THE MISTAKES AND THE FUTURE OF NEGRO EDUCATION
During the thirty years I have been engaged in Negro education in the
South my work has brought me into contact with many different kinds of
Negro schools. I have visited these schools in every part of the South
and have had an opportunity to study their work and learn something of
their difficulties as well as of their successes. During the last five
years, for example, I have taken time from my other work to make
extended trips of observation through eight different states, looking
into the condition of the schools and saying a word, wherever I went, in
their interest. I have had opportunities, as I went about, to note not
merely the progress that has been made inside the school houses, but to
observe, also, the effects which the different types of schools have had
upon the homes and in the communities by which they are surrounded.
Considering all that I have seen and learned of Negro education in the
way I have described, it has occurred to me that I could not do better
in the concluding reminiscences of my own larger education than give
some sort of summary statement, not only of what has been accomplished,
but what seems to be the present needs and prospects of Negro education
in general for the Southern States. In view also of the fact that I have
gained the larger part of my own larger education in what I have been
able to do for this cause, the statement may not seem out of place here.
Let me then, first of all, say that never in the history of the world
has a people, coming so lately out of slavery, made such efforts to
catch up with and attain the highest and best in the civilization about
them; never has such a people made the same amount of progress in the
same time as is the case of the Negro people of America.
At the same time, I ought to add, also, that never in the history of the
world has there been a more generous effort on the part of one race to
help civilize and build up another than has been true of the American
white man and the Negro. I say this because it should be remembered
that, if the white man in America was responsible for bringing the Negro
here and holding him in slavery, the white man in America was equally
responsible for giving him his freedom and the opportunities by which he
has been able to make the tremendous progress of the last forty-eight
years.
In spite of this fact, in looking over and considering conditions of
Negro education in the South to-day, not so much with reference to the
past as to the future, I am impressed with the imperfect, incomplete,
and unsatisfactory condition in which that education now is. I fear that
there is much misconception, both in the North and in the South, in
regard to the actual opportunities for education which the Negro has.
In the first place, in spite of all that has been said about it, the
mass of the Negro people has never had, either in the common schools or
in the Negro colleges in the South, an education in the same sense as
the white people in the Northern States have had an education. Without
going into details, let me give a few facts in regard to the Negro
schools of so-called higher learning in the South. There are twenty-five
Negro schools which are ordinarily classed as colleges in the South.
They have, altogether, property and endowments, according to the report
of the United States commissioner of education, of $7,993,028. There are
eleven single institutions of higher learning in the Northern States,
each of which has property and endowment equal to or greater than all
the Negro colleges in the South. There are, for instance, five colleges
or universities in the North every one of which has property and
endowments amounting to more than $20,000,000; there are three
universities which together have property and endowments amounting to
nearly $100,000,000.
The combined annual income of twenty-four principal Negro colleges is
$1,048,317. There are fifteen white schools that have a yearly income of
from one million to five million dollars each. In fact, there is one
single institution of learning in the North which, in the year of 1909,
had an income, nearly twice as large as the combined income of the one
hundred and twenty-three Negro colleges, industrial schools, and other
private institutions of learning of which the commissioner of education
has any report. These facts indicate, I think, that however numerous the
Negro institutions of higher learning may be, the ten million Negroes in
the United States are not getting from them, either in quality or in
quantity, an education such as they ought to have.
Let me speak, however, of conditions as I have found them in some of the
more backward Negro communities. In my own state, for example, there are
communities in which Negro teachers are now being paid not more than
from fifteen dollars to seventeen dollars a month for services covering
a period of three or four months in the year. As I stated in a recent
open letter to the Montgomery _Advertiser_, more money is paid for Negro
convicts than for Negro teachers. About forty-six dollars a month is now
being paid for first-class, able-bodied Negro convicts, thirty-six
dollars for second-class, and twenty-six dollars for third-class, and
this is for twelve months in the year. This will, perhaps, at least
suggest the conditions that exist in some of the Negro rural schools.
I do not mean to say that conditions are as bad everywhere as these that
I refer to. Nevertheless, when one speaks “of the results of Negro
education” it should be remembered that, so far as concerns the masses
of the Negro people, education has never yet been really tried.
