As originally published in
The Atlantic Monthly

September 1902

Of the Training of Black
Men

by W. E. B. Du Bois

FROM the shimmering swirl of waters where many, many
thoughts ago the slave-ship first saw the square tower of Jamestown have flowed down to our day three streams of thinking: one from the larger world here and over-seas, saying, the multiplying of human wants in culture lands calls for the
world-wide cooperation of men in satisfying them. Hence arises a new human unity, pulling the ends of the earth nearer, and all men, black, yellow, and white. The larger humanity strives to feel in this contact of living nations and sleeping
hordes a thrill of new life in the world, crying, If the contact of
Life and Sleep be Death, shame on such Life. To be sure,
behind this thought lurks the afterthought of force and
dominion, -- the making of brown men to delve when the
temptation of beads and red calico cloys.

The second thought streaming from the death-ship and the
curving river is the thought of the older South: the sincere and
passionate belief that somewhere between men and cattle God
created a tertium quid, and called it a Negro, -- a clownish,
simple creature, at times even lovable within its limitations, but
straitly foreordained to walk within the Veil. To be sure, behind
the thought lurks the afterthought, -- some of them with
favoring chance might become men, but in sheer self-defense
we dare not let them, and build about them walls so high, and
hang between them and the light a veil so thick, that they shall
not even think of breaking through.

And last of all there trickles down that third and darker
thought, the thought of the things themselves, the confused
half-conscious mutter of men who are black and whitened,
crying Liberty, Freedom, Opportunity -- vouchsafe to us, O
boastful World, the chance of living men! To be sure, behind
the thought lurks the afterthought: suppose, after all, the World
is right and we are less than men? Suppose this mad impulse
within is all wrong, some mock mirage from the untrue?

So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, even through
conquest and slavery; the inferiority of black men, even if
forced by fraud; a shriek in the night for the freedom of men
who themselves are not yet sure of their right to demand it. This
is the tangle of thought and afterthought wherein we are called
to solve the problem of training men for life.

Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sage and
dilettante, lie its dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at
once grotesque and awful. Plain it is to us that what the world
seeks through desert and wild we have within our threshold, --
a stalwart laboring force, suited to the semi-tropics; if, deaf to
the voice of the Zeitgeist, we refuse to use and develop these
men, we risk poverty and loss. If, on the other hand, seized by
the brutal afterthought, we debauch the race thus caught in our
talons, selfishly sucking their blood and brains in the future as in
the past, what shall save us from national decadence? Only that
saner selfishness which, Education teaches men, can find the
rights of all the whirl of work.

Again, we may decry the color prejudice of the South, yet it
remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind
exist and must be reckoned with soberly. They cannot be
laughed away, nor always successfully stormed at, nor easily
abolished by act of legislature. And yet they cannot be
encouraged by being let alone. They must be recognized as
facts, but unpleasant facts; things that stand in the way of
civilization and religion and common decency. They can be met
in but one way: by the breadth and broadening of human
reason, by catholicity of taste and culture. And so, too, the
native ambition and aspiration of men, even though they be
black, backward, and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt with.
To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with
mighty fires; to flout their striving idly is to welcome a harvest of
brutish crime and shameless lethargy in our very laps. The
guiding of thought and the deft coordination of deed is at once
the path of honor and humanity.

And so, in this great question of reconciling three vast and
partially contradictory streams of thought, the one panacea of
Education leaps to the lips of all: such human training as will
best use the labor of all men without enslaving or brutalizing;
such training as will give us poise to encourage the prejudices
that bulwark society, and stamp out those that in sheer
barbarity deafen us to the wail of prisoned souls within the Veil,
and the mounting fury of shackled men.

