Negro education

“ As to their education, popular opinion was no less unfavorable than as to their labor. The common expressions were "learn [Pg 288] ing will spoil the negro for work," "negro education would be the ruin of the South," and even "the elevation of the blacks would be the degradation of the whites." In practical application of these views, negro schools were frequently broken up and the school-houses burned; and in many places they were only safe under the immediate protection of the Federal troops. ”

“ The first objection to negro education is that the race is incapable of any but elementary education and that all beyond is wasted effort. Has the Negro as a race an inferior intellectual quality, a disability to respond to opportunities? [Pg 324] With all the effort to educate the race, and with due regard to the fact that the proportion who can read and write is rapidly rising, the Negroes are alarmingly ignorant, the most illiterate group in the whole United States ”

“ In the last analysis most of the objections to negro education come down to the assertion that it puts the race above the calling whereunto God hath appointed it. The argument goes back to the unconscious presumption that the Negro was created to work the white man’s field, and that even a little knowledge makes him ambitious to do something else. ”

“ I did, as a matter of fact, hear one friend of negro education hold forth—Bishop Bratton, of Mississippi. |A Bishop on Race Equality.| The Bishop laid down a good many principles—among them that “the negro is capable of development to a point whose limit he (the speaker) had not discovered,” but that “the vast majority are still children intellectually, and little short of savages morally.” The purport of his address was the assertion that negro education should not be left entirely or mainly to negro teachers. ”

“ If the ratio of colored population in secondary and higher education is to be equal to the average for the whole country, it must be increased to five times its present average." And if this be true of the secondary and higher education, it is safe to say that the Negro has not one-tenth his quota in college studies. How baseless, therefore, is the charge of too much training! We need Negro teachers for the Negro common schools, and we need first-class normal schools and colleges to train them. This is the work of higher Negro education and it must be done. ”

“ The funds and associations interested in the education of Negroes in the United States differ widely in purpose and resources. Some are rendering a remarkable educational service not only to the Negroes; but also to the South and the whole Nation. A number of the agencies are devoting only a part of their resources to Negro education. ”

“ It thus becomes all the more imperative that the race should gain for itself the primary principles of knowledge and culture.
The social separation of the races in America renders it imperative that the professional classes among the Negroes should be recruited from their own ranks. Under ordinary circumstances, professional places are filled by the most favored class in the community. In a Latin or Catholic country, where the fiction of “social equality” does not exist, there is felt no necessity for Negro priest, teacher, or physician to administer to his own race. ”

“ Why, if education could lift the Negro to the Caucasian level, to what, pray, in the meantime would it lift the Caucasian himself? We repeat, and the repetition cannot be made too emphatic, there is no hope whatever of any organic improvement, of any race betterment of the Negro, from any or from all extra-organic agencies of education or religion or civilization. Let us, then, educate the negro, to make him a more useful and productive, a law-abiding and happier member of the community ”

“ The "Sabbath-school" constituted an important factor in Negro education. Although cloaked with the purpose of bringing the blacks to God by giving them religious instruction the institution permitted its workers to teach them reading and writing when they were not allowed to study such in other institutions. [1] Even the radical slaveholder was slow to object to a policy which was intended to facilitate the conversion of men's souls. All friends especially interested in the mental and spiritual uplift of the race hailed this movement as marking an epoch in the elevation of the colored people. ”

“ I do not find it necessary to stigmatize as hateful or unintelligent the early assumption that Negro education presented problems that were elementary, special and peculiar and that the mass teaching of Negroes was an experiment not easily tied in with the education of pupils of more favored background. ”

“ In our own land, when Negroes demand education, we say, “Why, surely, give them industrial education. Your race has a great opportunity— [13] to make itself useful. It needs trained craftsmen and workers and, perhaps, a few parsons. Teach your sons and daughters to work. That is enough.” And we dexterously select leaders for them who will administer the soothing syrup of this old idea with deftness and dispatch. The General Education Board which disburses millions of dollars annually in the South for education has, so far, given to forty-one Negro schools the sum of $464,015. ”

“ CHAPTER VI EDUCATING THE URBAN NEGRO Such an impetus was given Negro education during the period of better beginnings that some of the colored city schools then established have existed even until to-day. Negroes learned from their white friends to educate themselves. In the Middle and Southern States, however, much of the sentiment in favor of developing the intellect of the Negro passed away during the early part of the nineteenth century. This reform, like many others of that day, suffered when Americans forgot the struggle for the rights of man. ”

“ I would set no limits to the attainments of the Negro in arts, in letters or statesmanship, but I believe the surest way to reach those ends is by laying the foundation in the little things of life that lie immediately about one's door. I plead for industrial education and development for the Negro not because I want to cramp him, but because I want to free him. ”

“ One of the chief hindrances to the progress of Negro education in the public schools in the South is in my opinion due to the fact that the Negro colleges in which so many of the teachers are prepared 300have not realized the importance of convincing the Southern white people that education makes the same improvement in the Negro that it does in the white man; makes him so much more useful in his labour, so much better a citizen, and so much more dependable in all the relations of life, that it is worth while to spend the money to give him an education. ”

