 | CHAPTER II. The future of the American negro |  |
CHAPTER II.
In order that the reader may understand
me and why I lay so much stress
upon the importance of pushing the doctrine
of industrial education for the
Negro, it is necessary, first of all, to review
the condition of affairs at the present
time in the Southern States. For
years I have had something of an opportunity
to study the Negro at first-hand;
and I feel that I know him pretty well,—
him and his needs, his failures and his
successes, his desires and the likelihood
of their fulfilment. I have studied him
and his relations with his white neighbours,
and striven to find how these relations
may be made more conducive to
the general peace and welfare both of
the South and of the country at large.
In the Southern part of the United
States there are twenty-two millions of
people who are bound to the fifty millions
of the North by ties which neither
most intelligent in a New York community
has his intelligence darkened
by the ignorance of a fellow-citizen in
the Mississippi bottoms. The most
wealthy in New York City would be
more wealthy but for the poverty of
a fellow-being in the Carolina rice
swamps. The most moral and religious
men in Massachusetts have their
religion and morality modified by the
degradation of the man in the South
whose religion is a mere matter of form
or of emotionalism. The vote of the
man in Maine that is cast for the highest
and purest form of government is
largely neutralised by the vote of the
man in Louisiana whose ballot is stolen
or cast in ignorance. Therefore, when
the South is ignorant, the North is ignorant;
when the South is poor, the
North is poor; when the South commits
crime, the nation commits crime.
For the citizens of the North there is
character of the civilisation in the
South, or theirs will be lowered. No
member of the white race in any part of
the country can harm the weakest or
meanest member of the black race
without the proudest and bluest blood
of the nation being degraded.
It seems to me that there never was
a time in the history of the country
when those interested in education
should the more earnestly consider to
what extent the mere acquiring of the
ability to read and write, the mere acquisition
of a knowledge of literature
and science, makes men producers, lovers
of labour, independent, honest, unselfish,
and, above all, good. Call education by
what name you please, if it fails to
bring about these results among the
masses, it falls short of its highest end.
The science, the art, the literature, that
fails to reach down and bring the humblest
up to the enjoyment of the fullest
matter how costly the buildings or apparatus
used or how modern the methods
of instruction employed. The study of
arithmetic that does not result in making
men conscientious in receiving and
counting the ballots of their fellow-men
is faulty. The study of art that does
not result in making the strong less
willing to oppress the weak means little.
How I wish that from the most cultured
and highly endowed university in the
great North to the humblest log cabin
school-house in Alabama, we could burn,
as it were, into the hearts and heads of
all that usefulness, that service to our
brother, is the supreme end of education.
Putting the thought more directly
as it applies to conditions in the South,
can you make the intelligence of the
North affect the South in the same
ratio that the ignorance of the South
affects the North? Let us take a not
improbable case: A great national case
or war, the honour or dishonour of our
nation,—yea, the very existence of the
government. The North and West are
divided. There are five million votes
to be cast in the South; and, of this
number, one-half are ignorant. Not
only are one-half the voters ignorant;
but, because of the ignorant votes they
cast, corruption and dishonesty in a
dozen forms have crept into the exercise
of the political franchise to such
an extent that the conscience of the
intelligent class is seared in its attempts
to defeat the will of the ignorant voters.
Here, then, you have on the one hand
an ignorant vote, on the other an intelligent
vote minus a conscience. The
time may not be far off when to this
kind of jury we shall have to look for
the votes which shall decide in a large
measure the destiny of our democratic
institutions.
When a great national calamity stares
given to depending on a short "campaign
of education" to do on the hustings
what should have been accomplished
in the school.
With this idea in view, let us examine
with more care the condition of civilisation
in the South, and the work to be
done there before all classes will be fit
for the high duties of citizenship. In
reference to the Negro race, I am confronted
with some embarrassment at
the outset, because of the various and
conflicting opinions as to what is to be
its final place in our economic and political
life.
Within the last thirty years—and,
I might add, within the last three
months,—it has been proven by eminent
authority that the Negro is increasing in
numbers so fast that it is only a question
of a few years before he will far
outnumber the white race in the South,
and it has also been proven that the
question of a few years before he will
have completely disappeared. It has
also been proven that education helps
the Negro and that education hurts him,
that he is fast leaving the South and
taking up his residence in the North
and West, and that his tendency is to
drift toward the low lands of the Mississippi
bottoms. It has been proven that
education unfits the Negro for work
and that education makes him more
valuable as a labourer, that he is our
greatest criminal and that he is our
most law-abiding citizen. In the midst
of these conflicting opinions, it is hard
to hit upon the truth.
