353
w. e. b. du bois
A Negro Student
at Harvard at the End
of the 19th Century
H
arvard university in 1888 was a great institution of learning.
It was 238 years old and on its governing board were Alexander
Agassiz, Phillips Brooks, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Charles Francis Adams;
and a John Quincy Adams, but not the ex-President. Charles William
Eliot, a gentleman by training and a scholar by broad study and travel,
was president. Among its teachers emeriti were Oliver Wendell Holmes
and James Russell Lowell. Among the active teachers were Francis Child,
Charles Eliot Norton, Justin Winsor and John Trowbridge; Frank Taussig,
Nathaniel Shaler, George Palmer, William James, Francis Peabody, Josiah
Royce, Barrett Wendell, Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart. In
1890 arrived a young instructor, George Santayana. Seldom, if ever, has
any American University had such a galaxy of great men and fine teachers
as Harvard in the decade between 1885 and 1895.
To make my own attitude toward the Harvard of that day clear, it must
be remembered that I went to Harvard as a Negro, not simply by birth,
but recognizing myself as a member of a segregated caste whose situation
I accepted. But I was determined to work from within that caste to find
my way out.
The Harvard of which most white students conceived I knew little. I
had not even heard of Phi Beta Kappa, and of such important social orga-
nizations as the Hasty Pudding Club, I knew nothing. I was in Harvard
for education and not for high marks, except as marks would insure my
staying. I did not pick out “snap” courses. I was there to enlarge my grasp
of the meaning of the universe. We had had, for instance, no chemical
laboratory at Fisk; our mathematics courses were limited. Above all I
wanted to study philosophy! I wanted to get hold of the bases of knowl-
edge, and explore foundations and beginnings. I chose, therefore, Palmer’s
course in ethics, but since Palmer was on sabbatical that year, William
James replaced him, and I became a devoted follower of James at the time
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354
he was developing his pragmatic philosophy.
Fortunately I did not fall into the mistake of regarding Harvard as the
beginning rather than the continuing of my college training. I did not
find better teachers at Harvard, but teachers better known, who had had
wider facilities for gaining knowledge and lived in a broader atmosphere
for approaching truth. I hoped to pursue philosophy as my life career,
with teaching for support. With this program I studied at Harvard from
the fall of 1888 to 1890, as undergraduate. I took a varied course in
chemistry, geology, social science and philosophy. My salvation here was
the type of teacher I met rather than the content of the courses. William
James guided me out of the sterilities of scholastic philosophy to realist
pragmatism; from Peabody’s social reform with a religious tinge I turned
to Albert Bushnell Hart to study history with documentary research;
and from Taussig, with his reactionary British economics of the Ricardo
school, I approached what was later to become sociology. Meantime Karl
Marx was mentioned, but only incidentally and as one whose doubtful
theories had long since been refuted. Socialism was dismissed as unim-
portant, as a dream of philanthropy or as a will-o-wisp of hotheads.
When I arrived at Harvard, the question of board and lodging was of
first importance. Naturally, I could not afford a room in the college yard
in the old and venerable buildings which housed most of the well-to-do
students under the magnificent elms. Neither did I think of looking for
lodgings among white families, where numbers of the ordinary students
lived. I tried to find a colored home, and finally at 20 Flagg Street I came
upon the neat home of a colored woman from Nova Scotia, a descendant
of those black Jamaican Maroons whom Britain had deported after sol-
emnly promising them peace if they would surrender. For a very reason-
able sum I rented the second storey front room and for four years this was
my home. I wrote of this abode at the time: “My room is, for a college
man’s abode, very ordinary indeed. It is quite pleasantly situated — second
floor, front, with a bay window and one other window . . . . As you enter
you will perceive the bed in the opposite corner, small and decorated with
floral designs calculated to puzzle a botanist . . . . On the left hand is a
bureau with a mirror of doubtful accuracy. In front of the bay window is
a stand with three shelves of books, and on the left of the bureau is an
improvised bookcase made of unpainted boards and uprights, containing
most of my library of which I am growing quite proud. Over the heat
register, near the door, is a mantle with a plaster of Paris pug-dog and a
calendar, and the usual array of odds and ends . . . . On the wall are a few
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W. E. B. Du Bois
quite ordinary pictures. In this commonplace den I am quite content.”
