other students. I burned no midnight oil. I did my studying in the daytime and had my day parceled out almost to the minute. I spent a great deal of time in the library and did my assignments with thoroughness and with prevision of the kind of work I wanted to do later. From the beginning my relations with most of the teachers at Harvard were pleasant. They were on the whole glad to receive a serious student, to whom extra-curricular activities were not of paramount importance and one who in a general way knew what he wanted.

Harvard had in the social sciences no such leadership of thought and breadth of learning as in philosophy, literature and physical science. She was then groping and is still groping toward a scientific treatment of human action. She was facing at the end of the century a tremendous economic era. In the United States, finance was succeeding in monopolizing transportation, and raw materials like sugar, coal and oil. The power of the trust and combine was so great that the Sherman Act was passed in 1890. On the other hand, the tariff at the demand of manufacturers continued to rise in height from the McKinley to the indefensible Wilson tariff making that domination easier. The understanding between the industrial North and the New South was being perfected and in 1890 the series of disfranchising laws began to be enacted by the Southern states destined in the next 16 years to make voting by Southern Negroes practically impossible. A financial crisis shook the land in 1893 and popular discontent showed itself in the Populist movement and Coxey's Army. The whole question of the burden of taxation began to be discussed.

These things we discussed with some clearness and factual understanding at Harvard. The tendency was toward English free trade and against the American tariff policy. We reverenced Ricardo and wasted long hours on the "Wages-fund." I remember Frank Taussig's course supporting dying Ricardean economics. Wages came from what employers had left for labor after they had subtracted their own reward. Suppose that this profit was too small to attract the employer, what would the poor worker do but starve? The trusts and monopolies

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were viewed frankly as dangerous enemies of democracies, but at the same time as inevitable methods of industry. We were strong for the gold standard and fearful of silver. The attitude of Harvard toward labor was on the whole contemptuous and condemnatory. Strikes like the railway strikes of 1886 and the terrible Homestead strike of 1892, as well as Coxey's Army of 1894, were pictured as ignorant lawlessness, lurching against conditions largely inevitable.

Karl Marx was mentioned, only to point out how thoroughly his theses had been disproven; of his theory itself almost nothing was said. Henry George was given but tolerant notice. The anarchists of Spain, the nihilists of Russia, the British miners -- all these were viewed not as part of the political development and the tremendous economic organization but as sporadic evils. This was natural. Harvard was the child of its era. The intellectual freedom and flowering of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were yielding to the deadening economic pressure which would make Harvard rich and reactionary. This defender of wealth and capital, already half ashamed of Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips, was willing finally to replace an Eliot with a manufacturer and a nervous warmonger. 7 The social community that mobbed Garrison, easily electrocuted Sacco and Vanzetti.

It was not until I was long out of college that I realized the fundamental influence man's efforts to earn a living had upon all his other efforts. The politics which we studied in college were conventional, especially when it came to describing and elucidating the current scene in Europe. The Queen's Jubilee in June 1887, while I was still at Fisk, set the pattern of our thinking. The little old woman at Windsor became a magnificent symbol of Empire. Here was England with her flag draped around the world, ruling more black folk than white and leading the colored peoples of the earth to Christian baptism, and as we assumed, to civilization and eventual self-rule.

In 1885, Stanley, the traveling American reporter, became a hero and symbol of white world leadership in Africa. The wild, fierce fight of the Mahdi and the driving of the English

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out of the Sudan for 13 years did not reveal its inner truth to me. I heard only of the martyrdom of the drunken Bible-reader and freebooter, Chinese Gordon.

The Congo Free State was established and the Berlin Conference of 1885 was reported to be an act of civilization against the slave trade and liquor. French, English and Germans pushed on in Africa, but I did not question the interpretation which pictured this as the advance of civilization and the benevolent tutelage of barbarians. I read of the confirmation of the Triple Alliance in 1891. Later I saw the celebration of the renewed Triple Alliance on the Tempelhofer Feld, with the new young Emperor William II, who, fresh from his dismissal of Bismarck, led the splendid pageantry; and finally the year I left Germany, Nicholas II became Tsar of all the Russias. In all this I had not yet linked the political development of Europe with the race problem in America.

I was repeatedly a guest in the home of William James; he was my friend and guide to clear thinking; I was a member of the Philosophical Club and talked with Josiah Royce and George Palmer; I remember vividly once standing beside Mrs. Royce at a small reception. We ceased conversation for a moment and both glanced across the room. Professor Royce was opposite talking excitedly. He was an extraordinary sight: a little body; indifferently clothed; a big red-thatched head and blazing blue eyes. Mrs. Royce put my thoughts into words: "Funny-looking man, isn't he?" I nearly fainted; yet I knew how she worshipped him.

I sat in an upper room and read Kant's Critique with Santayana; Shaler invited a Southerner, who objected to sitting beside me, out of his class; he said he wasn't doing very well, anyway. I became one of Hart's favorite pupils and was afterwards guided by him through my graduate course and started on my work in Germany. Most of my courses of study went well. It was in English that I came nearest my Waterloo at Harvard. I had unwittingly arrived at Harvard in the midst of a violent controversy about poor English among students. A number of fastidious Englishmen like Barrett

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Wendell had come to Harvard about this time; moreover New England itself was getting sensitive over Western slang and Southern drawls and general ignorance of grammar. Freshmen at this time could elect nearly all their courses except English; that was compulsory, with theses, daily themes and tough examinations.

On the other hand, I was at the point in my intellectual development when the content rather than the form of my writing was to me of prime importance. Words and ideas surged in my mind and spilled out with disregard of exact accuracy in grammar, taste in word or restraint in style. I knew the Negro problem and this was more important to me than literary form. I knew grammar fairly well, and I had a pretty wide vocabulary; but I was bitter, angry and intemperate in my first thesis. Naturally my English instructors had no idea of nor interest in the way in which Southern attacks on the Negro were scratching me on the raw flesh. Ben Tillman was raging in the Senate like a beast and literary clubs, especially rich and well-dressed women, engaged his services eagerly and listened avidly. Senator Morgan of Alabama had just published a scathing attack on "niggers" in a leading magazine, when my first Harvard thesis was due. I let go at him with no holds barred. My long and blazing effort came back marked "E" -- not passed!

It was the first time in my scholastic career that I had encountered such a failure. I was aghast, but I was not a fool. I did not doubt but what my instructors were fair in judging my English technically even if they did not understand the Negro problem. I went to work at my English and by the end of that term had raised it to a "C". I realized that while style is subordinate to content, and that no real literature can be composed simply of meticulous and fastidious phrases, nevertheless that solid content with literary style carries a message further than poor grammar and muddled syntax. I elected the best course on the campus for English composition, English 12.

I have before me a theme which I wrote October 3, 1890, for Barrett Wendell, then the great pundit of Harvard

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English. I wrote: "Spurred by my circumstances, I have always been given to systematically planning my future, not indeed without many mistakes and frequent alterations, but always with what I now conceive to have been a strangely early and deep appreciation of the fact that to live is a serious thing. I determined while in high school to go to college -- partly because other men did, partly because I foresaw that such discipline would best fit me for life. . . . I believe, foolishly perhaps, but sincerely, that I have something to say to the world, and I have taken English 12 in order to say it well." Barrett Wendell liked that last sentence. Out of 50 essays, he picked this out to read to the class.

Commencement was approaching, when one day I found myself at midnight on one of the swaggering streetcars that used to roll out from Boston on its way to Cambridge. It was in the Spring of 1890, and quite accidentally I was sitting by a classmate who would graduate with me in June. As I dimly remember, he was a nice looking young man, almost dapper; well dressed, charming in manner. Probably he was rich or at least well-to-do, and doubtless belonged to an exclusive fraternity, although that did not interest me. Indeed I have even forgotten his name. But one thing I shall never forget and that was his rather regretful admission (which slipped out as we gossiped) that he had no idea as to what his life work would be, because, as he added, "There's nothing in which I am particularly interested!"

I was more than astonished; I was almost outraged to meet any human being of the mature age of 22 who did not have his life all planned before him -- at least in general outline; and who was not supremely, if not desperately, interested in what he planned to do.

Since then, my wonder has left my classmate, and been turned in and backward upon myself: how long had I been so sure of my life-work and how had I come so confidently to survey and plan it? I now realize that most college seniors are by no means certain of what they want to do or can do with life; but stand rather upon a hesitating threshold, awaiting will, chance or opportunity. Because I had not

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mingled intimately or understandingly with my white Harvard classmates, I did not at the time realize this, but thought my unusual attitude was general.

In June 1890, I received my bachelor's degree from Harvard cum laude in philosophy. I was one of the five graduating students selected to speak at commencement. My subject was "Jefferson Davis." I chose it with deliberate intent of facing Harvard and the nation with a discussion of slavery as illustrated in the person of the president of the Confederate States of America. Naturally, my effort made a sensation. I said, among other things: "I wish to consider not the man, but the type of civilization which his life represented: its foundation is the idea of the strong man -- Individualism coupled with the rule of might -- and it is this idea that has made the logic of even modern history, the cool logic of the Club. It made a naturally brave and generous man, Jefferson Davis: now advancing civilization by murdering Indians, now hero of a national disgrace, called by courtesy the Mexican War; and finally as the crowning absurdity, the peculiar champion of a people fighting to be free in order that another people should not be free. Whenever this idea has for a moment escaped from the individual realm, it has found an even more secure foot-hold in the policy and philosophy of the State. The strong man and his mighty Right Arm has become the Strong Nation with its armies. Under whatever guise, however a Jefferson Davis may appear as man, as race, or as a nation, his life can only logically mean this: the advance of a part of the world at the expense of the whole; the overwhelming sense of the I, and the consequent forgetting of the Thou. It has thus happened that advance in civilization has always been handicapped by shortsighted national selfishness. The vital principle of division of labor has been stifled not only in industry, but also in civilization; so as to render it well nigh impossible for a new race to introduce a new idea into the world except by means of the cudgel. To say that a nation is in the way of civilization is a contradiction in terms and a system of human culture whose principle

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is the rise of one race on the ruins of another is a farce and a lie. Yet this is the type of civilization which Jefferson Davis represented; it represents a field for stalwart manhood and heroic character, and at the same time for moral obtuseness and refined brutality. These striking contradictions of character always arise when a people seemingly become convinced that the object of the world is not civilization, but Teutonic civilization."

A Harvard professor wrote to Kate Field's Washington, then a leading periodical: "Du Bois, the colored orator of the commencement stage, made a ten-strike. It is agreed upon by all the people I have seen that he was the star of the occasion. His paper was on `Jefferson Davis,' and you would have been surprised to hear a colored man deal with him so generously. Such phrases as a `great man,' a `keen thinker,' a `strong leader,' and others akin occurred in the address. One of the trustees of the University told me yesterday that the paper was considered masterly in every way. Du Bois is from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and doubtless has some white blood in his veins. He, too, has been in my classes the past year. If he did not head the class, he came pretty near the head, for he is an excellent scholar in every way, and altogether the best black man that has come to Cambridge."

Bishop Potter of New York wrote in the Boston Herald: "When at the last commencement of Harvard University, I saw a young colored man appear . . . and heard his brilliant and eloquent address, I said to myself: `Here is what an historic race can do if they have a clear field, a high purpose, and a resolute will.'"

The New York Nation commented editorially: "When the name of William Edward Du Bois was called and a slender, intellectual-looking mulatto ascended on the platform and made his bow to the President of the University, the Governor of Massachusetts, the Bishop of New York, and a hundred other notables, the applause burst out heartily as if in recognition of the strange significance of his appearance there. His theme . . . heightened this significance. Du Bois

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handled his difficult and hazardous subject with absolute good taste, great moderation, and almost contemptuous fairness."

Already I had now received more education than most young white men, having been almost continuously in school from the age of six to the age of 22. But I did not yet feel prepared. I felt that to cope with the new and extraordinary situations then developing in the United States and the world, I needed to go further and that as a matter of fact I had just well begun my training in knowledge of social conditions.

I revelled in the keen analysis of William James, Josiah Royce and young George Santayana. But it was James with his pragmatism and Albert Bushnell Hart with his research method, that turned me back from the lovely but sterile land of philosophic speculation, to the social sciences as the field for gathering and interpreting that body of fact which would apply to my program for the Negro. As undergraduate, I had talked frankly with William James about teaching philosophy, my major subject. He discouraged me, not by any means because of my record in his classes. He used to give me A's and even A-plus, but as he said candidly, there is "not much chance for anyone earning a living as a philosopher." He was repeating just what Chase of Fisk had said a few years previously.

I knew by this time that practically my sole chance of earning a living combined with study was to teach, and after my work with Hart in United States history, I conceived the idea of applying philosophy to an historical interpretation of race relations.

In other words, I was trying to take my first steps toward sociology as the science of human action. It goes without saying that no such field of study was then recognized at Harvard or came to be recognized for 20 years after. But I began with some research in Negro history and finally at the suggestion of Hart, I chose the suppression of the African slave trade to America as my doctor's thesis. Then came the question as to whether I could continue study in the graduate

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school. I had no resources in wealth or friends. I applied for a fellowship in the graduate school of Harvard and was appointed Henry Bromfield Rogers fellow for a year and later the appointment was renewed; so that from 1890 to 1892 I was a fellow at Harvard University, studying in history and political science and what would have been sociology if Harvard has yet recognized such a field.

My grandfather Du Bois died while I was at Harvard, and although the settlement of the estate was held up for lack of exact data concerning my father's death, eventually $400 was paid me during my senior year. I finished the first draft of my thesis and delivered an outline of it at the seminaries of American history and political economy December 7, 1891. I received my master's degree in the Spring. I was thereupon elected to the American Historical Society and asked to speak in Washington at their meeting in December 1892. The New York Independent noted this among the "three best papers presented," and continued:

"The article upon the `enforcement of the Slave Laws' was written and read by a black man. It was thrilling when one could, for a moment, turn his thoughts from listening to think that scarcely thirty years have elapsed since the war that freed his race, and here was an audience of white men listenin to a black man -- listening, moreover, to a careful, cool, philosophical history of the laws which had not prevented the enslavement of his race. The voice, the diction, the manner of the speaker were faultless. As one looked at him, one could not help saying `Let us not worry about the future of our country in the matter of race distinctions.'"

I began with a bibliography of Nat Turner and ended with this history of the suppression of the African Slave Trade to America; neither needed to be done again at least in my day. Thus in my quest for basic knowledge with which to help guide the American Negro I came to the study of sociology, by way of philosophy and history rather than by physics and biology. After hesitating between history and economics, I chose history. On the other hand, psychology, hovering then on the threshold of experiment under Hugo Munsterberg,

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soon took a new orientation which I could understand from the beginning. I worked on my thesis, "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America," and hoped to get my doctor's degree in another two years.

Already I had made up my mind that what I needed was further training in Europe. The German universities were at the top of their reputation. Any American scholar who wanted preferment went to Germany for study. The faculties of Johns Hopkins, and the new University of Chicago, were beginning to be filled with German Ph.D's, and even Harvard had imported Munsterberg for the new experimental psychology, and Kuno Frank had long taught there. British universities did not recognize American degrees and French universities made no special effort to encourage American graduates. I wanted then to study in Germany. I was determined that any failure on my part to become a recognized American scholar must not be based on any lack of modern training.

I was confident. So far I had met no failure. I willed and lo! I was walking beneath the elms of Harvard -- the name of allurement, the college of my youngest, wildest visions. I needed money; scholarships and prizes fell into my lap -- not all I wanted or strove for, but all I needed to keep in school. Commencement came and standing before governor, president, and grave gowned men, I told them certain truths, waving my arms and breathing fast. They applauded with what may have seemed to many as uncalled-for fervor, but I walked home on pink clouds of glory! I asked for a fellowship and got it. I announced my plan of studying in Germany, but Harvard had no more fellowships for me. A friend, however, told me of the Slater Fund and how the board was looking for colored men worth educating.

No thought of modest hesitation occurred to me. I rushed at the chance. It was one of those tricks of fortune which always seem partly due to chance: In 1882, the Slater Fund for the education of Negroes had been established and the board in 1890 was headed by ex-President R. B. Hayes. Ex-President Hayes went down to Johns Hopkins University

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which admitted no Negro students and told a "darkey" joke in a frank talk about the plans of the fund. The Boston Herald of November 2, 1890, quoted him as saying: "If there is any young colored man in the South whom we find to have a talent for art or literature or any special aptitude for study, we are willing to give him money from the education funds to send him to Europe or give him advanced education." He added that so far they had been able to find only "orators." This seemed to me a nasty fling at my black classmate, Morgan, who had been Harvard class orator a few months earlier.

The Hayes statement was brought to my attention at a card party one evening; it not only made me good and angry but inspired me to write ex-President Hayes and ask for a scholarship. I received a pleasant reply saying that the newspaper quotation was incorrect; that his board had some such program in the past but had no present plans for such scholarships. I wrote him referring him to my teachers and to others who knew me, and intimating that his change of plan did not seem to me fair or honest. He wrote again in apologetic mood and said that he was sorry the plan had been given up; that he recognized that I was a candidate who might otherwise have been given attention. I then sat down and wrote Mr. Hayes this letter:

May 25, 1891

Your favor of the 2nd. is at hand. I thank you for your kind wishes. You will pardon me if I add a few words of explanation as to my application. The outcome of the matter is as I expected it would be. The announcement that any agency of the American people was willing to give a Negro a thoroughly liberal education and that it had been looking in vain for men to educate was to say the least rather startling. When the newspaper clipping was handed me in a company of friends, my first impulse was to make in some public way a categorical statement denying that such an offer had ever been made known to colored students. I saw this would be injudicious and fruitless, and I therefore determined on the plan of applying myself. I did so and have been refused along with a number of cases beside mine.

As to my case I personally care little. I am perfectly capable of fighting alone for an education if the trustees do not see fit to help me. On the other hand the injury you have -- unwittingly I trust --

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done the race I represent, and am not ashamed of, is almost irreparable. You went before a number of keenly observant men who looked upon you as an authority in the matter, and told them in substance that the Negroes of the United States either couldn't or wouldn't embrace a most liberal opportunity for advancement. That statement went all over the country. When now finally you receive three or four applications for the fulfillment of that offer, the offer is suddenly withdrawn, while the impression still remains.

If the offer was an experiment, you ought to have had at least one case before withdrawing it; if you have given aid before (and I mean here toward liberal education -- not toward training plowmen) then your statement at Johns Hopkins was partial. From the above facts I think you owe an apology to the Negro people. We are ready to furnish competent men for every European scholarship furnished us off paper. But we can't educate ourselves on nothing and we can't have the moral courage to try, if in the midst of our work our friends turn public sentiment against us by making statements which injure us and which they cannot stand by.

That you have been looking for men to liberally educate in the past may be so, but it is certainly strange so few have heard it. It was never mentioned during my three years stay at Fisk University. President J. C. Price of Livingstone [then a leading Negro spokesman] has told me that he never heard of it, and students from various other Southern schools have expressed great surprise at the offer. The fact is that when I was wanting to come to Harvard, while yet in the South, I wrote to Dr. Haygood [Atticus G. Haygood, a leader of Southern white liberals] for a loan merely, and he never even answered my letter. I find men willing to help me thro' cheap theological schools, I find men willing to help me use my hands before I have got my brains in working order, I have an abundance of good wishes on hand, but I never found a man willing to help me get a Harvard Ph.D.

Hayes was stirred. He promised to take up the matter the next year with the board. Thereupon, the next year I proceeded to write the board:

"At the close of the last academic year at Harvard, I received the degree of Master of Arts, and was reappointed to my fellowship for the year 1891-92. I have spent most of the year in the preparation of my doctor's thesis on the Suppression of the Slave Trade in America. I prepared a preliminary paper on this subject and read it before the American Historical Association at its annual meeting at Washington during the Christmas holidays. . . . Properly to finish my

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education, careful training in a European university for at least a year is, in my mind and the minds of my professors, absolutely indispensable." I thereupon asked respectfully for "aid to study at least a year abroad under the direction of the graduate department of Harvard or other reputable auspices" and if this was not practicable, "that the board loan me a sufficient sum for this purpose." I did not of course believe that this would get me an appointment, but I did think that possibly through the influence of people who thus came to know about my work, I might somehow borrow or beg enough to get to Europe.

I rained recommendations upon Mr. Hayes. The Slater Fund Board surrendered, and I was given a fellowship of $750 to study a year abroad; with the promise that it might possibly be renewed for a second year. To salve their souls, however, this grant was made as half gift and a half repayable loan with five per cent interest. I remember rushing down to New York and talking with ex-President Hayes in the old Astor House, and emerging walking on air. I saw an especially delectable shirt in a shop window. I went in and asked about it. It cost three dollars, which was about four times as much as I had ever paid for a shirt in my life; but I bought it.

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Chapter X: Europe 1892 to 1894
When I was a young man I conceived that the foundations of world culture were laid, the way was charted, the progress toward certain great goals was undoubted and inevitable. There was room for argument concerning details and methods and possible detours in the onsweep of civilization; but the fundamental facts were clear, unquestioned and unquestionable.

Between the years 1885 and 1894 I received my education at Fisk University, Harvard College and the University of Berlin. It was difficult for me at the time to form any critical estimate of any meaning of the world which differed from the conventional unanimity about me. Apparently one consideration alone saved me from complete conformity with the thoughts and confusions of then current social trends; and that was the problem of racial and cultural contacts. Otherwise I might easily have been simply the current product of my day. Even as it was, the struggle for which I was preparing and the situations which I was trying to conceive and study, related themselves primarily to the plight of the comparatively small group of American Negroes with which I was identified, and theoretically to the larger Negro race. I did not face the general plight and conditions of all humankind. That I took for granted, and in the unanimity of thought and development of that day, as I saw it, this was scarcely to be wondered at.

