Weekly Trinity journal., 1867-01-12
NUMBER |.
From the New York Tribune.
Negroes In Trigonometry and the Classics


If that large class of Americans, imported and
native, who have been educated to express their
hatred of equal rights and their prejudice agains.
race by mouthing with hot rage, or airy con-
tempt, the word Niger p could be compelled
to visit in detachments, the Philadelphia Insti-
tute for colored youth, on Shipper Street, they
would speedily get cured of the false ideas upon
which slavery in the United States sought q
logical and lawful foundation, and which
inspire the opponents of impartial suffrage to
resist the extension of the ballot to the black
man We visited this school last week, and for
two days witnessed its annual Commencement
exercises We saw there abundant evidence -
! 1. That, under the management and nstruc-
tion of colored teachers, male and female, there
is in Philadelphia a school for the education of
girls and boys in the Latin and Greek classics,
the Mathematics, History, Geography and Com
position, which is fully equal to the best of the
endowed academies of Massachusetts and New
Hampshire. This is saying great deal, but we
will stand by it.
II. We saw that under the Development of
this culture favored by the strong social position
which the colored population in Philadelphia
have attained in that freest of our great cities,
there l81 boys and girls of African descent,
as intelligent as self-respectfnl, well-manner-
ed, as well-dressed, and as promising as the same
number Of school children in any of the best
schools in New England. To be more specific
We large school of colored pupils who, in
no respect, save color and features, differed at
all from the best educated and most carefully
trained white hoys and girls of the same age in
the best Academies of the Northern States, In
all respects they were fully theif equals.
III. We saw colored children of both sexes.
between the ages of IL and l9, rigidly examined
in Xenophon's Anabasis and the Greek Testa.
ment, in Virgils Eneid Cicero's orations ana
lIorace's songs, in plane and spherical trigonom-
etry, Legendre's geometry, algebra mental arith-
metic, English analysis, history and geography,
and that they understood and knew what
they recited--that they were radically and
thoroughly instructed-that their answers to
questions not exercises of memory-that
they had not been drilled parrot-like for public
show, and that they had successfully received
| from colored instructors the education which our
best schools give white children preparatory to
entering college.
". We heard compositions read and declama-
tions delivered upon such themes as ''The Essen
tal Feature OF Republic" +" emusic as an Ele-
ment of Worship" 'The Education of Wo-
men, " The Age of Pericles,'' " The American
Congress-" "The Province of Poetry" 20 Indi-
vidual Effort" "The New Rome The Two
Crsars.'' These performances, Original, marked
with thought, of high grade of excellence in the
use of language and structure of sentences, and
| full of generous feeling and morality,-had they
been listened to by the most prejudced upholders
of caste, would surely have shamed them out of
all further talk bout the inferioriy ofthe African
race, and broul / them to a candid confession that
there is not in the organization of the color
ed American which should withhold from him
complete political enfranchisenent nothing in
his character or capacities which can longer up
hold the and cowardly lie that the Govern
ment of the United States was intended to be n
O White Mans Government"
| Richard Humphreys, member of the Soci-
ETY. of Friends in Philadelphia, preparing for
his death in the year 1892, devised $4,000 in
trust ito instruct descendants of the African
race in school learning, in the various branches
of the mechanic arts and trade, and in agricul-
ture, in order to prepare and qualify them to
act as teachers in those branches of useful busi-
ness" That little sum of money was seed from
which has grown up the Shippen-st. Colored
High School. 1t would well repay visit by
any generous and public-spirited man in this
city. The example of beneficence and patriot
ism set by the Quaker, Humphreys, if followed
in New York by some citizen intrusted with
great wealth, would produce results of the high
est social and political value.