IX. "Of the Sons of Master and Man"

The ninth essay in The Souls of Black Folk is " Of the Sons of Master and Man"  This essay is based on the article, "The Relation of the Negroes to the Whites in the South" published in the Annals of the American Academy of the Political and Social Sciences (July-December 1901): 121-40.
The lines of music are from the Negro spiritual "I'm A Rollin'"

Listen to the Alfred Street Baptist Church Male Chorus sing "I'm A Rollin'"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7ktp6cy4hY

Du Bois wrote:
The world-old phenomenon of the contact of diverse races of men is to have new exemplification during the new century.  Indeed, the characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with the world's undeveloped peoples.

It is then, the strifr of all honorable men of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence and cruelty.

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST



   Herbert Spencer


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfBVyutexm0


Herbert Spencer (born April 27, 1820, Derby, Derbyshire, Eng. — died Dec. 8, 1903, Brighton, Sussex) English sociologist and philosopher, advocate of the theory of social Darwinism. His System of Synthetic Philosophy, 9 vol. (1855 – 96), held that the physical, organic, and social realms are interconnected and develop according to identical evolutionary principles, a scheme suggested by the evolution of biological species. This sociocultural evolution amounted to, in Spencer's phrase, "the survival of the fittest." The free market system, without interference by governments, would weed out the weak and unfit. His controversial laissez-faire philosophy was praised by social Darwinists such as William Graham Sumner and opposed by sociologists such as Lester Frank Ward. Liked or loathed, Spencer was one of the most discussed Victorian thinkers.

The Function of Today's HBCU

In 1903 Du Bois stated:

The function of the Negro college, then, is clear; it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and cooperation.

What is the function of the HBCU today?

The Talented Tenth: An Assessment by Nell Irvin Painter

Nell Irvin Painter on the Talented Tenth

Who is the Talented Tenth? This time-bound phrase comes from Du Bois's 1903 essay, "The Negro Problem," quoted in the Appendix of The Future of the Race, and begins: "The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men." These exceptional men--and Du Bois did mean men--would "guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst." The Talented Tenth would shoulder the task of uplifting the race without succumbing to money-grubbing selfishness; their formal education signified their intelligence and enlightened character. In 1903, the Talented Tenth was broad-minded and big-hearted by definition.

The passage of forty-five years diminished Du Bois's assurance. By 1948 he had revised his appraisal, and that revision also appears in the Appendix. He confessed the error of his assumption that altruism flowed automatically from higher education. The Best Men had not become the best of men. He lamented that the Talented Tenth had mostly produced self-indulgent egotists who turned their training toward personal advancement. Meanwhile, Du Bois had been learning to respect the masses from reading Marx. Nonetheless, he still cherished a hope that a new, self-sacrificing Talented Tenth of internationally minded men--still men--would ally African-Americans to the peoples of the Third World and uplift the colored masses universally. . . .

Du Bois never saw the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the age of affirmative action, which provided unprecedented opportunities to men like Gates and West. Du Bois died before the growth of the largest African-American middle class in history. He also died long before the invention of black women's studies, whose tenor often varies from what black men have to say.

Source:  http://www.nellpainter.com/cv/reviews/R34_FutureRace.html

VI. Of the Training of Black Men"

The sixth essay in The Souls of Black Folk is "Of the Training of Black Men"

Du Bois argues in this essay that "we are called to solve the problem of training men for life".  This essay originally appeared the September 1902 issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine.  Click on link to read the essay as it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly:  http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/blacked/dutrain.htm

Click on link to read earlier articles Booker T. Washington wrote in Atlantic Monthly on the education of African Americans:  http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/blacked/washaw.htm

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/black/washbh.htm


In his argument for the broad liberal arts training of African Americans,  Du Bois quotes an excerpt of Matthew 6: 25:

Is not life more than meat, and the body more than raiment?"

A more recent translation of the entire verse reads like this:

 Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?

Jesus in Matthew 6: 25 and Du Bois in this essay are railing against materialism, but what is materialism?
Bob Deffinbaugh in an online commentary describes materialism as:

Materialism, however, has nothing to do with how much money you or I have in the bank. It has little to do with whether you drive a Rolls Royce or a Rambler. Materialism is primarily an attitude toward money and its importance. Materialism is an attitude which attaches to money and material goods more importance than they deserve. To go one step further, materialism is primarily a matter of reversed priorities. You cannot identify a materialist by an audit, but only by exposing his attitudes.