But when we have vaguely said Education will set this tangle
straight, what have we uttered but a truism? Training for life
teaches living; but what training for the profitable living together
of black men and white? Two hundred years ago our task
would have seemed easier. Then Dr. Johnson blandly assured
us that education was needful solely for the embellishments of
life, and was useless for ordinary vermin. To-day we have
climbed to heights where we would open at least the outer
courts of knowledge to all, display its treasures to many, and
select the few to whom its mystery of Truth is revealed, not
wholly by truth or the accidents of the stock market, but at
least in part according to deftness and aim, talent and
character. This programme, however, we are sorely puzzled in
carrying out through that part of the land where the blight of
slavery fell hardest, and where we are dealing with two
backward peoples. To make here in human education that ever
necessary combination of the permanent and the contingent --
of the ideal and the practical in workable equilibrium -- has
been there, as it ever must in every age and place, a matter of
infinite experiment and frequent mistakes.

In rough approximation we may point out four varying decades
of work in Southern education since the Civil War. From the
close of the war until 1876 was the period of uncertain groping
and temporary relief. There were army schools, mission
schools, and schools of the Freedman's Bureau in chaotic
disarrangement, seeking system and cooperation. Then
followed ten years of constructive definite effort toward the
building of complete school systems in the South. Normal
schools and colleges were founded for the freedmen, and
teachers trained there to man the public schools. There was the
inevitable tendency of war to underestimate the prejudices of
the master and the ignorance of the slave, and all seemed clear
sailing out of the wreckage of the storm. Meantime, starting in
this decade yet especially developing from 1885 to 1895,
began the industrial revolution of the South. The land saw
glimpses of a new destiny and the stirring of new ideals. The
educational system striving to complete itself saw new
obstacles and a field of work ever broader and deeper. The
Negro colleges, hurriedly founded, were inadequately
equipped, illogically distributed, and of varying efficiency and
grade; the normal and high schools were doing little more than
common school work, and the common schools were training
but a third of the children who ought to be in them, and training
these too often poorly. At the same time the white South, by
reason of its sudden conversion from the slavery ideal, by so
much the more became set and strengthened in its racial
prejudice, and crystallized it into harsh law and harsher custom;
while the marvelous pushing forward of the poor white daily
threatened to take even bread and butter from the mouths of
the heavily handicapped sons of the freedmen. In the midst,
then, of the larger problem of Negro education sprang up the
more practical question of work, the inevitable economic
quandary that faces a people in the transition from slavery to
freedom, and especially those who make that change amid hate
and prejudice, lawlessness and ruthless competition.

The industrial school springing to notice in this decade, but
coming to full recognition in the decade beginning with 1895,
was the proffered answer to this combined educational and
economic crisis, and an answer of singular wisdom and
timeliness. From the very first in nearly all the schools some
attention had been given to training in handiwork, but now this
training first raised to a dignity that brought it in direct touch
with the South's magnificent industrial development, and given
an emphasis which reminded black folk that before the Temple
of Knowledge swing the Gates of Toil.

Yet after all they are but gates, and when turning our eyes from
the temporary and contingent in the Negro problem to the
broader question of the permanent uplifting and civilization of
black men in America, we have a right to inquire, as this
enthusiasm for material advancement mounts to its height, if
after all the industrial school is the final and sufficient answer in
the training of the Negro race; and to ask gently, but in all
sincerity, the ever recurring query of the ages, Is not life more
than meat, and the body more than raiment? And men ask this
to-day all the more eagerly because of the sinister signs in
recent educational movements. The tendency is here, born of
slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism
of the day, to regard human beings as among the material
resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future
dividends. Race prejudices, which keep brown and black men
in their "places," we are coming to regard as useful allies with
such a theory, no matter how much they may dull the ambition
and sicken the hearts of struggling human beings. And above
all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration,
that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and
character rather than bread-winning, is the privilege of white
men and the danger and delusion of black.

Especially has criticism been directed against the former
educational efforts to aid the Negro. In the four periods I have
mentioned, we find first, boundless, planless enthusiasm and
sacrifice; then the preparation of teachers for a vast public
school system; then the launching and expansion of that school
system amid increasing difficulties; finally the training of
workmen for the new and growing industries. This
development has been sharply ridiculed as a logical anomaly
and flat reversal of nature. Soothly we have been told that first
industrial and manual training should have taught the Negro to
work, then simple schools should have taught him to read and
write, and finally, after years, high and normal schools could
have completed the system, as intelligence and wealth
demanded.

