NEGRO EDUCATION
However cheering the interest in general public and higher education
throughout the South, the Whites get most of the benefit; the lower third
of the people, the most ignorant, the poorest, the least ambitious, those
whose debasement is the greatest menace to the community, are less in the
public eye; and the efforts to educate them arouse antagonism of various
kinds. All calculations as to numbers of pupils, school expenditures, and
public opinion as to education are subject to restatement when the Negroes
are taken into account. Even in states like Maryland and Kentucky, where
they are not a fourth of the population, they disturb the whole
educational system, and in the Lower South, where they are in many places
overwhelming in numbers, the problem of their education becomes alarming.
Most people suppose that negro education began during the Civil War, but
it is as old as colonization; free Negroes were always allowed some
privileges in this respect, and thousands of slaves were taught to read by
kind-hearted mistresses and children of the family; the opinion of one who
has carefully explored this field of inquiry is that of the adult slaves,
about one in ten could read and write. Nevertheless, this practice was
contrary to the principles and the laws of the South, as is proved by the
dramatic prosecution of Mrs. Margaret Douglass, of Norfolk, in 1853, for
the crime of holding a school for free negro children, in ignorance of the
fact that it was forbidden as "against the peace and dignity of the
Commonwealth of Virginia." In due time this person, who had admitted
unhallowed light into little dark souls, was duly sentenced to thirty
days' imprisonment, a penalty (as the judge explained) intended to be "as
a terror to those who acknowledge no rule of action but their own evil
will and pleasure."
Both the teachings and the prosecutions establish a general belief that
Negroes could easily learn to read and write; and when during the Civil
War refugees flocked into the Union camps at Beaufort and Hilton Head,
charitably disposed people in the North sent down teachers; and, the
federal government coöperating, schools were started among those Sea
Island people, then rough, uncouth, and not far beyond the savage state,
though now a quiet, well-ordered, and industrious folk. From that time
till the giving up of the Freedman's Bureau in 1869, the federal
government expended some money and took some responsibility for negro
education. It was a pathetic sight to see old gray-headed people crowding
into the schools alongside the children, with the inarticulate feeling
that reading and writing would carry them upward. The Northern missionary
societies kept up these elementary schools, and then began to found
schools and colleges for the training of the most gifted members of the
race. Out of their funds, and with the aid of the freedmen, they put up
schoolhouses, they collected money to establish institutions like Fisk
University in Nashville, Leland and Straight Universities in New Orleans,
and Atlanta University. Such colleges were on the same pattern as other
colleges for Whites both North and South, adopting the then almost
universal curriculum of Greek, Latin, and mathematics, along with
smatterings of other subjects; they included preparatory schools, which,
as in some white colleges both North and South, included the larger number
of the recorded students.
Now came the founding of rural schools, for both Negroes and Whites; all
the Reconstruction constitutions provided for free public schools; and
since that time there has been public organized education for the colored
people, such as it is, in every state, in every city, and in most of the
rural counties having a considerable black population. The reaction
against Reconstruction for some time bore against these schools and they
have come along slowly. When, about 1885, the South entered upon a new
career of education, the negro schools came more into people's minds; but
they have not advanced in proportion to the white schools, and they have
encountered a lively hostility directed particularly against the higher
forms of education.
The present status of the negro common schools may be summarized from the
report of the Commissioner of Education for 1906. Taking the whole South
together, there were, in that year, over 2,900,000 colored children five
to eighteen years old, of whom 1,600,000, or little more than half, were
enrolled in school, while of the white children of school age nearly three
fourths were enrolled. Out of 1,600,000 enrolled, the average attendance
was 990,000, or about a third of the children of school age, while of the
whites it was 3,000,000, or nearly half the children of school age. For
the 1,600,000 enrolled negro children, there were 28,000 teachers, or 1 to
57; for the 4,500,000 white children over 100,000 teachers, 1 to 45. The
annual expenditures for the 6,200,000 children enrolled (white and black)
were $46,000,000, but to the negro children (about a third of the whole,
and least likely to be educated otherwise) was assigned about a seventh of
this sum. To state the same thing in another form, in nearly all the
Southern states at least twice as much was spent per pupil on Whites as on
Negroes.
