I had associated them with the
Negro of the past, not with the Negro who was struggling upward.
They brought to my mind the plantation, the cabin, the slave, not
the freedman in quest of education. But on the plantation and in
the cabin they had never been sung as these thousand students
sang them. I saw again all the old plantations that I had ever
seen; the whole history of the Negro ran through my mind; and the
inexpressible pathos of his life found expression in these songs
as I had never before felt it.
And the future? These were the ambitious youths of the race, at
work with an earnestness that put to shame the conventional
student life of most educational institutions. Another song
rolled up along the rafters. And as soon as silence came, I found
myself in front of this extraordinary mass of faces, thinking not
of them, but of that long and unhappy chapter in our country's
history which followed the one great structural mistake of the
Fathers of the Republic; thinking of the one continuous great
problem that generations of statesmen had wrangled over, and a
million men fought about, and that had so dwarfed the mass of
English men in the Southern States as to hold them back a hundred
years behind their fellows in every other part of the world--in
England, in Australia, and in the Northern and Western States; I
was thinking of this dark shadow that had oppressed every
large-minded statesman from Jefferson to Lincoln.
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