EDUCATION UNDER DIFFICULTIES.
Some time as many as a half dozen funerals a day occurred in the coast
region from malarial fever or small pox. The chances for recovery were
rendered difficult by the absence of any physician, the nearest one
being sixty miles away.
Among the medicines sent Miss Schofield from friends of the North was
a bottle of port wine. This was sent in 1876, when she was attacked
by a hemorrhage of the lungs, with instructions from a physician that
she must take it three times a day. But the fear of setting an example
which might prove the ruin of many people in her charge caused her not
to open it. She took it to Aiken, and during the construction of her
residence there it was deposited in the walls and no one except Miss
Schofield to the day of her death, on February 1, 1916, knew where to
break the wall; no one on earth knows just where to this very day.
She despised the avarice and greed that caused men to manufacture
intoxicants but hated with the venom of the devil the lust for gain
by the municipalities and States which caused them to issue licenses
for the manufacture of alcohol. She taught and lived that the greatest
criminal in the history of criminology was the criminal who issued the
license for the commission of crime. In her opinion this was not only a
crime against society but a crime against criminals as well.
The pernicious influence of alcohol on the Negro was largely
responsible for her antagonism to the liquor traffic. Opposed to it
naturally, as every educated and thinking person must be, she was more
so after observing its destructive influence among the ignorant and
vicious.
It was confidently believed by her that if every Negro capable of
complying with the registration laws regulating the qualification of
voters, was registered and allowed to vote, uninfluenced by any outside
influence, that the legal sale of alcoholic stimulants in the South
at least, would be a thing of the past. She believed also that if
positions on the police force were available to colored men for service
in the Negro sections of the cities that not only would the illegal
sale of intoxicants be stopped but crimes of every character would be
largely suppressed.
Martha Schofield, having lived to see accomplished the task to which
her life had been dedicated on the day her father rescued Laura Duncan
from the blood hounds of the slave holding oligarchy, died as happy
and serene as an angel, perfectly confident that the work she had been
doing would gain momentum and go on more splendidly each year, until
illiteracy and physical and moral degradation would be an exceptional
thing among the Negroes.
Between the years of 1890 and 1910 the percentage of Negro illiteracy
had fallen from 57.10 to 30.40 per cent. among children between the
ages of ten and fourteen years. For those fifteen years of age and
under nineteen, the percentage of illiteracy was only 18.90 per cent.
The greater illiteracy in the higher age classes is very marked, the
illiteracy of Negroes of 55 to 64 years of age being about 67 per cent.
of the total, and nearly every one of those of 65 years and above were
found to be unable to read or write when the 1910 census was taken.
Negroes of sixty years and above, it will be recalled, were past
childhood before emancipation, when little or no provision was made to
teach them to read and write, and this accounts for the high percentage
of illiteracy in the old people and the rapidly decreasing percentage
of illiteracy among their children.
At the rate of advance in education among the Negroes at present there
will be less than 10 per cent. of the population between ten and
fourteen illiterate in 1920, and every child of sane mind and sound
body will be able to read and write by 1930, when the Fourteenth
Census shall have been taken. This all in the space of fifty years.
Remarkable!
And yet there are well informed influential people who still maintain
that the progress of the Negro has been slow, superficial and unworthy
of the effort and money expended on it.
Maybe so, but all admit, that it is very helpful to every human being
to be able to read and write, to be able to assimilate the thoughts
of others and to express his thoughts and hand them on to others of
his kind by other means than by the word of mouth. To deny this would
be equal to denying one the right to be taught the use of his mind or
tongue, the two organs which God in His infinite wisdom put no ban
upon, but made free as the air of Heaven, restricting their use only to
the accomplishment of honorable and noble undertakings, thus dethroning
the power of all, who though possessed of powerful intellect, would use
their talent in the interest of the base and ignoble.
While the peoples of all races are born with a knowledge of good
and evil they are not possessed at birth with the knowledge which
science is supposed to endow them with, and therefore, it should be
the pleasure, as it certainly is the imperative duty of the State
to provide liberally for the diffusion of knowledge among even the
humblest of all its citizens.