It was to my mind and the minds of most of my teachers a day of Progress with a capital P. Population in all the cultured lands was increasing swiftly, doubling and more; cities everywhere were growing and expanding and making themselves the centers and almost the only centers of civilization; transportation by land and sea was drawing the nations near and making the lands of the earth increasingly accessible. Inventions and technique were a perpetual marvel and their

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accomplishment infinite in possibility. Commerce was madly seeking markets all around the earth; colonies were being seized and countries integrated into European civilization in Asia, Africa, South America and the islands. Of the methods of this colonial imperialism, the condition of colonial peoples and the effect of colonies on home labor, I knew little until years later.

Above all, science was becoming a religion; psychology was reducing metaphysics to experiment and a sociology of human action was planned. Fighting the vast concept of evolution, religion went into its heresy trials, its struggles with "higher criticism," its discomfort at the "revised version" of the New Testament which was published the year I entered college. Everywhere men sought wealth and especially in America there was extravagant living among the rich; everywhere the poor planned to be rich and the rich planned to be richer; everywhere wider, bigger, higher, better things were set down as inevitable.

All this, of course, dominated education; especially the economic order determined what the next generation should learn and know. On the whole, looking at the marvelous industrial expansion of America, seeing the rise of the western farmer and the wages of the eastern mechanic, all seemed well; or if not, if there were ominous protests and upheavals, these were but the friction necessary to all advance. "God's in His heaven; All's right with the world," Browning was singing -- that colored Robert Browning, who died just after I received my first bachelor's degree.

Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the shrine of the established social order and of the economic development into which I was born. But just that part of this order which seemed to most of my fellows nearest perfection, seemed to me most inequitable and wrong; and starting from that critique, I gradually, as the years went by, found other things to question in my environment.

At first, however, my criticism was confined to the relation

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of my people to the world movement. I was not questioning the world movement in itself. What the white world was doing, its goals and ideals, I had not doubted were quite right. What was wrong was that I and people like me and thousands of others who might have my ability and aspiration, were refused permission to be a part of this world. It was as though moving on a rushing express, my main thought was as to my relations with the other passengers on the express, and not to its rate of speed and its destination.

In the days of my formal education, my interest became concentrated upon the race struggle. My attention from the first was focused on democracy and democratic development; and upon the problem of the admission of my people into the freedom of democracy. This my training touched but obliquely. We studied history and politics almost exclusively from the point of view of ancient German freedom, English and New England democracy, and the development of the white United States. Here, however, I could bring criticism from what I knew and saw touching the Negro.

Europe modified profoundly my outlook on life and my thought and feeling toward it, even though I was there but two short years with my contacts limited and my friends few. But something of the possible beauty and elegance of life permeated my soul; I gained a respect for manners. I had been before, above all, in a hurry. I wanted a world, hard, smooth and swift, and had no time for rounded corners and ornament, for unhurried thought and slow contemplation. Now at times I sat still. I came to know Beethoven's symphonies and Wagner's Ring. I looked long at the colors of Rembrandt and Titian. I saw in arch and stone and steeple the history and striving of men and also their taste and expression. Form, color and words took new combinations and meanings.

I crossed the ocean in a trance. Always I seemed to be saying, "It is not real; I must be dreaming!" I can live it again -- the little, Dutch ship -- the blue waters -- the smell of newmown hay -- Holland and the Rhine. I saw the Wartburg and Berlin; I made the Hartzreise and climbed the Brocken; I saw

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the Hansa towns and the cities and dorfs of South Germany; I saw the Alps at Berne, the Cathedral at Milan, Florence, Rome, Venice, Vienna, and Pest; I looked on the boundaries of Russia; and I sat in Paris and London.

On mountain and valley, in home and school, I met men and women as I had never met them before. Slowly they became, not white folks, but folks. The unity beneath all life clutched me. I was not less fanatically a Negro, but "Negro" meant a greater, broader sense of humanity and world fellowship. I felt myself standing, not against the world, but simply against American narrowness and color prejudice, with the greater, finer world at my back.

In Germany in 1892, I found myself on the outside of the American world, looking in. With me were white folk -- students, acquaintances, teachers -- who viewed the scene with me. They did not always pause to regard me as a curiosity, or something sub-human; I was just a man of the somewhat privileged student rank, with whom they were glad to meet and talk over the world; particularly, the part of the world whence I came.

I found to my gratification that they, with me, did not regard America as the last word in civilization. Indeed, I derived a certain satisfaction in learning that the University of Berlin did not recognize a degree even from Harvard University, no more than Harvard did from Fisk. Even I was a little startled to realize how much that I had regarded as white American, was white European and not American at all: America's music is German, the Germans said; the Americans have no art, said the Italians; and their literature, remarked the English, is mainly English. All agreed that Americans could make money and did not care how they made it. And the like. Sometimes their criticism got under even my anti-American skin, but it was refreshing on the whole to hear voiced my own attitude toward so much that America had meant to me.

I wrote in my diary: "Holland is an extremely neat and well-ordered mud-puddle, situated at the confluence of the English, French, and German languages. My memory of my

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first sight of it is inextricably interwoven with a smell of clover. It was after a two weeks' sea voyage -- pleasant to be sure, fascinating as the changing, changeless sea ever is, but two weeks -- then I came on deck one sunny morning to see long low green fields, sleepy little farm houses, long, prim, and decent rows of trees, stolid windmills and cows. So far as landscape is concerned, I never saw ought else in Holland and had I (God forbid!) followed my first inclinations, I should have gone away from this dear old nook with the usual uninteresting tale. I stayed a week or so, and I am very glad.

There is to be sure a certain sameness about the homely country -- a slowness which makes an American gasp and sometimes swear, and yet the very monotony of the country, the low dogged hum of its simple life, has for the loiterer a charm I can only liken to that of the backyard of my New England home. The Dutchman is in no hurry; he sees no necessary connection between the new and the good -- rather the contrary; he is ponderously honest, and he is guiltless of anything savoring of personal beauty. His nation may become grasping and greedy, but the individual Dutchman is too honest to know it or to believe it when it is told.

If Rotterdam had been any but a Dutch town, I shouldn't have seen it -- I mean if Dutch business methods had not been so exasperatingly deliberate as to take six days to get a draft on Baring Bros. of London cashed, I should not have spent even a night at his interesting place. As it was, I was imprisoned for nearly a week in the town, in daily terror lest mine host should present his ruddy bill before my extremely wan purse. And I liked it: a nice place in its way. To be sure I must say I never saw a more poorly tailored town in my life. I saw very few persons whose clothes seemed to have been made with the slightest reference to their bodies, except the housemaids. In maidservants, Rotterdam has apparently reached the ne plus ultra [acme; furthest point]: elaborately beruffled caps, immaculate white stockings and slippers, simple gingham dresses, and healthy, honestly homely faces, made them most pleasant figures to meet on the promenade.

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Rotterdam as a city has a certain lack of individuality which is in itself characteristic. You see, it lies in the midstream of Dutch commerce with the great world and the current has changed it. It has almost forgotten its native tongue -- so used is it to jabbering English, French, and German, and it has a general unconnected sort of air which would make a nervous people picturesque, but only makes the Rotterdamites a wee bit ludicrous.

One annoyance I met here and all over Europe: the landlord would hasten to inform me beamingly that `Fellow Americans had just arrived.' If there was one thing less desirable than white `fellow Americans' to me, it was black `fellow Americans' to them."

Of greatest importance was the opportunity which my Wanderjahre in Europe gave of looking at the world as a man and not simply from a narrow racial and provincial outlook. This was primarily the result not so much of my study, as of my human companionship, unveiled by the accident of color. From the days of my later youth in the South to my boarding a Rhine passenger steamer at Rotterdam in August 1892, I had not regarded white folk as human in quite the same way that I was. I had reached the habit of expecting color prejudice so universally, that I found it even when it was not there. So when I saw on this little steamer a Dutch lady with two grown daughters and one of 12, I proceeded to put as much space between us as the small vessel allowed. But it did not allow much, and the lady's innate breeding allowed less. Soon the little daughter came straight across the deck and placed herself squarely before me. She asked if I spoke German; before I could explain, the mother and other daughters approached and we were conversing.

Before we reached the end of our trip, we were happy companions, laughing, eating and singing together, talking English, French and German and viewing the lovely castled German towns. Once or twice when the vessel docked for change of cargo, the family strolled off to visit the town. Each time I found excuse to linger behind and visit alone later; until once at Düsseldorf, all got away before I sensed it and

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left me and the prettiest daughter conversing. Then seeing we had docked she suggested we follow and see the town. We did; and thereafter we continued acting like normal, well-bred human beings. I waved them all good-bye, in the solemn arched aisles of the Cologne Cathedral, with tears in my eyes.

So too in brave old Eisenach, beneath the shadow of Luther's Wartburg, I spent a happy holiday in a home where university training and German home-making left no room for American color prejudice. From this unhampered social intermingling with Europeans of education and manners, I emerged from the extremes of my racial provincialism. I became more human; learned the place in life of "Wine, Women, and Song"; I ceased to hate or suspect people simply because they belonged to one race or color; and above all I began to understand the real meaning of scientific research and the dim outline of methods of employing its technique and its results in the new social sciences for the settlement of the Negro problems in America.

In the Marbach home which took only properly introduced "paying guests" were two grown daughters, and two young women who were relatives; two young Frenchmen, an English youth and myself. Herr Oberpfarrer [the Rector], Doctor Marbach, and his efficient and correct wife presided. At first my German was halting and I was shy. But soon the courtesy of the elders and the ebullient spirits of the young folks evoked my good nature and keen sense of cameraderie. The very mistakes of those of us who were foreigners -- mistakes in grammar and usage and etiquette -- became a source of merriment and sympathy. We became a happy group closely bound to each other. We went together to church services and to concerts. We took long excursions through field and forest to places of interest, lunching in homely inns or in the open.

I remember once the contest in poetry we had in a forest glen looking out on a great mountain range; I recited in English and one of the Frenchmen in his tongue. Then Madame Marbach (who always chaperoned us) recited Du

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bist wie eine Blume [You are like a flower]. We wept openly at its beauty and I looked at Dora with her blue eyes and black hair and the lovely coloring of her skin. Dora always paired with me, first to correct my German and then by preference. Once we all went to the annual ball of the upper middle-class folk in the town. It was formal and a little stiff. The carefully gowned matrons sat around the walls of the room, knitting and gossiping and keeping watch over the demure white-gowned girls in their charge. The fathers sat at tables and drank beer. I danced with all the girls of our home; then bowing from the waist ventured to ask other young ladies to whom I had been introduced. Then came the Damen Wahl [Ladies' Choice], I drew back, but it was unnecessary, for my card was filled for every dance.

I was very fond of Dora Marbach and as I well knew, so was she of me. Our fellows joked about us and when I sang the folk song of Die Lora am Thore [Lora at the Gate], little Bertha invariably changed the name to "Dora." We confessed our love for each other and Dora said she would marry me "gleich!" [at once]. But I knew this would be unfair to her and fatal for my work at home, where I had neither property nor social standing for this blue-eyed stranger. She could not quite understand. Naturally I received much advice as to marriage plans. One lady told me very seriously "Sie sollen heiraten eine hell-blonde!" [you should marry a light blonde]. But I knew better, although there may have been some echo in my mind of the proverb:

Es war' so schön gewesen
Es hät' nicht sollen sein!
It was so lovely
That it could not be!

It was an American woman who sought to see to it that no entanglement between me and Dora took place. She and her husband came to board with the Marbachs for a month or so. He was a professor in Colorado, a good-natured, ill-mannered Westerner. She was a nervous gossip, astonished to see a

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Negro so well received in this household. What she told Frau Marbach about American Negroes I do not know, but I can imagine. There was nothing said of the couple but all were glad when they left. I felt a little sensitive when I left. I exchanged letters with the family while I remained in Germany but I never returned to this beloved foster home.

In the Fall I went up to Berlin and registered in the university. In my study, I came in contact with several of the great leaders of the developing social sciences: in economic sociology and in social history. My horizon in the social sciences was broadened not only by teachers, but by students from France, Belgium, Russia, Italy and Poland.

For matriculation in groups of 100 we went into a large room with a high ceiling ornamented with busts of Berlin's famous professors. The year's Rector Magnificus was the widely famous Rudolf Virchow. He was a meek and calm little man, white-haired and white-bearded, with kindly face and pleasant voice. I had again at Berlin as at Harvard, unusual opportunity. Although a foreigner, I was admitted my first semester to two seminars under Gustav Schmoller and Adolf Wagner, both of them at the time the most distinguished men in their lines; I received eventually from both of them pleasant testimony on my work in economics, history and sociology. I sat under the voice of the fire-eating Pan-German, Heinrich von Treitschke; I heard Max Weber; I wrote on American agriculture for Schmoller and discussed social conditions in Europe with teachers and students. Under these teachers and in this social setting, I began to see the race problem in America, the problem of the peoples of Africa and Asia, and the political development of Europe as one. I began to unite my economics and politics; but I still assumed that in these groups of activities and forces, the political realm was dominant. Here are comments I made at the time:

"Matriculation commenced the 15th of October. I registered as number 85 of the more than 5,000 who usually matriculate here. The lectures mostly began the week following. Each professor writes a more or less legible announcement

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as to the time and place of the commencement of his lectures. The student then has to scurry about and examine a dozen different blackboards and hundreds of different slips of paper to find his particular professor's announcement. Poorly written English is bad enough, but when puzzling German, cloaked in execrably written German script, it is a combination fearful and wonderful to behold. Schmoller's scrawl caused me trouble, Wagner was well-nigh illegible, but Treitschke -- well, I haven't deciphered his announcement yet.

The lectures are of two sorts -- private and public. The first have four hours a week, generally mornings on Tuesdays or Fridays, or on two afternoons from four to six. These lectures must be paid for at the rate of $5.00 a course for the semester. In this heaven of `electivism' every student must take at least a one-point course. The public lectures are full, and have one or two hours a week, on Wednesday or Saturday mornings or on other evenings at six or seven.

An American astounded a professor by asking how much work a student was expected to do. The real answer is none or all he can manage. Only two things are required: the signature of the teacher at the beginning and at the end of the course. One of the articles furnished at matriculation is an Anmelde-Buch in which the names of the various professors and lectures you propose to take must be written. This is taken to the Questor who receives the tuition and receipts. Then you must trot to each professor and get his signature for each set of lectures at the beginning and end of the semester.

The students take part in the recitation-room proceeding mainly with their feet. A shuffle of feet presages disapproval, a stamping means applause. A few days ago, when Wagner mentioned Bismarck and called him the principal creator of German unity, a rub-a-dub followed from the 300 students for nearly five minutes. Shuffling is used also to express disapproval of late arrivals. Sometimes the disturbance is not generally thought great enough and the shuffling is rebuked by hissing. At other times when the tardy one is unusually

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noisy, there is a deafening whirr of feet which stops the lecture and never fails to abash the intruder. Commencing late, the lectures also end late. The students generally submit to remaining five minutes past but after that there comes an ominous clicking of inkstands and now and then designed and premature applause cuts off the lecturer's last words.

To me by far the most interesting of the professors is the well-known von Treitschke, the German Machiavelli. He never comes to his lectures until very late, often commencing his ten o'clock lecture on Politik at 10:30 -- never before 10:20. He is a large man, of `fair round belly with good capon lined,' or possibly with the more unpoetic beer; he generally dresses rather carefully in dark gray or blue cutaway with cylinder hat, gloves and the all-prevading German cane. His complexion is dark, his well-kept hair and full beard iron gray, and his features rather gross. He is stone deaf with a slight impediment in his speech, and a sort of breathless way of speaking, that makes him very difficult at first for a foreigner to understand. The task, however, is worth all pains, for his is one of the most forcible and independent minds on the faculty.

His entrance is always the same. He comes in slowly, somewhat out of breath, with his overcoat, hat, and cane on his left arm. These he hangs on the wall and ascends to his desk where he stands as he speaks. He then takes off his right glove and putting his head a bit on one side says: `Meine Herren,' with a falling inflection. Then begins the lecture, which, as I overheard a puzzled and sighing American say, `has but one period and that's at the end.' He does not speak so fast, but his articulation is bad (imagine badly articulated German!) and he has a way of catching his breath in the midst of his sentences instead of at the end, giving the ear no natural pause.

His lectures are nevertheless intensely interesting. He is rapt in his subject, a man of intense likes and dislikes, beliefs and disbeliefs. He is the very embodiment of united monarchical, armed Germany. He has pity for France, hearty dislike for all things English -- while for America, well, the

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United States is his bête noire, which he seldom fails to excoriate. One day he startled me by suddenly declaring during a lecture on America: `Die Mulattin sind niedrig! Sie fühlen sich niedrig.' [Mulattoes are inferior; they feel themselves inferior.] I felt as if he were pointing me out; but I presume he was quite unaware of my presence. However my presence or absence would have made no difference to him. He was given to making extraordinary assertions out of a clear sky and evidently believing just what he said. My fellow students gave no evidence of connecting what he said with me. Yet von Treitschke was not a narrow man. His outlook is that of the born aristocrat who has something of the Carlyle contempt of levelling democracy. On the other hand he criticizes his own government and nation unsparingly when he sees fit -- I have heard him characterize one of the highest officials as a verrückte Dummkopf [mad idiot] while the students cheered. He grows enthusiastic in his lectures, gestures considerably, and has a little half-caustic smile which always foreshadows some sharp critical sally that usually brings down the house; as for instance when he characterized some current author's work as efforts `to widen the boundaries of human stupidity.'

The Berlin student is not typical of his class, nor will the stranger find here so much of the purely student life. Berlin stands, I imagine, to the smaller universities something as Harvard to the Western universities. The students generally go to a local university first, then spend a semester or more in the classic glare of Berlin with its 83 full professors, 87 assistant professors, and 186 instructors; returning finally to their own universities to take their degree. The galaxy of learning here at Berlin is not so brilliant today, I imagine, as in the day of the great Theodor Mommsen.

Yet it is sufficiently attractive. All of these professors, of course, I have not had the opportunity of seeing, much less hearing -- indeed, four years at Harvard left some great names and faces unconnected in my mind. Those I have seen here are more especially connected with my department of political science; but they are celebrated enough to merit some

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particular notice. Wagner I have already spoken of personally -- his hobby is the discovery of the golden mean between the warring extremes of his science. He comes dangerously near committing the common mistake in such cases of mistaking his extremes. He is publishing a new edition of his valuable Lehrbuch, and as inducement is offering various blandishments to the national apparition of socialism. The bête noire of the German economist is, of course, the British school founded, as Wagner says, with a jerk of his head, by `Adahm Smiss.' Wagner, however, gives them due credit for their great work and agrees with them more fully than with the younger German radicals headed by Schmoller.

There is evidently no intellectual love lost between Wagner and Schmoller. Schmoller is a large man about 50, with flowing beard, grown bald and prematurely gray. His complexion is dark and his eyes small and bright. He wears glasses, speaks with an accent, and is evidently a man of strong prejudices, fearless and sharp in expression of opinion, but a tireless investigator. He strikes me as more of a historian than economist. He conducts the economics seminar every other semester, alternating with Wagner. This semester Schmoller has the seminar, consisting of upward of 40 members, two of whom are American born, representing Harvard and Boston University. The papers presented so far have been indifferent, but the discussion animated and intelligent.

The difference in general appearance between the Berlin student and his Harvard brother is very marked. The Harvard man affects a slouchy stride, jams his hands in his pockets, dresses well, and yet with a certain conscious carelessness; and would appear as a sort of devil-may-care young fellow, out of swaddling clothes but not yet in straitjacket. The Berlin student affects a strut, never uses his trouser pockets or whistles in public, dresses poorly but with a certain primness of collar, gloves, and cane; and would appear as a young man of intellect, promise, and present importance. A crowd of German students is more picturesque.

In social life particularism is more marked here than even at Harvard. The simpleton who asks: `Well, how about

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the social life of the Harvard students?' should be questioned in turn: `Which Harvard students?' So in Berlin. Most of the students have spent their kneipe [carousing] years elsewhere and come here if not for more serious, at least for a different sort of play. The Verbindungen [student associations] do not consequently play so much of a role here as elsewhere.

After so much has been written, most people understand the German student fraternities. They are of two sorts: the Verbindungen and the Vereine. The Verbindungen are in two great divisions: the Verbindungen with affiliate chapters in all universities; under these come the corps, to which formerly only the nobles belonged, but which now differ but little from the other divisions -- the Burschenuhaften, the Landsmannschaften, which have the bulk of members. Second, the Freie Verbindungen, which are local societies.

All the inter-university Verbindungen wear the student caps, a band of three colors across the breast; practice the sham sword duels to a considerable extent, do not wear beards, kneipe together, and address each other by the familiar Du instead of the polite Sie. The objects of the Verbindungen are purely social. They meet at stated times in their `local,' drink beer, and sing, fight, etc. Duelling still goes on -- have recently seen three or four freshly cut cheeks and heads -- but not to a very great extent. I should judge that less than a tenth, possibly less than a twentieth of the members, bear scars. The custom as carried out now is entirely harmless -- more so than the Harvard Dickey initiation, I should say. All the different societies parade slowly in the little square before the University in full regalia. Their number are, however, insignificant -- generally not more than fifty or sixty in all.

