# The Atlantic Monthly/Volume 69/Number 416/The Education of the Negro

THE EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO.
Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, the president of the board of trustees of the Peabody fund, said in his address, October 1, 1890, at the twenty-ninth meeting of that board: "If there be a race problem anywhere, time and education can alone supply its solution. But time without education will only render it the more insoluble. Continued ignorance is a remedy for nothing. It is itself the disease to be cured and eradicated. Free common schools with industrial, agricultural, and mechanical departments attached to them, and with all the moral and religious influences which can be brought to bear on them, . . . these seem to me the great need, if not the one and only thing needful, for the countless masses of colored children of the South at this moment."
The religious idea at the bottom of our civilization is the missionary idea. According to our most Christian theologies, the divine Being is conceived as possessed of the spirit of this idea from all eternity. The divine decrees broke up the eternal Sabbath of blessed perfection, and created finite, imperfect beings, in order, it would seem, that there should be occasion for the exercise of this missionary spirit, a spirit of divine charity. For those divine decrees ordained a supreme sacrifice, the descent into finitude on the part of the Divine, a descent to its bitterest depths. For the Eternal Word tasted of death and descended into Hades, the very nadir of the Divine, to make it possible for finite beings to ascend into participation with Him and to grow forever into His image.
That this is the deepest thought in our civilization, and to all appearances a permanent and final idea, we may be assured by a glance at all religious and other protests against the ecclesiastical forms in which this doctrine is stated and the institutions founded upon it. All religious protests that have obtained a following within Christendom have taken pains to ground their opposition on a more explicit assertion of this very doctrine of good will towards men of all conditions, the possibility of salvation for finite beings in their lowest debasement.
If we question, in the name of science or philosophy, the significance of this religious faith in the divine altruism, and endeavor to support our objections ​by an appeal to the results of dispassionate observation and reflection, we shall find only its confirmation. Outside of religious movements, the other activities of man in modern civilization all emphasize the same idea with the strangest unanimity. Science comes to say through Darwin that all nature in time and space is a process of nurturing individuality,—the principle of survival of that which develops the most intelligence and will-power. Nature is a process for the creation of souls. It implies, of course, the supremacy of mind, since all its lower processes exist for the production of spiritual beings; they depend on mind, so to speak, and demonstrate the substantiality of mind. Mind is the final cause and purpose of nature. This again implies that mind creates nature to reflect it. God creates nature, and through nature creates spiritual beings who participate in his blessedness. Hence nature presupposes a God of grace and good will towards his creatures.
Through Comte and Spencer Science also announces altruism as the highest law of social existence, and as the necessary condition for the most perfect development of individualism. Finally, the political and industrial activities proclaim the same thing: the former by continual approaches towards democracy; the latter by the progressive introduction of machinery to perform the drudgery of labor, and to elevate the human being to a directing power using and controlling the forces of nature. Without machinery he used his bone and sinew to obtain his livelihood, and was a "hand;" but with the aid of machinery he saves most of the severe bodily labor, and substitutes for it brain labor and directive intelligence. Hence man's wants have come to necessitate his intellectual education and the development of his individuality. All the people as people must be educated in schools, in order to secure that directive power over nature requisite for national safety in a military as well as in an industrial sense.
Thus religion, which states the deepest principle of our civilization, is confirmed by the scientific, political, and social movements of our age, and all agree in this supreme doctrine, that the lowest must be lifted up by the highest,—lifted up into self-activity and full development of individuality.
Religion states this in sentimental forms. Science and philosophy echo, with more or less inadequacy, the dogma of religion in their account of the physical and social structure of the universe. The one lost sheep shall occupy more attention than the ninety and nine that went not astray. The return of the prodigal furnishes the chief source of blessed satisfaction and joy in the divine world.
It is evident that any problem relating to a lower race, savage or downtrodden, must be discussed in the light of this religious principle. The utterance of Mr. Winthrop, quoted above, in regard to the race problem in the South was dictated by this lofty ideal of our civilization. Fortunate it is for our age, too, that science has come to an altruistic first principle, and is in process of readjusting all its conclusions in subordinate spheres so as to harmonize with it; likewise fortunate that the political and social welfare is now seen to involve the care of the weakling classes, and their elevation into self-help by moral, industrial, and intellectual education.
I shall endeavor here to expand and apply these considerations to our race problem, and to show how this Christian solution meets the given conditions.
The negro was brought to this country as a slave almost from the date of its first settlement. Two hundred and fifty years of bondage had elapsed when the issue of civil war set him free. He had brought with him from Africa the lowest form of civilization to be found ​among men,—that in which the most degrading superstition furnishes the forms of public and private life. His religion was fetichism. But by contact with the Anglo-Saxon race in the very close relation of domestic servitude, living in the same family and governed by the absolute authority which characterizes all family control, the negro, after two and a half centuries, had come to possess what we may call the Anglo-Saxon consciousness. For the negro of the South, with the exception of a stratum of population in the dark belt of large plantations, where he has not been brought into contact with white people through domestic servitude, but segregated as oxen and horses are, the negro of the South, with this exception, I repeat, is thoroughly imbued with nearly all the ideals and aspirations which form the conscious and unconscious motives of action with the white people among whom he lives. It would be very easy to convince one's self of this by free conversation with any specimen of the colored race, and a comparison of his thoughts with those of a newly arrived immigrant from Ireland, Italy, Germany, or Scandinavia. It would be found that the negro is in thorough sympathy, intellectually and emotionally, with our national point of view, while the immigrant looks through the dark glass of his own national presuppositions, and misinterprets most that he sees around him here. Only in the second generation, and after association with the native population in common schools, the workshop, and the political meeting, does the European contingent of our population become assimilated.