That a system logically so complete was historically impossible,
it needs but a little thought to prove. Progress in human affairs
is more often a pull than a push, surging forward of the
exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and
painfully to his vantage ground. Thus it was no accident that
gave birth to universities centuries before the common schools,
that made fair Harvard the first flower of our wilderness. So in
the South: the mass of the freedmen at the end of the war
lacked the intelligence so necessary to modern workingmen.
They must first have the common school to teach them to read,
write, and cipher. The white teachers who flocked South went
to establish such a common school system. They had no idea
of founding colleges; they themselves at first would have
laughed at the idea. But they faced, as all men since them have
faced, that central paradox of the South, the social separation
of the races. Then it was the sudden volcanic rupture of nearly
all relations between black and white, in work and government
and family life. Since then a new adjustment of relations in
economic and political affairs has grown up -- an adjustment
subtle and difficult to grasp, yet singularly ingenious, which
leaves still that frightful chasm at the color line across which
men pass at their peril. Thus, then and now, there stand in the
South two separate worlds; and separate not simply in the
higher realms of social intercourse, but also in church and
school, on railway and street car, in hotels and theatres, in
streets and city sections, in books and newspapers, in asylums
and jails, in hospitals and graveyards. There is still enough of
contact for large economic and group cooperation, but the
separation is so thorough and deep, that it absolutely precludes
for the present between the races anything like that sympathetic
and effective group training and leadership of the one by the
other, such as the American Negro and all backward peoples
must have for effectual progress.

This the missionaries of '68 soon saw; and if effective industrial
and trade schools were impractical before the establishment of
a common school system, just as certainly no adequate
common schools could be founded until there were teachers to
teach them. Southern whites would not teach them; Northern
whites in sufficient numbers could not be had. If the Negro was
to learn, he must teach himself, and the most effective help that
could be given him was the establishment of schools to train
Negro teachers. This conclusion was slowly but surely reached
by every student of the situation until simultaneously, in widely
separated regions, without consultation or systematic plan,
there arose a series of institutions designed to furnish teachers
for the untaught. Above the sneers of critics at the obvious
defects of this procedure must ever stand its one crushing
rejoinder: in a single generation they put thirty thousand black
teachers in the South; they wiped out the illiteracy of the
majority of the black people of the land, and they made
Tuskegee possible.

Such higher training schools tended naturally to deepen
broader development: at first they were common and grammar
schools, then some became high schools. And finally, by 1900,
some thirty-four had one year or more of studies of college
grade. This development was reached with different degrees of
speed in different institutions: Hampton is still a high school,
while Fisk University started her college in 1871, and Spelman
Seminary about 1896. In all cases the aim was identical: to
maintain the standards of the lower training by giving teachers
and leaders the best practicable training; and above all to
furnish the black world with adequate standards of human
culture and lofty ideals of life. It was not enough that the
teachers of teachers should be trained in technical normal
method; they must also, so far as possible, be broad-minded,
cultured men and women, to scatter civilization among a people
whose ignorance was not simply of letters, but of life itself.

It can thus be seen that the work of education in the South
began with higher institutions of training, which threw off as
their foliage common schools, and later industrial schools, and
at the same time strove to shoot their roots ever deeper toward
college and university training. That this was an inevitable and
necessary development, sooner or later, goes without saying;
but there has been, and still is, a question in many minds if the
natural growth was not forced, and if the higher training was
not either overdone or done with cheap and unsound methods.
Among white Southerners this feeling is widespread and
positive. A prominent Southern journal voiced this in a recent
editorial:

The experiment that has been made to give the
colored students classical training has not been
satisfactory. Even though many were able to
pursue the course, most of them did so in a
parrotlike way, learning what was taught, but not
seeming to appropriate the truth and import of
their instruction, and graduating without sensible
aim or valuable occupation for their future. The
whole scheme has proved a waste of time,
efforts, and money of the state.