Following the attitudes which I had adopted in the South, I sought
no friendships among my white fellow students, nor even acquaintance-
ships. Of course I wanted friends, but I could not seek them. My class
was large — some three hundred students. I doubt if I knew a dozen of
them. I did not seek them, and naturally they did not seek me. I made no
attempt to contribute to the college periodicals since the editors were
not interested in my major interests. But I did have a good singing voice
and loved music, so I entered the competition for the Glee Club. I ought
to have known that Harvard could not afford to have a Negro on its Glee
Club traveling about the country. Quite naturally I was rejected.
I was happy at Harvard, but for unusual reasons. One of these was my
acceptance of racial segregation. Had I gone from Great Barrington High
School directly to Harvard, I would have sought companionship with
my white fellows and been disappointed and embittered by a discovery
of social limitations to which I had not been used. But I came by way of
Fisk and the South and there I had accepted color caste and embraced
eagerly the companionship of those of my own color. This was of course
no final solution. Eventually, in mass assault, led by culture, we Negroes
were going to break down the boundaries of race; but at present we were
banded together in a great crusade, and happily so. Indeed, I suspect that
the prospect of ultimate full human intercourse, without reservations and
annoying distinctions, made me all too willing to consort with my own
and to disdain and forget as far as was possible that outer, whiter world.
In general, I asked nothing of Harvard but the tutelage of teachers and
the freedom of the laboratory and library. I was quite voluntarily and will-
ingly outside its social life. I sought only such contacts with white teachers
as lay directly in the line of my work. I joined certain clubs, like the
Philosophical Club; I was a member of the Foxcroft dining club because
it was cheap. James and one or two other teachers had me at their homes
at meal and reception. I escorted colored girls to various gatherings, and
as pretty ones as I could find to the vesper exercises, and later to the class
day and commencement social functions. Naturally we attracted atten-
tion and the Crimson noted my girl friends. Sometimes the shadow of
insult fell, as when at one reception a white woman seemed determined
to mistake me for a waiter.
In general, I was encased in a completely colored world, self-suffi-
cient and provincial, and ignoring just as far as possible the white world
which conditioned it. This was self-protective coloration, with perhaps an
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inferiority complex, but with belief in the ability and future of black folk.
My friends and companions were drawn mainly from the colored
students of Harvard and neighboring institutions, and the colored folk of
Boston and surrounding towns. With them I led a happy and inspiring
life. There were among them many educated and well-to-do folk, many
young people studying or planning to study, many charming young
women. We met and ate, danced and argued, and planned a new world.
Towards whites I was not arrogant; I was simply not obsequious, and
to a white Harvard student of my day a Negro student who did not seek
recognition was trying to be more than a Negro. The same Harvard man
had much the same attitude toward Jews and Irishmen.
I was, however, exceptional among Negroes at Harvard in my ideas
on voluntary race segregation. They for the most part saw salvation only
in integration at the earliest moment and on almost any terms in white
culture; I was firm in my criticism of white folk and in my dream of a
self-sufficient Negro culture even in America. This cutting of myself off
from my white fellows, or being cut off, did not mean unhappiness or
resentment. I was in my early manhood, unusually full of high spirits and
humor. I thoroughly enjoyed life. I was conscious of understanding and
power, and conceited enough still to imagine, as in high school, that they
who did not know me were the losers, not I. On the other hand, I do
not think that my white classmates found me personally objectionable. I
was clean, not well-dressed but decently clothed. Manners I regarded as
more or less superfluous and deliberately cultivated a certain brusque-
rie. Personal adornment I regarded as pleasant but not important. I was
in Harvard, but not of it, and realized all the irony of my singing “Fair
Harvard.” I sang it because I liked the music, and not from any pride in
the pilgrims.
With my colored friends I carried on lively social intercourse, but
necessarily one which involved little expenditure of money. I called at
their homes and ate at their tables. We danced at private parties. We went
on excursions down the Bay. Once, with a group of colored students
gathered from surrounding institutions, we gave Aristophanes’ The Birds
in a Boston colored church. The rendition was good, but not outstand-
ing, not quite appreciated by the colored audience, but well worth doing.
Even though it worked me near to death, I was proud of it.
Thus the group of professional men, students, white-collar workers
and upper servants, whose common bond was color of skin in themselves
or in their fathers, together with a common history and current experi-
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W. E. B. Du Bois
ence of discrimination, formed a unit that like many tens of thousands
of like units across the nation had or were getting to have a common
culture pattern which made them an interlocking mass, so that increas-
ingly a colored person in Boston was more neighbor to a colored person
in Chicago than to a white person across the street.
Mrs. Ruffin of Charles Street, Boston, and her daughter Birdie were
often hostesses to this colored group. She was widow of the first colored
judge appointed in Massachusetts, an aristocratic lady, with olive skin and
high piled masses of white hair. Once a Boston white lady said to Mrs.