But, also, in the midst of this confusion,
there are a few things of which I
am certain,—things which furnish a
basis for thought and action. I know
that whether the Negroes are increasing
or decreasing, whether they are
growing better or worse, whether they
years ago some fourteen of them were
brought into this country, and that now
those fourteen are nearly ten millions.
I know that, whether in slavery or freedom,
they have always been loyal to the
Stars and Stripes, that no school-house
has been opened for them that has not
been filled, that the 2,000,000 ballots that
they have the right to cast are as potent
for weal or woe as an equal number
cast by the wisest and most influential
men in America. I know that wherever
Negro life touches the life of the
nation it helps or it hinders, that
wherever the life of the white race
touches the black it makes it stronger
or weaker. Further, I know that almost
every other race that has tried to
look the white man in the face has disappeared.
I know, despite all the conflicting
opinions, and with a full knowledge
of all the Negroes' weaknesses,
that only a few centuries ago they went
that they came out Christians; they
went into slavery as so much property,
they came out American citizens; they
went into slavery without a language,
they came out speaking the proud
Anglo-Saxon tongue; they went into
slavery with the chains clanking about
their wrists, they came out with the,
American ballot in their hands.
I submit it to the candid and sober
judgment of all men, if a race that is
capable of such a test, such a transformation,
is not worth saving and making
a part, in reality as well as in name, of
our democratic government. That the
Negro may be fitted for the fullest enjoyment
of the privileges and responsibilities
of our citizenship, it is important
that the nation be honest and candid
with him, whether honesty and candour
for the time being pleases or displeases
him. It is with an ignorant race as it
is with a child: it craves at first the
rather than the reality. The ignorant
race is tempted to jump, at one
bound, to the position that it has required
years of hard struggle for others
to reach.
It seems to me that, as a general
thing, the temptation in the past in
educational and missionary work has
been to do for the new people that
which was done a thousand years ago,
or that which is being done for a people
a thousand miles away, without making
a careful study of the needs and conditions
of the people whom it is designed
to help. The temptation is to run all
people through a certain educational
mould, regardless of the condition of
the subject or the end to be accomplished.
This has been the case too
often in the South in the past, I am
sure. Men have tried to use, with these
simple people just freed from slavery
and with no past, no inherited traditions
which they have used in New England,
with all its inherited traditions and
desires. The Negro is behind the white
man because he has not had the same
chance, and not from any inherent difference
in his nature and desires. What
the race accomplishes in these first fifty
years of freedom will at the end of these
years, in a large measure, constitute its
past. It is, indeed, a responsibility that
rests upon this nation,—the foundation
laying for a people of its past, present,
and future at one and the same time.
One of the weakest points in connection
with the present development of
the race is that so many get the idea
that the mere filling of the head with
a knowledge of mathematics, the sciences,
and literature, means success in
life. Let it be understood, in every
corner of the South, among the Negro
youth at least, that knowledge will
benefit little except as it is harnessed,
direction that will bear upon the present
needs and condition of the race. There
is in the heads of the Negro youth of
the South enough general and floating
knowledge of chemistry, of botany, of
zoöology, of geology, of mechanics, of
electricity, of mathematics, to reconstruct
and develop a large part of the
agricultural, mechanical, and domestic
life of the race. But how much of it
is brought to a focus along lines of practical
work? In cities of the South like
Atlanta, how many coloured mechanical
engineers are there? or how many machinists?
how many civil engineers?
how many architects? how many house
decorators? In the whole State of
Georgia, where eighty per cent, of the
coloured people depend upon agriculture,
how many men are there who are
well grounded in the principles and
practices of scientific farming? or dairy
work? or fruit culture? or floriculture?
For example, not very long ago I had
a conversation with a young coloured
man who is a graduate of one of the
prominent universities of this country.
The father of this man is comparatively
ignorant, but by hard work and the exercise
of common sense he has become
the owner of two thousand acres of land.
He owns more than a score of horses,
cows, and mules and swine in large
numbers, and is considered a prosperous
farmer. In college the son of this farmer
has studied chemistry, botany, zoölogy,
surveying, and political economy. In
my conversation I asked this young man
how many acres his father cultivated in
cotton and how many in corn. With a
far-off gaze up into the heavens he answered
that he did not know. When I
asked him the classification of the soils
on his father's farm, he did not know.