One of the troubles with Negro education at the present time is that
there are no definite standards of education among the different Negro
schools. It is not possible to tell, for instance, from the name of an
institution, whether it is teaching the ordinary common school branches,
Greek and Latin, or carpentry, blacksmithing, and sewing. More than
that, there is no accepted standard as to the methods or efficiency of
the teaching in these schools. A student may be getting a mere
smattering, not even learning sufficient reading and writing to be able
to read with comfort a book or a newspaper. He may be getting a very
good training in one subject and almost nothing in some other. A boy
entering such a school does not know what he is going for, and, nine
times out of ten, he will come away without knowing what he got. In many
cases, the diploma that the student carries home with him at the
conclusion of his course is nothing less than a gold brick. It has made
him believe that he has gotten an education, when he has actually never
had an opportunity to find out what an education is.
I have in mind a young man who came to us from one of those little
colleges to which I have referred where he had studied Greek, Latin,
German, astronomy, and, among other things, stenography. He found that
he could not use his Greek and Latin and that he had not learned enough
German to be able to use the language, so he came to us as a
stenographer. Unfortunately, he was not much better in stenography and
in English than he was in German. After he had failed as a stenographer,
he tried several other things, but because he had gone through a college
and had a diploma, he could never bring himself to the point of fitting
himself to do well any one thing. The consequence was that he went
wandering about the country, always dissatisfied and unhappy, never
giving satisfaction to himself or to his employers.
Although this young man was not able to write a letter in English
without making grammatical errors or errors of some kind or other, the
last time I heard of him he was employed as a teacher of business, in
fact, he was at the head of the business department in one of the little
colleges to which I have referred. He was not able to use his
stenography in a well-equipped office, but he was able to teach
stenography sufficiently well to meet the demands of the business course
as given in the kind of Negro college of which there are, unfortunately,
too many in the South.
Now, there was nothing the matter with this young man—excepting his
education. He was industrious, ambitious, absolutely trustworthy, and,
if he had been able to stick at any one position long enough to learn to
do the work required of him well, he would have made, in my opinion, a
very valuable man. As it was, his higher education spoiled him. In going
through college he had been taught that he was getting an education
when, as a matter of fact, he really had no education worth the mention.
One of the mistakes that Negro schools have frequently made has been the
effort to cover, in some sort of way, the whole school curriculum from
the primary, through the college, taking their students, as a friend of
mine once said, “from the cradle to the grave.” The result is that many
of the Negro colleges have so burdened themselves with the work of an
elementary grade that they are actually doing no college work at all,
although they still keep up the forms and their students still speak of
themselves as “college students.”
In this way nearly every little school calling itself a college has
attempted to set up a complete school system of its own, reaching from
the primary grade up through the university. These schools, having set
themselves an impossible task, particularly in view of the small means
that they have at their command, it is no wonder that their work is
often badly done.
I remember visiting one of these institutions in the backwoods district
of one of the Southern States. The school was carried on in an old
ramshackle building, which had been erected by the students and the
teachers, although it was evident that not one of them had more than the
most primitive notion of how to handle a saw or a square.
The wind blew through the building from end to end. Heaps of Bibles,
which had been presented to the school by some friends, were piled up on
the floor in one corner of the building. The dormitory was in the most
disorderly condition one could possibly imagine. Half of the building
had been burned away and had never been rebuilt. Broken beds and old
mattresses were piled helter-skelter about in the rooms. What showed as
well as anything the total incompetency of everybody connected with the
school were the futile efforts that had been made to obtain a supply of
drinking water. The yard around the school, which they called the
“campus,” was full of deep and dangerous holes, where some one had
attempted at different times to dig a well but failed, because, as was
evident enough, he had not the slightest idea of how the work should
have been done.
At the time I was there the school was supplied with water from an old
swamp in the neighbourhood, but the president of the college explained
to me an elaborate plan which he had evolved for creating an artificial
lake and this enterprise, he said, had the added advantage of furnishing
work for the students.