“ The work of education for the Negro at the South had to begin at the bottom. There were no schools at all for this people; and hence the work began with the alphabet. And there could be no classification of the scholars. All the way from six to sixty the pupils ranged in age; and even some who had given slavery a century of their existence—mothers and fathers in Israel—crowded the schools established for their race. Some ministers of the Gospel after a half century of preaching entered school to learn how to spell out the names of the twelve Apostles. ”

“ A race must have some intellectual quickness to pick up anything out of such a poor system. The arguments in favor of negro education have so far been convincing to every Southern community, since negro common schools are maintained and considerable amounts are spent for secondary and higher education. ”

“ Finally, and as the only sound foundation for the whole system of education, the Negro must be taught the great elementary truths of morality and duty. Until he is so established in these that he claims to be on this ground the equal of the white, he can never be his equal on any other ground. When he is the equal of the white, it will make itself known. Until then, he is fighting not the white race, but a law of nature, universal and inexorable—that races rise or fall according to their character. ”

“ Why should white people, by their presence, words, and many other things, encourage the black man to get education, if they do not desire him to improve his condition?
The Payne Institute in Augusta, Georgia, an excellent institution, to which I have already referred, is supported almost wholly by the Southern white Methodist church. The Southern white Presbyterians support a theological school at Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for Negroes. For a number of years the Southern white Baptists have contributed toward Negro education. ”

“ Appropriations to public schools for Negroes diminished from year to year and when there appeared practical leaders with, their sane plan for industrial education the South ignorantly accepted this scheme as a desirable subterfuge for seeming to support Negro education and at the same time directing the development of the blacks in such a way that they would never become the competitors of the white people. ”

“ Education has been put forward as the great corrective—preferably industrial education. The intellect of the whites is to be educated to the point where they will so appreciate the blessings of liberty and equality, as of their own motion to enlarge and defend the Negro's rights. The Negroes, on the other hand, are to be so trained as to make them, not equal with the whites in any way—God save the mark! this would be unthinkable!—but so useful to the community that the whites will protect them rather than to lose their valuable services. ”

“ The deep-seated prejudice of the Southern white against the fact of negro education, his bitter unwillingness to see the experiment tried, coupled with his scornful incredulity that anything worth the effort could be accomplished, made it certain that those most deeply concerned, because of the new relation these people sustained to them, in the elevation, through schools, of the negro, would originate no efforts to this end. ”

“ Often influential white men taught Negroes not only the rudiments of education but almost anything they wanted to learn. Not a few slaves were instructed by the white children whom they accompanied to school. While attending ministers and officials whose work often lay open to their servants, many of the race learned by contact and observation. Shrewd Negroes sometimes slipped stealthily into back streets, where they studied under a private teacher, or attended a school hidden from the zealous execution of the law. ”

“ The new school building program represents the state’s one real constructive reaction to Negro integration efforts. The purpose may have been less an altruistic desire to improve Negro education than to furnish the state with another arguing point in the preservation of segregation. Whatever the motive, an immediate result has been to provide Negroes with greatly improved, though still segregated, educational facilities. ”

“ We have also learned that this upheaval left the slaves the objects of piety for the sympathetic, the concern of workers in behalf of social uplift, a class offered instruction as a prerequisite to emancipation. The private teaching of Negroes became tolerable, benevolent persons volunteered to instruct them, and some schools maintained for the education of white students were thrown open to those of African blood. ”

“ In this world he gets by far the larger part of his life training, and through the eyes of this dark world he peers into the veiled world beyond. Who guides and determines the education which he receives in his world? His teachers here are the group-leaders of the Negro people—the physicians and clergymen, the trained fathers and mothers, the influential and forceful men about him of all kinds; here it is, if at all, that the culture of the surrounding world trickles through and is handed on by the graduates of the higher schools. Can such culture training of group leaders be neglected? ”

“ They send their picked youth to the great centers of western knowledge; but before this culture is applied to their own needs it must first be sifted through the sieve of their native comprehension. The graduates of the schools and colleges for the Negro race are forming centers of civilizing influence in all parts of the land, and we confidently, believe that these grains of leaven will ultimately leaven the whole lump. ”

“ Having limited him in a franchise which he has not in a generation learned to use, continue to teach him. It is from the educated Negro; that is, the Negro who is more enlightened than the general body of his race, that order must come. The ignorance, venality, and superstition of the average Negro are dangerous to us. Education will divide them and will uplift [Pg 285] them. They may learn in time that if they wish to rise they must look to the essential qualities of good citizenship. ”

“ It is not only a place where a Negro may get inspiration, by seeing what other members of his race have accomplished, but a place, also, where he has an opportunity to learn some of the fundamental duties and responsibilities of social and civic life.
Negroes have here, for example, an opportunity, which they do not have to the same degree elsewhere, either in the North or in the South, of entering simply and naturally into all the phases and problems of community life. They are the farmers, the business men, bankers, teachers, preachers. ”

“ Perhaps the earliest systematic effort toward negro education was in 1691, when, in Virginia, the Church became the agency through which the apprenticeship of Negroes was made. Youths gifted mechanically and industrially were indentured on condition that the talent be developed and that they be taught to read ”