A part of this disparity is due simply to the fact that the superior race
produces the larger number of children capable of secondary and higher
training and has more money to carry its children along, to pay their
expenses and tuition where necessary, in order to give them a start in
life. That consideration does not account either for the very low
enrollment or low attendance of negro children. The truth is that the
majority of white people, who have the sole power of laying taxes and of
appropriating money for education, think that the Negroes ought not to
have school advantages equal to those of white children, or advancing
beyond a common school education.
The mere statistics of negro schools and attendance after all carry with
them little information. What kind of pupils are they? What kind of school
buildings are provided for them? What is the character of their teachers?
Naturally, among both races, many are at work after twelve or fourteen
years, but the percentages of enrollment and attendance are so much less
than those of the white people that apparently colored children are less
likely than white to be sent to school and to be kept there when started.
Though every Northern state without exception has some kind of compulsory
education, not a single Southern state, except Kentucky and Missouri, has
enacted it.
Some personal knowledge of Southern schools, both in cities and the
country, suggests several reasons why the attendance is small. Visit this
negro wayside school in the heart of the piney woods near Albany, Ga. The
building is a wretched structure with six glass windows, some of them
broken; the sky visible between the weatherboards. There is one desk in
the room, the teacher's, made of rough planks; the floor is rough and
uneven. Of the forty-four children enrolled, none of whom come more than
about three miles, thirty-two are present on a pleasant day; six of them
appear to be mulattoes. They wear shoes and stockings and are quiet and
well-behaved but sit in the midst of dirt on dirty benches. The teacher is
a pleasant woman, wife of a well-to-do colored man in the neighboring
town, but apparently untrained. She teaches five months at $35 a month.
Last year there was no school at all in this district.
Enter another school at Oak Grove, Ala. The house is a single room,
twenty-five feet square; larger than is needed, like many of the
schoolhouses, because it may serve also for church services. There is not
a sash in any one of the seven windows, each having a hinged shutter. The
teacher has a table, and for the pupils are provided several rude benches
with or without backs; the room is furnished with a blackboard and is
reasonably clean; the teacher, a young man eager and civil, a graduate of
a neighboring school carried on by the Negroes for themselves, holds five
months' school. Take another school near Albany, Ga., in a tolerably good
schoolhouse built by the Negroes themselves with some white assistance,
for the county commissioners will do no more than offer $100 to a district
that will spend about $300 more on a building. The room overcrowded, four
or five at a desk; twice as many girls as boys; a good teacher who has had
some normal training; a book for each group of three in the reading class;
the lesson about a brutal Yankee officer who compels a little Southern
girl to tell where the Confederate officer is hiding. The children read
well and with expression.
These are probably fairly typical of the rural negro schools throughout
the South, and better than some. As a matter of fact, thousands of negro
children have no opportunity to go to school, because the commissioners
simply refuse to provide school in their district; perhaps because the
number of children is thought too few; perhaps merely because they do not
wish to spend the money. In a town with perhaps 2,000 Negroes there is
sometimes only one negro teacher.
Here comes in the effect of the separate school system which prevails in
every Southern state, in the District of Columbia, in Indianapolis, and in
parts of New Jersey. The system was inaugurated just as soon as the Whites
obtained control of the Reconstruction government after the Civil War, and
it goes all the way through: separate buildings, separate teachers,
separate influences, separate accounts. The reasons for it are: first, the
belief of white parents that negro children, even the little ones, have a
bad influence on the white children; second, the conviction that mixed
schools would break down the rigorous separation of races necessary to
prevent eventual amalgamation; third, the blacks are niggers. In cities
and towns it adds little to the expense to keep up separate buildings and
corps of teachers, but in rural districts, where the number of children is
small, the expense of double schools may be a serious matter.
