OVER-NAMING.
Many will think me wrong in the opinion I now offer; some of the wisest of the teachers in the real work of teaching negroes will agree with me: it is a misfortune that the names given these schools are so out of proportion to their real work and character. None of them, even in catalogues, go beyond the ordinary college course; many of them do not come up to it; in none of them do more than a very small number complete this course. There is not a university, in any proper sense, among them all. It is not in the spirit of censure that I speak of these things, but of deep interest in the great and necessary work, that the good people engaged in these schools are trying, with rare consecration and in the teeth of a thousand discouragements, to accomplish.
The great names for these schools have done harm. They are misleading to begin with, and that is an evil. It is hard enough to get the indifferent or the antagonistic people to understand the subject of the education of the negroes at best; it is harder when new meanings have to be given to old names in order to state acts. I am of the opinion that the names given to most of these schools have done some harm in the North—whence the money has been drawn to support them. Northern men have sometimes spoken to me on these subjects in language that made it plain that they would have helped more but from a conviction that “schools and not universities are what these poor people need.” Per contra, it may well enough be answered, some have given largely to build “universities” that would not give to establish schools. As to the influence on northern sentiment of the too-great names, those who know that sentiment better than I do can express themselves more definitely. I know that the big names have done harm in the States where the schools are. At this point let me say, I am only stating what I believe to be facts. Comments, inferences, justifications, do not concern me just now.
First, then, the large names have excited prejudice among the white people who did not know what was back of the names. Most of them, for a long time, did not know what the universities and colleges were really trying to do; the majority do not know at this time.
Some of those who did know something thought the whole business a mere sham; for a long time only a few southern white people really knew that faithful, wise and successful teaching was done in these colleges and universities—most of it not being college or university work at all. The few who really knew what good work was being done could over-look the ambitious names—it being a weakness in the South and West, yielded to by not a few, to give great names to small schools for white youth. The wiser and kinder-hearted ones could condone the offense of over-large names in view of their own example.
The big names did as much as anything else to anger the poor whites against all negro education. People who know human nature will understand this statement without explanation: those who do not know human nature will not understand it anyway.
The worst evil, in the long run, of this big naming of schools for the negroes, fell upon the negroes themselves. It aggravated the tendency—very strong among them—to be satisfied with the name of a thing in the lack of the thing itself, and, what is more, not knowing that they can lack the thing when they have the name. Take, for example, “⸺ University,” an admirable school well known to me. Its annual enrollment will average three hundred; its catalogue course reaches from the primary studies through an ordinary college curriculum; one in ten attempts this college course; one in fifty may complete it. The whole three hundred tell their friends: “I was educated in ⸺ University.” It gives them importance. They pass as scholars beyond their merits among their own people. In many of them it breeds injurious conceits—of a sort that makes enemies of those who might be friends, and prejudices with the uninformed—who in all countries are the majority—the whole subject of negro education. It is to be feared that only a few colored students know the difference between “⸺ University” and a real university.