Harlem's Socrates: Race First in Jim Crow America
African-American society to lead the rest to a brighter future. Harrison, in contrast, wrote, “the Common People are the real race,” voicing his belief that the masses were capable of leadership and the exercise of their own creative will. Harrison adamantly disagreed with the idea of the “talented tenth.” Remarkably similar to notions of the ideal American public educational system today, Harrison advocated schools in which all African Americans could receive an education allowing them to move beyond any sort of delegated industrial or agricultural roles. Criticizing the American educational system directly in The Negro and the Nation (1920), Harrison attacked public school funding as applied to blacks in the United States. He compiled a large pool of data on the allocation of public school funds around the country and found African-American schools, compared to white schools, to be drastically underfunded. A study focused on counties located in Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia claimed African Americans actually paid more in taxes for education than what the government in turn allotted to black public schools. Worse yet, Harrison asserted, “in no modern country is education made to depend upon the tax-paying power of the parents. If that were so, the children of 40,000,000 American proletarians would live and die without schooling.”47 Harrison called for equality in the funding and form of public education across race and class lines in order to provide equal opportunities. To be separate and unequal did not equate with a healthy democracy. In the meantime blacks could do everything within their power to self-educate, as Harrison himself did. He promoted education vigorously during his popular outdoor and indoor lectures. As historian J.A. Rogers has pointed out, Harrison inspired his listeners on at least one occasion to purchase “one hundred copies of a book on sociology at a dollar each, within an hour, on Lenox Avenue in Harlem.”48 This is a specific example
The University of Oregon McNair Research Journal [35]