One reason why the schools are poor is that the pupils are irregular, and
one reason why they are irregular is that the schools are poor. The
wretched facilities of the rural schools, both white and negro, tend to
drive children out; and the incompetent teachers do not make parents or
children fonder of school. For the white schools a supply of reasonably
intelligent young men and women is now coming forward. As to the Negroes,
with few exceptions, every teacher is a Negro, though appointed by and
supervised by some white authority; it is doubtful whether half the negro
teachers have themselves gone through a decent common school education.
Many of them are ignorant and uneducated. The superintendent of the town
schools at Valdosta, Ga., says: "There are to-day outside of the cities,
not more than one half dozen teachers in each county in the state, upon an
average, who can honestly make a license to teach. The custom in most
counties is to license so many as we are compelled to have to fill the
schools from among those who make the most creditable show upon
examination. School commissioners do not pretend to grade their papers
strictly. If they did three-fourths of the negro schools would be
immediately closed."
Conditions are not much better in the towns, where many negro teachers
earn only $150 to $200 a year; but in the cities the negro teachers are
more carefully selected, for they can be drawn from the local negro high
schools or the normal schools. But the colored people are said to scheme
and maneuver to get this teacher out and that one in. They have been known
to petition against a capable and unblemished teacher on the ground that
she was the daughter of a white man, and it was immoral for her to be
teaching black children.
If the negro common schools are inferior to the white, this is still more
marked in their secondary public schools, such as they are. No principle
is more deeply ingrained in the American people than that it is worth
while to spend the necessary money to educate up to about the eighteenth
year all the young people who show an aptitude, and whose parents can get
on without their labor. The Southern states accept this principle, but for
such education the Negroes have few opportunities. Out of 151,000 Southern
young people in public and private high schools, 6,500 high school pupils
and 2,600 in the private schools are Negroes. That is, a third of the
population counts a seventeenth of the secondary pupils. Most of the
so-called negro colleges are made up of secondary and normal pupils who
get a training very like that of the Northern academies, and some favored
cities have public high schools for the Negroes. This is the case in
Baltimore, and was the case in New Orleans until about 1903, when the high
schools were discontinued, on the ground that the Negro could not profit
by so much education, although the lower branches of the high schools were
still taught in the upper rooms of the negro grammar schools.
It must not be forgotten that there are more than a hundred institutions
for training the colored people, which draw nothing from the public funds.
These schools, in part supported by the colored people themselves, in part
by Northern gifts, which during the last forty years have amounted to
between thirty and fifty million dollars, are usually better than the
public schools, and have more opportunities for those lessons of
cleanliness and uprightness which the Negro needs quite as much as book
learning. Those schools are a thorn in the side of the South--so much so
that for years it was hardly possible to get any Southern man to act as
trustee; they are supposed to teach the negro youth a desire for social
equality; they are thought to draw the Negroes off from cordial relations
with the Southern Whites; above all, they include the higher institutions
which are credited with spoiling the race with too much Greek and Latin.
To a considerable degree the schools of this type are mulatto schools,
probably because the people of mixed blood are more intelligent and
prosperous, and more interested in their children's future; but many of
them are planted in the darkest part of the Black Belt--such as the Penn
School in the Sea Islands. Wherever they exist, they appeal to the
ambition and the conscience of the Negro, and help to civilize the race;
they are not only schools but social settlements. Alongside the earlier
schools and colleges planted by Northerners in the regular academic type,
during the last thirty years have arisen first Hampton, then Tuskegee, and
then many like schools, built up on the principle of industrial training,
which will be described in the next chapter.
