In order that the reader may understand me and why I lay so much
stress upon the importance of pushing the doctrine of industrial
education for the Negro, it is necessary, first of all, to review the
condition of affairs at the present time in the Southern States. For
years I have had something of an opportunity to study the Negro at
first-hand; and I feel that I know him pretty well,--him and his
needs, his failures and his successes, his desires and the likelihood
of their fulfilment. I have studied him and his relations with his
white neighbours, and striven to find how these relations may be made
more conducive to the general peace and welfare both of the South and
of the country at large.
In the Southern part of the United States there are twenty-two
millions of people who are bound to the fifty millions of the North by
ties which neither can tear asunder if they would. The most
intelligent in a New York community has his intelligence darkened by
the ignorance of a fellow-citizen in the Mississippi bottoms. The most
wealthy in New York City would be more wealthy but for the poverty of
a fellow-being in the Carolina rice swamps. The most moral and
religious men in Massachusetts have their religion and morality
modified by the degradation of the man in the South whose religion is
a mere matter of form or of emotionalism. The vote of the man in Maine
that is cast for the highest and purest form of government is largely
neutralised by the vote of the man in Louisiana whose ballot is stolen
or cast in ignorance. Therefore, when the South is ignorant, the North
is ignorant; when the South is poor, the North is poor; when the South
commits crime, the nation commits crime. For the citizens of the North
there is no escape; they must help raise the character of the
civilisation in the South, or theirs will be lowered. No member of the
white race in any part of the country can harm the weakest or meanest
member of the black race without the proudest and bluest blood of the
nation being degraded.
It seems to me that there never was a time in the history of the
country when those interested in education should the more earnestly
consider to what extent the mere acquiring of the ability to read and
write, the mere acquisition of a knowledge of literature and science,
makes men producers, lovers of labour, independent, honest, unselfish,
and, above all, good. Call education by what name you please, if it
fails to bring about these results among the masses, it falls short of
its highest end. The science, the art, the literature, that fails to
reach down and bring the humblest up to the enjoyment of the fullest
blessings of our government, is weak, no matter how costly the
buildings or apparatus used or how modern the methods of instruction
employed. The study of arithmetic that does not result in making men
conscientious in receiving and counting the ballots of their
fellow-men is faulty. The study of art that does not result in making
the strong less willing to oppress the weak means little. How I wish
that from the most cultured and highly endowed university in the great
North to the humblest log cabin school-house in Alabama, we could
burn, as it were, into the hearts and heads of all that usefulness,
that service to our brother, is the supreme end of education. Putting
the thought more directly as it applies to conditions in the South,
can you make the intelligence of the North affect the South in the
same ratio that the ignorance of the South affects the North? Let us
take a not improbable case: A great national case is to be decided,
one that involves peace or war, the honour or dishonour of our
nation,--yea, the very existence of the government. The North and West
are divided. There are five million votes to be cast in the South;
and, of this number, one-half are ignorant. Not only are one-half the
voters ignorant; but, because of the ignorant votes they cast,
corruption and dishonesty in a dozen forms have crept into the
exercise of the political franchise to such an extent that the
conscience of the intelligent class is seared in its attempts to
defeat the will of the ignorant voters. Here, then, you have on the
one hand an ignorant vote, on the other an intelligent vote minus a
conscience. The time may not be far off when to this kind of jury we
shall have to look for the votes which shall decide in a large measure
the destiny of our democratic institutions.
When a great national calamity stares us in the face, we are, I fear,
too much given to depending on a short "campaign of education" to do
on the hustings what should have been accomplished in the school.
With this idea in view, let us examine with more care the condition of
civilisation in the South, and the work to be done there before all
classes will be fit for the high duties of citizenship. In reference
to the Negro race, I am confronted with some embarrassment at the
outset, because of the various and conflicting opinions as to what is
to be its final place in our economic and political life.
Within the last thirty years--and, I might add, within the last three
months,--it has been proven by eminent authority that the Negro is
increasing in numbers so fast that it is only a question of a few
years before he will far outnumber the white race in the South, and it
has also been proven that the Negro is fast dying out, and it is only
a question of a few years before he will have completely disappeared.
It has also been proven that education helps the Negro and that
education hurts him, that he is fast leaving the South and taking up
his residence in the North and West, and that his tendency is to drift
toward the low lands of the Mississippi bottoms. It has been proven
that education unfits the Negro for work and that education makes him
more valuable as a labourer, that he is our greatest criminal and that
he is our most law-abiding citizen. In the midst of these conflicting
opinions, it is hard to hit upon the truth.
