THE NEW SOUTHERN STATESMANSHIP
“Democracy is the progress of all through all, under the leadership of the best and the wisest.”—Mazzini.
In former chapters I have had much to tell that was unpleasant and perhaps discouraging; but it had to be told, for it is there, and must be honestly met and reckoned with.
But the chief pleasure of the present task has been the opportunity it has given me to meet the working idealists of the South, and to see the courageous and unselfish way in which they are meeting the obstacles which confront them. If any man would brighten his faith in human nature, if he would attain a deeper and truer grasp upon the best things of life, let him attend one of the educational rallies of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, or Texas, and hear the talks of Dr. S. C. Mitchell, President Alderman, J. Y. Joyner, P. P. Claxton, Chancellor Barrow, President Houston, and others; or let him spend a few days at Hampton with Dr. Frissell, or at Tuskegee with Dr. Washington, or at Calhoun with Miss Thorne. Coming away from a meeting one night at Tuskegee after there had been speaking in the chapel by both white and coloured men, I could not help saying to myself:
“The Negro problem is not unsolvable; it is being solved, here and now, as fast as any human problem can be solved.”
Men may be found straining their vision to see some distant and complex solution to the question (have we not heard talk of deportation, extermination, amalgamation, segregation, and the like?) when the real solution is under their very eyes, going forward naturally and simply.
It is this quiet, constructive movement among the white people in the South which I wish to consider here.
In a former chapter I showed how the Negroes of the country are divided into two parties or points of view, the greater led by Booker T. Washington, the lesser by W. E. B. DuBois. Washington’s party is the party of the opportunist and optimist, which deals with the world as it is: it is a constructive, practical, cheerful party. It emphasises duties rather than rights. Dr. DuBois’s party, on the other hand, represents the critical point of view. It is idealistic and pessimistic: a party of agitation, emphasising rights rather than duties.
But these two points of view are by no means peculiar to Negroes: they divide all human thought; and the action and reaction between them is the mode of human progress.
Division of White Leadership in the South
White leadership in the South, then, is divided along similar lines with Negro leadership—a party of rights and a party of duties. But with this wide difference: among the Negroes as I showed, the party of agitation and criticism led by DuBois is far inferior both numerically and in influence to the party of opportunity and duties led by Washington. For the Negroes have been forced to concede the futility of trying to progress by political action and legislation, by rights specified but not earned. Washington’s preaching has been:
“Stop thinking about your rights and get down to work. Get yourself right and the world will be all right.”
But among the white people of the South the party of agitation and the emphasis of rights rather than duties is still far in the ascendency. Led by such men as Tillman, Vardaman, Jeff Davis, Hoke Smith, and others, it controls, for the present, the policies of the entire South. It has much to say of the rights of the white man, very little about his duties. It is, indeed, doing for the whites by agitation and legislation (often a kind of force) exactly what Dr. DuBois would like to do for the Negro, if he could.
“Agitate, object, fight,” say both Tillman and DuBois.
“Work,” says Washington.
Now, the same logic of circumstances which produced Booker T. Washington and his significant movement among the Negroes has produced a group of new and highly able white leaders. These new leaders saw that agitation (while most necessary in its place) would not, after all, build up the South; they saw that although the sort of leader typified by Tillman and Vardaman was passing laws and winning elections, he was not, after all, getting anywhere; that race feeling was growing more bitter, often to the injury of Southern prosperty; that progress is not built upon stump speeches. The answer to all this was plain enough.
“Let us stop talking, forget the race problem, and get to work. It does not matter where we take hold, but let us go to work.”
And the doctrine of work in the South has become a great propaganda, almost, indeed, a passion. It has found expression in a remarkable growth of industrial activities, cotton-mills, coal-mines, iron and steel industries; in new methods of farming; in spreading railroads. But more than all else, perhaps, it has developed a new enthusiasm for education, not only for education of the old classical sort, but for industrial and agricultural education—the training of workers. All this, indeed, represents the rebound from years of agitation in which the Negro has been “cussed and discussed,” as one Southerner put it to me, beyond the limit of endurance. Wherever I went in the South among the new industrial and educational leaders I found an active distaste for the discussion of the Negro problem. These men were too busy with fine new enterprises to be bothered with ancient and unprofitable issues.
New Prescriptions for Solving the Negro Problem
When I asked Professor Dillard of New Orleans how he thought the Negro question should be treated, he replied:
“With silence.”
“My prescription,” says President Alderman in his address on “Southern Idealism,” “is ‘silence and slow time,’ faith in the South, and wise training for both white and black.”