The Vereine are clubs for local social and literary purposes. They wear no caps or only colors on their fob watch chains. There are numerous Vereine in Berlin for all purposes, from philosophy to chess, and from converting the Jews to Alp-climbing. Outside of this, there is also an independent `student union' of those belonging to no societies.

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The political situation is followed with keen interest by the students, though there is very little outspoken opinion. It is easy to see, that William II is not altogether popular among the young men, that many are not averse to coquetting a bit with socialism, and there is a general unrest and dissatisfaction among these future citizens.

Naturally I am attracted to the socialist movement, but the history of the development of Marxism and of the revisionists like Lassalle, Bernstein and Bakunin was too complicated for a student like myself to understand, who had received no real teaching along this line. I was overwhelmed with rebuttals of Marxism before I understood the original doctrine. Even such great occurrences as the French Commune were minimized by the main history teaching to which I had listened in America. Until the fall of Bismarck in 1890, socialist organization or agitation were illegal in Germany, but the increase of industrial workers had led to a vast scheme of state insurance for accidents, old age relief and the like under Bismarck. In 1891, William II through his new Chancellor Caprivi tried a new social policy which allowed socialists to organize and a new Social Democratic party was beginning to grow rapidly at the time I arrived as a student. I frequently attended their meetings, but my student rank hindered me from that close personal acquaintanceship with workers which I should have had for complete understanding. I did soon realize that the Social Democratic party was the largest in the state, but kept from its rightful representation in the Reichstag by privilege and systematic gerrymandering."

The pageantry and patriotism of Germany in 1892 astonished me. In New England our patriotism was cool and intellectual. Ours was a great nation and it was our duty to preserve it. We "loved" it but with reason not passion. In the South, Negroes simply did not speak or think of patriotism for the nation which held their fathers in slavery for 250 years. On the other hand we revered rebels like Robert Dale Owen, Henry George or Edward Bellamy. When I heard my German companions sing "Deutschland, Deutschland

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über Alles, über Alles in der Welt" I realized that they felt something I had never felt and perhaps never would. The march of soldiers, the saluting of magnificent uniforms, the martial music and rhythm of movement stirred my senses.

Then there was that new, young Emperor, "von Gottes Gnade, deutsche Kaiser, Koenig von Preussen" [blessed by God, German Kaiser, King of Prussia], who led and pinpointed the pageantry. Ever and again he came riding ahead of his white and golden troops on prancing chargers through the great Brandenburg gate, up the Linden "With banners gaily flying, with trumpet and with drum!" I thrilled at the sight even though I knew of that shriveled left arm and of his impossible demand for supreme power. I even trimmed my beard and mustache to a fashion like his and still follow it. If I a stranger was thus influenced, what about the youth of Germany? I began to feel that dichotomy which all my life has characterized my thought: how far can love for my oppressed race accord with love for the oppressing country? And when these loyalties diverge, where shall my soul find refuge?

Germany took up my music and art where Fisk had left me; to religious oratorio was now added opera and symphony, song and sonata. I heard cheaply and often from the balcony seats offered students, the great music of the world: but I heard it in reverse; I heard Wagner before Verdi; I listened to Tannhäuser before Il Trovatore. Nevertheless my delight in good music was signally increased.

The many vacations of the academic year I used for trips in Germany and to other parts of Europe; but I missed after the Summer in Eisenach, the companionship of close friends. I kept up my older habit of traveling alone.

I had some student companionship in Germany and might easily have had more. I was invited to join a Gesellschaft for study of comparative international law; I found there some good companions and we talked and published a set of bylaws. To this we added a song book, to which at unanimous request I added a translation of the then popular "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!" Nevertheless I took my first excursion alone

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and chose the Hansa cities of northwest Germany. I planned this trip for March, but before leaving there came my 25th birthday on February 23. I asked in no companions.

It was in the long, dark winter of northern Germany, and while I was comfortable, I felt a little lonesome and far away from home and boyhood friends. I arose at eight and took coffee and oranges, read letters, thought of my dead parents, and was sorry. The night before I had heard Schubert's beautiful Unfinished Symphony, planned my celebration and written to Grandma and Mabel and had a curious little ceremony with candles, Greek wine, oil, and song and prayer. I wandered up to the reading room, then to the art gallery, and finally had a fine dinner with Sonderhof over a bottle of Rudesheimer and cigarettes. Then we went to Potsdam for coffee and saw a pretty girl. We came back to the Seminar, took a walk, supped on cocoa, wine, oranges and cake and I came home alone. I had candles in my room on Schönburger Ufer, and a dedication of my small library to the memory of my mother; and I wrote something rather sentimental about life in general:

"Night -- grand and wonderful. I am glad I am living. I rejoice as a strong man to win a race, and I am strong -- is it egotism -- is it assurance -- or is it the silent call of the world spirit that makes me feel that I am royal and that beneath my sceptre a world of kings shall bow. The hot dark blood of a black forefather is beating at my heart, and I know that I am either a genius or a fool. O I wonder what I am -- I wonder what the world is -- I wonder if life is worth the Sturm. I do not know -- perhaps I never shall know: But this I do know: be the Truth what it may I will seek it on the pure assumption that it is worth seeking -- and Heaven nor Hell, God nor Devil shall turn me from my purpose till I die. I will in this second quarter century of my life, enter the dark forest of the unknown world for which I have so many years served my apprenticeship -- in the chart and compass which the world furnishes me I have little faith -- yet I have nothing better -- I will seek till I find -- and die. There is a grandeur in the very hopelessness of such a life

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-- Life? And is life all? If I strive, shall I live to strive again? I do not know and in spite of the wild Sehnsucht [yearning] for Eternity that makes my heart sick now and then -- I shut my teeth and say I do not care. Carpe Diem! [Seize the day! -- that is, enjoy the present.] What is life but life, after all? Its end is its greatest and fullest self -- this end is the Good: the Beautiful is its attribute -- its soul, and Truth is its being. Not three commensurable things are these, they are three dimensions of the cube. Mayhap God is the fourth, but for that very reason he will be incomprehensible. The greatest and fullest life is by definition beautiful, beautiful -- beautiful as a dark passionate woman, beautiful as a golden-hearted school girl, beautiful as a grey haired hero. That is the dimension of breadth. Then comes Truth -- what is, cold and indisputable. What is height. Now I will, so help my soul, multiply breadth by height, beauty by truth and then goodness, strength shall bind them together into a solid whole. Wherefore? I know not now. Perhaps infinite other dimensions do. This is a wretched figure and yet it roughly represents my attitude toward the world. I am striving to make my life all that life may be -- and I am limiting that strife only in so far as that strife is incompatible with others of my brothers and sisters making their lives similar. The crucial question now is where that limit comes. I am too often puzzled to know. Paul put it as meat-eating, which was asinine. I have put it as the (perhaps) life-ruin of Amalie which is cruel. God knows I am sorely puzzled. I am firmly convinced that my own best development is not one and the same with the best development of the world and here I am willing to sacrifice. That sacrifice to the world's good becomes too soon sickly sentimentality. I therefore take the world that the Unknown lay in my hands and work for the rise of the Negro people, taking for granted that their best development means the best development of the world. . . ."

I was considerably alarmed at the end of my second semester toward the middle of the year 1893 when no word arrived as to re-appointment to my fellowship which I had confidently expected. I cabled without success. Finally this

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rather casual reply came from the President of Johns Hopkins, D. C. Gilman:

The Slater Trustees have renewed your appointment with the understanding that you should give a note for one half the sum as before. You will presently hear from Mr. Strong representing the Treasurer.

A telegram was received here May 8th, reading: "Was Du Bois reappointed?" without signature. I answered it and there came back a dispatch from Berlin, saying that the message was undelivered. I did not repeat the message.

I shall hope to hear from you after receiving this note, and to have the semi-annual letters in the coming year as in the past.

The Christmas holidays of 1893 I spent in making a trip through south Germany. Three of us visited Weimar, Frankfort, Heidelberg and Mannheim. From Christmas Day to New Year's we stopped in a little German "Dorf" in the Rheinpfalz, where I had an excellent opportunity to study the peasant life closely and compare it with country life in the South. Three of us started out -- a Scotsman, an American and myself. The American was descended from German immigrants to the United States and had relatives in the Rhineland in southwest Germany. We spent Christmas in the village of Gimmeldigen. What a lovely holiday, visiting and feasting among peasant folk who treated me like a prince! We visited perhaps 20 different families, talked, ate and drank new wine with them; listened to their gossip, attended their social assemblies, etc. The bill which my obsequious landlord presented on my departure was about onetenth of what I expected. We stayed in Naustadt a week, with a family whose dead father had driven the first locomotive into France at the opening of the Franco-German war. The daughter was a fine, homely young woman who did everything to make us comfortable.

We then went to Strassburg, Stuttgart, Ulm, Muenchen, Nuremberg, Prague and Dresden. In those places we stayed from one to five days following our Baedekers closely and paying much attention to the Muenchen and Dresden art galleries. The whole trip cost me about $80. We parted from our American: he was a good-hearted but rather vulgar man,

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with an education that left no visible results. John Dollar, my British companion, and I got on famously together because we were so opposite in temperament. He was coldly and conventionally British in dress and speech. He paraded more than he walked, hated Catholic priests for no reason which he ever stated and was constitutionally afraid of women. With this went a strange simplicity and deep sympathy with human suffering. Later we decided to go down to Italy; to Genoa, Rome and Naples and then over to Venice and Vienna and Budapest. On this trip we used German instead of English because as Dollar assured me it would be much cheaper. He was quite right. We went over the vast barrier of the Alps gazing up on its heaven of snow and sky and then down on the incomparable beauty of the Italian lakes.

These were troubled days all over Europe. Switzerland was following socialism by adopting social insurance and was on the brink of buying up her railroads. Humbert I and Leo XIII were at loggerheads over papal territory in Italy. Crispi had risen, fallen and come back to power, and was now heading for the fatal Ethiopian war of 1896. We went to Genoa and Turin; to Florence, Rome and Naples. I saw for the first time some of the world's great sculpture and painting; its historical monuments; I sensed the difficulties between France and Italy when Dollar and I, mistaken for Frenchmen, were stoned by youth in the Roman Forum. We lived cheaply and fared bountifully. We saw Naples, free, lovely and dirty, in all the gay abandon of the fin-desiècle. It was a great and inspiring trip. We turned back north and saw Venice with its doves and the Palace of the Doges, and then went northeast to Vienna.

This was Vienna in its glory, not at its height but still magnificent. I remember the great Opera House and the way men stood in their seats and looked the audience over; the leisurely way in which we all promenaded in the wide and long halls and lunched at will; and then the finely conducted music and acting. It was one of the world's greatest and most influential cities. Here Dollar left me. I do not

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think he liked Austria as much as Rome and also his engagements called him.

As for me I had further scenes to examine. While at Berlin, I found myself once explaining to a schoolmate, Stanislaus Ritter von Estreicher, the race problem in America. He was not as impressed as I thought he should be. He said: "I understand only too well; but you should see the race antagonism in my home. Come to Krakow and see the clash of German and Pole!" I promised that I would visit him when near. So now I travelled alone into Hungary, with the object of turning north through Slovenia and over the Tatra mountains into Poland. It was a journey with a hint of adventure and with a far-off likeness to my American South.

In Budapest I was struck by the hostility to German Austria. This was four years after the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf at Meyerling. Taafe was prime minister and had sought to placate the rising Hungarian drive to greater independence by grant of manhood suffrage. But the Hungarians were asserting their desire for independence. In the post office, they pretended not to understand German even when I tried to buy stamps. It would be the very next year that Kossuth was to die in Italy and increase the demand for Hungarian independence from Austria.

I fared north over that great plain along which the Magyars came west a thousand years before. I had glimpses of Hungary as I traveled slowly by third-class railway coach, stopping to spend a night here and there. A Hungarian peasant wrote later of conditions in Hungary at the time: "Come with me in the Spring and hoe for 16 hours for 12 cents a day; eat dry bread and rotten bacon, sleep in a hole dug with his own hoe for six hours. We work even longer in summer. On the putzas four families, 20 to 25 people, live in one room. I have seen men collapsing on the street from starvation. Such things are not exactly calculated to make one enthusiastic about the Fatherland. Do our lords think we shall starve to death without a word?"

All this I did not actually see, but I heard its echoes; my dark face elicited none of the curiosity which it had in

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blonde north Germany, for there were too many dark Gypsies and other brunettes. I saw poverty and despair. I was several times mistaken for a Jew; arriving one night in a town of north Slovenia, the driver of a rickety cab whispered in my ear, "Unter die Juden?" [among Jews]. I stared and then said yes. I stayed in a little Jewish inn. I was a little frightened as in the gathering twilight I traversed the foothills of the dark Tatras alone and on foot. I crossed into Poland and stopped to go down into the salt mines of Wielitza.

Finally I came to Krakow and my friend. It was an interesting visit and an old tale. Tyranny in school and work; insult in home and on the street. Of course here, in contrast to America, there were the privileged Poles who escaped personal insult; there was the aristocracy who had some recognized rights. The whole mass of the oppressed were not reduced to one level; nevertheless the degradation was only too familiar. The venerable librarian of the university treated me to Polish schnapps which nearly choked me. The family made me most welcome. I never saw my schoolmate again, but I heard later that in the Second World War, the Germans tried to make him a Quisling for them. In 1940, von Estreicher died in a German concentration camp, after he had refused to be one of Germany's puppet rulers of Poland.

I came back to Berlin by way of Prague and Dresden and started my third and final semester. Schmoller wanted to present me for my doctorate, despite the fact that I had not finished the "triennium" required in a German university and my work at Harvard was not recognized. The faculty was willing in my case but was restrained by the professor of English who threatened to push the similar claims of several Britishers. I therefore regretfully had to forego the chance of a German doctorate and wait for the degree from Harvard.

As a farewell to Germany, I made the Hartzreise in the Spring of 1894. Again I went alone, but with my now familiar German and wide experience of travel, I felt at home.

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I kept no diary of this trip, but started west from Berlin to Magdeburg and Halberstadt in Saxony. I passed the splendid seat of the Prince zu Steinberg-Wernigerhode. Then I climbed to the Brocken and lived Walpurgis night again; I forded streams and climbed mountains until in full darkness I came to an old inn. I ordered beer and kalbsbratten and dined alone. This was my perfect farewell to a Germany which no longer exists.

I stayed in Europe as long as the last penny allowed -- eager for work and home and yet reluctant. My old pal Dollar wrote me from England and we planned to meet in London before I left for America.

I now turned home. If I had spent a fourth semester at Berlin, that would have not only exceeded my funds covering two years of work but also have taken me up to Christmas and made the securing of work in America for the next year unlikely. A better alternative occurred to me and that was to spend the Spring in France. The years of preparation were over and life was to begin. I computed my balance of funds carefully. I could go first class to London, spend a short time with my friend Dollar and then take first class cabin accommodation to the United States. Or by carefully husbanding my funds, riding third class on railways and returning steerage to New York I could spend a month or more in France. My earlier idea had been to spend a year in Germany and a year in France in graduate study; but I had to choose between a more complete German experience and two incomplete glimpses of both countries. So I spent nearly all my time in Germany. But here at the end was an opportunity at least to have a glimpse of France and then rough it home. Of course if I had intimated my need for further funds to Dollar he would have been willing and able to make me a loan. But here my New England frugality stopped me. I already was in debt for half of my fellowships; I had no job; and I had lived well enough in Europe to endure for a week the experience of immigrants to America. Even they on arrival might easily have a better chance for life than I in my own country.

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I went to France and saw Paris; wandered wide and deep and made my French fairly understandable. I sensed the everlasting lure of Paris, three years after the suicide of Boulanger and the year of the final completion of the Franco-Russian alliance. It was also the year President Carnot was assassinated and Dreyfus condemned for treason. But these events gained only my passing attention. I was fascinated by the glory of French culture in painting, sculpture, architecture and historical monument. I saw Sarah Bernhardt; I haunted the Louvre.

In June I met my friend Dollar in London for a few days of a last farewell. Dollar, dear old boy, hadn't the slightest idea that I was going steerage and prattled finely about "selecting a cabin" and all that. We wandered about the depot, watching the crowds, edified by Dollar's explanation of the station until finally I entered the carriage, bade my good friend adieu and rattled off.

We stopped at Southampton in a sort of flurry, nobody, not even the guards seeming to know what we were to do next. As we stood helplessly on the platform the guard suddenly screamed "second cabin passengers this way" and left us steerage people alone. Finally they called us and grabbing our luggage we followed our guide who led us through the streets in one long line to a small brick shed about a mile off, where we deposited our baggage in the ante-room and entered. Within the walls were white-washed bricks, the ceiling wooden and iron and wooden columns in the center. At one end there was an alcove where several cooks were busy and distributed through the room were long wooden tables and benches on which not over-clean tablecloths were spread.

It was a most miscellaneous crowd: men, women, children, girls, husbands, wives -- and as I should judge about an even mixture of honest people and rascals. Let me describe some types about me: opposite me a good-natured, honest, red-bearded Englishman, well dressed -- paper collar, silver ring, etc. Tells me he's been in America before and talks sensibly. Beside me a short bull-necked candidate for states

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prison, drunk and sleeping with his head on the table; on the other side an ill-smelling old man with chin beard, good-natured and a bit stupid. Yonder is a tall girl -- rather good looking, a bit tawdrily dressed -- afraid for her future. There is a motherly old lady in black with a look of sorrow on her face -- poor thing. They're eating now -- grabbing things and swilling tea.

Well there we sat in this great bare room that whole afternoon: the ship would not sail till the morrow and we must of course sleep there unless, as the steward gently hinted, we went to a hotel. By careful maneuvering I secured a doorless compartment alone and an ill-smelling bunk. A rather restless night it was however -- the smell, the noise of the drunken roisterers and the thoughts of the wild trip I was about to take. Two of the roisterers came staggering in about midnight, mistook my compartment for theirs, staggered about, guffawed, hiccoughed and joked and at last managed to tumble to their own bed. Then I was waked again by one of them crawling through the hall on his knees with a lighted match, seeking a penny he'd dropped -- not exactly a comfort-giving exhibition in a dry, wooden hovel. Finally my troubled morning dreams were mingled with the stench of the beer which his poor stomach refused longer to hold. This was too much -- I could not eat breakfast but rushed out of the fetid atmosphere of the crowded hall into the wet misty atmosphere of Southampton.

It was early Sunday morning and all shops were closed -- oh what a dreary lonesome feeling that was! At last I bought an indifferent breakfast for tenpence and then returned to the "barracks" to find that we would not sail before afternoon. In despair I started off again and succeeded in finding a more interesting wandering. Southampton is in many respects a fine old town with its historic gates and old bits of town wall and I enjoyed this all thoroughly. Finally I returned to dinner -- a jam and a crowd which I joined with loathing. Then came a baggage van and away we straggled to the quay amid the undisguised amusement of the inhabitants -- and it was a picturesque and laughable

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crowd -- young and old -- lame and well -- rags and fine clothes -- Jew and gentile, Russians, English, Americans, Negroes, Poles, Germans, French, Greeks, Austrians -- all running and waddling along. Ah -- it was funny and yet sad -- this great stream of hopes and longing, of disappointment and sorrow, of happiness and crime about to turn itself into Americans. At the quay we were hemmed in by ropes for about a half or three-quarters of an hour and a big red tag with the stamps of the U.S. Consul attached to our bags certifying that he had inspected us -- which was of course a lie. Finally we showed our tickets and came on board. In a few minutes, the two tugs started with us in tow and we had embarked.

I'm not myself of the seasick getting kind but I must confess that the next morning as I felt the ship rising and fading away under my feet and rolling from side to side with something more than ordinary enthusiasm, I felt a certain settled melancholy which compelled me to confine my first breakfast to an orange and rush in rather undignified haste from the dark dungeons below onto the wet and dirty deck. I was not sicker than this, missed no meals and gave up no further offering to the sea; but it was a trying time. The sea was very choppy, even a bit stormy. Then in addition to that, the filth and nastiness of the people about me, the small amount of deck room -- that was enough to cause the stoutest stomach to revolt, even on land. And the people were sick -- oh so sick, it was pitiable to see them and yet at the same time so laughable. In spite of the efforts of the crew it was well nigh impossible to keep the deck clean, everywhere lay unsightly messes; as one fellow said as I told of the good dinner we'd had: "Yes, I saw a lot of it up on deck." One can hardly realize how sick it's possible to get. Some of the pale, drawn faces looked quite deathlike and the whole tone of melancholy hopelessness that pervaded the crowd was most remarkable. Some made no attempt at first to come on deck and after a few days I was continually surprised by the appearance of new faces which until then had lain low in the cabins below. Such a sort of universal sickness, however, is a

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strange opportunity to view human character: these 350 human beings so accidentally thrown together learned to know each other first amid pain and suffering and the little friendships made there, the little deeds good and bad, sank deeper into their souls than usual. It is perhaps this circumstance that gives a sea voyage its most peculiar flavor.