But, also, in the midst of this confusion, there are a few things of
which I am certain,--things which furnish a basis for thought and
action. I know that whether the Negroes are increasing or decreasing,
whether they are growing better or worse, whether they are valuable
or valueless, that a few years ago some fourteen of them were brought
into this country, and that now those fourteen are nearly ten
millions. I know that, whether in slavery or freedom, they have always
been loyal to the Stars and Stripes, that no school-house has been
opened for them that has not been filled, that the 2,000,000 ballots
that they have the right to cast are as potent for weal or woe as an
equal number cast by the wisest and most influential men in America. I
know that wherever Negro life touches the life of the nation it helps
or it hinders, that wherever the life of the white race touches the
black it makes it stronger or weaker. Further, I know that almost
every other race that has tried to look the white man in the face has
disappeared. I know, despite all the conflicting opinions, and with a
full knowledge of all the Negroes' weaknesses, that only a few
centuries ago they went into slavery in this country pagans, that
they came out Christians; they went into slavery as so much property,
they came out American citizens; they went into slavery without a
language, they came out speaking the proud Anglo-Saxon tongue; they
went into slavery with the chains clanking about their wrists, they
came out with the American ballot in their hands.
I submit it to the candid and sober judgment of all men, if a race
that is capable of such a test, such a transformation, is not worth
saving and making a part, in reality as well as in name, of our
democratic government. That the Negro may be fitted for the fullest
enjoyment of the privileges and responsibilities of our citizenship,
it is important that the nation be honest and candid with him, whether
honesty and candour for the time being pleases or displeases him. It
is with an ignorant race as it is with a child: it craves at first
the superficial, the ornamental signs of progress rather than the
reality. The ignorant race is tempted to jump, at one bound, to the
position that it has required years of hard struggle for others to
reach.
It seems to me that, as a general thing, the temptation in the past in
educational and missionary work has been to do for the new people that
which was done a thousand years ago, or that which is being done for a
people a thousand miles away, without making a careful study of the
needs and conditions of the people whom it is designed to help. The
temptation is to run all people through a certain educational mould,
regardless of the condition of the subject or the end to be
accomplished. This has been the case too often in the South in the
past, I am sure. Men have tried to use, with these simple people just
freed from slavery and with no past, no inherited traditions of
learning, the same methods of education which they have used in New
England, with all its inherited traditions and desires. The Negro is
behind the white man because he has not had the same chance, and not
from any inherent difference in his nature and desires. What the race
accomplishes in these first fifty years of freedom will at the end of
these years, in a large measure, constitute its past. It is, indeed, a
responsibility that rests upon this nation,--the foundation laying for
a people of its past, present, and future at one and the same time.
One of the weakest points in connection with the present development
of the race is that so many get the idea that the mere filling of the
head with a knowledge of mathematics, the sciences, and literature,
means success in life. Let it be understood, in every corner of the
South, among the Negro youth at least, that knowledge will benefit
little except as it is harnessed, except as its power is pointed in a
direction that will bear upon the present needs and condition of the
race. There is in the heads of the Negro youth of the South enough
general and floating knowledge of chemistry, of botany, of zoology, of
geology, of mechanics, of electricity, of mathematics, to reconstruct
and develop a large part of the agricultural, mechanical, and domestic
life of the race. But how much of it is brought to a focus along lines
of practical work? In cities of the South like Atlanta, how many
coloured mechanical engineers are there? or how many machinists? how
many civil engineers? how many architects? how many house decorators?
In the whole State of Georgia, where eighty per cent. of the coloured
people depend upon agriculture, how many men are there who are well
grounded in the principles and practices of scientific farming? or
dairy work? or fruit culture? or floriculture?
For example, not very long ago I had a conversation with a young
coloured man who is a graduate of one of the prominent universities of
this country. The father of this man is comparatively ignorant, but by
hard work and the exercise of common sense he has become the owner of
two thousand acres of land. He owns more than a score of horses, cows,
and mules and swine in large numbers, and is considered a prosperous
farmer. In college the son of this farmer has studied chemistry,
botany, zoology, surveying, and political economy. In my conversation
I asked this young man how many acres his father cultivated in cotton
and how many in corn. With a far-off gaze up into the heavens he
answered that he did not know. When I asked him the classification of
the soils on his father's farm, he did not know. He did not know how
many horses or cows his father owned nor of what breeds they were, and
seemed surprised that he should be asked such questions. It never
seemed to have entered his mind that on his father's farm was the
place to make his chemistry, his mathematics, and his literature
penetrate and reflect itself in every acre of land, every bushel of
corn, every cow, and every pig.