Ruffin ingratiatingly: “I have always been interested in your race.” Mrs.
Ruffin flared: “Which race?” She began a national organization of colored
women and published the Courant, a type of small colored weekly paper
which was then spreading over the nation. In this I published many of my
Harvard daily themes.
Naturally in this close group there grew up among the young people
friendships ending in marriages. I myself, outgrowing the youthful at-
tractions of Fisk, began serious dreams of love and marriage. There were,
however, still my study plans to hold me back and there were curious
other reasons. For instance, it happened that two of the girls whom I
particularly liked had what was to me then the insuperable handicap of
looking like whites, while they had enough black ancestry to make them
“Negroes” in America. I could not let the world even imagine that I had
married a white wife. Yet these girls were intelligent and companionable.
One went to Vassar College, which then refused entrance to Negroes.
Years later when I went there to lecture I remember disagreeing vio-
lently with a teacher who thought the girl ought not to have “deceived”
the college by graduating before it knew of her Negro descent! Another
favorite of mine was Deenie Pindell. She was a fine forthright woman,
blonde, blue-eyed and fragile. In the end I had no chance to choose her,
for she married Monroe Trotter.
Trotter was the son of a well-to-do colored father and entered Harvard
in my first year in the Graduate School. He was thick-set, yellow, with
close-cut dark hair. He was stubborn and strait-laced and an influential
member of his class. He organized the first Total Abstinence Club in the
Yard. I came to know him and joined the company when he and other
colored students took in a trip to Amherst to see our friends Forbes and
Lewis graduate in the class with Calvin Coolidge.
Lewis afterward entered the Harvard Law School and became the
celebrated center rush of the Harvard football team. He married the
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beautiful Bessie Baker, who had been with us on that Amherst trip.
Forbes, a brilliant, cynical dark man, later joined with Trotter in publish-
ing the Guardian, the first Negro paper to attack Booker T. Washington
openly. Washington’s friends retorted by sending Trotter to jail when he
dared to heckle Washington in a public Boston meeting on his political
views. I was not present nor privy to this occurrence, but the unfairness
of the jail sentence led me eventually to form the Niagara movement,
which later became the NAACP.
Thus I lived near to life, love and tragedy; and when I met Maud Cuney,
I became doubly interested. She was a tall, imperious brunette with gold-
bronze skin, brilliant eyes and coils of black hair, daughter of the Collector
of Customs at Galveston, Texas. She had come to study music and was a
skilled performer. When the New England Conservatory of Music tried
to “jim-crow” her in the dormitory, we students rushed to her defense and
we won. I fell deeply in love with her, and we were engaged.
Thus it is clear how in the general social intercourse on the campus I
consciously missed nothing. Some white students made themselves
known to me and a few, a very few, became lifelong friends. Most of my
classmates I knew neither by sight nor name. Among them many made
their mark in life: Norman Hapgood, Robert Herrick, Herbert Croly,
George Dorsey, Homer Folks, Augustus Hand, James Brown Scott, and
others. I knew none of these intimately. For the most part I do not doubt
that I was voted a somewhat selfish and self-centered “grind” with a chip
on my shoulder and a sharp tongue.
Only once or twice did I come to the surface of college life. First I
found by careful calculation that I needed the cash of one of the Boylston
prizes in oratory to piece out my year’s expenses. I got it through winning
a second oratorical prize. The occasion was noteworthy by the fact that
another black student, Clement Morgan, got first prize at the same contest.
With the increase at Harvard of students who had grown up outside
New England, there arose at this time a certain resentment at the way
New England students were dominating and conducting college affairs.
The class marshal on commencement day was always a Saltonstall, a Cabot,
a Lowell, or from some such New England family. The crew and most
of the heads of other athletic teams were selected from similarly limited
social groups. The class poet, class orator, and other commencement of-
ficials invariably were selected because of family and not for merit. It so
happened that when the officials of the class of 1890 were being selected
in early spring, a plot ripened. Personally, I knew nothing of it and was
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W. E. B. Du Bois
not greatly interested. But in Boston and in the Harvard Yard the result of
the elections was of tremendous significance, for this conspiratorial clique
selected Clement Morgan as class orator. New England and indeed the
whole country reverberated.