Of course I do not say this in disparagement of the European immigrant, for he stubbornly resists our national idea only in proportion to the value of his own. But I do insist on the practical fact that the negro of the South is not an African in his inner consciousness, but an American, who has acquired our Anglo-Saxon consciousness in its American type through seven generations of domestic servitude in the family of a white master. That this has been acquired so completely because of the inherent aptitude of the African race to imitate may be admitted as probable, and it follows from this that the national consciousness assumed by the black race is not so firmly seated as in other races that have risen through their own activity to views of the world more advanced than fetichism. Hence we may expect that the sundering of the negro from ​close domestic relations with the white race will be accompanied with tendencies of relapse to the old fetich-worship and belief in magic; and this would be especially the case in the dark belt where the large plantations are found. Fetichism, as the elemental or first form of religion that arises among conscious beings,—animals cannot have even fetichism,—attributes arbitrary power to inanimate things, but does not arrive at the idea of one absolute Being. It remains in some of its forms even in the most advanced of religious peoples, as a limited belief in magic, faith in charms, amulets, lucky-bones, signs and omens, sacred places and times, etc. Even the high doctrine of Special Providence, so eminently Christian, easily passes over into fetichism (as the magical control of events through prayer), and is in fact blended with it in all minds devoid of scientific education.
Here is the chief problem of the negro of the South. It is to retain the elevation acquired through the long generations of domestic slavery, and to superimpose on it the sense of personal responsibility, moral dignity, and self-respect which belongs to the conscious ideal of the white race. Those acquainted with the free negro of the South, especially with the specimens at school and college, know that he is as capable of this higher form of civilization as in slavery he was capable of faithful attachment to the interests of his master.
The first step towards this higher stage which will make the negro a valued citizen is intellectual education, and the second is industrial education. By the expression "industrial education," I do not refer so much to training in habits of industry, for he has had this discipline for two hundred years, but to school instruction in arts and trades as applications of scientific principles. Nor do I refer even to manual and scientific training, valuable as it is, so much as to that fundamental training in thrift which is ​so essential to the progress of industry. The negro must teach himself to become a capitalist. There are two stages to this: first that of hoarding, second that of profitable investment. The first stage of thrift may be stimulated by adopting the postal savings device. If it be true, as is plausibly asserted, that the so-called poor white of the South is less thrifty than the negro, such adoption by our government of the postal savings institution would be a blessing to both races. "We know, indeed, that the poor white in the North is chiefly in need of the thrift that has a habit of hoarding; that is, the habit of saving something from its weekly pittance, no matter how small.
The introduction of manufacturing industries throughout the South is favorable to the rise of the poor white from his poverty. In the early days of cotton manufacture in New England, the unthrifty white people, who hitherto had lived in cottages or hovels near the large farms, removed to the villages that were springing up near water privileges. They learned how to "work in the mill," all the members of the family, from the oldest to the youngest, and the aggregate wages was wealth compared with what they had known before. In fact, they earned more than the well-to-do farmers in whose service they had formerly labored. The children now earned more wages than the parents had earned before. The work on the farm was varied and intermittent, depending upon the season. Ploughing, planting, weeding, haying, harvesting, threshing, marketing, wood-cutting, etc., are regulated by the farmer's calendar. There are rainy days, when the day laborer loses his hire; and, besides these, there are intervals between the season of one species of work and that of the next, in which no employment is offered him by the farm proprietor. If he had thrift, he would find work of some kind for himself at home; he would save money and own his house. But thrift he does not possess. Hence what he earns in the days of the working season is prodigally expended while it lasts, and the days of idleness after harvest are days of want in the household. The children are educated in the same habits of unthrift.
The rise of manufactures and the removal of the ill-to-do families from the farm to the mill put an end to the periodic alternation of want and plenty in the house. Plenty now prevails, but does not generate thrift: for there is less occasion for it. The week's wages may be expended as fast as earned, thanks to the demoralizing institution of credit at the grocery kept by the proprietors of the mill. But, notwithstanding this drawback, there is more self-respect on the part of the children, who now have the consciousness that they earn their living. Manufactures and commerce bring about urban life as contrasted with rural life. The village grows into the city; the railroad carries the daily newspaper from the metropolis to the suburbs and to all towns on its line, and thus extends urban life indefinitely.
The difference between these two orders of life, the urban and rural, is quite important, and its discussion affords us an insight into a process going on rapidly throughout the South. The old régime of the large farm, with its cordon of dependent families, rendered possible a sort of patriarchal constitution. The farm proprietor, in the North as well as in the South, wielded great power over the unthrifty families of day laborers ​who lived near him. He helped them do their thinking, as he mingled with them in the daily work. He was called upon to assist whenever their unthrift pinched them. His intellect and will in a measure supplanted the native intellect and will of his hired laborers, not merely in directing their work on his farm, but also in their private matters, it being their habit to consult him. The farm proprietor thus furnished a sort of substantial will-power that governed his small community as the head of a family governs his.
This semi-patriarchal rule which exists in the exclusively agricultural community produces its own peculiar form of ethical life. The head of the farm, who does the thinking and willing for the others in all matters that are not fixed by routine, so penetrates their lives that he exercises a moral restraint over them, holding them back from crime of all kinds. Such ethical influence is, however, of the lowest and most rudimentary character in the stage next above slavery. It presupposes a lack of individual self-determination in the persons thus controlled. They are obsessed, as it were, by his will and intellect, and fail to develop their own native capacities. He rules as a clan leader, and they are his henchmen. They are repressed, and are not educated into a moral character of their own. There is little outward stimulus impelling them to exercise their independent choice. Hence agricultural communities are conservative, governed by custom and routine, taking up very slowly any new ideas.
