Dr. Brooks's $1,000

An agile, soft-spoken old Negro, who has mounted his pulpit in Washington's 19th Street Baptist Church every Sunday for 52 years, is Dr. Walter Henderson Brooks. Once Dr. Brooks was a slave. Emancipated at 14, he entered Presbyterian-owned Lincoln University near Oxford, Pa., at 15. A gift of $500 from some Pittsburgh Presbyterians enabled him to go through college and theological school, start out on a career which has made him the best known of Washington's many Negro preachers. Last month came a proud day for Dr. Brooks when he wrote to Lincoln's white President William Hallock Johnson: "I can never return the favor in mere dollars and cents. . . . But today, for the first time in my life, and I am now more than 83 years of age, I am able to draw a check for $1,000 and have a hundred or two left to my account, only a hundred or two, however.

Walter Brooks was a 3-year-old moppet, romping on a Virginia plantation, when a tall, lean Presbyterian clergyman named John Miller Dickey founded the first institution for the higher education of Negroes in the U. S., called it Ashmun Institute. Soon after it opened in Oxford in 1854, a mob of townspeople appeared at Dr. Dickey's home, threatened to shoo his students across the Maryland border into slavery. Dr. Dickey's stern face and commanding figure cowed the mob, carried the college through its first crisis. At the close of the Civil War the name was changed to Lincoln University. After that its crises were all financial.

Lincoln has turned out its fair share of Negro teachers and doctors, more than its share of Negro clergymen. Poet Langston Hughes and Physician Eugene Percy Roberts went there. So did five college presidents, one U. S. Congressman, two U. S. Ministers to Liberia. Many of Lincoln's 300-odd students sing in the glee club, find jobs as waiters at Atlantic City in the summer. Among them are such well-named persons as Benjamin Franklin Coleman, Scipio Solomon Johnson, John Milton Smith, Woodrow Wilson Smithey, James Madison Walden.

No Negro college has ever grown rich, and Lincoln has fared even worse than such younger and bigger institutions as Howard, Hampton, Tuskegee, and Fisk. Its plant consists of a cluster of grimy brick buildings fronting on the busy Baltimore Pike. Lately President Johnson and his trustees have been pondering two facts: 1) the centre of U. S. Negro population, fed by the teeming black sections of Washington, New York and Philadelphia, has been shifting rapidly northward and eastward; 2) Lincoln is the only first-rate Negro university north of the Mason & Dixon Line, east of Ohio's Wilberforce.

Last week in Manhattan's Union League Club, a die-hard Republican organization which, after the Civil War, used to send carpetbaggers South to round up the Negro vote, was launched a drive for money to build a new Lincoln library, dining hall, and gymnasium, make many a campus improvement. President Johnson announced the $1,000 check from Alumnus Brooks as the first contribution, put it up as bait for $399,000 more.

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