Morgan was a black man. He had been working in a barbershop in
St. Louis at the time when he ought to have been in school. With the
encouragement and help of a colored teacher, whom he later married,
he came to Boston and entered the Latin School. This meant that when
he finally entered Harvard, he entered as freshman in the orthodox way
and was well acquainted with his classmates. He was fairly well received,
considering his color. He was a pleasant unassuming person and one of
the best speakers of clearly enunciated English on the campus. In his
junior year he had earned the first Boylston prize for oratory in the same
contest where I won second prize. It was, then, logical for him to become
class orator, and yet this was against all the traditions of America. There
were editorials in the leading newspapers, and the South especially raged
and sneered at the audience of “black washerwomen” who would replace
Boston society at the next Harvard commencement.
Morgan’s success was contagious, and that year and the next in several
leading Northern colleges colored students became the class orators. Ex-
President Hayes, as I shall relate later, sneered at this fact. While, as I have
said, I had nothing to do with the plot, and was not even present at the
election which chose Morgan, I was greatly pleased at this breaking of
the color line. Morgan and I became fast friends and spent a summer
giving readings along the North Shore to defray our college costs.
Harvard of this day was a great opportunity for a young man and a
young American Negro and I realized it. I formed habits of work rather
different from those of most of the other students. I burned no midnight
oil. I did my studying in the daytime and had my day parceled out almost
to the minute. I spent a great deal of time in the library and did my assign-
ments with thoroughness and with prevision of the kind of work I wanted
to do later. From the beginning my relations with most of the teachers at
Harvard were pleasant. They were on the whole glad to receive a serious
student, to whom extracurricular activities were not of paramount impor-
tance, and one who in a general way knew what he wanted.
Harvard had in the social sciences no such leadership of thought and
breadth of learning as in philosophy, literature, and physical science. She was
then groping and is still groping toward a scientific treatment of human
action. She was facing at the end of the century a tremendous economic
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era. In the United States, finance was succeeding in monopolizing trans-
portation and raw materials like sugar, coal and oil. The power of the trust
and combine was so great that the Sherman Act was passed in 1890. On
the other hand, the tariff, at the demand of manufacturers, continued to
rise in height from the McKinley to the indefensible Wilson tariff, making
that domination easier. The understanding between the Industrial North
and the New South was being perfected and, beginning in 1890, a series
of disfranchising laws was enacted by the Southern states that was destined
in the next sixteen years to make voting by Southern Negroes practically
impossible. A financial crisis shook the land in 1893 and popular discon-
tent showed itself in the Populist movement and Coxey’s Army. The whole
question of the burden of taxation began to be discussed.
These things we discussed with some clearness and factual under-
standing at Harvard. The tendency was toward English free trade and
against the American tariff policy. We reverenced Ricardo and wasted
long hours on the “Wages-fund.” I remember Taussig’s course supporting
dying Ricardean economics. Wages came from what employers had left
for labor after they had subtracted their own reward. Suppose that this
profit was too small to attract the employer, what would the poor worker
do but starve! The trusts and monopolies were viewed frankly as danger-
ous enemies of democracies, but at the same time as inevitable methods
of industry. We were strong for the gold standard and fearful of silver. On
the other hand, the attitude of Harvard toward labor was on the whole
contemptuous and condemnatory. Strikes like that of the anarchists in
Chicago and the railway strikes of 1886, the terrible Homestead strike
of 1892 and Coxey’s Army of 1894 were pictured as ignorant lawlessness,
lurching against conditions largely inevitable.
Karl Marx was mentioned only to point out how thoroughly his theses
had been disproven; of the theory itself almost nothing was said. Henry
George was given but tolerant notice. The anarchists of Spain, the Nihilists
of Russia, the British miners — all these were viewed not as part of political
and economic development but as sporadic evil. This was natural. Harvard
was the child of its era. The intellectual freedom and flowering of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were yielding to the deadening
economic pressure which would make Harvard rich but reactionary. This
defender of wealth and capital, already half ashamed of Sumner and Phil-
lips, was willing finally to replace an Eliot with a manufacturer and a
nervous warmonger. The social community that mobbed Garrison easily
electrocuted Sacco and Vanzetti.
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W. E. B. Du Bois
It was not until I was long out of college and had finished my first
studies of economics and politics that I realized the fundamental influence
man’s efforts to earn a living had upon all his other efforts. The politics
which we studied in college were conventional, especially when it came
to describing and elucidating the current scene in Europe. The Queen’s
Jubilee in June, 1887, while I was still at Fisk, set the pattern of our think-
ing. The little old woman at Windsor became a magnificent symbol of
Empire. Here was England with her flag draped around the world, ruling
more black folk than white and leading the colored peoples of the earth
to Christian baptism, and, as we assumed, to civilization and eventual self-
rule. In 1885, Stanley, the traveling American reporter, became a hero and
symbol of white world leadership in Africa. The wild, fierce fight of the
Mahdi and the driving of the English out of the Sudan for thirteen years
did not reveal their inner truth to me. I heard only of the martyrdom of
the drunken Bible-reader and freebooter, Chinese Gordon.