The change to urban life through the intermediary step of village life breaks up this patriarchal clanship, and cultivates in its place independence of opinion and action. The laborer in the "mill" recognizes his right to choose his employer and his place of labor, and exercises it to a far greater degree than the farm laborer. He migrates from village to village; in the city he has before him a bewildering variety of employers to choose from. The city employer does not act as patriarch, nor permit his laborers to approach him as head of a clan. The urban life protects the laborer from the obsessing influence of the employer, and throws a far greater weight of responsibility on the individual. Hence the urban life stimulates and develops independence of character.
In the case of the Southern slave there was none of this alternation between idleness and industry, plenty and want, that comes to the poor white at the North and South by reason of his freedom. But his will and intellect were obsessed more effectually because the slave could not be allowed the development of spontaneous, independent self-activity. Since the civil war, however, the condition of the negro has changed, and in the agricultural regions it now resembles more nearly the status above described as that of the poor white in rural in contradistinction from urban surroundings. Where the country is sparsely settled the proprietor farmer retains the dominant influence. Where the villages are getting numerous the tendency to independence manifests itself in a partial revolt from the patriarchal rule of the plantation, and the struggle leads naturally to an unpleasant state of affairs for all parties. But the urban factor in the problem is certain to gain the ascendency, and we must see in the near future, with the increase of railroads and manufacturing centres, the progressive decadence of the patriarchal rule. The old system of social morality will perish, and a new one will take its place. In the formation of the new one the present danger lies.
If the negro separates entirely from the white classes so far as domestic relations are concerned, and forms his own independent family, he separates from the clan influence also, and loses the education of the white master's family in ​manners. He loses, too, the education of the master's counsel and directing influence. Unless this is counterbalanced by school education, it will produce degeneracy: for to remove the weight of authority is productive of good only when there has been a growth of individuality that demands a larger sphere of free activity. In case of entering upon village life and mechanical industries greater freedom from authority is demanded, and its effects are healthful; but with the isolated life on the plantation the opposite holds.
The remedy for evils incident to these changes is, as before said, school education, provided it is inclusive enough to furnish industrial and moral as well as intellectual training.
Education, intellectual and moral, is the only means yet discovered that is always sure to help people to help themselves. Any other species of aid may enervate the beneficiary, and lead to a habit of dependence on outside help. But intellectual and moral education develops self-respect, fertility of resources, knowledge of human nature, and aspiration for a better condition in life. It produces that divine discontent which goads on the individual, and will not let him rest.
How does the school produce this important result? In what way can it give to the negro a solid basis for character and accomplishments? The school has undertaken to perform two quite different and opposite educational functions. The first produces intellectual training, and the second the training of the will.
The school, for its intellectual function, causes the pupil to learn certain arts, such as reading and writing, which make possible communication with one's fellow-men, and impart certain rudimentary insights or general elementary ideas with which practical thinking may be done, and the pupil be set on the way to comprehend his environment of nature, and of humanity and history. There is taught in the humblest of schools something of arithmetic, the science and art of numbers, by whose aid material nature is divided and combined,—the most practical of all knowledge of nature because it relates to the fundamental conditions of the existence of nature, the quantitative structure of time and space themselves. A little geography, also, is ​taught; the pupil acquires the idea of the interrelation of each locality with every other. Each place produces something for the world-market, and in return it receives numerous commodities of useful and ornamental articles for food, clothing, and shelter. The great cosmopolitan idea of the human race and its unity of interests is born of geography, and even the smattering of it which the poorly taught pupil gets enwraps this great general idea, which is fertile and productive, a veritable knowledge of power from the start.
All school studies, moreover, deal with language, the embodiment of the reason, not of the individual, but of the Anglo-Saxon stock or people. The most elementary language study begins by isolating the words of a sentence, and making the pupil conscious of their separate articulation, spelling, and meaning. The savage does not quite arrive at a consciousness of the separate words of the language, but knows only whole sentences. All inflected languages preserve for us their primitive form of language consciousness, the inflections being the addition (to the roots or stems) of various subjective or pronominal elements necessary to give definiteness of application. The Turanic languages are called "agglutinative," because the power of analytic thinking has not proceeded so far as to differentiate the parts of speech fully. Every sentence is as it were some form of a conjugation of its verb.
Now, the steps of becoming conscious of words as words involved in writing and spelling, and in making out the meaning, and, finally, in the study of grammatical distinctions between the parts of speech, bring to the pupil a power of abstraction, a power of discriminating form from contents, substance from accidents, activity from passivity, subjective from objective, which makes him a thinker. For thinking depends on the mastery of categories, the ability to analyze a subject and get at its essential elements and see their necessary relations. The people who are taught to analyze their speech into words have a constant elementary training through life that makes them reflective and analytic as compared with a totally illiterate people.
This explains to some degree the effect upon a lower race of adopting the language of a higher race. It brings up into consciousness, by furnishing exact expressions for them, complicated series of ideas which remain sunk below the mental horizon of the savage. It enables the rudimentary intelligence to ascend from the thought of isolated things to the thought of their relations and interdependencies.