Source: http://bible.org/seriespage/fatal-failures-religion-4-materialism-matthew-619-34#TopOfPage

Why is the argument against materialism important?
Du Bois argues in the essay that:
The tendency is here, born of slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends?
What do you think?

V. "Of the Wings of Atalanta"

The fifth essay in The Souls of Black Folk is "Of the Wings of Atalanta".  It begins with stanza six of John Greenleaf Whittier's poem "Howard at Atlanta" (1869).  The musical bars are from the obscure Negro spiritual, "The Rocks and Mountains".  "Atalanta" is a romantic way of spelling Atlanta and alludes the Greek myth a free spirited woman named Atalanta who would only marry the man who could beat her in a foot race.  Du Bois compares the city of Atlanta to that free-spirited woman.

The most important topic Du Bois discusses in this essay is the function of the university.  This discussion is as important in 2010 as it was in 1903 when Du Bois published The Souls of Black or in 1933 when Carter G. Woodson published the Mis-Education of the Negro.  The discussion of the function of the university extends beyond the industrial arts versus classical education debate of the early twentieth century.  It even extends beyond the university to elementary and secondary education.  Documentaries like "Waiting for Superman" and "The Lottery" highlight how crucial a topic the function of thehee university and more broadly speaking the function of education is.

Du Bois in the essay, "The Wings of Atalanta" argues that:

The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.

 Check out the trailer for "Waiting For Superman"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKTfaro96dg

Check out Amos Wilson talking about the function of education
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6ShE9IONGQ

Check education clip:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fnh9q_cQcUE


Check out on 21st Century Educational Realities:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc1hgMl3uUk

Another kind of College Administrator: John Hope

    


If money, education, and honesty will not bring to me as much privilege, as much equality as they bring to any American citizen, then
 

   




If money, education, and honesty will not bring to me as much privilege, as much equality as they bring to any American citizen, then they are to me a curse, and not a blessing.
John Hope

June 30, 1906, John Hope became the first Black president of Morehouse College in Atlanta. John Hope was an important African American educator and race leader of the early twentieth century. Twenty-three years later, in 1929, Hope went on to become the first African American president of Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University). Under his leadership, Atlanta University became the first college in the nation to focus exclusively on graduate education for African American students. As a race leader, Hope was steadfast in his support of public education, adequate housing, health care, job opportunities, and recreational facilities for blacks in Atlanta and across the nation. He also supported full civil rights in the South during an era when African Americans were expected to accommodate a system of inequality.
To accomplish his goals, Hope embraced several civil rights organizations, including the Niagara Movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the southern-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation. He was also very active in such social service organizations as the National Urban League, the “Colored Men’s Department” of the YMCA, and the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools. Hope was very well known among both blacks and whites in the early twentieth century. Buck Franklin, the father of the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin, was so impressed with Hope’s social and educational leadership that he named his son after Hope.
John Hope’s early life contributes much to an understanding not only of racial identity but also of class, color, and caste among African Americans, especially in the South. Born of a biracial union in Augusta on June 2, 1868, he belonged to a small black elite whose history predated the end of slavery. His father, Scottish-born James Hope, immigrated to New York City early in the nineteenth century and eventually moved to Augusta, where he became a prominent businessman. His mother, Mary Frances Butts, was a free African American woman born in Hancock County, Georgia. Although Georgia law prohibited interracial marriages, Hope’s parents lived openly as husband and wife until his father’s death in 1876.
Hope’s education prepared him for his life’s work. Though he quit school after the eighth grade to help his struggling family survive, he decided five years later to complete his education and attended a preparatory school in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1886. He went on to earn a B.A. degree in 1894 at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Hope eventually decided to become a professional educator, teaching first at Roger Williams University, a small black liberal-arts school on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee. In 1897 Hope married Lugenia Burns, who would also become a prominent race leader and social activist. They moved in 1898 to Atlanta, where he took a teaching position at Atlanta Baptist College, which became Morehouse College in 1913. It was in Atlanta that Hope first met and befriended prominent black leaders and educators like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.

Something to think about . . .

As we conclude our reading of "Of Booker T. Washington and Others" Du Bois' third essay in The Souls of Black Folk, there are several quotes I would like for us to think about:

Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,--criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led,--this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society.

Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.

We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.

His [Booker T. Washington] doctrine has tended to make the whites North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro's shoulders and stand  aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to the righting these great wrongs.