The Mis-Education of the Negro

by Carter G. Woodson

“Highly educated” Negroes denounce persons who advocate for the Negro a sort of education different in some respects from that now given the white man.

If the “educated Negro” could go off and be white he might be happy, but only a mulatto now and then can do this. The large majority of this class, then, must go through life denouncing white people because they are trying to run away from the blacks and decrying the blacks because they are not white.

You would never thereby learn that Africans first domesticated the sheep, goat, and cow, developed the idea of trial by jury, produced the first stringed instruments, and gave the world its greatest boon in the discovery of iron. You would never know that prior to the Mohammedan invasion about 1000 A.D. these natives in the heart of Africa had developed powerful kingdoms which were later organized as the Songhay Empire on the order of that of the Romans and boasting of similar grandeur. Unlike

The education of the Negroes, then, the most important thing in the uplift of the Negroes, is almost entirely in the hands of those who have enslaved them and now segregate them.

This is slightly dangerous ground here, however, for the Negro’s mind has been all but perfectly enslaved in that he has been trained to think what is desired of him.

ASSIMILATION