Raleigh News and Observer
On the very day that James B. Duke of North Carolina was making his opulent trust fund of $40 million for education and charity in North Carolina, George Eastman of Rochester, N.Y., added to his gifts, which now amount to 50-odd million dollars. Neither Mr. Duke nor Mr. Eastman ever went to college. They are what would be called “self-made men.” They pay the highest tribute to education by endowing educational institutions.
There is another similarity in the big donations of these two business men. Both remembered institutions for the education of the negroes. Eastman gave a donation of $2 million to Tuskegee upon condition that $3 million more to make a $5 million fund, be raised by its other friends. Mr. Duke, without any conditions whatever, gave a large sum (amount not yet known) to Johnston C. Smith University for the education of negroes located at Charlotte.
The New York Times, discussing these “two great gifts,” turns to a quotation from Governor Aycock in Mr. French Strother’s article on North Carolina. The Times says:
“A few weeks ago Mr. French Strother, writing of North Carolina, said that this State, which now pays more Federal taxes than any other State in the Union except New York and Pennsylvania, was “cashing in on an ideal and a dream,” shared by several other young men. It was the ideal and dream of a man who kept crying: “A democracy cannot be built on the backs of ignorant men.” His slogan was “educate”—educate the people and industry will spring up, educate the negro and there will be no negro question. It may now be said that the State has not only “cashed in” but that it has had a bonus in the gift of Mr. Duke and incidentally of Mr. Eastman.
Mr. Eastman accepted the thesis of the North Carolina dreamer of a quarter of a century ago that if the negro is educated there will be no negro question—at any rate he goes so far as to say that the only hope of the negro race and the settlement of his problem is through education, and that of the Hampton-Tuskegee type.
It is probable that Mr. Duke and Mr. Eastman do not know each other. It is certain they acted independently. The fact that both of them included institutions for the negroes shows that the spirit of the words of Aycock are in the minds of many practical business men. It is noteworthy that the Northern man has reached the conclusion that “the only hope of the negro race and the settlement of his problems is through education, and that of the Hampton-Tuskegee type.”
It was more than a coincidence that Duke and Eastman were thinking along the same lines.
From page 3 of The Concord Daily Tribune, Saturday, Dec. 13, 1924
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1924-12-13/ed-1/seq-3/#words=DECEMBER+13%2C+1924
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