Edgar Gardner Murphy of Alabama, himself one of the new leaders, has thus outlined the position of the rising Southern leadership:
“The South is growing weary of extremists and of sensational problem-solvers.... Our coming leadership will have a sense of proportion which will involve a steady refusal to be stampeded by antique nightmares and ethnological melodrama. It will possess an increasing passion for getting hold of the real things in a real world. And it will ... deal with one task at a time. It will subordinate paper schemes of distant amelioration to duties that will help right now.”
Emphasis here is laid upon “real things in a real world” and “duties that will help right now”; and that is the voice everywhere of the new statesmanship.
But let us be clear upon one point at the start. The platforms of these parties are matters of emphasis. One emphasises rights; the other emphasises duties. I have no doubt that Booker T. Washington believes as firmly in the rights of the Negro as any leader of his race; he has merely ceased to emphasise these rights by agitation until his people have gained more education and more property, until by honest achievement they are prepared to exercise their rights with intelligence.
In the same way, the views of many of the new Southern white leaders of whom I shall speak in this article have not radically changed, so far as the Negro is concerned; some of them, I have found, do not differ from Tillman upon essential points; but, like Washington, they have decided not to emphasise controversial matters, and go to work and develop the South, and the people of the South, for the good of the whole country. If the test has to come in the long run between white men and coloured men, as it will have to come and is coming all the time, they want it to be an honest test of efficiency. The fittest here, too, will survive (there is no escaping the great law!), but these new thinkers wish the test of fitness to be, not mere physical force, not mere brute power, whether expressed in lynching or politics, but the higher test of real capacity. They have supreme confidence that the white man is superior on his merits in any contest; and Washington, on his side, is willing to (indeed, he must) take up the gauntlet thus thrown down.
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| Photograph by Hitchler | Photograph by Pach Bros. |
| JAMES H. DILLARD of New Orleans, President Jeanes Fund Board. | EDWIN A. ALDERMAN President of the University of Virginia. |
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| Photograph by The Elliotts | |
| A. M. SOULE President Georgia State College of Agriculture. | D. F. HOUSTON President of the University of Texas. |
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| Photograph by Pach Bros. | Photograph by Knafft & Bro. |
| GEORGE FOSTER PEABODY of New York, member of the Southern Education and Jeanes Fund Boards. | P. P. CLAXTON of the University of Tennessee, leader of the educational campaign in Tennessee. |
The condition in the South may be likened to a battle in which the contestants, weary of profitless and wordy warfare, are turning homeward to gather up new ammunition. Each side is passionately getting education, acquiring land, developing wealth and industry, preparing for the struggles of the future. And it is a fine and wholesome tendency. In a large sense, indeed, this movement typifies the progressive thought of the entire country for it means a sincere attempt to change the plane of battle (for battle there must be) from one of crude, primitive force, whether physical, political, or, indeed, industrial, to one of intellectual efficiency or usefulness to society.
And these working idealists of both races understand one another better than most people think. Dr. Mitchell and President Alderman understand Booker T. Washington, and he understands them. This is not saying that they agree. But agreement upon every abstract principle is not necessary where both parties are hard at work at practical, definite, and immediate tasks.
Self-Criticism in the South
The new Southern statesmanship began (as all new movements begin) with self-criticism. Henry W. Grady, a real statesman, by criticising the old order of things, announced the beginning of the “New South”—an active, working, hopeful South.
He saw the faults of the old exclusive agricultural life and the danger of low-class, uneducated labour, and he urged industrial development and a better school system. R. H. Edmonds of Baltimore, through the Manufacturers’ Record, and many other able business leaders have done much to bring about the new industrial order: the day of new railroads, cotton-mills, and coal-mines; the day of cities.
But it is in the educational field that the development of the new statesmanship has been most remarkable. Although it was unfortunate in one way that so much of the political leadership of the South should have fallen to men of the type of Vardaman, Jeff Davis, and Heflin, it is highly fortunate in another way. For it has driven the broadest and ablest minds in the South to seek expression in other lines of activity, in industry and in the church, but particularly in educational leadership. It is not without profound significance that the great American, General Lee, turned his attention and gave his highest energies after Appomattox, not to politics, but to education. The South to-day has a group of schoolmen who are leaders of extraordinary force and courage. The ministry has also attained an influence in the South which it does not possess in most parts of the North. The influence of Bishop Galloway of Mississippi, Dr. John E. White and Dr. C. B. Wilmer of Atlanta, and many others has been notable.