He did not know how many horses or
cows his father owned nor of what
breeds they were, and seemed surprised
It never seemed to have entered his
mind that on his father's farm was the
place to make his chemistry, his mathematics,
and his literature penetrate and
reflect itself in every acre of land, every
bushel of corn, every cow, and every
Pig.
Let me give other examples of this
mistaken sort of education. When a
mere boy, I saw a young coloured man,
who had spent several years in school,
sitting in a common cabin in the South,
studying a French grammar. I noted
the poverty, the untidiness, the want of
system and thrift, that existed about the
cabin, notwithstanding his knowledge
of French and other academic studies.
Again, not long ago I saw a coloured
minister preparing his Sunday sermon
just as the New England minister prepares
his sermon. But this coloured
minister was in a broken-down, leaky,
rented log cabin, with weeds in the yard,
filth, and want of thrift. This minister
had spent some time in school studying
theology. How much better it would
have been to have had this minister
taught the dignity of labour, taught theoretical
and practical farming in connection
with his theology, so that he
could have added to his meagre salary,
and set an example for his people in
the matter of living in a decent house,
and having a knowledge of correct farming!
In a word, this minister should
have been taught that his condition, and
that of his people, was not that of
a New England community; and he
should have been so trained as to meet
the actual needs and conditions of the
coloured people in this community, so
that a foundation might be laid that
would, in the future, make a community
like New England communities.
Since the Civil War, no one object
has been more misunderstood than that
education for the Negro. To begin
with, it must be borne in mind that the
condition that existed in the South immediately
after the war, and that now
exists, is a peculiar one, without a parallel
in history. This being true, it seems
to me that the wise and honest thing to
do is to make a study of the actual condition
and environment of the Negro,
and do that which is best for him, regardless
of whether the same thing has
been done for another race in exactly
the same way. There are those among
the white race and those among the
black race who assert, with a good deal
of earnestness, that there is no difference
between the white man and the
black man in this country. This sounds
very pleasant and tickles the fancy; but,
when the test of hard, cold logic is applied
to it, it must be acknowledged that
there is a difference,—not an inherent
one, not a racial one, but a difference
in the past.
If I may be permitted to criticise the
educational work that has been done in
the South, I would say that the weak
point has been in the failure to recognise
this difference.
Negro education, immediately after
the war in most cases, was begun too
nearly at the point where New England
education had ended. Let me illustrate.
One of the saddest sights I ever saw
was the placing of a three hundred dollar
rosewood piano in a country school
in the South that was located in the
midst of the "Black Belt." Am I arguing
against the teaching of instrumental
music to the Negroes in that community?
Not at all; only I should have
deferred those music lessons about
twenty-five years. There are numbers
of such pianos in thousands of New
England homes. But behind the piano
in the New England home there are
economy; there is the small manufacturing
industry, started several years ago
by hand power, now grown into a great
business; there is ownership in land, a
comfortable home, free from debt, and a
bank account. In this "Black Belts"
community where this piano went, four-fifths
of the people owned no land,
many lived in rented one-room cabins,
many were in debt for food supplies,
many mortgaged their crops for the
food on which to live, and not one
had a bank account. In this case, how
much wiser it would have been to have
taught the girls in this community sewing,
intelligent and economical cooking,
housekeeping, something of dairying and
horticulture? The boys should have
been taught something of farming in
connection with their common-school
education; instead of awakening in them
a desire for a musical instrument which
resulted in their parents going into debt
a home was purchased. Industrial lessons
would have awakened, in this community,
a desire for homes, and would
have given the people the ability to free
themselves from industrial slavery to the
extent that most of them would have
soon purchased homes. After the home
and the necessaries of life were supplied
could come the piano. One piano lesson
in a home of one's own is worth
twenty in a rented log cabin.
All that I have just written, and the
various examples illustrating it, show
the present helpless condition of my
people in the South,—how fearfully
they lack the primary training for good
living and good citizenship, how much
they stand in need of a solid foundation
on which to build their future success.
I believe, as I have many times said in
my various addresses in the North and
in the South, that the main reason for
the existence of this curious state of
in the ways of life.
There is, too, a great lack of money
with which to carry on the educational
work in the South. I was in a county
in a Southern State not long ago where
there are some thirty thousand coloured
people and about seven thousand whites.
