“Practically all of the successful
Negroes in this country are of the uneducated type or of that of Negroes who have had no formal education at all. The large
majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges are all but worthless in the development
of their people. If after leaving school they have the opportunity to give out to Negroes what traducers of the race would
like to have it learn such persons may thereby earn a living at teaching or preaching what they have been taught but they
never become a constructive force in the development of the race. The so-called school, then, becomes a questionable factor
in the life of this despised people. As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is
a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. It kills one's aspirations
and dooms him to”
“If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you
determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he
is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think
that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is
no back door, his very nature will demand one.”
“History shows that it does
not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves
and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.”
"Philosophers have long conceded,
however, that every man has two educators: 'that which is given to him, and the other that which he gives himself. Of the
two kinds the latter is by far the more desirable. Indeed all that is most worthy in man he must work out and conquer for
himself. It is that which constitutes our real and best nourishment. What we are merely taught seldom nourishes the mind like
that which we teach ourselves.”
“It may be well to repeat
here the saying that old men talk of what they have done, young men of what they are doing, and fools of what they expect
to do. The Negro race has a rather large share of the last mentioned class.”
“In the schools of business
administration Negroes are trained exclusively in the psychology and economics of Wall Street and are, therefore, made to
despise the opportunities to run ice wagons, push banana carts, and sell peanuts among their own people. Foreigners, who have
not studied economics but have studied Negroes, take up this business and grow rich.”