On this, our floating island, the world is much simpler than usual. First it consists of us and the trembling world of cabins, decks, masts and chimneys. Then there is a great circle of dark blue waters stretching away, away evenly in a circle until meeting with the sky in the dim and misty distance it becomes one with the sky world and its clouds and pale day moon. Our ship is a fairly large one, not very swift and a bit old -- the Chester of the American Line with, all told, some 800 souls aboard. My first work in the morning is to get a slight bath, a thing of no ordinary difficulty for steerage passengers. I generally get up on deck a bit early. A bell rings and I hasten down two rickety pairs of steep stairs, two stories below the deck where our cabins are. This is a long room, perhaps 15 yards long and as wide as the ship. The sides are taken up with the bunks, leaving a space perhaps 15 feet in the middle through which a long narrow table of plain boards runs lengthwise. Beside this are narrow stationary seats without backs. The whole room is lighted by only a half dozen small port holes and kerosene lamps giving it a rather gloomy appearance. It is fairly well ventilated, considering its depth below the world. We range ourselves by the tables each bringing the utensils delivered to him by the steward at the beginning of the trip -- a tin plate, cup and spoon, and a knife and fork. The breakfast consists of rather poor coffee (with milk and molasses already in) plenty of good bread and fair butter, and good porridge or stew: a breakfast which in spite of the noise, the broad talk and the very primitive table manners of my neighbors, I generally enjoy. The next duty is to wash your own dishes for which a can for slops and a can of hot water is provided, the dish cloth being furnished by the passenger. As usual, some omit

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even this bit of trouble and have apparently not washed their plates since starting.

There are five Negroes aboard. We do not go together, indeed have not all spoken together, but I think all have had a pleasant voyage with little cause to complain of any prejudice. Of course we awakened more or less curiosity with some and I fancy something of dislike in others. Yet I find us all talking to the women and one, especially from his good-heartedness, seems a general favorite; in fine, in a gradual line of individuals here the blacks would by no means stand at the bottom of the row. What I notice in all the passengers is their good-heartedness, their straightforwardness. There is not a trace of deception and desire to injure or envy others. A people with such hearts do not deserve annihilation. Society: What happens when 350 people of the lower classes are for nine days thrown together with very little outside government? The answer to this can be seen on this voyage and is most interesting. We have here of course all grades of society but a majority of what must be called lower. Yet I think that the better classes here, the better and more orderly elements though scarcely greater in numbers, have been distinctly more influential. The experience has proven in a degree what I have always thought, that the number of "estates" becomes unlimited in a sense. One can scarcely bring any sort of a crowd of people together without finding a large number of distinct classes. Then again the number of estates is quite limited, for the several classes here developed differences in no great degree different from the classes elsewhere in the world -- it is the same old strife of finer souls against brutality.

We have of course strange divisions here: that of education, that of wealth, that of life object, that of nation, that of language and that of color. There is here a great number of half-educated men -- men who for lack of opportunity or perseverance have but tasted the beginnings of life. They are, when not dogmatic and conceited, most interesting men and in all cases studies in human nature. They are often

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compounded of opposites: an intellectual acumen and desire to learn with low habits and even brutality; then again there are embryonic cranks.

After a week we began to become tired and uneasy. We wanted Life to end and begin. A new land loomed there beyond the horizon and we began searching the skies. I who was born there was also approaching something new and untried after 24 years of preparation. At last it loomed on the morning when we saw the Statue of Liberty. I know not what multitude of emotions surged in the others, but I had to recall that mischievous little French girl whose eyes twinkled as she said: "Oh yes the Statue of Liberty! With its back toward America, and its face toward France!"

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Chapter XI: Wilberforce
As a student in Germany, I built great castles in Spain and lived therein. I dreamed and loved and wandered and sang; then after two long years I dropped suddenly back into "nigger"-hating America!

My Days of Disillusion which followed were not disappointing enough to discourage me. I was still upheld by that fund of infinite faith, although dimly about me I saw the shadow of disaster. I began to realize how much of what I had called Will and Ability was sheer Luck! Suppose my good mother had preferred a steady income from my child labor rather than bank on the precarious dividend of my higher training? Suppose that pompous old village judge, whose dignity we often ruffled and whose apples we stole, had had his way and sent me while a child to a "reform" school to learn a "trade." Suppose Principal Hosmer had been born with no faith in "darkies," and instead of sending me to college had had me taught carpentry and the making of tin pans? Suppose I had missed a Harvard scholarship? Suppose the Slater Board had then, as now, distinct ideas as to where the education of Negroes should stop? Suppose and suppose! As I sat down calmly on flat earth and looked at my life a certain great fear seized me. Was I the masterful captain or the pawn of laughing sprites? Who was I to fight a world of color prejudice? I raise my hat to myself when I remember that, even with these thoughts, I did not hesitate or waver; but just went doggedly to work, and therein lay whatever salvation I have achieved.

I returned to the United States at 26 years of age and after 20 years of study to look for a job and begin work. I wrote my friend Dollar in London:

"You know I landed in New York in June, 1894, with $2 plus my fare home up in Berkshire. It was not altogether a happy homecoming -- it was too much of a disillusionment

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after months of picturesque German gutturals, days of sunny skies, and weeks of dirty mighty Romes. I felt as though the bottom of the universe was loose and might go down if after all this soaring I stepped full feet upon it. And I must step, walk, stumble and climb now; for the lehr jahre [learning years] were passed -- I fancied -- and the meister jahre [adult years] begun."

It was a disturbed world in which I landed; 1892 saw the high tide of lynching in the United States; Cleveland had entered his second term in 1893 and the Chicago Exposition had taken place. The Dreyfus case had opened in France with his conviction and imprisonment, and he was destined for 12 years to suffer martyrdom. The war between China and Japan broke out the year of my return. I recognized the blow democracy received when Congress repealed the Force bills in 1894, refusing longer even to try to protect the legal citizenship rights of Negroes. But on the other hand, I did not at all understand the implications of the Matabele War in 1893. I did not see how the gold and diamonds of South Africa and later the copper, ivory, cocoa, tin and vegetable oils of other parts of Africa and especially the black labor force were determining and conditioning the political action of Europe.

First came the task of earning a living. I was not exacting or hard to please. I just got down on my knees and begged for work, anything and anywhere. I began a systematic mail campaign. I wrote to no white institution -- I knew there were no openings there. I wrote one colored public school in East Tennessee, not far from where I had taught school. The board hesitated, but finally indicated that I had rather too much education for their use. I applied to Howard University, Hampton Institute, Tuskegee Institute and my own Fisk. They had no openings.

So I sat down and wrote more letters: "President of so and so college; Sir: I am a Negro, 27 years of age, educated in the public schools of Massachusetts, at Fisk University, Nashville and Harvard University, where I took the degrees of A.B. and A.M. I wish to teach next year. Have you a

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vacancy, etc." I wrote so many that I scarcely remember where. The hot months rolled by and answers came slowly -- brief no's, polite regrets, general disclaimers and one or two vague notes with dubious hopes. The editors notwithstanding, no college man expects the gates of the wide world to fly open before him "with impetuous recoil" and yet I say it wasn't too much for a colored man with a Harvard A.M. to expect a bread and butter job, was it?

At last a few offers came. The first was a telegram from Wilberforce University, a colored church school in Ohio: "Our chair of classics $800 is yours. Wire acceptance. Come next week." I immediately accepted with gratitude. Later there was Lincoln Institute, a state colored school out in Missouri, that offered $1,050 for a teacher of "classics and mathematics." I refused since I had accepted Wilberforce. I knew something about Wilberforce. It was venerable and well known. Finally, August 25, I received a telegram: "Can give mathematics if terms suit. Will you accept. Booker T. Washington." It would be interesting to speculate just what would have happened if I had received the offer of Tuskegee first, instead of that of Wilberforce.

So, late in hot August, I started for Wilberforce. Life was now begun and I was half happy. Up through the Berkshire Valley with its quiet beauty, then across New York I glided, wrapped in dreams. The lights of Buffalo bade me goodnight, and half asleep, I drifted across Ohio.

The depot at Xenia was small and "busy" with a slight admixture of dirt and tobacco juice which was unpleasant. I telephoned to Wilberforce. Then I waited an hour. Finally the President entered the waiting room. I shall never forget that man. He had by long odds the prettiest smile of any man I ever saw, so quiet and charming. All I remember now of that first meeting is the vision of that smile softly entering the waiting room and remember too that it was borne on two short and rather disreputable looking bowlegs.

Wilberforce was a small colored denominational college married to a State normal school. The church was too poor to run the college; the State tolerated the normal school so

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as to keep Negroes out of other State schools. Consequently, there were enormous difficulties in both church and State politics. This I soon realized. I had been hired to teach "Latin and Greek." They were not my specialty and despite years spent in their study I really knew far too little to teach them. But I had assumed that I was to assist Professor William Scarborough, a well-known Negro scholar long working at Wilberforce. To my amazement I found that I was to replace him, since in a quarrel between him and the President, he had been ousted and I had been advertised as a learned professor just from Germany. This was my introduction to church politics. I did not like it but the name of Wilberforce lured me.

The breath of it had swept the water and dropped into southern Ohio, where white Southerners had once taken their cure at Tawawa Springs and where white Methodists later planted a school. Then came the little bishop, Daniel Payne, a Negro, who bought it and made it a school of the African Methodists.

Into this situation I landed with the cane and gloves of my German student days; with my rather inflated ideas of what a "university" ought to be and with a terrible bluntness of speech that was continually getting me into difficulty; as when, for instance, the student leader of a prayer meeting into which I had wandered casually to look local religion over, suddenly and without warning announced that "Professor Du Bois will lead us in prayer." I simply answered, "No, he won't," and as a result nearly lost my new job. It took a great deal of explaining to the board of bishops why a professor in Wilberforce should not be able at all times and sundry to address God in extemporaneous prayer. I was saved only by the fact that my coming to Wilberforce had been widely advertised and I was willing to do endless work when the work seemed to me worth doing.

I went to Wilberforce with high ideals. I wanted to help build a great university. I was willing to work night as well as day, and taught full time. I helped in student discipline, took part in the social life, and began to write books. But I

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found myself against a stone wall. Nothing stirred before my impatient pounding! Or if it stirred, it soon slept again.

The African Methodist Church was the greatest social institution of American Negroes. Wilberforce was its largest school. This school therefore became the capital of a nationwide institution. Its large body of trustees were interested in the church organization, not in the college. The bishops and would-be bishops gathered here in force on each commencement where elders and ministers waylaid them in long conferences. The teachers also found it expedient to make powerful acquaintances at these occasions; I in my independence met no one but walked off into the woods as the hosts talked.

But I worked hard and this most students and many teachers liked. My program for the day at Wilberforce looked almost as long as a week's program now. I taught Latin, Greek, German, and English, and wanted to add sociology. I had charge of some of the most unpleasant duties of discipline and had outside work in investigation. I met and made many friends: Charles Young, a Negro soldier not long graduated from West Point, was one; he was serving as military instructor here for the Federal government. He and I both refused to attend the annual "revivals" of religion which interrupted school work every year at Christmas time. We both dreamed of a great future for this Negro school. Later Young fought in Mexico against Villa. He ranked first for a generalship in the army when the First World War opened, but was deftly shoved aside. He accepted duty later in Nigeria, West Africa, and died of black water fever. There was also at Wilberforce a student, Charles Burroughs, a gifted reader, who was in my classes; Paul Laurence Dunbar came over from Dayton and read to us. I had known his work but was astonished to find that he was a Negro. And not least, I met the slender, quiet, and dark-eyed girl Nina Gomer who became Mrs. Du Bois in 1896. Her father was chef in the leading hotel of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and her dead mother a native of Alsace.

In May 1896, I was not only in love with a beautiful girl,

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but also had carefully calculated that (a) I should marry before 30, and that (b) my salary of $800 was sufficient for two -- if paid. They had an irritating way at Wilberforce in those days of not paying salaries very promptly. Indeed this nearly ruined my plans. It was May 1, I was penniless and my bride was awaiting me in Iowa. The treasurer was about to leave for General Conference where he had more weighty matters to discuss than teachers' salaries. I waylaid him and firmly persuaded him that until my salary due was paid, he was unlikely to see General Conference. He agreed and on May 12, I arrived in Cedar Rapids.

I went to a little white cottage and met a tall, heavy father, a young stepmother and a shy fat little sister. A benevolent white minister married us, and after inarticulate greetings, we rushed to the Chicago train and next day I was back at Wilberforce with a very tired young bride. There was a reception with hilarious students, critical teachers, and good town folk. I had furnished a two-room apartment in the men's dormitory: a bedroom on the west looking down on the ravine and across the hall a sitting room which I remember chiefly because of a gorgeous crimson couch cover which I had bought of Carson-Pirie in Chicago by mail order.

Probably Wilberforce was about the least likely of all Negro colleges to adopt me and my program. First of all I was cocky and self-satisfied. I doubtless strutted and I certainly knew what I wanted. My redeeming feature was infinite capacity for work and terrible earnestness, with appalling and tactless frankness. But not all was discouragement and frustration at Wilberforce. Of importance that exceeded everything, was the group of students whom I met and taught. Most of the student body was in high school grades and poorly equipped for study. But filtering into the small college department were a few men and women of first-class intelligence, able and eager to work. As working companions, we made excursions into Greek literature; I gathered a class in German which talked German from the first day; I guided the writing of English themes and did a bit of modern history. Try as I might, however, the institution

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would have no sociology, even though I offered to teach it on my own time.

I tried various other lines of effort: there was for instance a beautiful ravine where a stream of water flowing through the campus rolled and slithered down to a wide green meadow amid trees, vines, and boulders. On the campus above stood Shorter Hall, named after a dead bishop whose middle-aged son was a professor of mathematics, a good-hearted, irascible man, combined of orthodox religion and wrath for students who couldn't count. In the wing of Shorter Hall, next the ravine, was the library; or rather a few piles of old books which I had arranged to drag down from the attic and planned in this big empty room a real library and reading room for students and teachers. Hitherto the only library facilities were in that upper attic where Professor Scott might admit you with his key, if perchance he could spare time from his chemistry. Remember the libraries at Harvard and Berlin which I had used! And even that at Fisk! I was determined to have a library. But there was no money. There was never money for anything. Then I had an idea: there were my students, boys and girls, with talent in voice and action. There was the divine ravine: why not give A Midsummer Night's Dream in that rare bit of wood and foliage? The campus went quite wild over the proposal. It could be given in the Spring just after Commencement. It need not cost much. The whole country would visit it. We began to study the text, plan the scenes, and choose the players. I began to see this play as the greatest course in education of the whole year, of many years gone.

Then came the catastrophe: we heard that Ben Arnett had been appointed Professor of Literature for the year beginning with Commencement. We laid down our text; we turned our backs on the lush ravine; the waters trickled in vain and the students wandered disconsolately. We teachers began to fight: we wrote, we visited, we held meetings; we stormed through the campus; we faced the bishop. And to understand all this, one must know the bishopric of the great African Methodist Church.

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It was a hierachy of the conventional type and yet more and different. I knew a dozen of these bishops and a more varied and impressive, a more astonishing body of men I never met. Bishop Daniel Payne died the year before I arrived at Wilberforce. He was a man of tremendous character, a Man of God, if such there ever was. Tiny in figure, soft in voice, he thundered through this widespread mass of black folk like a prophet. He made them buy Wilberforce when they had nothing and knew little; he arranged the grounds, gathered the first teachers, and husbanded the pennies. He enforced discipline in the church, he traveled, he preached until his name was known from Carolina to the Rockies. Then he died, but his soul lived on.

Among his successors was Benjamin Arnett, the presiding Bishop over Wilberforce when I arrived; and what Arnett said, went. He was a thick-set man with a sharp, dark face, a blazing eye, and a rare smile and a will to do. With little literary ability, he established a sort of school of literature, bringing together and reprinting hundreds of books, pamphlets, and scraps of the writings of American Negro literature. He was a power in Ohio politics. He distributed offices in the church and settled the appointment of teachers at Wilberforce. My own appointment must have had his consent, perhaps even his advocacy, else I would not have been at Wilberforce. He lived in a lovely old home bowered by oaks and there he was handicapped by his family. His oldest son, named after him, was not a complete devil, but he certainly was not fitted to teach youth at Wilberforce. Yet at the end of my first year, the Bishop thrust him down our throats without even the courtesy of a notice; and we raised hell without stopping to consider what opposition to Bishop Arnett meant. As a body we refused to teach with Ben Arnett.

We won. Young Ben Arnett never became professor at Wilberforce. But of course the Bishop won too. He held power for life and no one stayed at Wilberforce long whom he did not like. Under my impetuous and uncurbed assault, the Bishop had to bend, but I knew well that my days at Wilberforce were numbered. The ravine with its vines and

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shrubbery, its singing waters and all its faerie, slept long in peace until 25 years later it was buried beneath a culvert of stone and its voice stilled forever.

As I realized that none of my dreams would be fulfilled at Wilberforce, I knew all the sadness of a spent dream. Wilberforce was near the center of the Negro population of the nation. We drew students from New Orleans and New York; from the Atlantic and the Pacific. We escaped the "jim-crow" of the slave South and the ostracism of the cold North. The college was poor and neglected and yet the church which owned it and whose prized child it was, formed a marvellous human institution. Its leaders were of every sort: selfless saints like Payne, J. R. Lee, and William Mitchell; ruthless politicians like Arnett; scoundrels like W. B. Derrick; and charging bulls like Henry M. Turner. With high ideals and brute force they rolled and jammed this mass of men and women forward and together until they became a force in the whole nation. Suppose I had had the cunning to help harness and guide this superhuman energy, what could I not have helped to turn it into? Not into a university, certainly, such as I dreamed, but perhaps into something greater. But no, I did not have ability of that sort, nor will to dream of it. And so I turned away, or, rather, I was turned toward other and different goals.

I left one curious and subtle complication spun in the subtle brain of that President Mitchell of whom I have spoken. Wilberforce, as I said, lacked funds. There was no visible source of Negro income large enough to support a college. The members of the church were fighting desperately for food and clothes. Their labor was being exploited to the last dime by every white American who had a chance or could steal it. President Mitchell found himself always in a financial hole and he eyed the coffers of the State of Ohio, as many before and since had done.

Miss Bierce carried on certain classes in teaching. She was a stern, accurate white daughter of the Western Reserve, severe and devoted to her work. When these normal classes threatened to cease because of lack of funds, the President

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suggested that he and Miss Bierce ask the State teaching authorities for a little help, since the State so needed teachers for its colored children. These students had a right to attend the white schools but they seldom did. The State helped. Opponents pointed out that the State had no right to support a colored State institution, but the President was ready. He and Arnett induced the Legislature to establish "a combined Normal and Industrial Department at Wilberforce University." The witchery in this wording lay in "Industrial" which lured the support of the followers of the rising Booker T. Washington; and also in that little word "at" which made this university a department not "of" Wilberforce, but "at" Wilberforce. This appropriation grew yearly until by 1900, two-thirds of the cost of Wilberforce was borne by the State. Finally, in 1942, the State set up its own college and Wilberforce again tried indifferently to stand alone.

Probably, looking back after the event, I have rationalized my life into a planned, coherent unity which was not as true to fact as it now seems; probably there were hesitancies, gropings, and half-essayed bypaths, now forgotten or unconsciously ignored. But my first quarter-century of life seems to me at this distance as singularly well-aimed at a certain goal, along a clearly planned path. I returned ready and eager to begin a life-work, leading to the emancipation of the American Negro. History and the other social sciences were to be my weapons, to be sharpened and applied by research and writing. Where and how, was the question in 1895. I became uneasy about my life program. I had published my first book, but I was doing nothing directly in the social sciences and saw no immediate prospect. Then the door of opportunity opened: just a crack, to be sure, but a distinct opening.

When a temporary appointment came from the University of Pennsylvania for one year as "assistant instructor" at $900, I accepted forthwith in the Fall of 1896; that year Abyssinia vanquished Italy; and England, suddenly seeing two black nations threatening her Cape-to-Cairo plans, threw her army back into the Sudan and recaptured Khartoum. The next

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year the free silver controversy of Bryan and McKinley flamed in America.

First, then, in 1896, I married -- a slip of a girl, beautifully dark-eyed and thorough and good as her mother, a German housewife. Then I accepted a job to make a study of Negroes in Philadelphia for the University of Pennsylvania, one year at $900. How did I dare these two things? I do not know. Yet they spelled salvation. To remain at Wilberforce without doing my ideals meant spiritual death. Both my wife and I were homeless. I dared a home and a temporary job. But it was a different daring from the days of my first youth. I was ready to admit that the best of men might fail. I meant still to be captain of my soul, but I realized that even captains are not omnipotent in uncharted and angry seas.

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Chapter XII: University of Pennsylvania
In the Fall of 1896, I went to the University of Pennsylvania as "assistant instructor" in sociology. It all happened this way: Philadelphia, then and still one of the worst governed of America's badly governed cities, was having one of its periodic spasms of reform. A thorough study of causes was called for. Not but what the underlying cause was evident to most white Philadelphians: the corrupt, semicriminal vote of the Negro Seventh Ward. Everyone agreed that here lay the cancer; but would it not be well to give scientific sanction to the known causes by an investigation, with imprimatur of the University? It certainly would, answered Samuel McCune Lindsay of the Department of Sociology. And he put his finger on me for the task.

If Lindsay had been a smaller man and had been induced to follow the usual American pattern of treating Negroes, he would have asked me to assist him as his clerk in this study. Probably I would have accepted having nothing better in sight for work in sociology. But Lindsay regarded me as a scholar in my own right and probably proposed to make me an instructor. Evidently the faculty demurred at having a colored instructor. But since I had a Harvard Ph.D., and had published a recognized work in history, the University could hardly offer me a fellowship. A compromise was hit on and I was nominated to the unusual status of "assistant" instructor. Even at that there must have been some opposition, for the invitation was not particularly cordial. I was offered a salary of $900 for a period limited to one year. I was given no real academic standing, no office at the University, no official recognition of any kind; my name was eventually omitted from the catalogue; I had no contact with students, and very little with members of the faculty, even in my own department.