For many years after the war the South was passive with exhaustion. Young men, who were not afraid, had to grow up to the task of reconstruction. And no one who has not traced the history of the South since the war can form any conception of the magnitude of that task. It was essentially the building of a new civilisation. The leaders were compelled not only to face abject poverty, but they have had to deal constantly with the problem of a labouring class just released from slavery. At every turn, in politics, in industry, in education, they were confronted with the Negro and the problem of what to do with him. Where one school-house would do in the North, they were compelled to build two school-houses, one for white children, one for black. It took from twenty-five to forty years of hard work after the war before the valuation of wealth in the South had again reached the figures of 1860. The valuations in the year 1890 for several of the states were less than in 1860. South Carolina in 1900—forty years after the beginning of the war—had only just caught up with the record of 1860. Since 1890, however, the increase everywhere has been swift and sure.
Courage and Vision of New Leaders
Well, it required courage and vision in the earlier days to go before a poverty-stricken people, who had not yet enough means for living comfortably, and to demand of them that they build up and support two systems of education in the South. And yet that was exactly the task of the educational pioneers. Statesmanship, as I have said, begins with self-criticism. While the mere politician is flattering his followers and confirming them in their errors, the true statesman is criticising them and spurring them to new beliefs and stronger activities. While the politician is pleading rights, the statesman also dares to emphasise duties. While the politicians in the South (not all, but many of them) have been harping on race prejudice and getting themselves elected to office by reviving ancient hatred, these new statesmen have been facing courageously forward, telling the people boldly of the conditions of illiteracy which surround them, and demanding that schools be built and every child, white and black, be educated. In many cases they have had to overcome a settled prejudice against education, especially education of Negroes; and after that was overcome they have had to build up a sense of social responsibility for universal education before they could count on getting the money they needed for their work.
After the war the North, in one form or another, poured much money into the South for teaching the Negroes; lesser sums, like those coming from the Peabody fund, were contributed toward white schools. But in the long run there can be no real education which is not self-education; outside influences may help (or indeed hurt), but until a state—like a man—is inspired with a desire for education and a willingness to make sacrifices to get it, the people will not become enlightened.
In the middle eighties the fire of this inspiration began to blaze up in many parts of the South. Various combustible elements were present: a sense of the appalling condition of illiteracy existing in the South; a pride and independence of character which was hurt by the gifts of money from the North; a feeling that the Negroes in some instances were getting better educational opportunities than the white children; and, finally, the splendid idealism of young men who saw clearly that the only sure foundation for democracy is universal education.
Inspiration of Democracy in North Carolina
Not unnaturally the movement found its earliest expression in North Carolina, which has been the most instinctively democratic of Southern states. From the beginning of the country North Carolina, with its population of Scotch-Presbyterians and Quakers, has been inspired with a peculiar spirit of independence. When I was in Charlotte I went to see the monument which commemorates the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence: the work of a group of stout-hearted citizens who decided, before the country at large was ready for it, to declare their independence of British rule. North Carolina was among the last of the Southern states to secede from the Union, and its treatment of its Negroes all along has been singularly liberal. For example, in several Southern states little or no provision is made for the Negro defective classes, but at Raleigh I visited a large asylum for Negro deaf, dumb, and blind which is conducted according to the most improved methods. And to-day North Carolina is freer politically, the state is nearer a new and healthy party alignment, than any other Southern state except Tennessee and possibly Kentucky.
Such a soil was fertile for new ideas and new movements. In 1885 two young men, Charles D. McIver and Edwin A. Alderman, now president of the University of Virginia, began a series of educational campaigns under the supervision of the state. They spoke in every county, rousing the people to build better school-houses and to send legislators to Raleigh who should be more liberal in educational appropriations. In many cases their rallies were comparable with the most enthusiastic political meetings—only no one was asking to be elected to office, and the only object was public service. As Alderman has said:
“It was an effort to move the centre of gravity from the court-house to the school-house.”
And it really moved; the state took fire and has been afire ever since. Governor Aycock made the educational movement a part of his campaign; Governor Glenn has been hardly less enthusiastic; and the development of the school system has been little short of amazing. When I was in Raleigh last spring J. Y. Joyner, State Superintendent of Schools, who was also one of the pioneer campaigners, told me that a new school-house was being built for every day in the year, and new school libraries established at the same rate. Between 1900 and 1906 the total amount of money expended for schools in North Carolina more than doubled, and while the school population in the same years had increased only 6 per cent., the daily attendance had increased 28 per cent.