After the Congo Free State was established, the Berlin Conference of
1885 was reported to be an act of civilization against the slave trade and
liquor. French, English, and Germans pushed on in Africa, but I did not
question the interpretation which pictured this as the advance of civiliza-
tion and the benevolent tutelage of barbarians. I read of the confirmation
of the Triple Alliance in 1891. Later I saw the celebration of the renewed
Triple Alliance on the Tempelhofer Feld, with the new young Emperor
Wilhelm II, who, fresh from his dismissal of Bismarck, led the splendid
pageantry; and, finally, the year I left Germany, Nicholas II became Czar
of all the Russias. In all this I had not yet linked the political development
of Europe with the race problem in America.
I was repeatedly a guest in the home of William James; he was my
friend and guide to clear thinking; as a member of the Philosophical
Club I talked with Royce and Palmer; I remember vividly once standing
beside Mrs. Royce at a small reception. We ceased conversation for a mo-
ment and both glanced across the room. Professor Royce was opposite
talking excitedly. He was an extraordinary sight: a little body, indifferently
clothed; a big red-thatched head and blazing blue eyes. Mrs. Royce put
my thoughts into words: “Funny-looking man, isn’t he?” I nearly fainted!
Yet I knew how she worshipped him.
I sat in an upper room and read Kant’s Critique with Santayana; Shaler
invited a Southerner, who objected to sitting beside me, to leave his class;
he said he wasn’t doing very well, anyway. I became one of Hart’s favorite
pupils and was afterwards guided by him through my graduate course and
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started on my work in Germany. Most of my courses of study went well.
It was in English that I came nearest my Waterloo at Harvard. I had unwit-
tingly arrived at Harvard in the midst of a violent controversy about poor
English among students. A number of fastidious scholars like Barrett
Wendell, the great pundit of Harvard English, had come to the campus
about this time; moreover, New England itself was getting sensitive over
western slang and southern drawls and general ignorance of grammar.
Freshmen at this time could elect nearly all their courses except English;
that was compulsory, with daily themes, theses, and tough examinations.
But I was at the point in my intellectual development when the content
rather than the form of my writing was to me of prime importance.
Words and ideas surged in my mind and spilled out with disregard of
exact accuracy in grammar, taste in word or restraint in style. I knew the
Negro problem and this was more important to me than literary form. I
knew grammar fairly well, and I had a pretty wide vocabulary; but I was
bitter, angry and intemperate in my first thesis. Naturally my English in-
structors had no idea of nor interest in the way in which Southern attacks
on the Negro were scratching me on the raw flesh. Tillman was raging like
a beast in the Senate, and literary clubs, especially those of rich and well-
dressed women, engaged his services eagerly and listened avidly. Senator
Morgan of Alabama had just published a scathing attack on “niggers” in a
leading magazine, when my first Harvard thesis was due. I let go at him
with no holds barred. My long and blazing effort came back marked
“E” — not passed!
It was the first time in my scholastic career that I had encountered
such a failure. I was aghast, but I was not a fool. I did not doubt but
that my instructors were fair in judging my English technically even
if they did not understand the Negro problem. I went to work at my
English and by the end of that term had raised it to a “C.” I realized that
while style is subordinate to content, and that no real literature can be
composed simply of meticulous and fastidious phrases, nevertheless solid
content with literary style carries a message further than poor grammar
and muddled syntax. I elected the best course on the campus for English
composition — English 12.
I have before me a theme which I submitted on October 3, 1890 to
Barrett Wendell. I wrote: “Spurred by my circumstances, I have always
been given to systematically planning my future, not indeed without
many mistakes and frequent alterations, but always with what I now con-
ceive to have been a strangely early and deep appreciation of the fact
36 3
W. E. B. Du Bois
that to live is a serious thing. I determined while in high school to go
to college — partly because other men did, partly because I foresaw that
such discipline would best fit me for life. . . . I believe, foolishly perhaps,
but sincerely, that I have something to say to the world, and I have taken
English 12 in order to say it well.” Barrett Wendell liked that last sentence.
Out of fifty essays, he picked this out to read to the class.
