Douglass, were self-trained, but yet trained liberally; others, like
Alexander Crummell and McCune Smith, graduated from famous foreign
universities. Most of them rose up through the colored schools of New York
and Philadelphia and Boston, taught by college-bred men like Russworm, of
Dartmouth, and college-bred white men like Neau and Benezet.

After emancipation came a new group of educated and gifted leaders:
Langston, Bruce and Elliot, Greener, Williams and Payne. Through political
organization, historical and polemic writing and moral regeneration, these
men strove to uplift their people. It is the fashion of to-day to sneer at
them and to say that with freedom Negro leadership should have begun at
the plow and not in the Senate--a foolish and mischievous lie; two hundred
and fifty years that black serf toiled at the plow and yet that toiling
was in vain till the Senate passed the war amendments; and two hundred
and fifty years more the half-free serf of to-day may toil at his plow,
but unless he have political rights and righteously guarded civic
status, he will still remain the poverty-stricken and ignorant plaything
of rascals, that he now is. This all sane men know even if they dare
not say it.

And so we come to the present--a day of cowardice and vacillation, of
strident wide-voiced wrong and faint hearted compromise; of double-faced
dallying with Truth and Right. Who are to-day guiding the work of the
Negro people? The "exceptions" of course. And yet so sure as this Talented
Tenth is pointed out, the blind worshippers of the Average cry out in
alarm: "These are exceptions, look here at death, disease and crime--these
are the happy rule." Of course they are the rule, because a silly nation
made them the rule: Because for three long centuries this people lynched
Negroes who dared to be brave, raped black women who dared to be virtuous,
crushed dark-hued youth who dared to be ambitious, and encouraged and