North Carolina Compared with Massachusetts
To give a graphic idea of the progress in education, I can do no better than to show the increase in public expenditures since 1872:
| 1872 Total school expenditures | $ 42,856 | |
| 1880 Total school expenditures | 349,831 | |
| 1890 Total school expenditures | 787,145 | |
| 1900 Total school expenditures | 1,091,610 | |
| 1906 Total school expenditures | 2,291,053 |
I have looked into the statistics and I find that North Carolina spends more per hundred dollars of taxable property for school purposes than Massachusetts, which is perhaps the leading American state in educational expenditures. In 1906 North Carolina raised $.40 on every one hundred dollars, while Massachusetts raised $.387. But this does not mean, of course, that North Carolina has reached the standard of Massachusetts; it only shows how the people, though not rich, have been willing to tax themselves. And they have only just begun; the rate of illiteracy of the state, as in all the South, is still excessive among both white and coloured people. According to the last census, North Carolina has more illiterate white people than any other state in the Union, a condition due, of course, to its large population of mountaineers. While the progress already made is notable the leaders still have a stupendous task before them. At the present time, although taxing itself more per hundred dollars’ worth of property than Massachusetts, North Carolina pays only $2.63 each year for the education of each child, whereas Massachusetts expends $24.89—nearly ten times as much.
I do not wish to over-emphasise the work in North Carolina; I am merely using conditions there as a convenient illustration of what is going on in greater or less degree all over the South. One of the group of early enthusiasts in North Carolina was P. P. Claxton, who is now in charge of the educational campaign in Tennessee. With President Dabney, formerly of the University of Tennessee and State Superintendent Mynders, Mr. Claxton has conducted a state-wide campaign for education. Every available occasion has been utilised: picnics, court-days, Decoration Days: and often the audiences have been larger and more enthusiastic than political rallies. Indeed, the meetings have been carried on much like a political campaign. At one time over one hundred speakers were in the field. Every county in the state was stumped, and in two years it was estimated that over half of the entire population of the state actually attended the meetings. Labour unions and women’s clubs were stirred to activity, resolutions were passed, politicians were called upon to declare themselves, and teachers’ organisations were formed. The result was most notable. In 1902 the state expended $1,800,000 for educational purposes; in 1908—six years later—the total will exceed $4,000,000.
A similar campaign has been going on in Virginia, under the auspices of the Coöperative Educational Association, in which the leaders have been Dr. S. C. Mitchell, Professor Bruce Payne, President Alderman, and others. In this work Ex-Governor Montague has also been a force for good, both while he was governor and since, and Governor Swanson at present is actively interested. Local leagues were formed in every part of the state to the number of 324. Negroes have also organised along the same line and now have ten local associations in five counties.
How the South Is Taxing Itself
One of the most striking features of the movement has been the development of the system of local taxation for school purposes—which is a long step in the direction of democracy. In the past the people have looked more or less to some outside source for help—to state or national funds, or the private gifts of philanthropists, or they have depended upon private schools—but now they are voting to take the burden themselves. In other words, with the building up of a popular school system, supported by local taxation, education in the South is becoming, for the first time, democratic. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this movement in stimulating the local pride and self-reliance of the people, or in inspiring each community with educational enthusiasm.
Another development of profound influence has been going on in the South. As I have already pointed out, the so-called “Northern philanthropist” has long been interested in Southern education, especially Negro education. For years his activities awakened, and indeed still awaken, a good deal of hostility in some parts of the South. Many Southerners have felt that the Northerners, however good their intentions, did not understand Southern conditions, and that some of the money was expended in a way that did not help the cause of progress in the South.
South and North Work Together
But both the Northerners (whatever their mistakes in method may have been) and the new Southern leaders were intensely and sincerely interested in the same thing: namely, better education and better conditions in the South. It was natural that these two groups of earnest and reasonable men should finally come together in a spirit of coöperation; and this is, indeed, what has happened. Out of a series of quiet conferences held in the South grew what has been called the “Ogden movement” and the Southern Education Board. This organisation was made up of three different classes of men: first, a group of the Southern leaders of whom I have spoken—Mitchell, Alderman, Dabney, Curry, Houston, Hill, McIver, Claxton, Edgar Gardner Murphy, Sydney J. Bowie, and Henry E. Fries; second, Southern men who, living in the North, were yet deeply interested in the progress of the South—men like Walter H. Page, George Foster Peabody, and Frank R. Chambers; and, finally, the Northerners—Robert C. Ogden, who was president of the board, William H. Baldwin, H. H. Hanna, Dr. Wallace Buttrick, Albert Shaw, and Dr. G. S. Dickerman.