The school teaches also literature, and trains the pupil to read by setting him lessons consisting of extracts from literary works of art. These are selected for their intensity, and for their peculiar merits in expressing situations of the soul brought about by external or internal circumstances. Language itself contains the categories of thought, and the study of grammatical structure makes one conscious of phases of ideas which flit past without notice in the mind of the illiterate person. Literary genius invents modes of utterance for feelings and thoughts that were hitherto below the surface of consciousness. It brings them above its level, and makes them forever after conscious and articulate. Especially in the realm of ethical and religious ideas, the thoughts that furnish the regulative forms for living and acting, literature is preeminent for its usefulness. Literature may be said, therefore, to reveal human nature. Its very elementary study in school makes the pupil acquainted with a hundred or more pieces of literary art, expressing for him with felicity his rarer and higher moods of feeling and thought. When, in mature age, we look back over our lives and recall to mind the influence that our schooldays brought us, the time spent ​over the school readers seems quite naturally to have been the most valuable part of our education. Our thoughts on the conduct of life have been stimulated by it, and this ethical knowledge is of all knowledge the nearest related to self-preservation.
The school, even in its least efficient form, does something on these lines of intellectual insight. For the most fruitful part of all intellectual education is the acquisition of the general outline and the basal idea,—the categories, so to speak, of the provinces of human learning. This intellectual part of school education could not well be more accurately directed to aid the cause of civilization. For the kind of knowledge and mental discipline that conserves civil life is the knowledge that gives an insight into the dependence of the individual upon society. The school is busied with giving the pupil a knowledge of the conditions of physical nature and human nature; the former in mathematical study, the latter in language study.
The school also educates the will through its discipline. It demands of the pupil that he shall be obedient to the rules of order, and adopt habits that make it possible to combine with one's fellows. The school is a small community, in which many immature wills are combined in such a way as to prevent one from standing in the way of another, while each helps all and all help each. For the pupil learns more by seeing the efforts of his fellows at mastering the lesson than he does by hearing the teacher's explanations. In order to secure concert of action, the semi-mechanical moral habits of regularity, punctuality, silence, and industry are insisted on. Moral education is not accomplished by lectures on morals so much as by a strict training in moral habits. The American school is proverbially strict in the matter of these semi-mechanical moral habits. They constitute the basis of self-control as related to combination with one's fellows. Leave out punctuality and regularity, and no combination is practicable; leave out silence and industry, and the school work is not possible. Without industry and abstention from meddlesomeness (and this is the equivalent of silence in the school) there can be no combination in civil society at large. The school secures peaceful co-operation, repressing the natural quarrelsomeness that exists among boys who are strangers to one another, and insuring civil behavior. Good behavior is the general term that characterizes the ideal aimed at by the school in the matter of will-training. A mastery of the "conventionalities of intelligence," as the "three R's" are called by a thoughtful observer, characterizes in like manner the ideal of its intellectual training.
From these considerations we can see how the common school may work, and does necessarily work, to civilize the intellect and will of the child, and how it must affect any lower race struggling to master the elements of civilization. For this scholastic training gives one the power to comprehend the springs of action that move the races which possess the directive power, and thus he can govern himself. It enables the pupil to see the properties and adaptabilities of material things, and he can subdue nature and convert things into wealth.
Here is the ground for the addition of industrial training to the traditional course of study in the common schools. The negro must learn to manage machinery, and make himself useful to the community in which he lives by becoming a skilled laborer. Every physical peculiarity may be converted by the ​cunning of intellect into some knack or aptitude which gives its possessor an advantage in productive industry. But the skill to use tools and direct machinery is a superior gift. Invention is fast discounting the value of special gifts of manual dexterity. Science is the seed-corn, while artisan skill—yes, even art itself—is only the baked bread.
The first step above brute instinct takes place when man looks beyond things as he sees them existing before him, and begins to consider their possibilities; he adds to his external seeing an internal seeing. The world assumes a new aspect; each object appears to be of larger scope than in its present existence, for there is a sphere of possibility environing it,—a sphere which the sharpest animal eyes of lynx or eagle cannot see, but which man, endowed with this new faculty of inward sight, perceives at once. To this insight into possibilities there loom up uses and adaptations, transformations and combinations, in a long series, stretching into the infinite behind each finite real thing. The bodily eye sees the real objects, but cannot see the infinite trails; they are invisible except to the inward eye of the mind.
What we call directive power on the part of man, his combining and organizing capacity, all rests on this ability to see beyond the real things before the senses to the ideal possibilities invisible to the brute. The more clearly man sees these ideals, the more perfectly he can construct for his behoof another set of conditions than those in which he finds himself.
The school, in so far as it gives intellectual education, aids the pupil by science and literature. Science collects about each subject all its phases of existence under different conditions; it teaches the student to look at a thing as a whole, and see in it not only what is visible before his senses, but also what is invisible,—what is not realized, but remains dormant or potential. The scientifically educated laborer, therefore, is of a higher type than the mere "hand laborer," because he has learned to see in each thing its possibilities. He sees each thing in the perspective of its history. Here, then, in the educated laborer, we have a hand belonging to a brain that directs, or that can intelligently comprehend, a detailed statement of an ideal to be worked out. The laborer and the overseer, or "boss," are united in one man. Hence it is that the productive power of the educated laborer is so great.
The school may indefinitely reinforce the effect of this general education by adding manual training and other industrial branches, taking care to make the instruction scientific; for it is science that gives scope and power of adaptation to new conditions. The instrument of modern civilization is the labor-saving machine. The negro cannot share in the white man's freedom unless he can learn to manage machinery. Nothing but drudgery remains for a race that cannot understand applied science. The productive power of a race that works only with its hands is so small that only one in the hundred can live in ​the enjoyment of the comforts of life. The nations that have conquered nature by the aid of machinery can afford luxury for large classes. In Great Britain, for example, thirty per cent of the families enjoy incomes of $1000 and upwards per annum, while the seventy per cent constituting the so-called "working classes" have an average of $485 to each family. When we consider how much this will buy in England, we see that the common laborer of to-day is better off for real comforts than the nobleman of three hundred years ago. In France, seventy-six per cent, including the working classes, receive $395 per family, while the twenty-four per cent, including the wealthy, get an average of $1300 and upwards. But in Italy the income returns show (in 1881) only 8500 families with incomes above $1000, while more than ninety-eight per cent of the population average less than $300 for each family. Agriculture without manufactures and commerce cannot furnish wealth for a large fraction of the people. But with diversity of industry there is opportunity for many, and will be finally for all. The increased use of machinery multiplies wealth, so that production doubles twice as often as the population in the United States.
