The Bamberg herald. [volume] (Bamberg, S.C.) 1891-1972, 1904-01-14

so that the new school should be exclus-
lively for negroes. he passed the word
along the back road from family to family,
not to pay any attention to the notice,
but to send the children to the village
school where they had been going.
As matter of fact, it was Intended
that half dozen white children living
in the northern part of the town should
90 to the new school, but their parents
added to the complication by refusing to
tolerate a negro teacher.
George Cook, farmer, led the revolt
OF the white parents. He said that he
would never send his children with negro
pupils to be taught by a negro teacher.
He kept up his opposition until Miss
Fowler, the negro girl, was retired, and
George Cooks own daughter, Daisy, was
installed in her place as teacher.
Miss Cook did not go through high
school. Miss Fowler did and was grad
uated at the head of her class. After Miss
Fowler was deprived of the place the
back road folks declared that theJ would
not send their children to the plains
school anyhow. Then followed the liveli-
est week that Shefield's school committee
and truant catcher ever had. Fourteen
negro children showed up at the village
school contrary to orders and took their
accustomed places. The mothers came
with them and remained outside in the
school yard to see what would happen.
Truant Officer Clark expelled every
negro child from the school-room, and
then went away. The mammies sent
their offspring back to the school-room
and shouted after them.through the door
and windows that they were just as good
as any white trash that ever learned to
spell.
Under the circumstances, nobody learn
ed to spell or do anything else that day.
The white children threw chalk and
things at the blacks, and the blacks threw
them back, and both colors banged on the
big stove and their desks with their
erasers.
Corporal punishment is allowed in the
Berkshire schools but the privilege to
spank didn't do the teacher much good
when the whole room was in revolt, so
she brought truce for the day by dismiss
ing the school.
That performance,"..with variations,
was repeated every school day for week.
The negro mothers, with their broods,
started early and trudged through mile
and quarter of snow and across the
Housatonic to the school house each
morning, only to find the truant officers
or member of the committee or Super
intendent Collins there to tell them that
they should have gone mile and half
in the other direction for their education.
Theimost imaginative small boy in the
negro colony, whose grandmother took
him once to an Uncle TOMS Cabin show
down in Canaan, told about the regular
morning e7ictions to-day and declared
that the truant officer drove the black
children out of school with a rawhide.
But that wasn't so.
So far the only plea.in behalf of the ne
groes that has been made by an outsider
comes from Clement G. Morgan of Boston,
negro Republican member of the Legis-
lature.
SuperintendenHC Collins wrote that there
had been no illegal discrimination and
that none was contemplated. This reply
was written with the advice of the town
attorney, Frank Il. Wright. Mr.. Morgan
was also asked to be more specific in his
charges.
Edward Curtis is the only white man
of the town who is known to be on the
side of the negroes. He is graduate of
Cornell, lawyer and civil engineer.
His own boy, who is now a student in the
Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, was once ex-
cluded from the village primary school
on the ground that it was overcrowded.
Mr.. Curtis has not had much love for
Shefield.since.
The anti-negro prejudice perhaps, may
be accounted for in part by the Ten Eyck
murder of twenty years ago. John Ten
Eyck, a negro, murdered with an axe
David Stillman and his wife, one of the
most venerable and respected couples in
the town.
There was as much talk then about an
attempt at lynching in the old Bay State
as there is to-day about q Jim Crow school,
A mob of the best citizens, with ropes,
tried to get Ten Eyck away from the
district Jail over in Great Darlington,
and lynching was avoided only when
High Sheriff Root and his deputies
charged the crowd with drawn reYolHers.
JUST ONE MINUTE.