I did not hesitate an instant but reported for duty with

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a complete plan of work and outline of methods and aims and even proposed schedules to be filled out. My general plan was promptly accepted and I started to work, consulting Lindsay regularly but never meeting the faculty. With my bride of three months, I settled in one room in the city over a cafeteria run by a College Settlement, in the worst part of the Seventh Ward. We lived there a year, in the midst of an atmosphere of dirt, drunkenness, poverty, and crime. Murder sat on our doorsteps, police were our government, and philanthropy dropped in with periodic advice.

The world seized and whirled me. I hardly knew what was important, what negligible; somehow I remember life, curiously enough, chiefly as a succession of homes: the settlement at Philadelphia at Seventh and Lombard in the slums where kids played intriguing games like "cops and lady bums"; and where in the night when pistols popped, you didn't get up lest you find you couldn't.

I wrote of my first Christmas in Philadelphia:

"We haven't been married long enough to escape the condescending smiles of our neighbors, and yet we feel quite like old married folks. This is our first Christmas and wife thinks we owe to the public to tell just how merry it has been. It began some days ago when wife asked me cautiously how much we could afford to spend for Christmas. I sat down and figured carefully: for there was the sewing machine to pay for out of this month's salary, and doctor's bill, and one other debt -- an old family friend. I finally evolved a surplus of $10.56, and told wife that we could spend five dollars apiece for the holidays. She was perfectly happy, and after some hours of calculating sallied forth to Wanamaker's.

The next week was filled with shopping and bookkeeping; one would have thought we were spending hundreds of dollars. Wife consulted me religiously on many points; however, both of us maintained a jolly silence. Tuesday we both went down South Street to the Second Street market, and bought two wreaths, a cross, and a 15-cent Christmas tree. Wife was somewhat alarmed at first at the prospect of a Christmas tree in our snug little room, but when it was

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safely ensconced in a corner on the machine, with tinsel, fruit, and cotton snow, she was quite delighted.

Christmas Eve found our little gift-packages mailed, the tree glowing and both our empty stockings hung beside it. I had secreted a dainty silk umbrella under the lounge, and I knew that other corners of the room held secrets, the question being how to get them into the stockings.

About eight in the evening we sallied out into the crisp air and hurried down to the Mission, where the folks had a tree for the little ones. How much happiness can be packed within four walls! The children were boisterous, rude, and noisy, but so brimming over with pleasure that it did one good to see them. Once at home again and with a last look at our own little tree, we were soon snug in bed, and the thought of the hidden umbrella alone kept me awake. I had almost despaired of getting it into the stocking, when the regular breathing of my wife told me that she had fallen asleep in spite of herself. I carefully slipped from bed, listened, crawled across the floor, listened again, and at last slipped the umbrella into wife's stocking; in a minute more I had chuckled myself to sleep. I was dreaming that I held a professorship that paid $1,500 a year, when suddenly I awoke with a start. Wife hasn't forgiven me yet for awaking so inopportunely, and if I had known the situation before I awoke, I would have stayed asleep. As it was, I awoke and caught wife in her little white gown secreting bundles in and about my sock. I laughed, then kept as quiet as I could, and wife didn't say a word.

Christmas day came with laughing over the night's adventure, the revealing of hiding places and enjoyment of the umbrella, suspenders, and neckties. At three came a cozy dinner with a little brown chicken and bills-of-fare written on old visiting cards. Finally the whole day melted away in misty happiness and to round it out, I wrote this."

The Provost of the University furnished the following credentials:

In connection with the College Settlement, the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania have undertaken the study of the social condition of the Colored People of the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia.

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The University has entered upon this work as a part of its duty and wishes to make the investigation as thorough and exact as possible. We want to know precisely how this class of people live; what occupations they follow; from what occupations they are excluded; how many of their children go to school; and to ascertain every fact which will throw light upon this social problem; and then having this information and these accurate statistics before us, to see to what extent and in what way, proper remedies may be applied. Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois is the investigator on behalf of the University, and I write to bespeak for him your cordial reception and earnest co-operation.

The two years at Wilberforce had been my uneasy apprenticeship, and with my advent into the University of Pennsylvania, I began a more clearly planned career which had an unusual measure of success, but was in the end pushed aside by forces which, if not entirely beyond my control, were yet of great weight.

The opportunity opened at the University of Pennsylvania seemed just what I wanted. I had offered to teach social science at Wilberforce outside of my overloaded program, but I was not allowed. My vision was becoming clearer. The Negro problem was in my mind a matter of systematic investigation and intelligent understanding. The world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity. The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation. At the University of Pennsylvania I ignored the pitiful stipend. It made no difference to me that I was put down as an "assistant instructor" and even at that, that my name never actually got into the catalogue; it goes without saying that I did no instructing save once to pilot a pack of idiots through the Negro slums.

Of the theory back of the plan of this study of Negroes I neither knew nor cared. I saw only here a chance to study an historical group of black folk and to show exactly what their place was in the community. I did it despite extraordinary difficulties both within and without the group. Whites said: Why study the obvious? Blacks said: Are we animals to be dissected and by an unknown Negro at that? Yet, I made a study of the Philadelphia Negro so thorough that it has withstood the criticism of 60 years.

I counted my task here as simple and clear-cut; I proposed

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to find out what was the matter with this area and why. I started with no "research methods" and I asked little advice as to procedure. The problem lay before me. Study it. I studied it personally and not by proxy. I sent out no canvassers. I went myself. Personally I visited and talked with 5,000 persons. What I could, I set down in orderly sequence on schedules which I made out and submitted to the University for criticism. Other information I stored in my memory or wrote out as memoranda. I went through the Philadelphia libraries for data, gained access in many instances to private libraries of colored folk and got individual information. I mapped the district, classifying it by conditions; I compiled two centuries of the history of the Negro in Philadelphia and in the Seventh Ward.

I essayed a thorough piece of work in Philadelphia. I labored morning, noon, and night. Few persons ever read that fat volume on The Philadelphia Negro, but they treat it with respect, and that consoles me. The colored people of Philadelphia received me with no open arms. They had a natural dislike to being studied like a strange species. I met again and in different guise those curious cross-currents and inner social whirlings. They set me to groping. I concluded that I did not know so much as I might about my own people.

It was a hard job, but I completed it by the Spring of 1898 and published it a year later, under the auspices of the University, as The Philadelphia Negro; a formidable tome of nearly a thousand pages. But the greatest import to me was the fact, that after years, I had at last learned just what I wanted to do, in this life program of mine, and how to do it. First of all I became painfully aware that merely being born in a group, does not necessarily make one possessed of complete knowledge concerning it. I had learned far more from Philadelphia Negroes than I had taught them concerning the Negro Problem.

It was as complete a scientific study and answer as could have then been given, with defective facts and statistics, one lone worker and little money. It revealed the Negro group as a symptom, not a cause; as a striving, palpitating group,

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and not an inert, sick body of crime; as a long historic development and not a transient occurrence.

In this appointment there was one fly which I have never mentioned; it would have been a fine thing if after this difficult, successful piece of work, the University of Pennsylvania had at least offered me a temporary instructorship in the college or in the Wharton School. Harvard had never dreamed of such a thing; a half century later one of Harvard's professors said of a gifted Negro student: "We'd give him a position if he were not a Negro!" White classmates of lower academic rank than I, became full professors at Pennsylvania and Chicago. Here in my case an academic accolade from a great American university would have given impetus to my life work which I was already determined to make in a Negro institution in the South. The thing that galled was that such an idea never even occurred to this institution whose head was a high official of the Sugar Trust. But I did not mention this rebuff. I did not let myself think of it. But then, as now, I know an insult when I see it.

Before the American Academy, affiliated with the University, I laid down in public session in 1899, a broad program of scientific attack on this problem, by systematic and continuous study; and I appealed to Harvard, Columbia and Pennsylvania, to take up the task. Needless to say, they paid not the slightest attention to this challenge and for 25 years thereafter not a single first-grade college in America undertook to give any considerable scientific attention to the American Negro. Of the methods of my research, I wrote:

The best available methods of sociological research are at present so liable to inaccuracies that the careful student discloses the results of individual research with diffidence; he knows that they are liable to error from the seemingly ineradicable faults of the statistical method; to even greater error from the methods of general observation; and, above all, he must ever tremble lest some personal bias, some moral conviction or some unconscious trend of thought due to previous training, has to a degree distorted the picture in his view. Convictions on all great matters of human interest one must have to a greater or less degree, and they will enter to some extent into the most cold-blooded scientific research as a disturbing factor.

Nevertheless, here are some social problems before us demanding

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careful study, questions awaiting satisfactory answers. We must study, we must investigate, we must attempt to solve; and the utmost that the world can demand is, not lack of human interest and moral conviction, but rather the heart-quality of fairness and an earnest desire for the truth despite its possible unpleasantness.

At the end of that study, I announced with a certain pride my plan of studying the complete Negro problem in the United States. I spoke at the 42nd meeting of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences in Philadelphia, November 19, 1897, and my subject was "The Study of the Negro Problem." I began by asserting that in the development of sociological study there was at least one positive answer which years of research and speculation had been able to return, and that was: "The phenomena of society are worth the most careful and systematic study, and whether or not this study may eventually lead to a systematic body of knowledge deserving the name of science, it cannot in any case fail to give the world a mass of truth worth the knowing." I then defined and tried to follow the development of the Negro problem not as one problem, but "rather a plexus of social problems, some new, some old, some simple, some complex; and these problems have their one bond of unity in the fact that they group themselves about those Africans whom two centuries of slave-trading brought into the land."

I insisted on the necessity of carefully studying these problems and said: "The American Negro deserves study for the great end of advancing the cause of science in general. No such opportunity to watch and measure the history and development of a great race of men ever presented itself to the scholars of a modern nation. If they miss this opportunity -- if they do the work in a slipshod, unsystematic manner -- if they dally with the truth to humor the whims of the day, they do far more than hurt the good name of the American people; they hurt the cause of scientific truth the world over, they voluntarily decrease human knowledge of a universe of which we are ignorant enough, and they degrade the high end of truth-seeking in a day when they need more and more to dwell upon its sanctity."

Finally I tried to lay down a plan for the study postulating

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only that the Negro "is a member of the human race, and as one who, in the light of history and experience is capable to a degree of improvement and culture, is entitled to have his interests considered according to his numbers in all conclusions as to the common weal."

Dividing the prospective scientific study of the Negro into two parts: the social group and his peculiar social environment, I proposed to study the social group by historical investigation, statistical measurement and sociological interpretation. Particularly with regard to anthropology, I said:

"That there are differences between the white and black races is certain, but just what those differences are is known to none with an approach to accuracy. Yet here in America is the most remarkable opportunity ever offered of studying these differences, of noting influences of climate and physical environment, and particularly of studying the effect of amalgamating two of the most diverse races in the world -- another subject which rests under a cloud of ignorance."

In concluding, I said:

It is to the credit of the University of Pennsylvania that she has been the first to recognize her duty in this respect and in so far as restricted means and opportunity allowed, has attempted to study the Negro problems in a single definite locality. This work needs to be extended to other groups, and carried out with larger system; and here it would seem is the opportunity of the Southern college. We hear much of higher Negro education, and yet all candid people know there does not exist today in the center of Negro population a single first-class fully equipped institution, devoted to the higher education of Negroes; not more than three Negro institutions in the South deserve the name of "college" at all; and yet what is a Negro college but a vast college settlement for the study of a particular set of peculiarly baffling problems?

What more effective or suitable agency could be found in which to focus the scientific efforts of the great universities of North and East, than an institution situated in the very heart of these social problems, and made the center of careful historical and statistical research? Without doubt the first effective step toward the solving of the Negro question will be the endowment of a Negro college which is not merely a teaching body, but a center of sociological research, in close connection and co-operation with Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and University of Pennsylvania.

Finally the necessity must again be emphasized of keeping clearly

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before students the object of all science, amid the turmoil and intense feeling that clouds the discussion of a burning social question. We live in a day when in spite of the brilliant accomplishments of a remarkable century, there is current much flippant criticism of scientific work; when the truth-seeker is too often pictured as devoid of human sympathy, and careless of human ideals. We are still prone in spite of all our culture to sneer at the heroism of the laboratory while we cheer the swagger of the street broil. At such times true lovers of humanity can only hold higher the pure ideals of science, and continue to insist that if we would solve a problem we must study it, and there is but one coward on earth and that is the coward that dare not know.

While I was making this study, I tried to interest the Federal government in making some such studies in other areas. In 1897, I wrote Carroll D. Wright, head of the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, and received an encouraging reply. I then wrote more in detail.

In accordance with your suggestion I have been for the last month giving considerable thought as to method of studying certain aspects of the industrial development of the Negro. It seems to me that the difficulties of studying so vast and varied a subject are so large that the first work to be done should be rather of an experimental or preliminary nature calculated to locate and define the difficulties and to indicate lines upon which a larger investigation could be carried to success. At the same time the results of a series of preliminary studies could be published and would by allaying false notions and prejudices prepare the public mind for the larger work.

Both the preliminary and the main work must of course be strictly limited in scope; great care must be taken to avoid giving offense to white or black, to raise no suspicions and at the same time to get definite accurate information. For the preliminary work I propose two plans -- the first to my mind preferable, the second feasible:

Plan A

The Industrial Development of the Negro

Preliminary Study: The economic situation of a typical town containing from 1,000-5,000 Negro inhabitants situated in Va., or the Carolinas, or Ga. Study: Occupations Economic History
Wages Cost of Living
Ownership of Homes Organizations
Hours of Labor Crops
Study to be conducted, visits, schedules, county records, etc. To be carried out in the months of July and August 1897.

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Plan B

The Industrial Development of the Negro

Preliminary Study: Condition of Negroes in the

(Barber)

(Public waiter)

(Caterer)

(Building)

(Mining)

(etc.)

In the city of Richmond or Raleigh or Charleston or Atlanta, etc.

Study: Number Economic History
Wages Organization
Hours of Labor General Condition
Cost of Living

Other Plans

A study of domestic service in a certain city

A study of the Negro in the professions in several cities

A study of the Negro farm laborer in a typical agricultural region

A study of the Negro church as a social institution in certain cities

An "Enquote" of the graduates of Southern schools into their own economic life and the general industrial situation

A study of the attitude of organized labor toward Negroes

A study of Negro stevedores

A bibliography of the economic condition of the Negro since emancipation

Plan A could be begun immediately. I could spend the summer in some typical village of the South and have the results ready to print in the fall. This plan could be repeated from time to time until these preliminary studies conducted in various districts in various times of year and under various circumstances would give a basis of fact and experience upon which a larger survey could be planned with a great saving of time and expense. Or, after one or two experiments the whole enterprise might take the form of a series of simultaneous investigations of this sort in selected typical districts of town and country upon lines indicated by the actual experience of the preliminary studies.

Plan B could also be carried out this summer within certain limitations. The other plans are suggested and if they strike you as preferable to the first two I could work them out more carefully.

Will you kindly look over these plans and let me know which, if any, meet your ideas. We can then discuss details further.

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Eventually this resulted in a series of studies for the Labor Bureau and one major effort which I shall tell of in a later chapter. The successors of Carroll Wright deliberately destroyed this piece of my best sociological work.

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Chapter XIII: Atlanta University
From the Fall of 1894 to the Spring of 1910, for 16 years, I was a teacher and a student of social science. For two years I remained at Wilberforce; for a year and a half at the University of Pennsylvania; and for 13 years at Atlanta University in Georgia. I sought in these years to know my world and to teach youth the meaning and way of the world.

The main result of my schooling had been to emphasize science and the scientific attitude. I got some insight into the laws of the physical world at Fisk and in the chemical laboratory and class in geology at Harvard. I was interested in evolution, geology and the new psychology. I began to conceive of the world as a continuing growth rather than a finished product. In Germany I turned still further from religious dogma and began to grasp the idea of a world of human beings whose actions, like those of the physical world, were subject to law. The triumphs of the scientific world thrilled me: the X-ray and radium came during my teaching term, the airplane and the wireless. The machine increased in technical efficiency and the North and South Poles were invaded.

On the other hand the difficulties of applying scientific law and discovering cause and effect in a world of living persons was still great. Social thinkers were engaged in vague statements and were seeking to lay down the methods by which, in some not too distant future, social law analogous to physical law would be discovered. Herbert Spencer finished his ten volumes of Synthetic Philosophy in 1896. The biological analogy, the vast generalizations, were striking, but actual scientific accomplishment lagged. For me an opportunity seemed to present itself. I could not lull my mind to hypnosis by regarding a phrase like "consciousness of kind" as a scientific law. But turning my gaze from fruitless word-twisting and facing the facts of my own social situation and racial

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world, I determined to put science into sociology through a study of the conditions and problems of my own group.

I was going to study the facts, any and all facts, concerning the American Negro and his plight, and by measurement and comparison and research, work up to any valid generalizations which I could. I entered this primarily with the utilitarian object of reform and uplift; but nevertheless, I wanted to do the work with scientific accuracy. Thus, in my own sociology, because of firm belief in a changing racial group, I easily grasped the idea of a changing developing society rather than a fixed social structure.

The decade and a half in which I taught, was riotous with happenings in the world of social development; with economic expansion, with political control, with racial difficulties. Above all, it was the era of empire and while I had some equipment to deal with a scientific approach to social studies, I did not have any clear conception or grasp of the meaning of that colonial imperialism which was beginning to grip the world. My only approach to meanings and helpful study there again was through my interest in race contact.

That interest began to clear my vision and interpret the whirl of events which swept the world. Japan was rising to national status and through the Chinese War and the Russian War, despite rivalry with Germany, Russia, and Great Britain, she achieved a new status in the world, which only the United States refused to recognize.

All this, I began to realize, was but a result of the expansion of Europe into Africa where a fierce fight was precipitated for the labor, gold, and diamonds of South Africa; for domination of the Nile Valley; for the gold, cocoa, raw materials, and labor of West Africa; and for the exploitation of the Belgian Congo. Europe was determined to dominate China and all but succeeded in dividing it between the chief white nations, when Japan stopped the process. After 16 years, stirred by the triumph of the Abyssinians at Adowa, and the pushing forward of the French in North Africa, England returned to the Egyptian Sudan.

The Queen's Jubilee, I knew, was not merely a sentimental

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outburst; it was a triumph of English economic aggression around the world and it aroused the cupidity and fear of Germany who proceeded to double her navy, expand into Asia, and consolidate her European position. Germany challenged France and England at Algeciras, prelude to the World War. Imperialism, despite Cleveland's opposition, spread to America, and the Hawaiian sugar fields were annexed. The Spanish war brought Cuban sugar under control and annexed Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The Panama Canal brought the Pacific nearer the Atlantic and protected capital investment in Santo Domingo and South America.

All this might have been interpreted as history and politics. Mainly I did so interpret it, but continually I was forced to consider the economic aspects of world movements as they were developing at the time. Chiefly this was because the group in which I was interested were workers, earners of wages, owners of small bits of land, servants. The labor strikes interested and puzzled me. They were for the most part strikes of workers led by organizations to which Negroes were not admitted. There was the great steel strike; the railway strikes, actual and threatened; the teamsters' strike in Chicago; the long strike in Leadville, Colorado. Only in the coal strike were Negroes involved. But there was a difference. During my school days, strikes were regarded as futile and ill-advised struggles against economic laws; and when the government intervened, it was to cow the strikers as law-breakers. But during my teaching period, the plight of the worker began to sift through into the consciousness of the average citizen. Public opinion not only allowed but forced Theodore Roosevelt to intervene in the coal strike, and the steel strikers had widespread sympathy.

Then there were the tariff agitations, the continual raising and shifting and manipulation of tariff rates, always in the end for the purpose of subsidizing the manufacturer and making the consumer pay. The political power of the great organizations of capital in coal, oil and sugar, the extraordinary immunities of the corporations, made the President openly attack the trusts as a king of super-government and

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we began to see more and more clearly the outlines of economic battle. The Supreme Court stood staunchly behind capital. It outlawed the labor boycott, it denied the right of the States to make railway rates. It declared the income tax unconstitutional.

With all that, and the memory of the Panic of 1873 not forgotten, came the Panic of 1893 and the financial upheaval of 1907. Into this economic turmoil, politics had to intrude. The older role of free, individual enterprise, with little or no government interference, had to be surrendered and the whole political agitation during these days took on a distinct economic tinge and object. The impassioned plea of Bryan in 1896 that labor be not "crucified upon a cross of gold" could not be wholly ridiculed to silence. The Populist movement which swept over the West and South, I began now to believe, was a third party movement of deep significance and it was kept from political power on the one hand by the established election frauds of the South, of which I knew, and by the fabulous election fund which made McKinley President of the United States. With this went the diversion of the Spanish war with its sordid scandals of rotten beef, cheating and stealing, fever and death from neglect. Politics and economics thus in those days of my teaching became but two aspects of a united body of action and effort.

I tried to isolate myself in the ivory tower of race. I wanted to explain the difficulties of race and the ways in which these difficulties caused political and economic troubles. It was this concentration of thought and action and effort that really, in the end, saved my scientific accuracy and search for truth. But first came a period of three years when I was casting about to find a way of applying science to the race problem. In these years I was torn with excitement of quick-moving events. Lynching, for instance, was still a continuing horror in the United States at the time of my entrance upon a teaching career. It reached a climax in 1892, when 235 persons were publicly murdered, and in the 16 years of my teaching nearly 2,000 persons were publicly killed by mobs,

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and not a single one of the murderers punished. The partition, domination, and exploitation of Africa gradually entered my thought as part of my problem of race. I saw in Asia and the West Indies the results of race discrimination while right here in America came the wild foray of the exasperated Negro soldiers at Brownsville and the political-economic riot at Atlanta.