This is the significance of manual training in our schools. The youth learns how to shape wood and iron into machines, and thus how to construct and manage machines. The hand worker is to be turned into a brain worker; for the machine does the work of the hand, but requires a brain to direct it. Human productive industry needs more and more directive power, but less and less mere sleight of hand. The negro, educated in manual training, will find himself at home in a civilization which is accumulating inventions of all sorts and descriptions to perform the work necessary to supply the people with food, clothing, and shelter at so cheap a rate as to have a large surplus of income to purchase the means of luxury, amusement, and culture.
The friends of the education of the negro, North and South, have seen the importance of providing industrial education for him. So long as he can work only at the cultivation of staple crops he cannot become a salutary element in the social whole. When he acquires skill in mechanical industries, his presence in the community is valued and his person is respected. Many colored institutions have been founded for the special promotion of skill in the arts and trades, and nearly all of the higher institutions have undertaken to provide some facilities for industrial education.
In analyzing the details of the school statistics for colored schools of the South for 1889, we find 25,530 pupils enrolled in private and endowed schools against 1,213,092 pupils in public schools. Although this number is relatively small,—less than one fortieth,—yet its importance cannot easily be overestimated, because of the fact that most of the secondary and higher education is received through these schools. Hence the efficiency of the colored teacher depends chiefly on the endowments made to institutions of this class. By teachers one is to understand preachers and all manner of professional men as well as those actually in charge of schools; for it is evident that every colored person who receives a higher education is a teacher of his race for good or evil in an exceptional sense.
​With the growing isolation of the negro in his state of freedom comes the necessity of a well-educated clergy to counteract an increasing tendency to relapse into fetichism and magic and all manner of degrading superstitions. The profession of Christianity in empty words does not avail anything, and the practical interpretation of those words by means of the ideas of fetichism secures and confirms the lowest status of savagery. The more highly educated the colored clergy, the more closely are the masses of the people brought into intelligent sympathy with the aspirations and endeavors of the white race with whom they live. For it is not the abstract dogma that gives vital religion, important though it be as a symbol of the highest. It is the correct interpretation of that dogma in terms of concrete vital issues which makes it a living faith. One must be able to see the present world and its Sphinx riddles solved by the high doctrines of his creed, or he does not possess a "saving faith." The preacher who cannot, for his illiteracy, see the hand of Providence in the instruments of modern civilization—in the steamship, the railroad, the telegraph, the morning newspaper, the popular novel, the labor-saving machine, the investigations in natural science—is not likely to be of much help in building up a new civilization, although he may, it is true, administer consolation to souls world-sick and weary.
The Christian religion as interpreted by the modern spirit means not only the preparation for death, but, more than this, a preparation for living. The true missionary spirit is thoroughly of this character. It bids each human being help his brother in all ways that may secure his self-help. Hence the conquest of nature, first by means of natural science, and secondly by means of useful inventions, to the end that man may be lifted forever above a life of drudgery into a life of intelligent directive power, where brains count more than hands,—this conquest is demanded by religion as a preliminary missionary movement.
The labors in social science directed to the end of discovering the best means of administering charity so that it may create activity and enterprise, rather than demoralize society's weaklings; the improvement of tenement houses, hygienic precautions, public parks and innocent amusements, all that goes to increase the interest of man in his fellow-men, and especially all that goes to lift the burden from childhood,—the burden that is premature and causes arrested ​development, stunting the soul in its growth,—these are Christian instrumentalities, and are seen to be such by an educated clergy. But an illiterate clergy condemns them as works of Antichrist, because it cannot see the spirit of the doctrines which it preaches. It sounds like a paradox to say that the illiterate is bound by the letter and cannot see the spirit, but it is true.
It is quite important that the higher education of the negro should include Latin and Greek. The Anglo-Saxon civilization in which he lives is a derivative one, receiving one of its factors from Rome and the other from Athens. The white youth is obliged to study the classic languages in order to become conscious of these two derivative elements in his life, and it is equally important for the colored youth. A "liberal" education by classic study gives to the youth some acquaintance with his spiritual embryology.
In 1889, the pupils in private and endowed schools and schools supported by taxation, performing this much-needed work of educating the spiritual leaders among the colored people, were classified as follows:—
These details as reported vary much from year to year, and quite naturally; for those who are receiving a secondary or higher education may intend to teach in schools for a time, at least, and the greater part may ultimately reach the pulpit. Hence they may be enrolled under the head of normal schools properly enough.
It is clear, from the above considerations, that money expended for the secondary and higher education of the negro accomplishes far more for him than similar expenditures accomplish for the white people. It is seed sown where it brings forth a hundred fold, because each one of the pupils of these higher institutions is a centre of diffusion of superior methods and refining influences among an imitative and impressible race. State and national aid as well as private bequests should take this direction first. There should be no gifts or bequests for common elementary instruction; this should be left to the common schools, and all outside aid should be concentrated on the secondary and higher instruction, inclusive of industrial education.