When I asked this man in regard to his course of study, he handed me a
great sheet of paper, about fifteen inches wide and two feet long,
filled with statements that he had copied from the curricula of all
sorts of different schools, including theological seminaries,
universities, and industrial schools. From this sheet, it appeared that
he proposed to teach in his school everything from Hebrew to telegraphy.
In fact, it would have taken at least two hundred teachers to do all the
work that he had laid out.
When I asked him why it was that he did not confine himself within the
limits of what the students needed and of what he would be able to
teach, he explained to me that he had found that some people wanted one
kind of education and some people wanted another. As far as he was
concerned, he took a liberal view and was willing to give anybody
anything that was wanted. If his students wanted industrial education,
theological education, or college education, he proposed to give it to
them.
I suggested to him that the plan was liberal enough, but it would be
impossible for him to carry it out. “Yes,” he replied, “it may be
impossible just now, but I believe in aiming high.” The pathetic thing
about it all was that this man and the people with whom he had
surrounded himself were perfectly sincere in what they were trying to
do. They simply did not know what an education was or what it was for.
We have in the South, in general, five types of Negro schools. There are
(1) the common schools, supported in large part by state funds
supplemented in many cases by contributions from the coloured people;
(2) academies and so-called colleges, or universities, supported partly
by different Negro religious denominations and partly by the
contributions of philanthropic persons and organizations; (3) the state
normal, mechanical, and agricultural colleges, supported in part by the
state and in part by funds provided by the Federal Government; (4)
medical schools, which are usually attached to some one or other of the
colleges, but really maintain a more or less independent existence; (5)
industrial schools, on the model of Hampton and Tuskegee.
Although these schools exist, in many cases, side by side, most of them
are attempting to do, more or less, the work of all the others. Because
every school is attempting to do the work of every other, the
opportunities for coöperation and team work are lost. Instead one finds
them frequently quarrelling and competing among themselves both for
financial support and for students. The colleges and the academies
frequently draw students away from the public schools. The state
agricultural schools, supported in part by the National Government, are
hardly distinguishable from some of the theological seminaries. Instead
of working in coöperation with one another and with the public
authorities in building up the public schools, thus bringing the various
institutions of learning into some sort of working harmony and system,
it not infrequently happens that the different schools are spending time
and energy in trying to hamper and injure one another.
We have had some experience at Tuskegee of this lack of coöperation
among the different types of Negro schools. For some years we have
employed as teachers a large number of graduates, not only from some of
the better Negro colleges in the South, but from some of the best
colleges in the North as well. In spite of the fact that Tuskegee offers
a larger market for the services of these college graduates than they
are able to find elsewhere, I have yet to find a single graduate who has
come to us from any of these colleges in the South who has made any
study of the aims or purposes of industrial education. And this is true,
although some of the colleges claim that a large part of their work
consists in preparing teachers for work in industrial schools.
Not only has it been true that graduates of these colleges have had no
knowledge or preparation which fitted them for teaching in an industrial
school, but in many cases, they have come to us with the most distorted
notions of what these industrial schools were seeking to do.
Perhaps the larger proportion of the college graduates go, when they
leave college, as teachers into the city or rural schools. Nevertheless,
there is the same lack of coöperation between the colleges and the
public schools that I have described as existing between the colleges
and the industrial schools. It is a rare thing, so far as my experience
goes, for students in the Negro colleges to have had an opportunity to
make any systematic study of the actual condition and needs of the
schools or communities in which they are employed after they graduate.
Instead of working out and teaching methods of connecting the school
with life, thus making it a centre and a source of inspiration that
might gradually transform the communities about them, these colleges
have too frequently permitted their graduates to go out with the idea
that their diploma was a sort of patent of nobility, and that the
possessor of it was a superior being who was making a sacrifice in
merely bestowing himself or herself as a teacher upon the communities to
which he or she was called.
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 have 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. As long
as the masses of the Southern white people remain unconvinced by the
results of the education which they see about them that education makes
the Negro a better man or woman, so long will the masses of the Negro
people who are dependent upon the public schools for their instruction
remain to a greater or less extent in ignorance.