While most fair-minded men would recognize this as extreme
and overdrawn, still without doubt many are asking, Are there
a sufficient number of Negroes ready for college training to
warrant the undertaking? Are not too many students
prematurely forced into this work? Does it not have the effect
of dissatisfying the young Negro with his environment? And do
these graduates succeed in real life? Such natural questions
cannot be evaded, nor on the other hand must a nation
naturally skeptical as to Negro ability assume an unfavorable
answer without careful inquiry and patient openness to
conviction. We must not forget that most Americans answer all
queries regarding the Negro a priori, and that the least that
human courtesy can do is to listen to evidence.

The advocates of the higher education of the Negro would be
the last to deny the incompleteness and glaring defects of the
present system: too many institutions have attempted to do
college work, the work in some cases has not been thoroughly
done, and quantity rather than quality has sometimes been
sought. But all this can be said of higher education throughout
the land: it is the almost inevitable incident of educational
growth, and leaves the deeper question of the legitimate
demand for the higher training of Negroes untouched. And this
latter question can be settled in but one way -- by a first-hand
study of the facts. If we leave out of view all institutions which
have not actually graduated students from a course higher than
that of a New England high school, even though they be called
colleges; if then we take the thirty-four remaining institutions,
we may clear up many misapprehensions by asking searchingly,
What kind of institutions are they, what do they teach, and
what sort of men do they graduate?

And first we may say that this type of college, including Atlanta,
Fisk and Howard, Shaw, and the rest, is peculiar, almost
unique. Through the shining trees that whisper before me as I
write, I catch glimpses of a boulder of New England granite,
covering a grave, which graduates of Atlanta University have
placed there: --

IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF THEIR
FORMER TEACHER AND FRIEND AND OF
THE UNSELFISH LIFE HE LIVED, AND
THE NOBLE WORK HE WROUGHT; THAT
THEY, THEIR CHILDREN, AND THEIR
CHILDREN'S CHILDREN MIGHT BE
BLESSED.

This was the gift of New England to the freed Negro: not alms,
but a friend; not cash, but character. It was not and is not
money these seething millions want, but love and sympathy, the
pulse of hearts beating with red blood; a gift which to-day only
their own kindred and race can bring to the masses, but which
once saintly souls brought to their favored children in the
crusade of the sixties, that finest thing in American history, and
one of the few things untainted by sordid greed and cheap
vainglory. The teachers in these institutions came not to keep
the Negroes in their place, but to raise them out of their places
where the filth of slavery had wallowed them. The colleges they
founded were social settlements; homes where the best of the
sons of the freedmen came in close and sympathetic touch with
the best traditions of New England. They lived and ate
together, studied and worked, hoped and harkened in the
dawning light. In actual formal content their curriculum was
doubtless old-fashioned, but in educational power it was
supreme, for it was the contact of living souls.

From such schools about two thousand Negroes have gone
forth with the bachelor's degree. The number in itself is enough
to put at rest the argument that too large a proportion of
Negroes are receiving higher training. If the ratio to population
of all Negro students throughout the land, in both college and
secondary training, be counted, Commissioner Harris assures
us "it must be increased to five times it present average" to
equal the average of the land.

