made to flourish servility and lewdness and apathy. But not even this was
able to crush all manhood and chastity and aspiration from black folk. A
saving remnant continually survives and persists, continually aspires,
continually shows itself in thrift and ability and character. Exceptional
it is to be sure, but this is its chiefest promise; it shows the
capability of Negro blood, the promise of black men. Do Americans ever
stop to reflect that there are in this land a million men of Negro blood,
well-educated, owners of homes, against the honor of whose womanhood no
breath was ever raised, whose men occupy positions of trust and
usefulness, and who, judged by any standard, have reached the full measure
of the best type of modern European culture? Is it fair, is it decent, is
it Christian to ignore these facts of the Negro problem, to belittle such
aspiration, to nullify such leadership and seek to crush these people back
into the mass out of which by toil and travail, they and their fathers
have raised themselves?

Can the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more quickly
raised than by the effort and example of this aristocracy of talent and
character? Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the
bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top
downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that
are worth the saving up to their vantage ground. This is the history of
human progress; and the two historic mistakes which have hindered that
progress were the thinking first that no more could ever rise save the few
already risen; or second, that it would better the unrisen to pull the
risen down.

How then shall the leaders of a struggling people be trained and the hands
of the risen few strengthened? There can be but one answer: The best and
most capable of their youth must be schooled in the colleges and