What may be done by the wise administration of an endowment fund has been demonstrated by the history of the Peabody education fund. Its benefactions have been distributed in such a manner as always to stimulate greater local effort, and never to paralyze. During the year 1889-90 the sum of $87,487 was given to aid institutions in ten States. The largest sum, $26,000, was given to the Peabody Normal College in Nashville, Tennessee, a central normal school for the education of white teachers from ten of the Southern States. The sum of one hundred dollars is paid as a scholarship to each regularly appointed pupil, and traveling expenses ​are also allowed. This item amounted to $22,500 (scholarships and traveling expenses) in the year 1889-90. In the years from 1868 to 1886 a total of $1,576,649 was distributed from this fund for all purposes, making an average of upwards of $80,000 per annum. The funds are now managed so as to assist and encourage normal instruction chiefly.
Since 1883 this work of discriminating endowment has been reinforced by the Slater fund, which has aided the industrial phase of education. From 1883 to 1886 the trustees of this fund disbursed an average of $25,000 per annum. In the year 1888-89 the amount appropriated had increased to $44,310. This fund has recently been placed under the management of the agent of the Peabody fund.
During the twelve years 1877-89 the enrollment of both races in the schools of the fifteen former slave States and the District of Columbia increased more than twice as fast as the population. While the white population, as a whole, during that period gained over thirty-four per cent, the white enrollment in school gained seventy-five per cent, or double the ratio. While the colored population increased about twenty-five per cent, the colored increment in school was one hundred and thirteen per cent, or quadruple the rate.
It appears that in the last thirteen years the South has expended of public money the sum of $216,000,000 for education. Of this sum the colored schools have received about one fourth, say $50,000,000.' The colored school enrollment is about one fourth of the whole (twenty-seven and two thirds per cent in 1889). It is found that the white school population enrolls a larger proportion of children of school age than the colored; exceeding it, in fact, by about twenty per cent. This showing on the part of the South in the matter of school attendance stimulates and encourages the friends of the "new South." The friends of schools are at work in the legislatures of the Southern States to increase the length of the school term, which remains quite brief, being only ninety days, on an average, in the South Central States, and one hundred days in the South Atlantic States.
In the words of the former agent of the Slater fund, Rev. Dr. Haygood (recently appointed bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South), in his report for 1889: "There has never been at any time in the past so much thought concentrated upon the subject of education in the South by Southern people as now.… Notably the public schools have been championed by the church and press as never before. If any proof were lacking of an awakened interest in the subject, it is found in the attention now paid to the subject of the education of the masses by the county newspapers."
​This interest, however, except in the cities, takes the form of state aid rather than local taxation. Cities can aid themselves, for the urban public opinion is organized in a corporate form. Moreover, self-protection from the results of illiteracy becomes a conscious motive in the public opinion of a dense population. But the rural population of the South far exceeds that in the cities.
This is the strong ground on which the demand for national aid for education is urged. It is not for urban but for rural populations which will not assess local taxes sufficient to maintain schools of a suitable grade of excellence or adequate length of annual session. In this matter, it is the urban population everywhere that possesses the wealth, and can afford local taxation sufficient for education. In the State of Massachusetts, the value of the land held for building lots and urban purposes surpasses the value of the land held solely for agriculture in the ratio of ten to one, as may be seen by the data of the census taken by Hon. Carroll D. Wright for 1885.
The three symbols of our most advanced civilization are the railroad, the morning newspaper, and the school. The rural population everywhere is backward in its sympathies for these "moderns." The good school is the instrumentality which must precede in order to create this sympathy. But the good school will not spring up of itself in the agricultural community. It must be provided for by the urban influence of the State and nation. By judicious distribution of general funds, coupled with provisions requiring local taxation as a condition of sharing in these funds, even the rural districts may be brought up to the standard. The State as a whole gains in wealth and in the priceless increase of individual ability by education.
It was revealed by the census of 1880 that the colored race furnished a disproportionate share of illiterates even in the Northern and Pacific group of States. In the Northern group the percentage of colored illiterates was nearly five times as large as the percentage of white illiterates,—sixteen per cent for the colored, and three and a third per cent for the white. In the Pacific group the same disproportion prevailed. In the Southern section of the colored population of the ages of fifteen to twenty years the illiterates amounted to sixty-seven per cent, while the white illiterates were only seventeen per cent of their quota; colored illiterates from ten to fourteen were seventy per cent, and the white thirty per cent, of their respective quotas.
The illiterate person is apt to be intolerant and full of race prejudice, and to this cause we may attribute the larger portion of the feuds between the races wherever they have existed in the South. But the worst feature of illiteracy is to be found in the fact that it is impenetrable to the influence of the newspaper. Enlightened public opinion depends so much on the daily newspaper that it is not possible without it; and lacking this, an ideal self-government is not to be thought of.
The most advanced form of government is that by public opinion. This is essentially a newspaper form of government. The extension of the railroad system into all parts of the South will carry the urban influence to the towns and villages; every station being a radiating centre for the daily newspapers of the metropolis. The education that comes from the daily survey of the events of the world, and a deliberate consideration of the opinions and verdicts editorially written in view of these events, is a supplement or extension of the school. It takes the place of the village gossip which once furnished the mental food ​for the vast majority. School education makes possible this participation in the world process of thought by means of the printed page. The book and periodical come to the individual, and prevent the mental paralysis or arrested development that used to succeed the school-days of the rural population.
With the colored people all educated in schools and become a reading people interested in the daily newspaper; with all forms of industrial training accessible to them, and the opportunity so improved that every form of mechanical and manufacturing skill has its quota of colored working men and women; with a colored ministry educated in a Christian theology interpreted in the missionary spirit, and finding its auxiliaries in modern science and modern literature,—with these educational essentials, the negro problem for the South will be solved without recourse to violent measures of any kind, whether migration, or disfranchisement, or ostracism. Mutual respect for moral and intellectual character, for useful talents and industry, will surely not lead to miscegenation, but only to what is desirable, namely, to civil and political recognition.