Fifty years ago the ability of Negro students in any appreciable
numbers to master a modern college course would have been
difficult to prove. To-day it is proved by the fact that four
hundred Negroes, many of whom have been reported as
brilliant students, have received the bachelor's degree from
Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, and seventy other leading colleges.
Here we have, then nearly twenty-five hundred Negro
graduates, of whom the crucial query must be made, How far
did their training fit them for life? It is of course extremely
difficult to collect satisfactory data on such a point, -- difficult
to reach the men, to get trustworthy testimony, and to gauge
that testimony by any generally acceptable criterion of success.
In 1900, the Conference at Atlanta University undertook to
study these graduates, and published the results. First they
sought to know what these graduates were doing, and
succeeded in getting answers from nearly two thirds of the
living. The direct testimony was in almost all cases
corroborated by the reports of the colleges where they
graduated, so that in the main the reports were worthy of
credence. Fifty-three per cent of these graduates were
teachers, -- presidents of institutions, heads of normal schools,
principals of city school systems, and the like. Seventeen per
cent were clergymen; another seventeen per cent were in the
professions, chiefly as physicians. over six per cent were
merchants, farmers, and artisans, and four per cent were in the
government civil service. Granting even that a considerable
proportion of the third unheard from are unsuccessful, this is a
record of usefulness. Personally I know many hundreds of
these graduates, and have corresponded with more than a
thousand; through others I have followed carefully the life-work
of scores; I have taught some of them and some of the pupils
whom they have taught, lived in homes which they have
builded, and looked at life through their eyes. Comparing them
as a class with my fellow students in New England and in
Europe, I cannot hesitate in saying that nowhere have I met
men and women with a broader spirit of helpfulness, with
deeper devotion to their life-work, or with more consecrated
determination to succeed in the face of bitter difficulties than
among Negro college-bred men. They have, to be sure, their
proportion of ne'er-do-weels, their pedants and lettered fools,
but they have a surprisingly small proportion of them; they have
not that culture of manner which we instinctively associate with
university men, forgetting that in reality it is the heritage from
cultured homes, and that no people a generation removed from
slavery can escape a certain unpleasant rawness and gaucherie,
despite the best of training.

With all their larger vision and deeper sensibility, these men
have usually been conservative, careful leaders. They have
seldom been agitators, have withstood the temptation to head
the mob, and have worked steadily and faithfully in a thousand
communities in the South. As teachers they have given the
South a commendable system of city schools and large
numbers of private normal schools and academies. Colored
college-bred men have worked side by side with white college
graduates at Hampton; almost from the beginning the backbone
of Tuskegee's teaching force has been formed of graduates
from Fisk and Atlanta. And to-day the institute is filled with
college graduates, from the energetic wife of the principal down
to the teacher of agriculture, including nearly half of the
executive council and a majority of the heads of departments.
In the professions, college men are slowly but surely leavening
the Negro church, are healing and preventing the devastations
of disease, and beginning to furnish legal protection for the
liberty and property of the toiling masses. All this is needful
work. Who would do it if Negroes did not? How could
Negroes do it if they were not trained carefully for it? If white
people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers,
and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?

If it be true that there are an appreciable number of Negro
youth in the land capable by character and talent to receive that
higher training, the end of which is culture, and if the two and a
half thousand who have had something of this training in the
past have in the main proved themselves useful to their race
and generation, the question then comes, What place in the
future development of the South ought the Negro college and
college-bred man to occupy? That the present social
separation and acute race sensitiveness must eventually yield to
the influences of culture as the South grows civilized is clear.
But such transformation calls for singular wisdom and patience.
If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing, the races
are to live for many years side by side, united in economic
effort, obeying a common government, sensitive to mutual
thought and feeling, yet subtly and silently separate in many
matters of deeper human intimacy -- if this unusual and
dangerous development is to progress amid peace and order,
mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call for social
surgery at once the delicatest and nicest in modern history. It
will demand broad-minded, upright men both white and black,
and in its final accomplishment American civilization will
triumph. So far as white men are concerned, this fact is to-day
being recognized in the South, and a happy renaissance of
university education seems imminent. But the very voices that
cry Hail! to this good work are, strange to relate, largely silent
or antagonistic to the higher education of the Negro.

Strange to relate! for this is certain, no secure civilization can
be built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent
proletariat. Suppose we seek to remedy this by making them
laborers and nothing more: they are not fools, they have tasted
of the Tree of Life, and they will not cease to think, will not
cease attempting to read the riddle of the world. By taking
away their best equipped teachers and leaders, by slamming
the door of opportunity in the faces of their bolder and brighter
minds, will you make them satisfied with their lot? or will you
not rather transfer their leading from the hands of men taught to
think to the hands of untrained demagogues? We ought not to
forget that despite the pressure of poverty, and despite the
active discouragement and even ridicule of friends, the demand
for higher training steadily increases among Negro youth: there
were in the years from 1875 to 1880, twenty-two Negro
graduates from Northern colleges; from 1885 to 1890 there
were forty-three, and from 1895 to 1900, nearly 100
graduates. Here, then, is the plain thirst for training; by refusing
to give this Talented Tenth the key to knowledge can any sane
man imagine that they will lightly lay aside their yearning and
contentedly become hewers of wood and drawers of water?

