Page:The New Negro.pdf/364

320 $3,568,815. As result the University has sent into the field already white unto harvest over six thousand graduates who are distributed over the entire range of the professional and practical callings and are scattered over the entire area wherever any considerable number of Negroes reside. Congress is challenged to isolate a like sum that has resulted in so much national service and advantage as the amount devoted to this national University of the Negro race.

But a national Negro university must be a conscious and recognized center of the higher life and cultural interests of the race. Howard University has gathered about itself more than a hundred Negro educators, who are filling its various chairs of instruction. There cannot be duplicated anywhere in the world such an aggregation of Negro educators, scholars and thinkers. With such a nucleus, Howard must become in due time the recognized center of Negro scholarship, especially for the fostering and development of those special studies of race history and of the pressing contemporary problems of race relations which are, in last analysis, the special field and functions of such an institution. There exists as yet no such center in spite of the obvious need for one. Every group, coming into cultural maturity, needs its Forum and its Acropolis. A national Negro university must shed the light of reason on the particular issues of Negro life and add the guidance of science to the tangled issues of race adjustment. A body of intellectual, moral and spiritual élite, consecrated to these ideals and co-operating in this aim, is calculated to put a new front on the whole scheme of racial life and aspiration. Under the stimulus of such a conception of its mission, Howard University, or the institution that most zealously undertakes it, will become the Mecca of ambitious Negro youth from all parts of the land and from all lands.

It is the internal urge of this service, racial and national, that more than any external pressure or urgency of educational segregation gives the Negro college of the present its truest reason for being. What is the need of Howard University, one might ask, when every first-class university in the North and West is open to any candidate qualified to meet its require-