One of the inspirers of the movement, also a member of the board, was Dr. H. B. Frissell, who followed General Armstrong as principal of Hampton Institute.
Each year conferences have been held in the South, a feature of which has been the “Ogden Special”—a special train from the North bringing Northern citizens to Southern institutions and encouraging a more intimate acquaintanceship on both sides. No one influence has been more potent than this in developing a spirit of nationalisation in the Southern educational movement.
So far in this chapter I have had very little to say about the Negro, and especially Negro education. It is important to know the view of the new leadership on this question. I have shown in previous articles that the majority view in the South was more or less hostile to the education of the Negro, or, at least, to his education beyond the bare rudiments.
The new leaders have recognised this feeling, and while without exception they believe that the Negro must be educated and most of them have said so openly, the general policy has been to emphasise white education and unite the people on that.
“In education,” one of the leaders said to me, “it doesn’t matter much where we begin. If we can arouse the spirit of the school, the people are going to see that it is as important to the state to have a trained Negro as it is to have a trained white man.”
One of the troubles in the South, one of the reasons for the prejudice against education, and particularly Negro education, has arisen from the fact that what has been called education was not really education at all. In the first place many of the schools have been so poor and the teachers so inefficient that the “education” acquired was next to worthless. There was not enough of it, nor was it of a kind to give the Negro any real hold upon life, and it often hurt him far more than it helped. Much of the prejudice in the South against Negro education is unquestionably due to the wretched school system, which in many places has not really educated anybody. But, deeper than all this, the old conception in the South of a school was for a long time the old aristocratic conception—what some one has called “useless culture”—of educating a class of men, not to work, but to despise work. That idea of education has wrought much evil, especially among the Negroes. It has taught both white and coloured men, not the doctrine of service, which is necessary to democracy, but it has given them a desire for artificial superiority, which is the characteristic of aristocracies. It has made the Negro “uppish” and “bumptious”; it has caused some white men to argue their superiority when they had no basis of accomplishment or usefulness to make them really superior.
The Inspiration of Hampton Institute
But when the idea of education began to be democratic, when men began to think more of their duties than of their rights, a wholly new sort of school appeared; and it appeared first among the Negroes. The country has not yet begun to realise the debt of gratitude which it owes to the promoters of Hampton Institute—to the genius of General Armstrong, its founder and to the organising ability of Dr. H. B. Frissell who followed him. These men will be more highly honoured a hundred years from now than they are to-day, for Americans will then appreciate more fully their service to the democracy.
The “Hampton idea” is the teaching of work—of service, of humility, of duties to God and to man. It is in the highest sense the democratic idea in education. And it has come, as most great movements have come, from the needs and the struggles of those who are downtrodden and outcast. And how wonderfully the idea has spread! Out of Hampton sprung Tuskegee and Calhoun and Kowaliga and scores of other Negro schools, until to-day nearly all Negro institutions for higher training in the South have industrial or agricultural departments.
The best Southern white people were and are friendly to schools of this new type. They thought at first that Hampton and Tuskegee were going to train servants in the old personal sense of servants who become only cooks, butlers, and farmers, and many still have that aristocratic conception of service. But the “Hampton idea” of servants is a much greater one, for it is the democratic idea of training men who will serve their own people and thereby serve the country. Men who graduate from Hampton and Tuskegee become leaders of their race. They buy and cultivate land, they set up business establishments—in short, they become producers and state-builders in the largest sense.
New World Idea of Education
The idea of Hampton is the new world idea of education, and white people in the South (and in the North as well) are now applying it everywhere in their educational movements. Agricultural and industrial schools for white boys and girls are spreading throughout the South: schools to teach work, just as Hampton teaches it. Only last year the state of Georgia provided for eleven new agricultural schools in various parts of the state, and there is already talk in the South, as in the North, of agricultural training in high schools. These men, white and black, who are educated for democratic service will in time become masters of the state.
The new leaders, then, of whom I have spoken, do not oppose Negro education: they favour it and will go forward steadily with the task of bring it about. So far, the Negro public schools have felt little of the new impulse; in some states and localities, as I have shown in other chapters, the Negro schools have actually retrograded, where the white schools have been improving rapidly. But that is the continuing influence of the old leadership; the new men have not yet come fully into their own.