Martha Schofield taught more emphatically than anything else the
economic necessity which exists among all races for the performance
of duty, one to another. She argued that unrighted wrongs retard
the progress of races, and if not checked by the refinements of
civilization, through the enlightenment of the mind, become the
instruments which at last wreck and destroy the strongest ships of
State. She wanted her work to prove to the country that great measures
of service in the field of education was the price to be paid for
the salvation of our land against the misery and death, which others
through ignorance and greed, had sown. She made the man at the North
without principle or scruple to modify his ambition in the selfish
accumulation of wealth equally as culpable as the man of the South,
in producing the suffering and misery which attended the great
civil conflict for freedom. She exhibited the chaos attending the
Reconstruction period as the awful penalty for benighted stupidity
and ignorance of an earlier day, for which none of the present day is
accountable, and whose fruits none, in an earlier past, foresaw.
Her doctrine of the elevation of the Negro so as to meet the
necessities of the new standard of civilization which freedom had
thrust upon him, spread like wild fire on a western prairie, and was,
of course, shocking, even inconceivable to the imagination of the
Southern white mind, which had been taught and religiously believed
that education impaired the usefulness of the colored people, both as
productive machines in the hard field of toil and as mediums for the
expression of the divine messages of power.
“No amount or kind of learning,” they argued, “can be made available to
the ‘nigger’ because of his inability to assimilate it. He’s a brute,
pure and simple, and has anyone ever succeeded through teaching in
making a brute anything but a brute?”
“Pigs will be pigs.”
Laws by the General Assembly of South Carolina forbade the whites the
privilege of teaching Negroes, but it was ignored by many good men and
women who devoted much time and money to the education of the race.
An influential Southern man, a former Governor of one of the great
States of the South and now an honored member of the Senate of the
United States once wrote a book in which he delved deep into history
and anthropology and proved to the complete satisfaction of the voters
of his State and to a great number of the learned professors of the
sciences in some of the Southern colleges, that the Negro by every fact
known to the scientists and evolutionists was a member of the families
of the lower animals, and, therefore, an impossibility in the matter of
intellectual development.
The influence of this propaganda at the South exerted itself strongly
to the detriment of the work undertaken by Miss Schofield, and others
who came after her, in that it aroused the passions of the ignorant
whites and determined them in the course of lawlessness, which but for
the zeal and strength of heart expressed by Martha Schofield might have
succeeded in delaying for many years the phenomenal rise and progress
of the black people of the Southern States.
One Sunday morning, the sun in all its radiance and splendor lighting
up the whole world, doing for the earth and every creature and plant on
it (giving them light and warmth and moisture that they might develop
and grow to perfection) just what God would have us do--help along
everything good that we can--on such a morning as this--a band of
armed men approached Miss Schofield’s home and demanded that she quit
teaching Negro children and return to her home or she would be forced
to do so.
To these she replied as follows: “Thee can kill my body and hide it
away, but my soul is of God, that is the one invincible thing, which
thee can not kill.”
A noble life consecrated absolutely, even in the face of death, to the
uplift and service of a lowly, impoverished race! Everywhere she went,
she reached righteousness, law, order, temperance, truth, cleanliness,
thoroughness and economy.
After fifty years of toil, of social ostracism, of infinitely wicked
persecution, which in later years by her patience, by her kindness
and charity was greatly modified, she fell in the harness, full of
achievements from the work which God had given her to do. At both the
funeral service at Aiken, S. C., where she died on the night before
the event arranged by friends to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary
of her service to the colored people and her helpfulness to all who
met her socially or in a business way, and at Darby Meeting House,
in Pennsylvania, where the interment of the body took place, solemn
covenants consecrating mind and heart and hand, amid the tears and
sobs of blacks and whites alike, were made by many to keep alive
forever the spark of truth and life she was first to express the
courage to plant in a land of enemies, surrounded on every side by the
dangers of assassination and the ravages of small pox, malaria, and
dengue fevers.
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