No. The dangerously clear logic of the Negro's position will
more and more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing
wealth and more intricate social organization preclude the
South from being, as it so largely is, simply an armed camp for
intimidating black folk. Such waste of energy cannot be spared
if the South is to catch up with civilization. And as the black
third of the land grows in thrift and skill, unless skillfully guided
in its larger philosophy, it must more and more brood over the
red past and the creeping, crooked present, until it grasps a
gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found energies
athwart the current of advance. Even to-day the masses of the
Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and
the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong
indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though
they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which
you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! If you
deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? When
you shriek, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they
answer, that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic
concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse
their vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as
just may wail: the rape which your gentlemen have done against
helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written
on the foreheads of two millions of mulattoes, and written in
in-effaceable blood. And finally, when you fasten crime upon
this race as its peculiar train, they answer that slavery was the
arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin abortion; that
color and race are not crimes, and yet they it is which in this
land receive most unceasing condemnation, North, East, South,
and West.

I will not say such arguments are wholly justified -- I will not
insist that there is no other side to the shield; but I do say that
of the nine millions of Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely
one out of the cradle to whom these arguments do not daily
present themselves in the guise of terrible truth. I insist that the
question of the future is how best to keep these millions from
brooding over the wrongs of the past and the difficulties of the
present, so that all their energies may be bent toward a cheerful
striving and cooperation with their white neighbors toward a
larger, juster, and fuller future. That one wise method of doing
this lies in the closer knitting of the Negro to the great industrial
possibilities of the South is a great truth. And this the common
schools and the manual training and trade schools are working
to accomplish. But these alone are not enough. The foundations
of knowledge in this race, as in others, must be sunk deep in
the college and university if we would build a solid, permanent
structure. Internal problems of social advance must inevitably
come, -- problems of work and wages, of families and homes,
of morals and the true valuing of the things of life; and all these
and other inevitable problems of civilization the Negro must
meet and solve largely for himself, by reason of his isolation;
and can there be any possible solution other than by study and
thought and an appeal to the rich experience of the past? Is
there not, with such a group and in such a crisis, infinitely more
danger to be apprehended from half-trained minds and shallow
thinking than from over-education and over-refinement? Surely
we have wit enough to found a Negro college so manned and
equipped as to steer successfully between the dilettante and the
fool. We shall hardly induce black men to believe that if their
bellies be full it matters little about their brains. They already
dimly perceive that the paths of peace winding between honest
toil and dignified manhood call for the guidance of skilled
thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the black
lowly and black men emancipated by training and culture.

The function of the Negro college then is clear: it must maintain
the standards of popular education, it must seek the social
regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of
problems of race contact and cooperation. And finally, beyond
all this, it must develop men. Above our modern socialism, and
out of the worship of the mass, must persist and evolve that
higher individualism which the centres of culture protect; there
must come a loftier respect for the sovereign human souls that
seeks to know itself and the world about it; that seeks a
freedom for expansion and self-development; that will love and
hate and labor in its own way, untrammeled alike by old and
new. Such souls aforetime have inspired and guided worlds,
and if we be not wholly bewitched by our Rhine-gold, they
shall again. Herein the longing of black men must have respect:
the rich and bitter depth of their experience, the unknown
treasures of their inner life, the strange rendings of nature they
have seen, may give the world new points of view and make
their loving, living, and doing precious to all human hearts. And
to themselves in these the days that try their souls the chance to
soar in the dim blue air above the smoke is to their finer spirits
boon and guerdon for what they lose on earth by being black.

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line
I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men
and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves
of Evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the
tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what
souls I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor
condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is
this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life
you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia?
Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgrah, between
Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?