[Illustration:
COLLIS P. HUNTINGTON MEMORIAL BUILDING
Tuskegee Institute
]
[Illustration:
THE OFFICE BUILDING
In which are located the administrative offices of the school, the
Institute Bank and the Institute Post Office
]
Some of the schools of the strictly academic type have declared that
their purpose in sticking to the old-fashioned scholastic studies was to
make of their students Christian gentlemen. Of course, every man and
every woman should be a Christian and, if possible, a gentleman or a
lady; but it is not necessary to study Greek or Latin to be a Christian.
More than that, a school that is content with merely turning out ladies
and gentlemen who are not at the same time something else—who are not
lawyers, doctors, business men, bankers, carpenters, farmers, teachers,
not even housewives, but merely ladies and gentlemen—such a school is
bound, in my estimation, to be more or less of a failure. There is no
room in this country, and never has been, for the class of people who
are merely gentlemen, and, if I may judge from what I have lately seen
abroad, the time is coming when there will be no room in any country for
the class of people who are merely gentlemen—for people, in other words,
who are not fitted to perform some definite service for the country or
the community in which they live.
In the majority of cases I have found that the smaller Negro colleges
have been modelled on the schools started in the South by the
anti-slavery people from the North directly after the war. Perhaps there
were too many institutions started at that time for teaching Greek and
Latin, considering that the foundation had not yet been laid in a good
common school system. It should be remembered, however, that the people
who started these schools had a somewhat different purpose from that for
which schools ordinarily exist to-day. They believed that it was
necessary to complete the emancipation of the Negro by demonstrating to
the world that the black man was just as able to learn from books as the
white man, a thing that had been frequently denied during the long
anti-slavery controversy.
I think it is safe to say that that has now been demonstrated. What
remains to be shown is that the Negro can go as far as the white man in
using his education, of whatever kind it may be, to make himself a more
useful and valuable member of society. Especially is it necessary to
convince the Southern white man that education, in the case of the
coloured man, is a necessary step in the progress and upbuilding, not
merely of the Negro, but of the South.
It should be remembered in this connection that there are thousands of
white men in the South who are perfectly friendly to the Negro and would
like to do something to help him, but who have not yet been convinced
that education has actually done the Negro any good. Nothing will change
their minds but an opportunity to see results for themselves.
The reason more progress has not been made in this direction is that the
schools planted in the South by the Northern white people have
remained—not always through their own fault to be sure—in a certain
sense, alien institutions. They have not considered, in planning their
courses of instruction, the actual needs either of the Negro or of the
South. Not infrequently young men and women have gotten so out of touch
during the time that they were in these schools with the actual
conditions and needs of the Negro and the South that it has taken years
before they were able to get back to earth and find places where they
would be useful and happy in some form or other of necessary and useful
labour.
Sometimes it has happened that Negro college students, as a result of
the conditions under which they were taught, have yielded to the
temptation to become mere agitators, unwilling and unfit to do any kind
of useful or constructive work. Naturally under such conditions as
teachers, or in any other capacity, they have not been able to be of
much use in winning support in the South for Negro education.
Nevertheless it is in the public schools of the South that the masses of
the Negro people must get their education, if they are to get any
education at all.
I have long been of the opinion that the persons in charge of the Negro
colleges do not realize the extent to which it is possible to create in
every part of the South a friendly sentiment toward Negro education,
provided it can be shown that this education has actually benefited and
helped in some practical way the masses of the Negro people with whom
the white man in the South comes most in contact. We should not forget
that as a rule in the South it is not the educated Negro, but the masses
of the people, the farmers, labourers, and servants, with whom the white
people come in daily contact. If the higher education which is given to
the few does not in some way directly or indirectly reach and help the
masses very little will be done toward making Negro education popular in
the South or toward securing from the different states the means to
carry it on.
On the other hand, just so soon as the Southern white man can see for
himself the effects of Negro education in the better service he receives
from the labourer on the farm or in the shop; just so soon as the white
merchant finds that education is giving the Negro not only more wants,
but more money with which to satisfy these wants, thus making him a
better customer; when the white people generally discover that Negro
education lessens crime and disease and makes the Negro in every way a
better citizen, then the white taxpayer will not look upon the money
spent for Negro education as a mere sop to the Negro race, or perhaps as
money entirely thrown away.
