The Negro and the nation

by Hubert H. Harrison

III—Educational.

EDUCATION is the name which we give to that process of equipment and training which, in our day, society gives the individual to prepare him for fighting the battle of life. We do not confer it as a privilege, but it is given on behalf of society for society’s own protection from the perils of ignorance and incompetence. It is a privilege to which ever member of society is entitled. For without some equipment of this sort the individual is but half a man, handicapped in the endeavor to make a living. Here in America, we subscribe to the dangerous doctrine that twelve million of the people should receive the minimum of education. And in order to reconcile ourselves to this doctrine, we deck it in the garments of wisdom. Because of the serf idea in American life, we say that the Negro shall have a serf’s equipment and no more. It is the same idea that the aristocracy of Europe evolved when the workers demanded that their children should be trained better than they themselves had been. “Why”, said the masters, “if we give your children schooling they will be educated out of their station in life. What should the son of a carpenter need to know of Euclid or Virgil? He should learn his father’s vocation that he may be well equipped to serve in that station of life into which it has pleased God to call him. We need more plowmen than priests, more servants than savants.”

In our own land, when Negroes demand education, we say, “Why, surely, give them industrial education. Your race has a great opportunity—to make itself useful. It needs trained craftsmen and workers and, perhaps, a few parsons. Teach your sons and daughters to work. That is enough.” And we dexterously select leaders for them who will administer the soothing syrup of this old idea with deftness and dispatch. The General Education Board which disburses millions of dollars annually in the South for education has, so far, given to forty-one Negro schools the sum of $464,015. Only in two instances has any money been given to a real college. Practically all of it went to the labor-caste schools. Why? Because the dark degradation of the Negro must be lightened by no ray of learning. That would never do. We need them as “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” And in the meanwhile, this is what the richest country on earth offers to ruthlessly exploited people as a training for life:

Before the Twelfth Annual Conference for Education in the South (1910) Mr. Charles L. Coon, superintendent of schools in North Carolina, read a paper on Negro Education in the South. His investigation extended over eleven states: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee. In these states the Negroes make up 40.1 per cent of the population, but receive only 14.8 per cent of the school fund. He showed that even if the school fund as disbursed were apportioned to each race according to taxes paid the colored people of Virginia should receive $507,305 instead of the $482,228 which they now receive; in North Carolina they should get $429,127 instead of $402,658, and in Georgia $647,852 instead of $506,170. So that these three states expend for Negro education $93,278 less than what the Negroes themselves pay for—and that sum is contributed by Negroes to the white children of the state!

But, as a matter of fact, in no modern country is education made to depend upon the tax-paying power of the parents. If that were so, the children of 40,000,000 American proletarians would live and die without schooling. So that the case is really much worse than it seems.

South Carolina spent in 1910 $10.34 for the education of each white child and $1.70 for the education of each colored child. In Lawrence county the state gave to each colored child 97 cents worth of education that year; in Lexington county, 90 cents; in Bamberg, 89 cents; in Saluda, 68 cents, and in Calhoun, 58 cents worth. The smallest sum spent on a white child for education that year was $4.03. In Georgia it was quite as bad. One county of this state owned 19 of the 27 school houses for Negroes. The valuation of the entire 19 was $2,500; that is, $131.58 for each school house for Negroes! The annual cost of the education of a Negro child in six counties of this civilized state was 39 cents. Meanwhile the whites of Baltimore were protesting against the building of a new Negro school! In Louisiana the report of the Department of Education shows that the average monthly salary of white male teachers is $75.29, while that of colored male teachers is $34.25. The average monthly salary of white female teachers is $50.80 and that of the colored female teachers is $28.67. The average length of the annual school term for white children is eight months and a quarter; for colored children, four months and a half.

In Wilcox County, Alabama, where there are 2,000 white children and 10,758 colored children, $32,660.48 is devoted to education. Of this amount the 10,758 colored children receive one-fourth—$6,532.09, or sixty cents each per annum—while the 2,000 white children receive the remaining four-fifths—$26,128.13, or about $13 each per annum. Mr. Booker Washington, who lives in this state sends his own children to the best colleges and to Europe while advising the rest of his people to “make your condition known to the white people of the state.” Now, if education—of any sort—is a training for life, is it not evident here that black children are being robbed of their chance in life? Why? Is it to be supposed that their fathers are so stupid as to allow this if they could vote their own needs? Yet Mr. Washington decries the agitation for the ballot as unwise and never loses an opportunity of sneering at these who see something of value in it. But to continue The number of white children of school age in Alabama is 364,266; the number of colored children of school age is 311,552. But the teachers of the white children receive in salaries $2,404,062.54, while the teachers of the colored children receive $202,251.13. The value of all schoolhouses, sites and furniture for white children is $6,503,019.57; for colored children, $273,147.50.

In South Carolina there are 316,007 Negro children of school age and 201,868 white children; but the state spends on its Negro children $368,802, and on its white children $1,684,976. Thus does America keep knowledge from Negroes. She is afraid of the educated black man. Of such are the people who taunt Negroes with ignorance.