The Northern schools for the education of the Negroes have brought about
one of the unpleasant features of the Southern question in the boycotting
of the Northern teachers, both men and women, who have come down to teach
them. This practice is a tradition from Reconstruction times when it was
supposed that the Northern teachers were training colored youth to assert
themselves against Whites. They expected only to furnish examples and
incitements to the Southern people themselves; hence a feeling of
bewilderment and grief, because from the very beginning the white teachers
in these institutions have been under a social ban the relentlessness of
which it is hard for a Northerner to believe. An educated and cultivated
white family has lived in a Southern city, superior intellectually and
morally to most of the community about it; yet no friendly foot ever
crossed its threshold. The beautiful daughter, easily first in the girls'
high school, never exchanged a word with her classmates outside the
school, except when called upon, as she regularly was, to help out her
less gifted fellows, as an unpaid and unthanked tutor--because her father
was spending his life in trying to uplift the Negro. The attitude of the
South toward most of those schools is one of absolute hostility. Even an
institution so favorably regarded in the South as Hampton Institute has
been prohibited by the Legislature of Virginia (which makes it a small
money grant) from selling the products of its industrial department.
The negro colleges in the South are far from prosperous; planted in the
day of small things with limited endowments, frequented by people who have
little money to pay for tuition, they have been supported from year to
year by Northern gifts which are not sufficient to keep them up to modern
demands. Though some of them have tolerable buildings, few have adequate
libraries, laboratories, or staff of specialist instructors. The state
institutions of this grade open to blacks are nearly all rather low in
standards, and offer little inducement for academic training; they are
either normal or industrial in type. The better off of the Negroes send
their sons to Northern white colleges where they may receive the best
instruction but have little contact with their fellow students. So far
from the number of negro college graduates being too great, it is entirely
too small for the immediate needs of the race. They must have educated
teachers and trained professional men; the negro schools will never
flourish without competent teachers and supervisors of the negro race. In
many respects the colleges are the weakest part of negro education. One
school in which numbers have had good training, Berea College, Kentucky,
has now been abandoned under an act of the state legislature forbidding
the teaching of Whites and Negroes together, but an industrial school of
high grade will be provided exclusively for the colored race.
As DuBois says: "If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing,
the races are to live for many years side by side, united in economic
effort, obeying a common government, sensitive to mutual thought and
feeling, yet subtly and silently separate in many matters of deeper human
intimacy,--if this unusual and dangerous development is to progress amid
peace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call for
social surgery at once the delicatest and nicest in modern history. It
will demand broad-minded, upright men, both white and black, and in its
final accomplishment American civilization will triumph." DuBois
calculates that in the twenty-five years from 1875 to 1900 there were only
1,200 or 1,300 negro graduates from all the colleges open to them North
and South, an average of about fifty a year out of a race numbering during
that period, on the average, six millions. Out of this amount about half
have become teachers or heads of institutions, and most of the rest are
professional men.
Many of the academic and normal training schools of various grades are
situated in the midst of large colored populations, and take upon
themselves a work similar to that of the college settlements in Northern
cities. Such is the flourishing school at Calhoun, Ala., which is in the
midst of one of the densest and most ignorant Negro populations in the
South, and besides training the children sent to it, it has supervised the
work of breaking up the land, which is sold to negro farmers in small
tracts, thereby giving an object lesson of the comfort and satisfaction in
owning one's own land. Most such schools aim to be centers of moral
influence upon the community about them. Here, again, they encounter the
hostility of their neighbors on the ground that they are putting notions
into the heads of the Negroes, and are destroying the labor system of the
community. On the other hand, many of the Whites take a warm interest in
these schools, although not a single one has ever received any
considerable gift of money from Southern white people. The testimony is
general that they are well taught, preserve good order, and inculcate
decency of person and life.
Probably the most effective argument in favor of negro education is the
success of Hampton and Tuskegee, two endowed schools, practically kept up
by Northern benefactors, which are the great exemplifiers of industrial
education. They are successful, both in providing for large numbers of
students--about 3,000 altogether--and in producing an effect upon the
whole South. The number of graduates is but a few score a year, and many
of them go into professions for which they were not directly prepared in
these schools. But great numbers of men and women who have spent only a
year or two in these institutions carry out into the community the great
lesson of self-help; and hundreds of schools and thousands of individuals
are moved by the example of these two famous schools and similar
institutions scattered throughout the South. They preach a gospel of work;
they hold up a standard of practicality; they are so successful as to draw
upon themselves the anathemas of men like Thomas Dixon, Jr., who says:
"Mr. Washington ... is training them _all_ to be masters of men, to be
independent.... If there is one thing a Southern white man cannot endure
it is an educated Negro."