I said something like this some years ago to the late Mr. H. H. Rogers
and together we devised a plan for giving the matter a fair test. He
proposed that we take two or three counties for the purpose of the
experiment, give them good schools, and see what would be the result.
We agreed that it would be of no use to build these schools and give
them outright to the people, but determined rather to use a certain
amount of money to stimulate and encourage the coloured people in these
counties to help themselves. The experiment was started first of all in
Macon County, Ala., in the fall of 1905. Before it was completed Mr.
Rogers died, but members of his family kindly consented to carry on the
work to the end of the term that we had agreed upon—that is to say, to
October, 1910.
As a result of this work forty-six new school buildings were erected at
an average cost of seven hundred dollars each; school terms were
lengthened from three and four to eight and nine months, at an average
cost to the people themselves of thirty-six hundred dollars per year.
Altogether about twenty thousand dollars was raised by the people in the
course of this five-year period. Similar work on a less extensive scale
was done in four other counties. As a result we now have in Macon County
a model public-school system, supported in part by the county board of
education, and in part by the contributions of the people themselves.
As soon as we had begun with the help of the coloured people in the
different country communities to erect these model schools throughout
the county, C. J. Calloway, who had charge of the experiment, began
advertising in coloured papers throughout the South that in Macon County
it was possible for a Negro farmer to buy land in small or large tracts
near eight-months’ schools. Before long the Negro farmers not only from
adjoining counties, but from Georgia and the neighbouring states, began
to make inquiries. A good many farmers who were not able to buy land but
wanted to be near a good school began to move into the county in order
to go to work on the farms. Others who already had property in other
parts of the South sold out and bought land in Macon County. Mr.
Calloway informs me that, during the last five years, he alone has sold
land in this county to something like fifty families at a cost of
$49,740. He sold during the year 1910 1450 acres at a cost of $21,335.
I do not think that any of us realized the full value of this
immigration into Macon County until the census of 1910 revealed the
extent to which the dislocation of the farming population has been going
on in other parts of the state. The census shows, for example, that a
majority of the Black Belt counties in Alabama instead of increasing
have lost population during the last ten years. It is in the Black Belt
counties which have no large cities that this decrease has taken place.
Macon County, although it has no large cities, is an exception, for
instead of losing population it shows an increase of more than ten per
cent.
I think that there are two reasons for this: In the first place there is
very little Negro crime and no mob violence in Macon County. The liquor
law is enforced and there are few Negroes in Macon County who do not
coöperate with the officers of the law in the effort to get rid of the
criminal element.
In the second place, Macon County is provided not only with the schools
that I have described, but with teachers who instruct their pupils in
regard to things that will help them and their parents to improve their
homes, their stock, and their land, and in other ways to earn a better
living.
When the facts brought out by the census were published in Alabama they
were the subject of considerable discussion among the large planters and
in the public press generally. In the course of this discussion I called
attention, in a letter to the Montgomery _Advertiser_, to the facts to
which I have referred.
In commenting upon this letter the editor of The _Advertiser_ said:
The State of Alabama makes liberal appropriations for education and it
is part of the system for the benefit to reach both white and black
children. It must be admitted that there are many difficulties in
properly spending the money and properly utilizing it which will take
time and the legislature to correct. The matter complained of in the
Washington letter could be easily remedied by the various county
superintendents and it is their duty to see that the causes for such
complaint are speedily removed. Negro fathers and mothers have shown
intense interest in the education of their children and if they cannot
secure what they want at present residences they will as soon as
possible seek it elsewhere. We commend Booker Washington’s letter on
this subject to the careful consideration of all the school officials
and to all citizens of Alabama.
The value of the experiment made in Macon County is, in my opinion, less
in the actual good that has been done to the twenty-six thousand people,
white and black, who live there, than it is in the showing by actual
experiment what a proper system of Negro education can do in a country
district toward solving the racial problem.
We have no race problem in Macon County; there is no friction between
the races; agriculture is improving; the county is growing in wealth. In
talking with the sheriff recently he told me that there is so little
crime in this county that he scarcely finds enough to keep him busy.