Commencement was approaching, when, one day, I found myself at
midnight on one of the swaggering streetcars that used to roll out from
Boston on its way to Cambridge. It was in the spring of 1890, and quite
accidentally I was sitting by a classmate who would graduate with me in
June. As I dimly remember, he was a nice-looking young man; well-
dressed, almost dapper, charming in manner. Probably he was rich or at
least well-to-do, and doubtless belonged to an exclusive fraternity, although
that did not interest me. Indeed I have even forgotten his name. But one
thing I shall never forget and that was his rather regretful admission
(which slipped out as we gossiped) that he had no idea as to what his life
work would be, because, as he added, “There’s nothing in which I am
particularly interested!”
I was more than astonished — I was almost outraged to meet any hu-
man being of the mature age of twenty-one who did not have his life
all planned before him, at least in general outline, and who was not su-
premely, if not desperately, interested in what he planned to do.
In June 1890, I received my bachelor’s degree from Harvard cum laude
in philosophy. I was one of the five graduating students selected to speak
at commencement. My subject was “Jefferson Davis.” I chose it with the
deliberate intent of facing Harvard and the nation with a discussion of
slavery as illustrated in the person of the president of the Confederate
States of America. Naturally, my effort made a sensation. I said, among
other things: “I wish to consider not the man, but the type of civilization
which his life represented: its foundation is the idea of the strong man — I
Individualism coupled with the rule of might — and it is this idea that has
made the logic of even modern history, the cool logic of the Club. It made
of a naturally brave and generous man, Jefferson Davis, one who advanced
civilization by murdering Indians; then a hero of a national disgrace, called
by courtesy the Mexican War; and finally, as the crowning absurdity, the
peculiar champion of a people fighting to be free in order that another
people should not be free. Whenever this idea has for a moment escaped
from the individual realm, it has found an even more secure foothold in
the policy and philosophy of the State. The strong man and his mighty
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Right Arm has become the Strong Nation with its armies. However, under
whatever guise a Jefferson Davis may appear as man, as race, or as a nation,
his life can only logically mean this: the advance of a part of the world at
the expense of the whole; the overwhelming sense of the I, and the conse-
quent forgetting of the Thou. It has thus happened that advance in civiliza-
tion has always been handicapped by shortsighted national selfishness. The
vital principle of division of labor has been stifled not only in industry, but
also in civilization; so as to render it well-nigh impossible for a new race to
introduce a new idea into the world except by means of the cudgel. To say
that a nation is in the way of civilization is a contradiction in terms, and a
system of human culture whose principle is the rise of one race on the
ruins of another is a farce and a lie. Yet this is the type of civilization which
Jefferson Davis represented: it represents a field for stalwart manhood and
heroic character, and at the same time for moral obtuseness and refined
brutality. These striking contradictions of character always arise when a
people seemingly become convinced that the object of the world is not
civilization, but Teutonic civilization.”
A Harvard professor wrote to Kate Field’s Washington, then a leading
periodical: “Du Bois, the colored orator of the commencement stage,
made a ten-strike. It is agreed upon by all the people I have seen that he
was the star of the occasion. His paper was on ‘Jefferson Davis,’ and you
would have been surprised to hear a colored man deal with him so gen-
erously. Such phrases as a ‘great man,’ a ‘keen thinker,’ a ‘strong leader, and
others akin occurred in the address. One of the trustees of the University
told me yesterday that the paper was considered masterly in every way.
Du Bois is from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and doubtless has some
white blood in his veins. He, too, has been in my classes the past year. If
he did not head the class, he came pretty near the head, for he is an excel-
lent scholar in every way, and altogether the best black man that has
come to Cambridge.”
Bishop Potter of New York wrote in the Boston Herald: “When at the
last commencement of Harvard University, I saw a young colored man
appear . . . and heard his brilliant and eloquent address, I said to myself:
‘Here is what an historic race can do if they have a clear field, a high
purpose, and a resolute will.’ ”
Already I had now received more education than most young white
men, having been almost continuously in school from the age of six to
twenty-two. But I did not yet feel prepared. I felt that to cope with the
new and extraordinary situations then developing in the United States
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W. E. B. Du Bois
and the world I needed to go further and that as a matter of fact I had just
well begun my training in knowledge of social conditions.
I revelled in the keen analysis of William James, Josiah Royce and young
George Santayana. But it was James with his pragmatism and Albert Bush-
nell Hart with his research method who turned me back from the lovely
but sterile land of philosophic speculation to the social sciences as the field
for gathering and interpreting that body of fact which would apply to
my program for the Negro. As undergraduate, I had talked frankly with
William James about teaching philosophy, my major subject. He discour-
aged me, but not by any means because of my record in his classes. He
used to give me “A’s” and even “A-plus,” but as he said candidly, there is
“not much chance of anyone earning a living as a philosopher.” He was
repeating just what Chase of Fisk had said a few years previously.
