The bulletin of Atlanta University, 1890 no. 16

              No. 16. ATLANTA, GEORGIA. FEBRUARY, 1890. THE BULLETIN OF ATLANTA   UNIVERSITY Our last issue was delayed by an accident to the engine upon which we depend for power for our press. The accident occurred just as our forms were ready. As it proved to be necessary to send to Massachusetts to get parts essential for repair, we could not print till the 25th of the month. All possible haste, however, was made in printing and mailing the edition when repairs had been made. A Northern friend, in a recent letter to our President, after referring to the continued witholding of the State aid, says: "It lays a heavy burden on you now, which I greatly lament, for you ought not to be compelled to leave your post and raise the funds which the Northern people ought to send in full measure, joyfully and ungrudgingly.* * * I did not sit down to write a letter, however, but Only to say that I propose to pool all my money for Southern schools this year on Atlanta, and though the last year has not beer, a prosperous one for me, financially, my outgo exceeding my income considerably, I shall try to double my last year's subscription.* ** I was much impressed by the estimate in your October Bulletin of 10,000 children reached during vacation by your pupils, and I think you can use that effectively. In haste, with heartiest sympathy and regard, Yours faithfully", NOT MULES BUT HUMAN  BEINGS. We give in another column an interesting extract from an article in the Atlanta Constitution, making reference to this University. We think we can appreciate  its humor, while deprecating its indifference to the feelings of the objects of it. A man who has the gift of humor is one whose feelings are naturally kindly, and it speaks significantly of environing public sentiment when such an one can, without apparent consciousness of doing an unkindly thing, speak of his fellow beings, struggling at a disadvantage in the hard race of life — hard  enough  for the most favored of us--as though, in intelligence, feeling and rights, they were on no higher level than animals. There are in Atlanta University young men and young women whose struggles to elevate themselves, and through themselves the degraded of their race, are heroic; their feelings as shown in their family relations, as they come to our notice, are beautiful and tender, their characters noble, their manners and sentiments refined, their minds cultivated, their religious tendencies devout. We do not envy any one the capacity to see in them nothing more than "nigger bucks" and "nigger gals" whom it is ludicrous to find going to school, and singing hymns at religious services or on Sunday evenings such as Christian people of ordinary musical and literary cultivation are accustomed to sing. We print the article to show under what disadvantages colored boys and girls are placed when the kindliest phase of feeling around them takes the form of such undisguised and seemingly unconscious contempt. Southern people seem to think it strange that the Negro does not more readily follow the political leadership of his white neighbors. On the whole is it calculated to make him do so to show the same amount of respect to him as to a mule, and to call those who, measured by any true standard of estimation, are young, gentlemen and ladies "nigger bucks" and "nigger gals"? We do not recognize that there is any race problem here or anywhere that the application of the golden rule cannot solve, and perhaps some of the "since the war" generation, if they will try this method, might accomplish as wonderful results as those illustrated in the changes on the hills around Atlanta. The true moral of these changes, we think, is not to try to educate the mule, but to recognize that the Negro isn't one any longer and to try the effect of treating him as a man.