Furthermore, I think I am perfectly safe in saying that the white people
in this county are convinced that Negro education pays.
What is true of Macon County may, in my opinion, be true of every other
county in the South. Much will be accomplished in bringing this about if
those schools which are principally engaged in preparing teachers shall
turn about and face in the direction of the South, where their work
lies. My own experience convinces me that the easiest way to get money
for any good work is to show that you are willing and able to perform
the work for which the money is given. The best illustration of this is,
perhaps, the success, in spite of difficulties and with almost no
outside aid, of the best of the Negro medical colleges. These colleges,
although very largely dependent upon the fees of their students for
support, have been successful because they have prepared their students
for a kind of service for which there was a real need.
What convinces me that the same sort of effort outside of Macon County
will meet with the same success is that it has in fact met with the same
success in the case of Hampton and some other schools that are doing a
somewhat similar work. On “the educational campaigns” which I have made
from time to time through the different Southern States I have been
continually surprised and impressed at the interest taken by the better
class of white people in the work that I was trying to do. Everywhere in
the course of these trips I have met with a cordial, even an
enthusiastic, reception not only from the coloured people but from the
white people as well.
For example, during my trip through North Carolina in November of 1910,
not only were the suggestions I tried to make for the betterment of the
schools and for the improvement of racial relations frequently discussed
and favourably commented upon in the daily newspapers, but after my
return I received a number of letters and endorsements from
distinguished white men in different parts of the state who had heard
what I had had to say.
I was asked the other day by a gentleman who has long been interested in
the welfare of the coloured people what I thought the Negro needed most
after nearly fifty years of freedom. I promptly answered him that the
Negro needed now what he needed fifty years ago, namely, education. If I
had attempted to be more specific I might have added that what Negro
education needed most was not so much more schools or different kinds of
schools as an educational policy and a school system.
In the last analysis, the work of building up such a school system as I
have suggested must fall upon the industrial normal schools and colleges
which prepare the teacher, because it is the success or failure of the
teacher which determines the success of the school. In order to make a
beginning in the direction which I have indicated, the different schools
and colleges will have to spend much less time in the future than they
have in the past in quarrelling over the kind of education the Negro
ought to have and devote more time and attention to giving him some kind
of education.
In order to accomplish this it will be necessary for these schools to
obtain very much larger sums of money for education than they are now
getting. I believe, however, if the different schools will put the
matter to the people in the North and the people in the South “in the
right shape,” it will be possible to get much larger sums from every
source. I believe the state governments in the South are going to see to
it that the Negro public schools get a much fairer share of the money
raised for education in the future than they have in the past. At the
same time I feel that very few people realize the extent to which the
coloured people are willing and able to pay, and, in fact, are now
paying, for their own education. The higher and normal schools can
greatly aid the Negro people in raising among themselves the money
necessary to build up the educational system of the South if they will
prepare their teachers to give the masses of the people the kind of
education which will help them to increase their earnings instead of
giving them the kind of education that makes them discontented and
unhappy and does not give them the courage or disposition to help
themselves.
In spite of all the mistakes and misunderstandings, I believe that the
Negro people, in their struggle to get on their feet intellectually and
find the kind of education that would fit their needs, have done much to
give the world a broader and more generous conception of what education
is and should be than it had before.
Education, in order to do for the Negro the thing he most needed, has
had to do more and different things than it was considered possible and
fitting for a school to undertake before the problem of educating a
newly enfranchised people arose. It has done this by bringing education
into contact with men and women in their homes and in their daily work.
The importance of the scheme of education which has been worked out,
particularly in industrial schools, is not confined to America or to the
Negro race. Wherever in Europe, in Africa, in Asia, or elsewhere great
masses are coming for the first time in contact with and under the
influence of a higher civilization, the methods of industrial education
that have been worked out in the South by, with, and through the Negro
schools are steadily gaining recognition and importance.
It seems to me that this is a fact that should not only make the Negro
proud of his past, brief as it has been, but, at the same time, hopeful
of the future.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Used numbers for footnotes.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.