The Bamberg herald. [volume] (Bamberg, S.C.) 1891-1972, 1904-01-14
THE COLORLINE UP NORTH.
PRETTY SHARPLY DRAWN IN THE SHEFFIELD
MASSACHUSETTS,, SCHOOL.

PRETTY SHARPLY DRAWN IN THE SHEFFIELD,
MASSACHUSETTS, SCHOOL.
Nesroes are lndisnant-wont Have Any Jim
Crow School Regulation and are Making a Fight
for Attendance at the White Sehool-who'e
Community Backs up Committee in Separa.
ton Of the Races.
A. correspondent of The New York Sun
writes from Sheffield, Mass, as follows:
Thermometers in the Berkshires have
been registering from II to below zero
for the last thirty-six hours, but in this
particular hill town the excitement OF the
row over the negro school children has
kept folks warm enough. The superin-
tendent of schools and the school COM
mittee are determined to put the negro
children off in a school by themselves,
and the blacks are determined not to
stay put.
That is the question and this is Berk-
shire county, Massachusetts-the Old Bay
State, the State of William Lloyd Garris'
on and Wendell Phillips, the home of the
Anti-Slavery Society and the mainstay OF
the abolitionists of a half century ago
The town school committee with the ap.
proyal of q member of the State board OF
education, has said that the negro children
must 90 to one school and keep away
from another, where the white children
90, regardless of what the negro parents
may wish.
But all the school officials are denying
that there is any discrimination on &C
count of color. The two Oldest negroes
here, grandfathers of big broods, who are
fighting the committee, fought in the
civil war as members of Col. Shaw's
famous colored regiment, the Fifty-fourth
Massachusetts, the achievements OF which
are recorded on bronze tablet on Boston
Common. A negro member OF the Mass
achusetts Legislature has taken up the
fight and has warned the school committee
TO beware of color line.
Three negro parents have already been
arrested and fined as the result OF the
school committees activity, and dozen
pickaninnies, backed by their mammles,
have caused Truant Officer Benjamin F.
Clark more trouble in the last week than
have the last three generations OF hockey
playing white boys.
As told in The Sun recently, the trouble
took q sensational turn when the Jim
Crow" school was burned down at three
o'clock in the morning on January 2. OF
course the fire was incendiary.. The build
ing was remote from all other structures
and there had been no fire in the school,
house stove since the day before Christ
mas. After the fire big foot prints were
found in the snow crust from the school
house site to the road leading to New
Guinea. That is what the negro settle
ment on the back road is called. The
tracks in the snow were not necessary to
convince all Sheffield that the frebug was
black man. The broad grins in New
Guinea whenever the destruction OF the
school.house is mentioned seem to indi-
cate the same thing. The..state fire mar
shal is coming here in a day or so to make
/, an official investigation. There may be
an arrest on charge more serious than
that of keeping children away from the
jim Crow school.
But in spite of all that has been said
and done, the townspeople resent the hue
and cry that has been raised throughout
the State and Indignantly deny that they
have established a Jim Crow school or
Intentionally drawn color line among
the children. The line was drawn and it
just happened, say the people of Sheffield,
that the little darkies are on one side of
it and the little white boys and girls on
the other. But that, they add, was mere
ly incidental to the geography of the case.
The2,OOO white people have their homes
and stores along the main street and to
the east OF it. The "back road" is mile
to the west on the other side of the Housa-
tonic river and runs parallel to the main
road until it reaches the Sheffield plains,
where it curves to the east and runs into
the main road.
The negroes-there are thirty or forty
big families of them-live on that back
road in the most squalid unpainted shan
ties, built of boxes and odds and ends Of
lumber, patched with rusty tin and with
the cracks in the boards and holes in the
windows stuffed with rags. In one OF
these huts there live a negro, his wife and
eight children. The negroes are not
particularly vicious, and their worst sins
seem to be laziness and squalor. They
have q little Methodist chapel of their
own and all attend the services. No
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