One happening in America linked in my mind the race problem with the general economic development, and that was the speech of Booker T. Washington in Atlanta in 1895. 8 When many colored papers condemned the proposition of compromise with the white South, which Washington proposed, I wrote to the New York Age suggesting that here might be the basis of a real settlement between whites and blacks in the South, if the South opened to the Negroes the doors of economic opportunity and the Negroes cooperated with the white South in political sympathy. But this offer was frustrated by the fact that between 1895 and 1909 the whole South disfranchised its Negro voters by unfair and illegal restrictions and passed a series of "jim-crow" laws which made the Negro citizen a subordinate caste.

As a possible offset to this came the endowment of the General Education Board and the Sage Foundation; but they did not to my mind plan clearly to attack the Negro problem: the Sage Foundation ignored us, and the General Education Board in its first years gave its main attention to the education of whites and to black industrial schools.

I was approached by President Horace Bumstead of Atlanta University in 1896 and asked to come to Atlanta University and take charge of the work in sociology, and of the new conferences which they were inaugurating on the Negro problem. With this program in mind, I eagerly accepted the invitation. Dr. Bumstead later wrote:

Let me express the keen satisfaction I take in having been the one chiefly responsible, perhaps, for bringing Doctor Du Bois to Atlanta University. He has recently called his thirteen years of service there his "real life work"; and I am proud to have helped open the way

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for him to begin it, and to have been closely associated with his labors for more than a decade, till I ceased to be president. I cannot but smile when I think of the objections and misgivings of some of our trustees and other friends when he came. We wanted a professor of sociology with special reference to investigating conditions concerning the Negro; and I said that Dr. Du Bois was the one man, white or black, far and away best fitted for the position. I knew of his long preparation at Fisk, Harvard, and in Germany, and I had read the unstinted praise which the New York Nation had given to his first publication, The Suppression of the Slave Trade, and I knew of the confidence which Provost Harrison of the University of Pennsylvania had in him when he engaged him to spend a year or more in making a scientific study of the Philadelphia Negro.

But, said some, if you are going to give the position to a Negro, why not to a graduate of Atlanta rather than of Fisk? Because, said I, we want the best man, regardless of where he was graduated. But how about his religion -- he's studied in Germany -- perhaps if you scratch him, you'll find an agnostic. Now it is true that Atlanta University has always had a pronounced religious, though undenominational, life -- a life inherited from the New England people represented by its founders; and it has always looked to its teachers, so far as possible, to help to maintain it -- so I must need have some assurances on this point. But, as Doctor Du Bois will remember, they were not very easy to get. He seemed to be one of those persons who, when asked about their religion, reply that they "have none to speak of." But though reluctant to speak of his religion or to say what he would do at Atlanta, I observed that at the time of my interview with him he was living with his newly wedded bride in the center of the Negro slums of Philadelphia, doing the beneficient work to which Provost Harrison had called him, and I thought there were some indications of genuine religion in that fact. Nor was I disappointed, later, when some of the deepest and most vital expressions of the religious life came from his lips as he conducted evening devotions at the University.

So, in spite of objections and misgivings, Doctor Du Bois came to Atlanta University, and we held him there for thirteen years notwithstanding several offers to go elsewhere and get double the salary that we could afford to pay him. His work became a memorable part of the history of the Institution. Let me specify two of its most prominent and valuable features.

One was the inauguration, for the first time in any American college, of a thoroughly scientific study of the conditions of Negro life, covering all of its most important phases, and resulting in a score of annual Atlanta University Publications, conceded to be of the highest authority, both in this country and in Europe.

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Even more important than this, was the stimulating personal influence of Doctor Du Bois upon our students. He had acquired his own education where the highest standards prevailed, and he would tolerate no lower ones in his own classrooms. Not only in study but also in conduct, he demanded of his pupils the best that was in them. He taught them the nobility and sacredness of their manhood -- endowed, as they were, with all the inherent rights and possibilities of development enjoyed by humanity anywhere. To his fellow teachers, too, he brought joy, for though often looked upon in the outside world as a pessimist, he was about the jolliest member of our Faculty. The inspiration of his stimulating personality has gone out through all the South and will be felt for generations to come.

The hundred hills of Atlanta are not all crowned with factories. On one, toward the west, the setting sun throws three buildings in bold relief against the sky. The beauty of the group lies in its simple unity: a broad lawn of green rising from the red street with mingled roses and peaches; north and south, two plain and stately halls; and in the midst, half hidden in ivy, a larger building, boldly graceful, sparingly decorated, and with one low spire. It is a restful group -- one never looks for more; it is all here, all intelligible. There I live, and there I hear from day to day the low hum of restful life.

In winter's twilight, when the red sun glows, I can see the dark figures pass between the halls to the music of the nightbell. In the morning, when the sun is golden, the clang of the daybell brings the hurry and laughter of 300 young hearts from hall and street, and from the busy city below -- children all dark and heavy-haired -- to join their clear young voices in the music of the morning sacrifice. In a half dozen classrooms they gather then, here to follow the love song of Dido, here to listen to the tale of Troy divine; there to wander among the stars, there to wander among men and nations -- and elsewhere other well worn ways of knowing this queer world. Nothing new, no time-saving devices, simply old time-glorified methods of delving for Truth, and searching out the hidden beauties of life, and learning the good of living.

The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that was

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laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium 9 and is today laid before the freedmen's sons by Atlanta University. And this course of study will not change; its methods will grow more deft and effectual, its content richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true college will ever have one goal -- not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.

The vision of life that rises before these dark eyes has in it nothing mean or selfish. Not at Berlin nor at Leipzig, not at Harvard nor Yale is there an air of higher resolve or more unfettered striving; the determination to realize for men, both black and white, the broadest possibilities of life, to seek the better and the best, to spread with their own hands the Gospel of Sacrifice -- all this is the burden of their talk and dream. Here, amid a wide desert of caste and proscription, amid the heart-hurting slights and jars and vagaries of a deep race-dislike, lies this green oasis, where hot anger cools, and the bitterness of disappointment is sweetened by the springs and breezes of Parnassus; and here men may lie and listen and learn of a future fuller than the past, and hear the voice of Time:

Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren.
Thou shalt forego, shalt do without

They made their mistakes, those who planted Fisk and Howard and Atlanta before the smoke of battle had lifted; they made their mistakes, but those mistakes were not the things at which we lately laughed somewhat uproariously. They were right when they sought to found a new educational system upon the university: where, forsooth, shall we ground knowledge save on the broadest and deepest knowledge?

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The roots of the tree, rather than the leaves, are the sources of its life; and from the dawn of history, from Academus to Cambridge, the culture of the university has been the broad foundation-stone on which is built the kindergarten's A B C.

But these builders did make a mistake in minimizing the gravity of the problem before them; in thinking it a matter of years and decades; in therefore building quickly and laying their foundation carelessly, and lowering the standard of knowing, until they had scattered haphazard through the South some dozen poorly equipped high schools and miscalled them universities. They forgot, too, just as their successors are forgetting, the rule of inequality -- that of the million black youth, some were fitted to know and some to dig; that some had the talent and capacity of university men, and some had the talent and capacity of blacksmiths; and that true training meant neither that all should be college men nor all artisans, but that the one should be made a missionary of culture to an untaught people, and the other a free workman among serfs.

My real life work was begun at Atlanta for 13 years, from my 29th to my 42nd birthday. They were years of great spiritual upturning, of the making and unmaking of ideals, of hard work and hard play. Here I found myself. I lost most of my mannerisms. I grew more broadly human, made my closest and most holy friendships, and studied human beings. I became widely acquainted with the real condition of my people. I realized the terrific odds which faced them. I saw the Atlanta riot. 10

The main significance of my work at Atlanta University, during the years 1897 to 1910, was the development at an American institution of learning, of a program of study on the problems affecting the American Negroes, covering a progressively widening and deepening effort designed to stretch over the span of a century. This program was grafted on an attempt by George Bradford of Boston, one of the trustees, to open for Atlanta University a field of usefulness for city Negroes comparable to what Hampton and Tuskegee

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were doing for rural districts in agriculture and industry. At the Hampton and Tuskegee Conferences, there came together annually and in increasing numbers, workers, experts and observers to encourage by speeches and interchange of experience the Negro farmers and laborers of adjoining areas. Visitors, white and colored, from North and South, joined to advise and learn. Mr. Bradford's idea was to establish at Atlanta a similar conference, devoted especially to problems of city Negroes. The first conference, emphasizing particularly Negro health problems, was held in 1896. Immediately the University looked about for a man to teach history and political science, and take charge of future conferences. I was chosen.

When I took charge of the Atlanta Conference, I did not pause to consider how far my developed plans agreed or disagreed with the ideas of the already launched project. It made little essential difference, since only one conference had been held and a second planned. These followed the Hampton and Tuskegee model of being primarily meetings of inspiration, directed toward specific efforts at social reform and aimed at propaganda for social uplift in certain preconceived lines. This program at Atlanta, I sought to swing as on a pivot to one of scientific investigation into social conditions, primarily for scientific ends. I put no special emphasis on special reform effort, but increasing and widening emphasis on the collection of a basic body of fact concerning the social condition of American Negroes, endeavoring to reduce that condition to exact measurement whenever or wherever occasion permitted. As time passed, it happened that many uplift efforts were in fact based on our studies: the kindergarten system of the city of Atlanta, white as well as black; the Negro Business League, and various projects to better health and combat crime. We came to be, however, as I had intended, increasingly, a source of general information and a basis for further study, rather than an organ of social reform.

The proverbial visitor from Mars would have assumed as elemental a study in America of American Negroes -- as physical specimens; as biological growths; as a field of investigation

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in economic development from slave to free labor; as a psychological laboratory in human reaction toward caste and discrimination; as a unique case of physical and cultural intermingling. These and a dozen other subjects of scientific interest, would have struck the man from Mars as eager lines of investigation for American social scientists. He would have been astounded to learn that the only institution in America in 1900 with any such program of study was Atlanta University, where on a budget of $5,000 a year, including salaries, cost of publication, investigation and annual meetings, we were essaying this pioneer work.

My program for the succession of conference studies was modified by many considerations: cost, availability of suitable data, tested methods of investigation; moreover I could not plunge too soon into such controversial subjects as politics or miscegenation. Within these limitations, I finished a ten-year cycle study as follows:

1896, Mortality among Negroes in Cities

1897, Social and Physical Condition of Negroes in Cities

1898, Some Efforts of Negroes for Social Betterment

1899, The Negro in Business

1900, The College-Bred Negro

1901, The Negro Common School

1902, The Negro Artisan

1903, The Negro Church

1904, Notes on Negro Crime

1905, A Select Bibliography of the American Negro

I then essayed for the second decade a broader program, more logical, more inclusive, and designed to bring the whole subject matter into a better integrated whole. But continued lack of funds and outside diversions (like the request of the Carnegie Institution of 1907 for a study of co-operation) kept even the second decade from the complete logic of arrangement which I desired; finally, my leaving Atlanta in 1910 and at last the severing of my connection with the conference in 1914, left the full form of my program still unfinished. I did, however, publish the following eight studies:

1906, Health and Physique of the Negro American

1907, Economic Co-operation among Negro Americans

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1908, The Negro American Family

1909, Efforts for Social Betterment among Negro Americans

1910, The College-Bred Negro American

1911, The Common School and the Negro American

1912, The Negro American Artisan

1914, Morals and Manners among Negro Americans

With the publication of 1914, my connection with Atlanta ceased for 20 years. Although studies and publications were prepared by others at the university in 1915 and 1918, the war finally stopped the enterprise.

What I was laboriously but steadily approaching in this effort was a recurring cycle of ten studies in succeeding decades; with repetition of each subject or some modification of it in each decade, upon a progressively broader and more exact basis and with better method; until gradually a foundation of carefully ascertained fact would build a basis of knowledge, broad and sound enough to be called scientific in the best sense of that term.

Just what form this dream would eventually have taken, I do not know. So far as actually forecast, it had assumed in 1914, some such form as this:

1. Population: Distribution and Growth

2. Biology: Health and Physique

3. Socialization: Family, Group and Class

4. Cultural Patterns: Morals and Manners

5. Education

6. Religion and the Church

7. Crime

8. Law and Government

9. Literature and Art

10. Summary and Bibliography

I proposed as I have said, to repeat each of these every ten years, basing the studies on ever broader and more carefully gathered data. Eventually I hoped to keep all the inquiries going simultaneously, only emphasizing and reporting on one particular subject each year. This would have allowed some necessary shifting or combination of subjects as time and developments might suggest; and adjustments to new scientific advance in fields like anthropology and psychology.

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The plan would have called in time for a large and well-paid staff of experts and a study of method and testing of results such as no group of Americans were engaged in at the time; beginning with a definite, circumscribed group, but ending with the human race.

The program, however, was weak on its economic side. It did not stress enough the philosophy of Marx and Engels and was of course far too soon for Lenin. The program ought to have been -- and as I think would have been if I had kept on this work -- the Economic Development of the American Negro Slave; on this central thread all the other subjects would have been strung. But this I had no chance to essay.

Social scientists at the time were thinking in terms of theory and vast and eternal laws, but I had a concrete group of living beings artificially set off by themselves and capable of almost laboratory experiment. I laid down an ambitious program for a hundred years of study. I proposed to take up annually in each decade the main aspects of the group life of Negroes with as thorough study and measurement as possible, and repeat the same program in the succeeding decade with additions, changes and better methods. In this way, I proposed gradually to broaden and intensify the study, sharpen the tools of investigation and perfect our methods of work, so that we would have an increasing body of scientifically ascertained fact, instead of the vague mass of the so-called Negro problems. And through this laboratory experiment I hoped to make the laws of social living clearer, surer, and more definite.

Some of this was accomplished, but of course only an approximation of the idea. For 13 years we poured forth a series of studies; limited, incomplete, only partially conclusive, and yet so much better done than any other attempt of the sort in the nation that they gained attention throughout the world. In all we published a total of 2,172 pages which formed a current encyclopedia on American Negro problems.

These studies with all their imperfections were widely distributed in the libraries of the world and used by scholars. It may be said without undue boasting that between 1896

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and 1920 there was no study made of the race problem in America which did not depend in some degree upon the investigations made at Atlanta University; often they were widely quoted and commended.

I had heartening letters from persons of eminence and character. William James wrote in 1907: "I have just looked through the last installment of your studies on the American Negro. I wish the portraits might have been better printed. But it is splendid scientific work." Frank Taussig of Harvard wrote the same year: "In my judgment no better work is being done in the country, and no better opportunity is afforded for financial support on the part of those who wish to further the understanding of the Negro problem." Booker Washington, who spoke at our conference on the Negro artisan in 1911, said: "The whole country should be grateful to this institution for the painstaking and systematic manner in which it has developed from year to year a series of facts which are proving most vital and helpful to the interests of our nation." Professor E. R. A. Seligman wrote: "I take great pleasure in testifying to my very high appreciation of the studies on the Negro problem which you have been editing for the past few years. They are essentially scholarly and that means sober and temperate, and they are covering a field which is almost untilled and which is not apt to be cultivated by others." Jane Addams attended our conference in 1908 and commended our work.

Many periodicals mentioned our work:

London Spectator, 1900: "This work is being done with much intelligence, discrimination and assiduity at the instance and under the inspiration of the Atlanta University."

School Review, 1902: "The work of this conference is constructive and merits hearty support."

Outlook, 1903: "No student of the race problem, no person who would either think or speak upon it intelligently, can afford to be ignorant of the facts brought out in the Atlanta series of sociological studies of the conditions and the progress of the Negro."

Publications of the Southern History Association, 1904: "The work done under the direction of the Atlanta Conference is entitled to the respectful and thoughtful consideration of every man interested in any aspect of the life of the American Negro."

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South Atlantic Quarterly, 1904: "They constitute, so far as the reviewer can learn, the most important body of direct evidence ever published as to moral and religious conditions of our colored people."

N. Y. Evening Post, 1905: "The only scientific studies of the Negro question being made today are those carried on by Atlanta University."

It must be remembered that the significance of these studies lay not so much in what they were actually able to accomplish, as in the fact that at the time of their publication Atlanta University was the only institution in the world carrying on a systematic study of the Negro and his development, and putting the result in a form available for the scholars of the world.

In addition to the publications, we did something toward bringing together annually at Atlanta University persons and authorities interested in the problem of the South. Among these were Charles William Eliot, Booker T. Washington, Frank Sanborn, Franz Boas, and Walter Wilcox. We were asked from time to time to cooperate in current studies. I cooperated in the taking of the Twelfth Census and wrote one of the monographs. I wrote magazine articles in the World's Work and in the Atlantic Monthly where I joined in a symposium and one of my fellow contributors was Woodrow Wilson.

Also I joined with the Negro leaders of Georgia in efforts to better local conditions; to stop discrimination in the distribution of school funds; to keep the legislature from making further discriminations in railway travel. I became a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1900 and was made a fellow in 1904. I went to Europe and while abroad I sat in London with the wife of Coleridge-Taylor and heard the first rendition of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast.

In 1909 I tried to start an "Encyclopedia Africana" and secured as members of the board of advisers the following distinguished scholars:

Sir Harry Johnston, K.C.B., England

Prof. W. M. Flinders Petrie, D.C.L., England

William Archer, Esq., England

Miss Alice Werner, England

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Dr. Francis Hoggan, England

Prof. Giuseppi Sergi, Italy

Dr. Karl Weule, Germany

Dr. J. Deniker, France

Major R. M. Daniel, Bechuanaland, Africa

Prof. A. B. Hart, L.L.D., Harvard

Prof. William James, L.L.D., Harvard

Prof. Hugo Munsterberg, L.L.D., Harvard

President G. Stanley Hall, L.L.D., Clark

Prof. A. F. Chamberlain, Ph.D., Clark

Prof. Franz Boas, Ph.D., Columbia

Sixty-two Negro scholars were on the Editorial Board, including: Kelley Miller, A.M., Howard; H. O. Tanner, France; Richard T. Greener, A.B., Harvard; Charles W. Chesnutt; John R. Lynch, U.S. Army; W.S. Scarborough, L.L.D., Oberlin, and many others. I was not able to raise funds to carry this enterprise further forward.

I testified before Congressional Commissions in Washington and appeared on the lecture platform with Walter Page, afterwards ambassador to England; I did a considerable amount of lecturing throughout the United States. I had wide correspondence with men of prominence in America and Europe: Lyman Abbott of the Outlook; E. D. Morel, the English expert on Africa; Max Weber of Heidelberg; Professor Wilcox of Cornell; Bliss Perry of the Atlantic Monthly; Horace Traubel, the great protagonist of Walt Whitman; Charles Eliot Norton and Talcott Williams. I began to be regarded by many groups and audiences as having definite information on the Negro to which they might listen with profit.

In 1900, came a significant occurrence which not until lately have I set in its proper place in my life. I had been for over nine years studying the American Negro problem. The result had been significant because of its unusual nature and not for its positive accomplishment. I wanted to set down its aim and method in some outstanding way which would bring my work to the notice of the thinking world. The great World's Fair at Paris was being planned and I thought I might put my findings into plans, charts and figures, so one might

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see what we were trying to accomplish. I got a couple of my best students and put a series of facts into charts: the size and growth of the Negro American group; its division by age and sex; its distribution, education and occupations; its books and periodicals. We made a most interesting set of drawings, limned on pasteboard cards about a yard square and mounted on a number of movable standards. The details of finishing these 50 or more charts, in colors, with accuracy, was terribly difficult with little money, limited time and not too much encouragement. I was threatened with nervous prostration before I was done and had little money left to buy passage to Paris, nor was there a cabin left for sale. But the exhibit would fail unless I was there. So at the last moment I bought passage in the steerage and went over and installed the work. It was an immediate success. It occupied a small room, perhaps 20 feet square but the room was always full. The American press, white and colored, was full of commendation and in the end, the exhibit received a Grand Prize, and I, as its author, a Gold Medal.

I was pleased and satisfied. I sat back quietly to hear the commendation and it came not only for this particular exhibit but for the work of the Atlanta conferences in general. I was sure that the work I had planned was certain of support and growth. But it was not. Within less than ten years it had to be abandoned because $5,000 a year could not be found in this rich land for its support. Where had I failed? There were many answers, but one was typically American, as the event proved; I did the deed but I did not advertise it. Either I myself or someone for me should have called public attention to what had been done or otherwise it would quickly be forgotten. Indeed the philosophy then current and afterward triumphant was that the Deed without Advertising was worthless and in the long run Advertising without the Deed was the only lasting value. Perhaps Americans do not realize how completely they have adopted this philosophy. But Madison Avenue does.

At the very time when my studies were most successful, there cut across this plan which I had as a scientist, a red ray

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which could not be ignored. I remember when it first, as it were, startled me to my feet: a poor Negro in central Georgia, Sam Hose, had killed his landlord's wife. I wrote out a careful and reasoned statement concerning the evident facts and started down to the Atlanta Constitution office, carrying in my pocket a letter of introduction to Joel Chandler Harris. I did not get there. On the way news met me: Sam Hose had been lynched, and they said that his knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery store farther down on Mitchell Street, along which I was walking. I turned back to the university. I began to turn aside from my work. I did not meet Joel Chandler Harris nor the editor of the Constitution.