The question is imperative. With all the efforts at education,
notwithstanding the great reduction in the percentage of illiteracy, the
number of negro adult men and women in the South who are unable to read
and write is actually greater than at any time since by emancipation they
were brought within the possibilities of education. The actual task grows
greater every day, and if the resources of the South are more than
correspondingly increased, it is still a question how much of them will be
devoted to this pressing need. Education will not do everything; it will
not make chaste, honest, and respectable men and women out of wretched
children left principally to their own instincts. Education is at best a
palliative, but the situation is too serious to dispense even with
palliatives.
Perhaps the first necessity is to improve the character and the training
of the negro teachers. Both in the rural and the city schools appointments
are in many cases made by white school board men who have little knowledge
and sometimes no interest in the fitness of their appointees. The colleges
and industrial schools all have this problem in mind. State normal schools
for Negroes in many of the Southern states try to meet this necessity, but
a great many of the country teachers, some of them in the experience of
the writer, are plainly unsuited for the task. Some of them are themselves
ignorant, few have the background of character and intellectual interest
which would enable them to transmit a moral uplift.
One of the most serious difficulties of negro education is the attendance,
or rather nonattendance. Within a few weeks after the beginning of school,
pupils begin to drop out; often perhaps because the teacher cannot make
the work interesting. One of their own number says: "Many of our children
do not attend school because our teachers are incompetent; because many of
the parents simply dislike their teachers; because some parents prefer
Baptist teachers; because many children have their own way about all they
do; because many children do not like a strict teacher; because some
parents contend for a fine brick building for the school; because, as a
whole, many parents are too ignorant and prejudiced and contentious to do
anything, yet we have enrolled about 150 pupils this session in spite of
the devil."
Some of the schools are overcrowded. There have been cases where 6
teachers were assigned for 1,800 children, of whom 570 enrolled, yet the
average earnings of the six teachers would not be more than $100 a year.
Against these instances must be placed a great number of intelligent,
faithful teachers who make up for some deficiencies of knowledge by their
genuine interest in their work.
For negro education as for white, but perhaps with more reason, it is
urged that the federal government ought to come in with its powerful aid.
The argument somewhat resembles that of the blind Chinese beggar who was
sent to the hospital where he recovered his sight, and then insisted that,
having lost his livelihood, he must be made porter to the hospital. Aside
from any claim of right, it is true that the problem of elevating the
Negroes concerns the whole nation, and is a part of the long process of
which emancipation was the beginning. Federal aid for colored schools,
however, can never be brought about without the consent of the Southern
states, and they are not likely to ask for or to receive educational funds
intended solely for the Negroes; while Northern members of Congress are
not likely to vote for taxing their constituents who already pay two or
three times as much per capita for education as the South, in order to
make up the deficiencies of the other section. It is impossible to
discover any way in which federal aid can be given to the Negroes without
reviving sectional animosity; and it is a fair question whether such gifts
could be so hedged about that they would not lead to a corresponding
diminution in the amount spent by the Southern states. The Government
grants to state agricultural colleges and experiment stations inure almost
wholly to the advantage of the Whites; if a part of that money could be
devoted to the education of the Negro, it might be helpful.
Several educational trusts created years ago for the benefit of the
Negroes have now ceased their work. The Peabody fund of about three
million dollars was much depleted by the repudiation of the Mississippi
and Florida bonds, and has now been entirely distributed. For some years
it was devoted to building up primary teaching on condition that the
localities benefited should themselves spend larger sums. Then it went
into normal schools. In 1882 the Slater fund of one million dollars was
given solely for the education of Negroes. The General Education Board in
its allocations to Southern institutions has liberally remembered several
of the negro institutions as well as the white.