I knew by this time that practically my sole chance of earning a living
combined with study was to teach, and after my work with Hart in
United States history I conceived the idea of applying philosophy to an
historical interpretation of race relations. In other words, I was trying to
take my first steps toward sociology as the science of human action. It
goes without saying that no such field of study was then recognized at
Harvard or came to be recognized for twenty years after. But I began
with some research in Negro history and finally at the suggestion of
Hart, I chose the suppression of the African slave trade to America as my
doctor’s thesis. Then came the question as to whether I could continue
study in the graduate school. I had no resources in wealth or friends. I
applied for a fellowship in the graduate school of Harvard, was appointed
Henry Bromfield Rogers fellow for a year and later the appointment was
renewed; so that from 1890 to 1892 I was a fellow in Harvard University,
studying history and political science and what would have been sociol-
ogy if Harvard had yet recognized such a field.
I finished the first draft of my thesis and delivered an outline of it at
the seminars of American history and political economy December 7,
1891. I received my master’s degree in the spring. I was thereupon elected
to the American Historical Society and asked to speak in Washington at
their meeting in December, 1892. The New York Independent noted this
among the “three best papers presented,” and continued:
The article upon the “enforcement of the Slave Laws” was written
and read by a black man. It was thrilling when one could, for a mo-
ment, turn his thoughts from listening to think that scarcely thirty
years have elapsed since the war that freed his race, and here was an
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audience of white men listening to a black man — listening, more-
over, to a careful, cool, philosophical history of the laws which had
not prevented the enslavement of his race. The voice, the diction, the
manner of the speaker were faultless. As one looked at him, one could
not help saying, “Let us not worry about the future of our country in
the matter of race distinctions.”
I had begun with a bibliography of Nat Turner and ended with a
history of the suppression of the African slave trade to America; neither
would need to be done again, at least in my day. Thus in my quest for
basic knowledge with which to help guide the American Negro, I came
to the study of sociology, by way of philosophy and history rather than
by physics and biology. After hesitating between history and economics,
I chose history. On the other hand, psychology, hovering then on the
threshold of experiment under Muensterberg, soon took a new orienta-
tion which I could understand from the beginning.
Already I had made up my mind that what I needed was further training
in Europe. The German universities were at the top of their reputation. Any
American scholar who wanted preferment went to Germany for study. The
faculties of Johns Hopkins and the new University of Chicago were begin-
ning to be filled with German Ph.D.’s, and even Harvard, where Kuno
Frank had long taught, had imported Muensterberg. British universities did
not recognize American degrees and French universities made no special
effort to encourage American graduates. I wanted then to study in Germany.
I was determined that any failure on my part to become a recognized
American scholar must not be based on lack of modern training.
I was confident. So far I had met no failure. I willed and lo! I was
walking beneath the elms of Harvard — the name of allurement, the col-
lege of my youngest, wildest visions! I needed money; scholarships and
prizes fell into my lap — not all I wanted or strove for, but all I needed to
keep me in school. Commencement came, and standing before governor,
president, and grave gowned men, I told them certain truths, waving my
arms and breathing fast! They applauded with what may have seemed
to many as uncalled-for fervor, but I walked home on pink clouds of
glory! I asked for a fellowship and got it. I announced my plan of study-
ing in Germany, but Harvard had no more fellowships for me. A friend,
however, told me of the Slater Fund and that the Board was looking for
colored men worth educating.
No thought of modest hesitation occurred to me. I rushed at the
chance. It was one of those tricks of fortune which always seem partly
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W. E. B. Du Bois
due to chance. In 1882, the Slater Fund for the education of Negroes
had been established and the board in 1890 was headed by ex-President
R. B. Hayes. Ex-President Hayes went down to Johns Hopkins University,
which admitted no Negro students, and told a “darkey” joke in a frank
talk about the plans of the fund. The Boston Herald of November 2, 1890
quoted him as saying: “If there is any young colored man in the South
whom we find to have a talent for art or literature or any special aptitude
for study, we are willing to give him money from the educational funds to
send him to Europe or give him advanced education.” He added that so
far they had been able to find only “orators.” This seemed to me a nasty
fling at my black classmate, Morgan, who had been Harvard class orator a
few months earlier.