Two considerations thereafter broke in upon my work and eventually disrupted it: first, one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved; and secondly, there was no such definite demand for scientific work of the sort that I was doing, as I had confidently assumed would be easily forthcoming. I regarded it as axiomatic that the world wanted to learn the truth and if the truth were sought with even approximate accuracy and painstaking devotion, the world would gladly support the effort. This was, of course, but a young man's idealism, not by any means false, but also never universally true. The work of the conference for 13 years including my own salary and small office force did not average $5,000 a year. Probably with some effort and sacrifice Atlanta University might have continued to raise this amount if it had not been for the controversy with Booker T. Washington that arose in 1903 and increased in intensity until 1908.

There were, of course, other considerations which made Atlanta University vulnerable to attack at this time. The University from the beginning had taken a strong and unbending attitude toward Negro prejudice and discrimination; white teachers and black students ate together in the same dining room and lived in the same dormitories. The charter of the institution opened the doors of Atlanta University to any student who applied, of any race or color; and when the State in 1887 objected to the presence of a few white students

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who were all children of teachers and professors, the institution gave up the small appropriation from the State rather than repudiate its principles. In fact, this appropriation represented not State funds, but the Negroes' share of the sum received from the Federal government for education.

When later there came an attempt on the part of the Southern Education Board and afterwards of the General Education Board to form a working program between educated Negroes and forward-looking whites in the South, it gradually became an understood principle of action that colored teachers should be encouraged in colored schools; that the races in the schools should be separated socially; that colored schools should be chiefly industrial; and that every effort should be made to conciliate Southern white public opinion. Schools which were successfully carrying out this program could look for further help from organized philanthropy. Other schools, and this included Atlanta University, could not.

Even this would not necessarily have excluded Atlanta University from consideration at the hands of the philanthropists. The University had done and was doing excellent and thorough work. Even industrial training in the South was often in the hands of Atlanta graduates. Tuskegee had always been largely manned by graduates of Atlanta and some of the best school systems of the South were directed by persons trained at Atlanta University. The college department was recognized as perhaps the largest and best in the South at the time among Negroes. But unfortunately, at this time, there came a controversy between myself and Booker Washington, which became more personal and bitter than I had ever dreamed and which necessarily dragged in the University.

Meantime, the task of raising money for Atlanta University and my work became increasingly difficult. In the fall of 1904 the printing of our conference report was postponed by the trustees until special funds could be secured. I did not at the time see the handwriting on the wall. I did not realize how strong the forces were back of Tuskegee and how they

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might interfere with my scientific study of the Negro. My continuing thought was that we must have a vehicle for both opinion and fact which would help me carry on my scientific work and at the same time be a forum less radical than the [Boston] Guardian, and yet more rational than the rank and file of Negro papers now so largely arrayed with Tuskegee. With this in mind, as early as 1904, I helped one of the Atlanta University graduates, who was a good printer, set up a job office in Memphis.

In 1905 I wrote to Jacob Schiff, reminding him of having met him in Bar Harbor in 1903.

"I want to lay before you a plan which I have and ask you if it is of sufficient interest to you for you to be willing to hear more of it and possibly to assist in its realization. The Negro race in America is today in a critical condition. Only united concerted effort will save us from being crushed. This union must come as a matter of education and long continued effort. To this end there is needed a high-class journal to circulate among the intelligent Negroes, tell them of the deeds of themselves and their neighbors, interpret the news of the world to them, and inspire them toward definite ideals. Now we have many small weekly papers and one or two monthlies, and none of them fill the great need I have outlined. I want to establish, therefore, for the nine million American Negroes and eventually for the whole Negro world, a monthly journal. To this end I have already in Memphis a printing establishment which has been running successfully at job work a year under a competent printer -- a self-sacrificing educated young man. Together we shall have about $2,000 invested in this plant by April 15."

Mr. Schiff wrote back courteously, saying: "Your plans to establish a high-class journal to circulate among the intelligent Negroes is in itself interesting, and on its face has my sympathy. But before I could decide whether I can become of advantage in carrying your plans into effect, I would wish to advise with men whose opinion in such a matter I consider of much value." Nothing ever came of this, because, as I

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might have known, most of Mr. Schiff's friends were strong and sincere advocates of Tuskegee.

It was with difficulty that I came fully to realize the situation that was thus developing: first of all, I could not persuade myself that my program of solving the Negro problem by scientific investigation was wrong, or that it could possibly fail of eventual support when once it was undertaken; that it was understood in widening circles of readers and thinkers, I was convinced, because of the reception accorded the Atlanta University Studies. When, however, in spite of that, the revenue of the University continued to fall off, and no special support came for my particular part of its work, I tried several times by personal effort to see if funds could not be raised.

In 1906 I made two appeals: first and boldly, I outlined the work of the Atlanta Conference to Andrew Carnegie, reminding him that I had been presented to him and Carl Schurz some years before. I hoped that despite his deep friendship for Mr. Washington and the Tuskegee idea, he would see the use and value of my efforts in Atlanta. The response was indirect. At the time a white Mississippi planter, Alfred W. Stone, was popular in the North. He had grave doubts about the future of the Negro race, widely criticized black labor, and once tried to substitute Italians on his own plantations, until they became too handy with the knife. To his direction, Mr. Carnegie and others entrusted a fund for certain studies among Negroes. This is standard American procedure; if there is a job to be done and a Negro fit to do it, do not give the job or the responsibility to the Negro; give it to some white man and let the Negro work under him. Why they selected Stone and neglected an established center like Atlanta University, I cannot imagine; but at any rate, Stone turned to me and offered to give the University a thousand dollars to help finance a special study of the history of economic co-operation among Negroes. I had planned that year, 1907, to study the Negro in politics, but here support was needed and I turned aside and made the study asked for.

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About the same time, I approached the United States Commissioner of Labor. For several years I had been able to do now and then certain small studies for the Bureau of Labor, which had been accepted and paid for. It began with a proposal to Carroll D. Wright in 1897 for a study of the Negro in a Virginia town in 1898, which Mr. Wright authorized me to make on my own responsibility, promising only to print it if he liked it. He did like it. This was followed by a major study of the Negro in the Black Belt in 1899 and among Negroes in Georgia in 1901, and I then approached the Bureau with a new proposal.

I asked United States Commissioner of Labor Neill, in 1906, to authorize a study of a Black Belt community. I wanted to take Lowndes County, Alabama, in a former slave state with a large majority of Negroes, and make a social and economic study from the earliest times when documents were available, down to the present; supplemented by studies of official records and a present house-to-house canvas of Negroes. I plied Commissioner Neill with plans and specifications until at last he authorized the study. Helped by Monroe Work, of Tuskegee Institute, and R. R. Wright, later a bishop of the A.M.E. Church, and a dozen or more local employees, I settled at the Calhoun School and began the study.

It was carried on with all sorts of difficulties, including financing which was finally arranged by loans from the University, and with the greeting of some of my agents with shotguns in certain parts of the county; but it was eventually finished. The difficult schedules were tabulated and I made chronological maps of the division of the land; I considered the distribution of labor; the relation of landlord and tenant; the political organization and the family life and the distribution of the population. The report was finished by hand with no copy, and rushed to Washington. I was criticized and I spent some weeks there in person, revising and perfecting it. It was finally accepted by the government, and $2,000 paid for it, most of which went back to the University in repayment of funds which they had kindly furnished me to carry on the work. But the study was not published. I knew the

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symptoms of this sort of treatment: in 1898, S. S. McClure had sent me to south Georgia to make a study of social situations there. He paid for the report but never published the manuscript and he afterward did the same thing in the case of Sir Harry Johnston.

I finally approached the Bureau and tried to find out when it would be published and was told that the Bureau had decided not to publish the manuscript, since it "touched on political matters." I was astonished and disappointed, but after a year I went back to them again and asked if they would allow me to have the manuscript since they were not going to use it. They told me it had been destroyed!

While I was down in Lowndes County finishing this study, there came the news of the Atlanta riot. I took the next train for Atlanta and my family. On the way, I wrote the "Litany of Atlanta."

Professor Seligman of Columbia wrote me:

"Like so many other of your well-wishers I was amazed and disgusted at the happenings in Atlanta. But perhaps I did not realize the horror of it all, until I read your beautiful poem in the Independent. It must indeed be a tragedy for men like you -- a tragedy all the greater because of the seeming impasse. But perhaps you will learn -- as I have learned after going thro' the fire of affliction -- that there are really only two things worth living for in this world -- the one is the love of those most nearly related to you, or thrown into close contact with you -- and the other is work, the chance to express oneself in some form of activity however humble. Those things are open to every human being, and at bottom there is nothing else which is comparable with them -- wealth, reputation, ambition or what not. Let us hold to the things that are eternally true, and let us seek within ourselves the compensation for the things that are withheld by an unthinking and uncivilized world."

It was of course crazy for me to dream that America, in the dawn of the 20th century with colonial imperialism, based on the suppression of colored folk, at its zenith, would encourage, much less adequately finance, such a program at

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a Negro college under Negro scholars. My faith in its success was based on the firm belief that race prejudice was based on widespread ignorance. My long-term remedy was Truth: carefully gathered scientific proof that neither color nor race determined the limits of a man's capacity or desert. I was not at the time sufficiently Freudian to understand how little human action is based on reason; nor did I know Karl Marx well enough to appreciate the economic foundations of human history.

I was therefore astonished and infinitely disappointed, gradually to realize that our work in the Atlanta conferences was not getting support; that, far from being able to command increased revenue for better methods of investigation and wider fields, it was with increasing difficulty that the aging and overworked President, with his deep earnestness and untiring devotion to principle, could collect enough to maintain even our normal activities. The conference had not been without a measure of success. Our reports were widely read and commented upon. On the other hand, so far as the American world of science and letters was concerned, we never "belonged"; we remained unrecognized in learned societies and academic groups. We rated merely as Negroes studying Negroes, and after all, what had Negroes to do with America or science? Gradually and with deep disappointment I began to realize, as early as 1906, that my program for studying the Negro problems must soon end, unless it received unforeseen support.

With all this came the strengthening and hardening of my own character. The billows of birth, love, and death swept over me. I saw life through all its paradox and contradiction of streaming eyes and mad merriment. I emerged into full manhood, with the ruins of some ideals about me, but with others planted above the stars; I was scarred and a bit grim, but hugging to my soul the divine gift of laughter and withal determined, even unto stubbornness, to fight the good fight.

At last, forebear and waver as I would, I faced the great decision. My life's last and greatest door stood ajar. What

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with all my dreaming, studying, and teaching was I going to do in this fierce fight? Despite all my youthful conceit and bumptiousness, I found developed beneath it all a reticence and new fear of forwardness, which sprang from searching criticisms of motive and high ideals of efficiency; but contrary to my dream of racial solidarity and notwithstanding my deep desire to serve and follow and think, rather than to lead and inspire and decide, I found myself suddenly the leader of a great wing of people fighting against another and greater wing. Nor could any effort of mine keep this fight from sinking to the personal plane. Heaven knows I tried. I finally wrote in March 1910:

"I insist on my right to think and speak; but if that freedom is made an excuse for abuse of and denial of aid to Atlanta University, then with regret I shall withdraw from Atlanta University."

For the American Negro, the last decade of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th centuries were more critical than the Reconstruction years of 1868 to 1876. Yet they have received but slight attention from historians and social students. They were usually interpreted in terms of personalities, and without regard to the great social forces that were developing. This was the age of triumph for big business, for industry, consolidated and organized on a world-wide scale, and run by white capital with colored labor. The southern United States was one of the most promising fields for this development, with a fine climate, invaluable staple crops, with a mass of cheap and potentially efficient labor, with unlimited natural power and use of unequalled technique, and with a transportation system reaching all the markets of the world.

The profit promised by the exploitation of this quasicolonial empire was facing labor difficulties, threatening to flare into race war. The relations of the poor-white and Negro working classes were becoming increasingly embittered. In the year when I undertook the study of the Philadelphia Negro, lynching of Negroes by mobs reached a crimson climax in the United States, at the astounding

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figure of nearly five a week. Government throughout the former slave states was conducted by fraud and intimidation, with open violation of state and federal law. Reason seemed to have reached an impasse; white demagogues, like Ben Tillman and J. K. Vardaman, attacked Negroes with every insulting epithet and accusation that the English language could afford, and got wide hearing. On the other hand Negro colleges and others were graduating colored men and women, few in the aggregate, but of increasing influence, who demanded the full rights of American citizens; and even if their threatening surroundings compelled silence or whispers, they were none the less convinced that this attitude was their only way of salvation. Supporting Negro education were the descendants of those Northerners who founded the first Negro institutions and had since contributed to their upkeep. But these same Northerners were also investors and workers in the new industrial organization of the world. Toward them now turned the leaders of the white South, who were at once apprehensive of race war and desirous of a new, orderly industrial South.

Conferences began between whites of the North and the South, including industrialists as well as teachers, business men rather than preachers. At Capon Springs, on the Robert Ogden 11 trips to Hampton and Tuskegee, in the organization of the Southern Education Board, and finally in the founding of the General Education Board, a new racial philosophy for the South was evolved. This philosophy seemed to say that the attempt to over-educate a "child race" by furnishing chiefly college training to its promising young people, must be discouraged; the Negro must be taught to accept what the whites were willing to offer him; in a world ruled by white people and destined so to be ruled, the place of Negroes must be that of a humble, patient, hard-working group of laborers, whose ultimate destiny would be determined by their white employers. Meantime, the South must have education on a broad and increasing basis, but primarily for whites; for Negroes, education, for the present, should

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be confined increasingly to elementary instruction, and more especially to training in farming and industry, calculated to make the mass of Negroes laborers contented with their lot and cheap.

White and Negro labor must, so far as possible, be taken out of active competition, by segregation in work: to the whites the bulk of well-paid skilled labor and management; to the Negro, farm labor, unskilled labor in industry and domestic service. Exceptions to this general pattern would occur especially in some sorts of skills like building and repairs; but in general the "white" and "Negro" job would be kept separate and superimposed.

Finally, Northern philanthropy, especially in education, must be organized and incorporated, and its dole distributed according to this program; thus a number of inefficient and even dishonest attempts to conduct private Negro schools and low-grade colleges would be eliminated; smaller and competing institutions would be combined; above all, less and less total support would be given higher training for Negroes. This program was rigorously carried out until after the First World War.

To the support of this program, came Booker T. Washington in 1895. The white South was jubilant; public opinion was studiously organized to make Booker Washington the one nationally recognized leader of his race, and the South went quickly to work to translate the program into law. Disfranchisement laws were passed between 1890 and 1910 by all the former slave states, and quickly declared constitutional by the courts, before contests could be effectively organized: "jim-crow" legislation, for travel on railroads and streetcars, and race separation in many other walks of life, were rapidly put on the statute books.

By the second decade of the 20th century, a legal caste system based on race and color, had been openly grafted on the democratic constitution of the United States. This explains why, in 1910, I gave up my position at Atlanta University and became Director of Publications and Research for

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the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, of which I was one of the incorporators in 1911.

Very early in my work in Atlanta, I began to feel, on the one hand, pressure being put upon me to modify my work; and on the other hand, an inner emotional reaction at the things taking place about me. To note the latter first: as a scientist, I sought the traditional detachment and calm of the seeker for truth. I had deliberately chosen to work in the South, although I knew that there I must face discrimination and insult. But on the other hand I was a normal human being with strong feelings and pronounced likes and dislikes, and a flair for expression; these I could not wholly suppress, nor did I try. I was on the other hand willing to endure and as my dear friend, Henry Hunt, said to me in after years, "I could keep still in seven different languages." But, if I did speak I did not intend to lie.

In one aspect of the Negro problem in America, my program had limited success; that was its relation to the white working class. The Negroes were working folk -- farmers, laborers, porters and servants. They belonged in the main to the "have-nots" as over against the "haves." Yet they were not regarded as an integral part of the American workers and I as student of their plight and their efforts was continually treating them as a separate class instead of grouping them with the mass of workers. This was not because of any failure on my part to conceive of the Negroes as primarily workers whose chief interest lay in the working class. The fault lay at the door of the powerful forces in the state which had separated the working class into antagonistic groups hating and fearing each other more than they feared their exploiters. In slavery days the poor whites hated and feared the black slaves. These slaves deprived the free white workers of land and livelihood; drove them to the hills and barrens or to the slums of cities; they were largely disfranchised and managed to make a living by fawning on slaveowners, becoming slave overseers or bearing arms to keep black slaves from revolt. They protested bitterly against this condition.

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To these poor whites, emancipation seemed not an opportunity for Negroes to rise to the status of free white workers, but rather the chance of white labor to climb on the backs of Negroes. The freedmen therefore were not only exploited by former slaveowners but even more by the up-struggling whites; and when white workers got the vote, blacks were disfranchised. A caste legislation put the Negro legally under the feet of the white workers, limiting his work, his wages, his dwelling place and his personal freedom. In the eyes of the Negro the white worker became his chief enemy; he led the lynch mobs, insulted him on the streets and took the food out of his mouth.

The mass of the Northern working class opposed slavery and wanted slaves emancipated. But they were largely foreign emigrants and many, like the Irish, met the competition of free Negro workers on arrival and fought for work in pitched battles. The newer emigrants were warned against cheap competing Negro labor and did not regard these dark strangers as fellow workmen. Employers threw white and black into competing groups. So that the National Labor Union representing the best of American labor, despite its brave repudiation of color discrimination, was unable in 1869 to secure admission of Negro workers into unions. Negroes, rebuffed, tried to form their own unions but had to start with the demand for political power. For this they depended on the Republican party and that party reduced them to serfdom in 1876. The Northern unions in tight craft organizations generally segregated the Negro worker or completely barred him. Some of the trades, like miners, longshoremen and cigarmakers, admitted Negroes; but many of the better paid trades, like blacksmiths, smelters, engineers, metal workers, boilermakers, electric workers, glassmakers, oil workers, textile workers and a host of similar unions, admitted in the new century few or no Negroes.

When, therefore, I essayed to study the Negro worker, I had no meeting ground with the white laboring class. I invited the secretary of the Georgia Federation of Labor to our conference and he spoke, but his hearers knew that his

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federation discriminated against Negroes. We studied Negro employees in Southern factories. We corresponded with all the unions in the nation but with small result. The American working class remained split by the color line. My study therefore became a study not of a working class but of a small part of one and the relations of these groups became more important than relations between worker and employer.

Of the general life in Atlanta, a word must be said. I stayed upon the campus as much as possible. My contact with the surrounding white city was limited to some necessary shopping. I did not vote since the "white primary," which was the real election, was closed to me. I did not enter parks or museums. I assumed that when the public was invited to any place or function, either the white people were meant, or, if not, attendance of Negroes meant segregated parts or times. Once I remonstrated with a colored teacher of literature for attending the "jim-crow" section of a theater in the top balcony. She answered: "Where else can I see Shakespeare? I cannot afford to go to New York."

One of the most annoying sorts of race discrimination was on the railroads. Did you ever see a "jim-crow" waiting room? There are some exceptions but usually no heat in winter and no air in summer; undisturbed loafers and white train hands and broken disreputable settees; to buy a ticket is torture: you stand and stand and wait and wait until every white person at the "Other Window" is waited on. Then the tired agent yells across (because all the tickets and change are over there): "What d'y' want? What! Where?" He brow-beats and contradicts you, hurries and confuses the ignorant; gives many the wrong change; for lack of time compels a number to purchase tickets on the train at a higher price and sends all out on the platform burning with indignation and hatred.

The "jim-crow" car is up next the baggage car and engine. The train stops out beyond the covering in the rain or sun or dust. Usually there is no step to help one climb on, and often the car is a smoker cut in two and you must pass through the white smokers and then they pass through your

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part with swagger and noise and stares. Your apartment is a half or a quarter or an eighth of the oldest car in service on the road. Unless it happens to be a through express, the old plush is caked with dirt, the floor is gummy and the windows dirty.

An impertinent white newsboy occupies two seats at the end and importunes you to buy cheap candy, Coca-Cola and worthless if not vulgar books. He yells and swaggers and a continued stream of white men saunters back and forth from the smoker to buy and listen. The white train crew from the baggage car uses the "jim-crow" to lounge in and perform their toilet. The conductor appropriates two seats for himself and his papers and yells gruffly for your tickets before the train has scarcely started. It is best not to ask him for information even in the gentlest tones. His information is for whites chiefly. It is difficult to get lunch or drinking water. Lunch rooms either "don't serve niggers" or serve them at some dirty and ill-attended hole in the wall. Toilet rooms are often filthy. If you have to change cars be wary of junctions which are usually without accommodation and filled with quarrelsome whites who hate a "darky dressed up." You are apt to have the company of a sheriff and a couple of meek or sullen black prisoners on part of your way and the dirty colored section hands will pour in toward night and drive you to the smallest corner. "No," said the little lady in the corner (she looked like an ivory cameo and her dress flowed on her like a caress), "We don't travel much."

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Chapter XIV: The Niagara Movement
In 1905 I was still a teacher at Atlanta University and was in my imagination a scientist, and neither a leader nor an agitator; I had much admiration for Mr. Washington and Tuskegee, and I had in 1894 applied at both Tuskegee and Hampton for work. If Mr. Washington's telegram had reached me before the Wilberforce bid, I should have doubtless gone to Tuskegee. Certainly I knew no less about mathematics than I did about Latin and Greek.