Let me give other examples of this mistaken sort of education. When a
mere boy, I saw a young coloured man, who had spent several years in
school, sitting in a common cabin in the South, studying a French
grammar. I noted the poverty, the untidiness, the want of system and
thrift, that existed about the cabin, notwithstanding his knowledge of
French and other academic studies.
Again, not long ago I saw a coloured minister preparing his Sunday
sermon just as the New England minister prepares his sermon. But this
coloured minister was in a broken-down, leaky, rented log cabin, with
weeds in the yard, surrounded by evidences of poverty, filth, and
want of thrift. This minister had spent some time in school studying
theology. How much better it would have been to have had this minister
taught the dignity of labour, taught theoretical and practical farming
in connection with his theology, so that he could have added to his
meagre salary, and set an example for his people in the matter of
living in a decent house, and having a knowledge of correct farming!
In a word, this minister should have been taught that his condition,
and that of his people, was not that of a New England community; and
he should have been so trained as to meet the actual needs and
conditions of the coloured people in this community, so that a
foundation might be laid that would, in the future, make a community
like New England communities.
Since the Civil War, no one object has been more misunderstood than
that of the object and value of industrial education for the Negro.
To begin with, it must be borne in mind that the condition that
existed in the South immediately after the war, and that now exists,
is a peculiar one, without a parallel in history. This being true, it
seems to me that the wise and honest thing to do is to make a study of
the actual condition and environment of the Negro, and do that which
is best for him, regardless of whether the same thing has been done
for another race in exactly the same way. There are those among the
white race and those among the black race who assert, with a good deal
of earnestness, that there is no difference between the white man and
the black man in this country. This sounds very pleasant and tickles
the fancy; but, when the test of hard, cold logic is applied to it, it
must be acknowledged that there is a difference,--not an inherent one,
not a racial one, but a difference growing out of unequal
opportunities in the past.
If I may be permitted to criticise the educational work that has been
done in the South, I would say that the weak point has been in the
failure to recognise this difference.
Negro education, immediately after the war in most cases, was begun
too nearly at the point where New England education had ended. Let me
illustrate. One of the saddest sights I ever saw was the placing of a
three hundred dollar rosewood piano in a country school in the South
that was located in the midst of the "Black Belt." Am I arguing
against the teaching of instrumental music to the Negroes in that
community? Not at all; only I should have deferred those music lessons
about twenty-five years. There are numbers of such pianos in thousands
of New England homes. But behind the piano in the New England home
there are one hundred years of toil, sacrifice, and economy; there is
the small manufacturing industry, started several years ago by hand
power, now grown into a great business; there is ownership in land, a
comfortable home, free from debt, and a bank account. In this "Black
Belt" community where this piano went, four-fifths of the people owned
no land, many lived in rented one-room cabins, many were in debt for
food supplies, many mortgaged their crops for the food on which to
live, and not one had a bank account. In this case, how much wiser it
would have been to have taught the girls in this community sewing,
intelligent and economical cooking, housekeeping, something of
dairying and horticulture? The boys should have been taught something
of farming in connection with their common-school education, instead
of awakening in them a desire for a musical instrument which resulted
in their parents going into debt for a third-rate piano or organ
before a home was purchased. Industrial lessons would have awakened,
in this community, a desire for homes, and would have given the people
the ability to free themselves from industrial slavery to the extent
that most of them would have soon purchased homes. After the home and
the necessaries of life were supplied could come the piano. One piano
lesson in a home of one's own is worth twenty in a rented log cabin.
All that I have just written, and the various examples illustrating
it, show the present helpless condition of my people in the
South,--how fearfully they lack the primary training for good living
and good citizenship, how much they stand in need of a solid
foundation on which to build their future success. I believe, as I
have many times said in my various addresses in the North and in the
South, that the main reason for the existence of this curious state
of affairs is the lack of practical training in the ways of life.