The Hayes statement was brought to my attention at a card party one
evening; it not only made me good and angry but inspired me to write
ex-President Hayes and ask for a scholarship. I received a pleasant reply
saying that the newspaper quotation was incorrect; that his board had
some such program in the past but had no present plans for such scholar-
ships. I responded referring him to my teachers and to others who knew
me, and intimating that his change of plan did not seem to me fair nor
honest. He wrote again in apologetic mood and said that he was sorry
the plan had been given up, that he recognized that I was a candidate
who might otherwise have been given attention. I then sat down and
wrote Mr. Hayes this letter:
May 25, 1891
Your favor of the 2nd is at hand. I thank you for your kind wishes.
You will pardon me if I add a few words of explanation as to my ap-
plication. The outcome of the matter is as I expected it would be. The
announcement that any agency of the American people was willing
to give a Negro a thoroughly liberal education and that it had been
looking in vain for men to educate was to say the least rather star-
tling. When the newspaper clipping was handed me in a company of
friends, my first impulse was to make in some public way a categorical
statement denying that such an offer had ever been made known to
colored students. I saw this would be injudicious and fruitless, and I
therefore determined on the plan of applying myself. I did so and have
been refused along with a “number of cases” beside mine.
As to my case, I personally care little. I am perfectly capable of fight-
ing alone for an education if the trustees do not see fit to help me.
On the other hand the injury you have — unwittingly I trust — done
the race I represent, and are not ashamed of, is almost irreparable. You
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went before a number of keenly observant men who looked upon
you as an authority in the matter, and told them in substance that the
Negroes of the United States either couldn’t or wouldn’t embrace a
most liberal opportunity for advancement. That statement went all
over the country. When now finally you receive three or four applica-
tions for the fulfillment of that offer, the offer is suddenly withdrawn,
while the impression still remains.
If the offer was an experiment, you ought to have had at least one
case before withdrawing it; if you have given aid before (and I mean
here toward liberal education — not toward training plowmen) then
your statement at Johns Hopkins was partial. From the above facts I
think you owe an apology to the Negro people. We are ready to fur-
nish competent men for every European scholarship furnished us off
paper. But we can’t educate ourselves on nothing and we can’t have
the moral courage to try, if in the midst of our work our friends turn
public sentiment against us by making statements which injure us and
which they cannot stand by.
That you have been looking for men to liberally educate in the
past may be so, but it is certainly strange so few have heard it. It
was never mentioned during my three years stay at Fisk University.
President Price of Livingstone, [then a leading Negro spokesman] has
told me that he never heard of it, and students from various other
Southern schools have expressed great surprise at the offer. The fact is
that when I was wanting to come to Harvard, while yet in the South,
I wrote to Dr. Haygood, [Atticus G. Haygood, a leader of Southern
white liberals], for a loan merely, and he never even answered my let-
ter. I find men willing to help me thro’ cheap theological schools, I
find men willing to help me use my hands before I have got my brains
in working order, I have an abundance of good wishes on hand, but I
never found a man willing to help me get a Harvard Ph.D.
Hayes was stirred. He promised to take up the matter the next year with
the board. Thereupon, the next year I proceeded to write the board: “At
the close of the last academic year at Harvard, I received the degree of
Master of Arts, and was reappointed to my fellowship for the year 1891–92.
I have spent most of the year in the preparation of my doctor’s thesis on
the Suppression of the Slave Trade in America. I prepared a preliminary
paper on this subject and read it before the American Historical Associa-
tion at its annual meeting at Washington during the Christmas holidays. . . .
Properly to finish my education, careful training in a European university
for at least a year is, in my mind and the minds of my professors, abso-
lutely indispensable.” I thereupon asked respectfully “aid to study at least a
year abroad under the direction of the graduate department of Harvard or
other reputable auspices” and if this was not practicable, “that the board
loan me a sufficient sum for this purpose.” I did not of course believe that
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W. E. B. Du Bois
this would get me an appointment, but I did think that possibly through
the influence of people who thus came to know about my work, I might
somehow borrow or beg enough to get to Europe.
I rained recommendations upon Mr. Hayes. The Slater Fund Board
surrendered, and I was given a fellowship of $750 to study a year abroad,
with the promise that it might possibly be renewed for a second year.
To salve their souls, however, this grant was made half as gift and half as
repayable loan with 5% interest. I remember rushing down to New York
and talking with ex-President Hayes in the old Astor House, and emerg-
ing walking on air. I saw an especially delectable shirt in a shop window.
I went in and asked about it. It cost three dollars, which was about four
times as much as I had ever paid for a shirt in my life; but I bought it.
Originally published in the Massachusetts Review, Vol. 1 , N o. 3
(Spring, 1960), pp. 439 –458.