Since the controversy between me and Washington has become historic, it deserves more careful statement than it has had hitherto, both as to the matters and the motives involved. There was first of all the ideological controversy. I believed in the higher education of a Talented Tenth who through their knowledge of modern culture could guide the American Negro into a higher civilization. I knew that without this the Negro would have to accept white leadership, and that such leadership could not always be trusted to guide this group into self-realization and to its highest cultural possibilities. Mr. Washington, on the other hand, believed that the Negro as an efficient worker could gain wealth and that eventually through his ownership of capital he would be able to achieve a recognized place in American culture and could then educate his children as he might wish and develop their possibilities. For this reason he proposed to put the emphasis at present upon training in the skilled trades and encouragement in industry and common labor.

These two theories of Negro progress were not absolutely contradictory. Neither I nor Booker Washington understood the nature of capitalistic exploitation of labor, and the necessity of a direct attack on the principle of exploitation as the beginning of labor uplift. I recognized the importance of the Negro gaining a foothold in trades and his

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encouragement in industry and common labor. Mr. Washington was not absolutely opposed to college training and sent his own children to college. But he did minimize its importance, and discouraged the philanthropic support of higher education. He thought employers "gave" laborers work, thus opening the door to acquiring wealth. I openly and repeatedly criticized what seemed to me the poor work and small accomplishment of the Negro industrial school, but did not attack the fundamental wrong of giving the laborer less than he earned. It was characteristic of the Washington statesmanship that whatever he or anybody believed or wanted must be subordinated to dominant public opinion and that opinion deferred to and cajoled until it allowed a deviation toward better ways. It was my theory to guide and force public opinion by leadership. While my leadership was a matter of writing and teaching, the Washington leadership became a matter of organization and money. It was what I may call the Tuskegee Machine.

The years from 1899 to 1905 marked the culmination of the career of Booker T. Washington. In 1899 Mr. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and myself spoke on the same platform at the Hollis Street Theater, Boston, before a distinguished audience. Mr. Washington was not at his best and friends immediately raised a fund which sent him to Europe for a three months' rest. He was received with extraordinary honors: he had tea with the aged Queen Victoria, but two years before her death; he was entertained by two dukes and members of the aristocracy; he met James Bryce and Henry M. Stanley; he was received at the Peace Conference at The Hague and was greeted by many distinguished Americans, like ex-President Harrison, Archbishop Ireland and two justices of the Supreme Court. Only a few years before he had received an honorary A.M. from Harvard; in 1901, he received a LL.D. from Dartmouth; and that same year he dined with President Roosevelt to the consternation of the white South.

Returning to America he became during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft, from 1901

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to 1912, the political referee in all Federal appointments or action taken with reference to the Negro and in many regarding the white South. In 1903 Andrew Carnegie made the future of Tuskegee certain by a gift of $600,000. There was no question of Booker T. Washington's undisputed leadership of the ten million Negroes in America, a leadership recognized gladly by the whites and conceded by most of the Negroes.

But there were discrepancies and paradoxes in this leadership. It did not seem fair, for instance, that on the one hand Mr. Washington should decry political activities among Negroes, and on the other hand dictate Negro political objectives from Tuskegee. At a time when Negro civil rights called for organized and aggressive defense, he broke down that defense by advising acquiescence or at least no open agitation. During the period when laws disfranchising the Negro were being passed in all the Southern states, between 1890 and 1909, and when these were being supplemented by "jim-crow" travel laws and other enactments making color caste legal, his public speeches, while they did not entirely ignore this development, tended continually to excuse it, to emphasize the shortcomings of the Negro, and were interpreted widely as putting the chief onus for his condition upon the Negro himself.

All this naturally aroused increasing opposition among Negroes and especially among the younger class of educated Negroes, who were beginning to emerge here and there, particularly from Northern institutions. This opposition began to become vocal in 1901 when two men, Monroe Trotter, Harvard 1895, and George Forbes, Amherst 1895, began the publication of the Boston Guardian. The Guardian, a weekly periodical, was bitter, satirical, and personal; but it was well edited, it was earnest, and it published facts. It attracted wide attention among colored people; it circulated among them all over the country; it was quoted and discussed. I did not wholly agree with the Guardian, and indeed only a few Negroes did, but nearly all read it or were influenced by it.

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This beginning of organized opposition, together with other events, led to the growth at Tuskegee of what I have called the Tuskegee Machine. It arose first quite naturally. Not only did presidents of the United States consult Booker T. Washington, but governors and congressmen; philanthropists conferred with him, scholars wrote to him. Tuskegee became a vast information bureau and center of advice. It was not merely passive in these matters but, guided by Emmett Scott, a young secretary who was intelligent, suave and far-seeing, active efforts were made to concentrate influence at Tuskegee. After a time almost no Negro institution could collect funds without the recommendation or acquiescence of Mr. Washington. Few political appointments of Negroes were made anywhere in the United States without his consent. Even the careers of rising young colored men were very often determined by his advice and certainly his opposition was fatal. How much Mr. Washington knew of this work of the Tuskegee Machine and was directly responsible, one cannot say, but of its general activity and scope he must have been aware.

Moreover, it must not be forgotten that this Tuskegee Machine was not solely the idea and activity of black folk at Tuskegee. It was largely encouraged and given financial aid through certain white groups and individuals in the North. This Northern group had clear objectives. They were capitalists and employers of labor and yet in most cases sons, relatives, or friends of the Abolitionists who had sent teachers into the new Negro South after the war. These younger men believed that the Negro problem could not remain a matter of philanthropy. It must be a matter of business. These Negroes were not to be encouraged as voters in the new democracy, nor were they to be left at the mercy of the reactionary South. They were good laborers and they could be made of tremendous profit to the North. They could become a strong labor force and properly guided they would restrain the unbridled demands of white labor, born of the Northern labor unions and now spreading to the South and encouraged by European socialism.

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One danger must be avoided and that was to allow the silly idealism of Negroes, half-trained in missionary "colleges," to mislead the mass of laborers and keep them stirred-up by ambitions incapable of realization. To this school of thought, the philosophy of Booker T. Washington came as a godsend and it proposed by building up his prestige and power, to control the Negro group. The control was to be drastic. The Negro intelligentsia was to be suppressed and hammered into conformity. The process involved some cruelty and disappointment, but that was inevitable. This was the real force back of the Tuskegee Machine. It had money and it had opportunity, and it found in Tuskegee tools to do its bidding.

There were some rather pitiful results in thwarted ambition and curtailed opportunity. I remember one case which always stands in my memory as typical. There was a young colored man, one of the most beautiful human beings I have ever seen, with smooth brown skin, velvet eyes of intelligence, and raven hair. He was educated and well-to-do. He proposed to use his father's Alabama farm and fortune to build a Negro town as an independent economic unit in the South. He furnished a part of the capital but soon needed more and he came North to get it. He struggled for more than a decade; philanthropists and capitalists were fascinated by his personality and story; and when, according to current custom, they appealed to Tuskegee for confirmation, there was silence. Mr. Washington would not say a word in favor of the project. He simply kept still. Will Benson struggled on with ups and downs, but always balked by a whispering galley of suspicion, because his plan was never endorsed by Tuskegee. In the midst of what seemed to us who looked on the beginnings of certain success, Benson died of overwork, worry, and a broken heart.

From facts like this, one may gauge the bitterness of the fight of young Negroes against Mr. Washington and Tuskegee. The controversy as it developed was not entirely against Mr. Washington's ideas, but became the insistence upon the right of other Negroes to have and express their ideas.

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Things came to such a pass that when any Negro complained or advocated a course of action, he was silenced with the remark that Mr. Washington did not agree with this. Naturally the bumptious, irritated, young black intelligentsia of the day declared: "I don't care a damn what Booker Washington thinks. This is what I think, and I have a right to think."

It was this point, and not merely disagreement with Mr. Washington's plans, that brought eventually violent outbreak. It was more than opposition to a program of education. It was opposition to a system and that system was part of the economic development of the United States at that time. The fight cut deep: it went into social relations; it divided friends; it made bitter enemies. I can remember that years later, when I went to live in New York and was once invited to a social gathering among Brooklyn colored people, one of the most prominent Negroes of the city refused to be present because of my attitude toward Mr. Washington.

When the Guardian began to increase in influence, determined effort was made to build up a Negro press for Tuskegee. Already Tuskegee filled the horizon so far as national magazines and the great newspapers were concerned. In 1901 the Outlook, then the leading weekly, chose two distinguished Americans for autobiographies. Mr. Washington's Up From Slavery was so popular that it was soon published and circulated all over the earth. Thereafter, every magazine editor sought articles with Washington's signature and publishing houses continued to ask for books. A number of talented "ghost writers," black and white, took service under Tuskegee, and books and articles poured out of the institution. An annual letter "To My People" went out from Tuskegee to the press. Tuskegee became the capital of the Negro nation. Negro newspapers were influenced and finally the oldest and largest was bought by white friends of Tuskegee. Most of the other papers found it to their advantage certainly not to oppose Mr. Washington, even if they did not wholly agree with him,

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I was greatly disturbed at this time, not because I was in absolute opposition to the things that Mr. Washington was advocating, but because I was strongly in favor of more open agitation against wrongs and above all I resented the practical buying up of the Negro press and choking off even mild and reasonable opposition to Mr. Washington in both the Negro press and the white.

Then, too, during these years there came a series of influences that were brought to bear upon me personally, which increased my discomfort and resentment. I had tried to keep in touch with Hampton and Tuskegee, for I regarded them as great institutions. I attended the conferences which for a long time were held at Hampton, and at one of them I was approached by a committee. It consisted of Walter Hines Page, editor of the Atlantic Monthly; William McVickar, Episcopal bishop of Rhode Island; and Dr. H. B. Frissell, principal of Hampton and brother of a leading New York banker. They asked me about the possibilities of my editing a periodical to be published at Hampton. I told them of my dreams and plans, and afterwards wrote them in detail. But one query came by mail: that was concerning the editorial direction. I replied firmly that editorial decisions were to be in my hands, if I edited the magazine. This was undiplomatic and too dogmatic; and yet, it brought to head the one real matter in controversy: would such a magazine be dominated by and subservient to the Tuskegee philosophy, or would it have freedom of thought and discussion? Perhaps if I had been more experienced, the question could have been discussed and some reasonable outcome obtained; but I doubt it. I think any such magazine launched at the time would have been seriously curtailed in its freedom of speech. At any rate, the project was dropped.

Beginning in 1902 pressure was put upon me to give up my work at Atlanta University and go to Tuskegee. There again I was not at first adverse in principle to Tuskegee, except that I wanted to continue the studies which I had begun and if my work was worth support, it was worth support

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at Atlanta University. I was unable to obtain assurance that my studies would be continued at Tuskegee, and that I would not sink to the level of a "ghost writer." I remember a letter came from Wallace Buttrick late in 1902, asking that I attend a private conference in New York with Felix Adler, William H. Baldwin, Jr., George Foster Peabody, and Robert Ogden. The object of the conference was ostensibly the condition of the Negro in New York City. I went to the conference and did not like it. Most of the more distinguished persons named were not present. The conference itself amounted to little, but after adjournment I was whisked over to William H. Baldwin's beautiful Long Island home and there what seemed to me to be the real object of my coming was disclosed. Mr. Baldwin was at that time president of the Long Island Railroad and slated to be president of the Southern. He was a rising industrial leader of America; also he was a prime mover on the Tuskegee board of trustees. Both he and his wife insisted that my place was at Tuskegee; that Tuskegee was not yet a good school, and needed the kind of development that I had been trained to promote.

This was followed by two interviews with Mr. Washington himself. I was elated at the opportunity and we met twice in New York City. The results to me were disappointing. Booker T. Washington was not an easy person to know. He was wary and silent. He never expressed himself frankly or clearly until he knew exactly to whom he was talking and just what their wishes and desires were. He did not know me, and I think he was suspicious. On the other hand, I was quick, fast-speaking and voluble. I had nothing to conceal. I found at the end of the first interview that I had done practically all the talking and that no clear and definite offer or explanation of my proposed work at Tuskegee had been made. In fact, Mr. Washington had said about as near nothing as was possible.

The next interview did not go so well because I myself said little. Finally, we resorted to correspondence. Even then I could get no clear understanding of just what I was

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going to do at Tuskegee if I went. I was given to understand that the salary and accommodations would be satisfactory. In fact, I was invited to name my price. Later in the year I went to Bar Harbor for a series of speeches in behalf of Atlanta University, and while there met Jacob Schiff, the [William J.] Schieffelins and Merriam of Webster's dictionary. I had dinner with the Schieffelins and their mother-in-law, whose father [Melville W. Fuller] was once Chief Justice of the United States. Again I was urged to go to Tuskegee.

Early in the next year I received an invitation to join Mr. Washington and certain prominent white and colored friends in a conference to be held in New York. The conference was designed to talk over a common program for the American Negro and evidently it was hoped that the growing division of opinion and opposition to Mr. Washington within the ranks of Negroes would thus be overcome. I was enthusiastic over the idea. It seemed to me just what was needed to clear the air.

There was difficulty, however, in deciding what persons ought to be invited to the conference; how far it should include Mr. Washington's extreme opponents, or how far it should be composed principally of his friends. There ensued a long delay and during this time it seemed to me that I ought to make my own position clearer than I had hitherto. I was increasingly uncomfortable under the statements of Mr. Washington's position: his depreciation of the value of the vote; his evident dislike of Negro colleges; and his general attitude which seemed to place the onus of blame for the status of Negroes upon the Negroes themselves rather than upon the whites. And above all I resented the Tuskegee Machine.

I had been asked sometime before by A. C. McClurg & Co. of Chicago if I did not have some material for a book; I planned a social study which should be perhaps a summing up of the work of the Atlanta Conference, or at any rate, a scientific investigation. They asked, however, if I did not have some essays that they might put together and

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issue immediately, mentioning my articles in the Atlantic Monthly and other places. I demurred because books of essays almost always fall so flat. Nevertheless, I got together a number of my fugitive pieces. I then added a chapter, "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others," in which I sought to make a frank evaluation of Booker T. Washington. I left out the more controversial matter: the bitter resentment which young Negroes felt at the continued and increasing activity of the Tuskegee Machine. I concentrated my thought and argument on Mr. Washington's general philosophy. As I read that statement now, I am satisfied with it. I see no word that I would change. I said:

"The black men of America have a duty to perform, a duty stern and delicate -- a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of their greatest leader. So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift, Patience, and Industrial Training for the masses, we must hold up his hands and strive with him, rejoicing in his honors and glorying in the strength of this Joshua called of God and of man to lead the headless host. But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds -- so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this -- we must unceasingly and firmly oppose him. By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: `We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'"

Pressure came from white Northern friends, who I believed appreciated my work and on the whole wished me and my race well. But they were apprehensive; fearful because as perhaps the most conspicuously trained young Negro of my day, and, quite apart from any question of ability,

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my reaction toward the new understanding between North and South, and especially my attitude toward Mr. Washington, were bound to influence Negroes. As a matter of fact, at that time I was not over-critical of Booker Washington. I regarded his Atlanta speech as a statesmanlike effort to reach understanding with the white South; I hoped the South would respond with equal generosity and thus the nation could come to understanding for both races. When, however, the South responded with "jim-crow" legislation, I became uneasy. Still I believed that my program of investigation and study was just what was needed to bring understanding in the long run, based on truth. I tried to make this clear. I attended the conferences at Hampton for several years, and became increasingly critical of those Hampton opinions. In all the deliberations to which I listened, and resolutions, which were passed at Hampton, never once was the work of Atlanta University nor college work anywhere for Negroes, commended or approved. I ceased regular attendance at the conferences; but when later I was invited back I delivered a defense of higher training for Negroes and a scathing criticism of the "Hampton Idea." I was not asked to return to Hampton for 25 years.

My book settled pretty definitely any further question of my going to Tuskegee as an employee. But it also drew pretty hard and fast lines about my future career. Meantime, the matter of the conference in New York dragged on until finally in October 1903, a circular letter was sent out setting January 1904 as the date of meeting. The conference took place accordingly in Carnegie Hall, New York. About 50 persons were present, most of them colored and including many well-known persons. There was considerable plain speaking but the whole purpose of the conference seemed revealed by the invited white guests and the tone of their message. Several persons of high distinction came to speak to us, including Andrew Carnegie and Lyman Abbott. Their words were lyric, almost fulsome in praise of Mr. Washington and his work, and in support of his ideas. Even if all they said

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had been true, it was a wrong note to strike in a conference of conciliation. The conference ended with two speeches by Mr. Washington and myself, and the appointment of a Committee of Twelve in which we were also included.

The Committee of Twelve which was thus instituted was unable to do any effective work as a steering committee for the Negro race in America. First of all, it was financed, through Mr. Washington, probably by Mr. Carnegie. This put effective control of the committee in Mr. Washington's hands. It was organized during my absence and laid down a plan of work which seemed to me of some value but of no lasting importance and having little to do with the larger questions and issues. I therefore soon resigned so as not to be responsible for work and pronouncements over which I would have little influence. My friends and others accused me of refusing to play the game after I had assented to a program of cooperation. I still think, however, that my action was wise.

By this time I was pretty throughly disillusioned. It did not seem possible for me to occupy middle ground and try to appease the Guardian on the one hand and the Hampton-Tuskegee idea on the other. I began to feel the strength and implacability of the Tuskegee Machine; the Negro newspapers definitely showing their reaction and publishing jibes and innuendoes at my expense. Filled with increasing indignation, I published in the Guardian a statement concerning the venality of certain Negro papers which I charged had sold out to Mr. Washington. It was a charge difficult of factual proof without an expenditure of time and funds not at my disposal. I was really at last openly tilting against the Tuskegee Machine and its methods. These methods have become common enough in our day for all sorts of purposes: the distribution of advertising and favors, the sending out of special correspondence, veiled and open attacks upon recalcitrants, the narrowing of opportunities for employment and promotion. All this is a common method of procedure today, but in 1904 it seemed to me monstrous and dishonest, and I resented it. On the other hand, the public expression

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of this resentment greatly exercised and annoyed Mr. Washington's friends. Some knew little about these activities at Tuskegee; others knew and approved. The New York Evening Post challenged me to present proof of my statements and refused to regard my answer as sufficient, which was of course true.

Then came a new and surprising turn to the whole situation which in the end quite changed my life. In the early summer of 1905, Mr. Washington went to Boston and arranged to speak in a colored church to colored people -- a thing which he did not often do in the North. Trotter and Forbes, editors of the Guardian, determined to heckle him and make him answer publicly certain questions with regard to his attitude toward voting and education. William H. Lewis, a colored lawyer whom I myself had introduced to Mr. Washington, had charge of the meeting, and the result was a disturbance magnified by the newspapers into a "riot," which resulted in the arrest of Mr. Trotter. Finally he served a term in jail.

With this incident I had no direct connection whatsoever. I did not know beforehand of the meeting in Boston, nor of the projected plan to heckle Mr. Washington. But when Trotter went to jail, my indignation overflowed. I did not always agree with Trotter then or later. But he was an honest, brilliant, unselfish man, and to treat as a crime that which was at worst mistaken judgment was an outrage. I sent out from Atlanta in June 1905 a call to a few selected persons "for organized determination and aggressive action on the part of men who believe in Negro freedom and growth." I proposed a conference during the summer "to oppose firmly present methods of strangling honest criticism; to organize intelligent and honest Negroes; and to support organs of news and public opinion."

Fifty-nine colored men from 17 different states eventually signed a call for a meeting near Buffalo, New York, during the week of July 9, 1905. I went to Buffalo and hired a little hotel on the Canadian side of the river at Fort Erie, and waited for the men to attend the meeting. If sufficient men

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had not come to pay for the hotel, I should certainly have been in bankruptcy and perhaps in jail; but as a matter of fact, 29 men, representing 14 states, came. The "Niagara Movement" was incorporated January 31, 1906, in the District of Columbia.

Its particular business and objects were to advocate and promote the following principles:

1. Freedom of speech and criticism.

2. An unfettered and unsubsidized press.

3. Manhood suffrage.

4. The abolition of all caste distinctions based simply on race and color.

5. The recognition of the principle of human brother-hood as a practical present creed.

6. The recognition of the highest and best human training as the monopoly of no class or race.

7. A belief in the dignity of labor.

8. United effort to realize these ideals under wise and courageous leadership.

The Niagara Movement raised a furor of the most disconcerting criticism. I was accused of acting from motives of envy of a great leader and being ashamed of the fact that I was a member of the Negro race. The leading weekly of the land, the New York Outlook, pilloried me with scathing articles. But the movement went on. The next year, 1906, instead of meeting in secret, we met openly at Harper's Ferry, the scene of John Brown's raid, and had in significance if not in numbers one of the greatest meetings that American Negroes ever held. We made pilgrimage at dawn bare-footed to the scene of Brown's martyrdom and we talked some of the plainest English that had been given voice to by black men in America. The resolutions which I wrote expressed with tumult of emotion my creed of 1906:

The men of the Niagara Movement, coming from the toil of the year's hard work, and pausing a moment from the earning of their daily bread, turn toward the nation and again ask in the name of ten million the privilege of a hearing. In the past year the work of the

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Negro hater has flourished in the land. Step by step the defenders of the rights of American citizens have retreated. The work of stealing the black man's ballot has progressed and fifty and more representatives of stolen votes still sit in the nation's capital. Discrimination in travel and public accommodation has so spread that some of our weaker brethren are actually afraid to thunder against color discrimination as such and are simply whispering for ordinary decencies.

Against this the Niagara Movement eternally protests. We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil, and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America. The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone, but for all true Americans. It is a fight for ideals, lest this, our common fatherland, false to its founding, become in truth the land of the Thief and the home of the Slave -- a byword and a hissing among the nations for its sounding pretensions and pitiful accomplishment.

Never before