There is, too, a great lack of money with which to carry on the
educational work in the South. I was in a county in a Southern State
not long ago where there are some thirty thousand coloured people and
about seven thousand whites. In this county not a single public school
for Negroes had been open that year longer than three months, not a
single coloured teacher had been paid more than $15 per month for his
teaching. Not one of these schools was taught in a building that was
worthy of the name of school-house. In this county the State or public
authorities do not own a single dollar's worth of school
property,--not a school-house, a blackboard, or a piece of crayon.
Each coloured child had had spent on him that year for his education
about fifty cents, while each child in New York or Massachusetts had
had spent on him that year for education not far from $20. And yet
each citizen of this county is expected to share the burdens and
privileges of our democratic form of government just as intelligently
and conscientiously as the citizens of New York or Boston. A vote in
this county means as much to the nation as a vote in the city of
Boston. Crime in this county is as truly an arrow aimed at the heart
of the government as a crime committed in the streets of Boston.
A single school-house built this year in a town near Boston to shelter
about three hundred pupils cost more for building alone than is spent
yearly for the education, including buildings, apparatus, teachers,
for the whole coloured school population of Alabama. The Commissioner
of Education for the State of Georgia not long ago reported to the
State legislature that in that State there were two hundred thousand
children that had entered no school the year past and one hundred
thousand more who were at school but a few days, making practically
three hundred thousand children between six and eighteen years of age
that are growing up in ignorance in one Southern State alone. The same
report stated that outside of the cities and towns, while the average
number of school-houses in a county was sixty, all of these sixty
school-houses were worth in lump less than $2,000, and the report
further added that many of the school-houses in Georgia were not fit
for horse stables. I am glad to say, however, that vast improvement
over this condition is being made in Georgia under the inspired
leadership of State Commissioner Glenn, and in Alabama under the no
less zealous leadership of Commissioner Abercrombie.
These illustrations, so far as they concern the Gulf States, are not
exceptional cases; nor are they overdrawn.
Until there is industrial independence, it is hardly possible to have
good living and a pure ballot in the country districts. In these
States it is safe to say that not more than one black man in twenty
owns the land he cultivates. Where so large a proportion of a people
are dependent, live in other people's houses, eat other people's food,
and wear clothes they have not paid for, it is pretty hard to expect
them to live fairly and vote honestly.
I have thus far referred mainly to the Negro race. But there is
another side. The longer I live and the more I study the question, the
more I am convinced that it is not so much a problem as to what the
white man will do with the Negro as what the Negro will do with the
white man and his civilisation. In considering this side of the
subject, I thank God that I have grown to the point where I can
sympathise with a white man as much as I can sympathise with a black
man. I have grown to the point where I can sympathise with a Southern
white man as much as I can sympathise with a Northern white man.
As bearing upon the future of our civilisation, I ask of the North
what of their white brethren in the South,--those who have suffered
and are still suffering the consequences of American slavery, for
which both North and South were responsible? Those of the great and
prosperous North still owe to their less fortunate brethren of the
Caucasian race in the South, not less than to themselves, a serious
and uncompleted duty. What was the task the North asked the South to
perform? Returning to their destitute homes after years of war to face
blasted hopes, devastation, a shattered industrial system, they asked
them to add to their own burdens that of preparing in education,
politics, and economics, in a few short years, for citizenship, four
millions of former slaves. That the South, staggering under the
burden, made blunders, and that in a measure there has been
disappointment, no one need be surprised. The educators, the
statesmen, the philanthropists, have imperfectly comprehended their
duty toward the millions of poor whites in the South who were buffeted
for two hundred years between slavery and freedom, between
civilisation and degradation, who were disregarded by both master and
slave. It needs no prophet to tell the character of our future
civilisation when the poor white boy in the country districts of the
South receives one dollar's worth of education and the boy of the same
class in the North twenty dollars' worth, when one never enters a
reading-room or library and the other has reading-rooms and libraries
in every ward and town, when one hears lectures and sermons once in
two months and the other can hear a lecture or a sermon every day in
the year.
The time has come, it seems to me, when in this matter we should rise
above party or race or sectionalism into the region of duty of man to
man, of citizen to citizen, of Christian to Christian; and if the
Negro, who has been oppressed and denied his rights in a Christian
land, can help the whites of the North and South to rise, can be the
inspiration of their rising, into this atmosphere of generous
Christian brotherhood and self-forgetfulness, he will see in it a
recompense for all that he has suffered in the past.