W. T. Harris.
* ↑ This article was sent in advance of publication to several gentlemen whose position and experience especially qualify them to comment on the assertions made and the suggestions offered. Among these correspondents were Hon. Randall Lee Gibson, Senator from Louisiana; Hon. J. L. M. Curry, chairman of the Educational Committee of the John F. Slater fund; Philip A. Bruce, Esq., editor of the Richmond (Va.) Times, and author of The Plantation Negro as a Freeman; and Lewis H. Blair. Esq., of Richmond, Va. The comments made by them severally appear as footnotes. Other communications were received in connection with the paper which were of the nature of general considerations, not readily reduced to the form of annotations, but indicating the profound interest taken in the subject by representative men in the South.—Editor of the Atlantic Monthly.
* ↑ It is a matter for discussion whether the negro has come into the possession of what may be called "the Anglo-Saxon consciousness." I cannot see how, so long as the people of this race constitute a distinct and insoluble entity in our political society, it will be possible for them to acquire the characteristics which it has taken such a long period of time to develop in the Caucasian race.—R. L. G.
* ↑ Withdrawn by force from his original physical and moral environment, the negro has adapted himself to his American surroundings, and in doing so has necessarily acquired, so far as his lower intelligence permitted, the ideals and aspirations of the people to whom he was bound so long in slavery; but he is essentially still an African in the controlling tendencies of his character. When left to an exclusive association with his own people, there is a powerful inclination on the part of the Southern negro to revert to all of the distinctive features of his African ancestors. This is a fact of the utmost importance in the consideration of the proper means to be employed for the improvement of his character. The principal cause of the many failures which have been made in the effort to produce this improvement has been the unfortunate misconception that the Southern negro of to-day is simply an ignorant white man with a black skin. The American descendants of European immigrants are, in the second generation, thoroughly assimilated with the surrounding white population. The grandsons of an American, a German, and an Englishman differ but little, if at all, in the basis of their character. It can hardly be said that the negroes even of those Northern communities in which their race has enjoyed freedom for five generatious are so assimilated with the surrounding white population that they are not to be discriminated from it in racial characteristics.—P. A. B.
* ↑ The first step really to be taken must be by the whites about him, in letting the negro feel that he possesses inalienable rights. What he now possesses is by sufferance only. He knows that he is neither a citizen nor a man, in the full sense.—L. H. B.
* ↑ I should prefer to define the course thus: first, religious; second, industrial; and third, intellectual. An ideal public school system for the Southern negroes for many generations to come would be a system under the operation of which each schoolhouse would be devoted to the religious instruction of the colored pupils, with a sufficient amount of industrial training to impart habits of industry, and a sufficient amount of intellectual training to facilitate the inculcation of the religious teachings. As far as possible, the public school system should be made supervisory of the moral life of the pupils; it should take the place of the parental authority, which is so much relaxed now that the watchful eye and firm support of the slaveholders have been withdrawn.—P. A. B.
* ↑ One of the discouraging features in the character of the young Southern negro is that apparently he has inherited but a small share of the steadiness and industry which were acquired under compulsion by his fathers. I am referring now to the young negro to be found in the agricultural communities. He is in a marked degree inferior to the former slave in agricultural knowledge and manipulating skill, for the very simple reason that his employer is unable to enforce the rigid attention to all the details of work which he would do if the young negro were his property.—P. A. B. Dr. Harris seems to me to overestimate the value of the slave's experience in developing the habits of punctuality and obedience in descendants who were never slaves. I fear that the result is far other; that in the descendants of the slave there is an inherited disposition to be disobedient to law as a proof of the newly acquired freedom.—Anon.
* ↑ There is need of the inculcation and of the adoption in home life, in daily conduct, of sounder principles of economy and of consumption. What to eat, what to wear, how to cook, how to provide and preserve home conveniences and comforts, how to lay by for a rainy day, must be indoctrinated, ingrained, and become a habit. In other days the African slave was cared for from cradle to coffin, and literally took no thought for the morrow. Comparatively few negroes now living were ever slaves, but the habits of servitude have been transmitted.—J. L. M. C.
* ↑ Until the negro learns thrift he will never be a man, no matter what his scientific or industrial education may be; therefore; postal savings banks are especially desirable, indeed necessary, for him.— L. H. B.
* ↑ It is vain to look for manufactures in the South. Manufactures flourish only in a cool climate. Manufacturing has for years been diminishing in the South, press reports to the contrary notwithstanding.—L. H. B.
* ↑ The increasing isolation of the negro of the South from the whites is so far as his own advancement is concerned, the most significant fact connected with his present condition. In one point only does he come in contact with the white man, and that is in the formal relation of employed to employer. The negro and the white man are driven into this relation of necessity. In their social spheres they are as wide apart as if they inhabited different countries. They have separate churches and separate schools, and it is only a question of time for them to have, in all parts of the South, separate public conveyances. The two races resemble two great streams that flow side by side, never commingling nor converging. There is no disposition to unite. On the contrary, the tendency is to swerve still further apart. This is a fact of supreme importance in its bearing upon the prospects of the negro race in the South, for that race is essentially imitative and adaptive in its character, showing a parasitic loyalty to its environment. In a state of servitude, the negro was disciplined into a fixed and industrious life by the regulations of the system which enslaved him; he was improved in manners and elevated in his general conceptions by his daily association with the individuals of a superior white caste. The semi-military discipline of slavery is gone, and no social or personal tie now unites the home of the negro with that of the white man.—P. A. B.