In this county not a single public school
for Negroes had been open that year
longer than three months, not a single
coloured teacher had been paid more
than $15 per month for his teaching.
Not one of these schools was taught in
a building that was worthy of the name
of school-house. In this county the State
or public authorities do not own a single
dollar's worth of school property,—not
a school-house, a blackboard, or a piece
of crayon. Each coloured child had
had spent on him that year for his
education about fifty cents, while each
child in New York or Massachusetts
had had spent on him that year for
each citizen of this county is expected
to share the burdens and privileges of
our democratic form of government just
as intelligently and conscientiously as
the citizens of New York or Boston.
A vote in this county means as much
to the nation as a vote in the city of
Boston. Crime in this county is as
truly an arrow aimed at the heart of
the government as a crime committed
in the streets of Boston.
A single school-house built this year
in a town near Boston to shelter about
three hundred pupils cost more for
building alone than is spent yearly for
the education, including buildings, apparatus,
teachers, for the whole coloured
school population of Alabama. The
Commissioner of Education for the
State of Georgia not long ago reported
to the State legislature that in that
State there were two hundred thousand
children that had entered no school the
more who were at school but a few
days, making practically three hundred
thousand children between six and
eighteen years of age that are growing
up in ignorance in one Southern State
alone. The same report stated that
outside of the cities and towns, while
the average number of school-houses
in a county was sixty, all of these
sixty school-houses were worth in lump
less than $2,000, and the report further
added that many of the school-houses
in Georgia were not fit for horse stables.
I am glad to say, however, that vast improvement
over this condition is being
made in Georgia under the inspired
leadership of State Commissioner Glenn,
and in Alabama under the no less zealous
leadership of Commissioner Abercrombie.
These illustrations, so far as they
concern the Gulf States, are not exceptional
cases; nor are they overdrawn.
Until there is industrial independence,
it is hardly possible to have good living
and a pure ballot in the country districts.
In these States it is safe to say
that not more than one black man in
twenty owns the land he cultivates.
Where so large a proportion of a people
are dependent, live in other people's
houses, eat other people's food, and wear
clothes they have not paid for, it is
pretty hard to expect them to live fairly
and vote honestly.
I have thus far referred mainly to
the Negro race. But there is another
side. The longer I live and the more
I study the question, the more I am
convinced that it is not so much a
problem as to what the white man will
do with the Negro as what the Negro
will do with the white man and his civilisation.
In considering this side of
the subject, I thank God that I have
grown to the point where I can sympathise
with a white man as much as I
have grown to the point where I can
sympathise with a Southern white man
as much as I can sympathise with a
Northern white man.
As bearing upon the future of our
civilisation, I ask of the North what
of their white brethren in the South,—
those who have suffered and are still
suffering the consequences of American
slavery, for which both North and South
were responsible? Those of the great
and prosperous North still owe to their
less fortunate brethren of the Caucasian
race in the South, not less than to themselves,
a serious and uncompleted duty.
What was the task the North asked the
South to perform? Returning to their
destitute homes after years of war to
face blasted hopes, devastation, a shattered
industrial system, they asked them
to add to their own burdens that of
preparing in education, politics, and
economics, in a few short years, for
slaves. That the South, staggering
under the burden, made blunders, and
that in a measure there has been disappointment,
no one need be surprised.
The educators, the statesmen, the philanthropists,
have imperfectly comprehended
their duty toward the millions of
poor whites in the South who were
buffeted for two hundred years between
slavery and freedom, between civilisation
and degradation, who were disregarded
by both master and slave. It needs no
prophet to tell the character of our future
civilisation when the poor white boy in
the country districts of the South receives
one dollar's worth of education
and the boy of the same class in the
North twenty dollars' worth, when one
never enters a reading-room or library
and the other has reading-rooms and
libraries in every ward and town, when
one hears lectures and sermons once in
two months and the other can hear a
year.
The time has come, it seems to me,
when in this matter we should rise
above party or race or sectionalism into
the region of duty of man to man, of
citizen to citizen, of Christian to Christian;
and if the Negro, who has been
oppressed and denied his rights in a
Christian land, can help the whites of
the North and South to rise, can be the
inspiration of their rising, into this atmosphere
of generous Christian brotherhood
and self-forgetfulness, he will see
in it a recompense for all that he has
suffered in the past.
| CHAPTER II. The future of the American negro | |