* ↑ Self-respect is near akin to self-support. Any one who has lived in a foreign land where class distinctions prevail knows how ineffaceable is deference to rank, sometimes approaching servility. The negro seems to assume, to feel, to act on, his inferiority. The action of the government, of party managers, of religious organizations, of givers of pecuniary aid, of administrators of charitable benefactions, has tended to make him look to and rely upon Hercules. Slavery subordinated will, repressed intelligence, did not cultivate individuality or self-determination, and what is needed for the African is a strengthening at weak points so as to build up self-reliant character.—J. L. M. C.
* ↑ It is well to understand clearly the formidable character of the obstacles which the negro mechanic will be called upon to overcome before he can acquire, in the mechanical trades, any substantial advantage from the prosperity which may surround him. In the first place, he will encounter race prejudice; employers will prefer mechanics of their own race, if other conditions are equal. Then he will have to submit to the stress of modern competition. The skilled white mechanic protects himself by his trade union; into that he is not likely to admit the negro mechanic. If the skilled negro mechanics form their own trade unions, the superiority of the members must be of the most striking character to create a preponderating influence in their favor in the mind of the employer, who naturally leans towards individuals of his own race. Let the negro unions work at cheaper rates and the white mechanics be forced to come down to the same wages, the former would at once be exposed to those destructive conditions to which I have referred. These are the influences that diminish the prospect of the negro taking an active part in the manufacturing development of the South, except in those branches of labor which are distinctly below such as require special skill and training.—P. A. B.
* ↑ See Mulhall's Dictionary of Statistics (new edition, 1890-91), pages 320-22.—W. T. H.
* ↑ The English laborer has a greater income than the Italian, because England is the common manufacturer for Italy. Southern climates, whether occupied by negroes or Caucasians, are fatal to the rigorous demands of scientific industry.—L. H. B.
* ↑ As yet public sentiment confines him principally to agricultural or other similarly unremunerative employments.—L. H. B.
* ↑ The improvement of the character of the negro preachers is even more important than the improvement of the character of the negro teachers; but it is an end more difficult to reach, because the preachers cannot be selected, like the teachers, after submission to an ordeal that tests their fitness for the positions to be filled. As a rule, the present spiritual guides of the Southern negroes are self-appointed. The most feasible plan for promoting this improvement of character seems to be the establishment of a large number of seminaries, to be controlled absolutely by the white religious denominations, in which the general system of instruction now pursued in the normal institutes, with religious courses predominating, shall be employed for the education of the students. A second Peabody or Slater, instead of leaving a large fund for the advancement of the usefulness of the normal schools for the Southern negroes, should set aside the same amount for establishing new seminaries for the education of negro preachers, or enlarging the scope and improving the methods of those already in existence. P. A. B.
* ↑ One of the chief drawbacks to higher civilization in the negro race is the exceeding difficulty of giving a predominant ethical character to his religion. In the black belt religion and virtue are often considered as distinct and separable things. The moral element, good character, is eliminated from the essential ingredients of Christianity, and good citizenship, womanliness, truth, chastity, honesty, cleanliness, trustworthiness, are not always of the essence of religious obligation. An intelligent, pious, courageous ministry is indispensable to any hopeful attempt to lift up the negro race.—J. L. M. C.
* ↑ In 1888, the total value of property used for colored normal schools was $1,224,130, for colored secondary schools (high schools and preparatory) $549,865, colleges $1,816,550, schools of science $61,500, schools of theology $252,500, schools of law $40,000, schools of medicine $30,003.—W. T. H.
* ↑ The wisest course to pursue at present is to employ every means to widen the scope and perfect the methods of the normal schools for the negroes. The Hampton Institute represents in an eminent degree the true principle to be applied in this age to their improvement through the public school, that principle being embodied in the careful selection of the best material which the race affords for instructors of the young.—P. A. B.
* ↑ At first the Peabody fund was used to secure the establishment in the Southern States of systems of free schools, and to create a local sentiment favorable to the maintenance and patronage of such schools. Now an insignificant portion of the income is used in aid of individual schools, and in no instance unless state revenues are supplemented by local taxation. Help those who help themselves is an inflexible law. The bulk of appropriations is now applied to the training of teachers through the Peabody Normal School at Nashville, state normal schools, and teachers' institutes for both races. The Slater fund, given for "the lately emancipated race," makes prominent the industries to impart habits of steady and intelligent and remunerative application. Aid will hereafter be concentrated upon fewer institutions. The object is to promote directive intelligence, to develop leadership, to teach the application of science so as to enable men to rise above unintelligent, unproductive drudgery.—J. L. M. C.
* ↑ Alabama expended, from 1870 to 1887 inclusive, the sum of $4,610,947 for its white schools, and $3,296,793 for its colored schools. Of these sums, from 1872 to 1887, $124,000 went for normal schools for whites, and $107,500 for colored normal schools.—W. T. H.
* ↑ The feuds spring almost wholly from the enmity of the whites. The negroes generally stand for the lamb drinking below and muddying the stream above. L. H. B.
* ↑ Freedom itself is educatory. The energy of representative institutions is a valuable schoolmaster. To control one's labor, to enjoy the earnings of it, to make contracts freely, to have the right of locomotion and change of residence and business, have a helpful influence on manhood. These concrete and intelligible acts affect the negro far more than abstract speculations, or effusive sentiment, or the slow processes of remote and combined causes. They require prompt and spontaneous action, and one learns from personal experience that he is a constituent member of society. Unquestionably, he sometimes makes ludicrous mistakes, is guilty of offensive self-assertion, but despite these errors there is perceptible and hopeful progress.—J. L. M. C.