I could quote indefinitely from the real statesmen of the South regarding Negro education, but I have too little space. Senator Lamar of Mississippi once said:
“The problem of race, in a large part, is a problem of illiteracy. Most of the evils which have grown up out of the problem have arisen from a condition of ignorance, prejudice and superstition. Remove these and the simpler elements of the question will come into play.... I will go with those who will go furthest in this matter.”
No higher note has been struck in educational ideals than in the Declaration of Principles adopted last winter (1907) at the meeting of the Southern Educational Association at Lexington, Ky., an exclusively Southern gathering of white men and women. Their resolutions, which for lack of space cannot be here printed in full, should be read by every man and woman in the country who is interested in the future of democratic institutions. I copy here only a few of the declarations:
1. All children, regardless of race, creed, sex, or the social station or economic condition of their parents, have equal right to, and should have equal opportunity for, such education as will develop to the fullest possible degree all that is best in their individual natures, and fit them for the duties of life and citizenship in the age and community in which they live.
2. To secure this right and provide this opportunity to all children is the first and highest duty of the modern democratic state, and the highest economic wisdom of an industrial age and community. Without universal education of the best and highest type, there can be no real democracy, either political or social; nor can agriculture, manufactures, or commerce ever attain their highest development.
3. Education in all grades and in all legitimate directions, being for the public good, the public should bear the burden of it. The most just taxes levied by the state, or with the authority of the state, by any smaller political division, are those levied for the support of education. No expenditures can possibly produce greater returns and none should be more liberal.
The New South on Negro Education
Concerning Negro education, I am publishing the resolutions in full, because they voice the present thought of the best leadership in the South:
1. We endorse the accepted policy of the states of the South in providing educational facilities for the youth of the Negro race, believing that whatever the ultimate solution of this grievous problem may be, education must be an important factor in that solution.
2. We believe that the education of the Negro in the elementary branches of education should be made thorough, and should include specific instruction in hygiene and home sanitation, for the better protection of both races.
3. We believe that in the secondary education of Negro youth emphasis should be placed upon agriculture and the industrial occupations, including nurse training, domestic science, and home economics.
4. We believe that for practical, economical and psychological reasons Negro teachers should be provided for Negro schools.
5. We advise instruction in normal schools and normal institutions by white teachers, whenever possible, and closer supervision of courses of study and methods of teaching in Negro normal schools by the State Department of Education.
6. We recommend that in urban and rural Negro schools there should be closer and more thorough supervision, not only by city and county superintendents, but also by directors of music, drawing, manual training, and other special topics.
7. We urge upon school authorities everywhere the importance of adequate buildings, comfortable seating, and sanitary accommodations for Negro youth.
8. We deplore the isolation of many Negro schools, established through motives of philanthropy, from the life and the sympathies of the communities in which they are located. We recommend the supervision of all such schools by the state, and urge that their work and their methods be adjusted to the civilisation in which they exist, in order that the maximum good of the race and of the community may be thereby attained.
9. On account of economic and psychological differences in the two races, we believe that there should be a difference in courses of study and methods of teaching, and that there should be such an adjustment of school curricula as shall meet the evident needs of Negro youth.
10. We insist upon such an equitable distribution of the school funds that all the youth of the Negro race shall have at least an opportunity to receive the elementary education provided by the state, and in the administration of state laws, and in the execution of this educational policy, we urge patience, toleration, and justice.
(Signed) G. R. Glenn, P. P. Claxton, J. H. Phillips,
C. B. Gibson, R. N. Roark, J. H. Van Sickle,
Committee.
In this connection also let me call attention to the reports of J. Y. Joyner, Superintendent of Education, and Charles L. Coon of North Carolina, for a broad view of Negro education.
I have already shown how the South and the North came together in educational relationships in the Southern Education Board. I have pointed it out as a tendency toward nationalisation in educational interests. But the Southern Education Board, while it contained both Northern and Southern white men, was primarily interested in white education and contained no Negro members. At the time the board was organised, an active interest in the Negro would have defeated, in part at least, its declared purpose.
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| Photograph by Curtiss Studio | |
| S. C. MITCHELL of Richmond College; President of the Coöperative Education Association of Virginia. | JUDGE EMORY SPEER of Georgia. After two terms in Congress he was appointed to the Federal bench. |
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| Photograph by Sol. Young | Photograph by Rockwood |
| EDGAR GARDNER MURPHY of Alabama, member Southern Education Board; author “Problems of the Present South.” | DR. H. B. FRISSELL Principal Hampton Institute and member of Southern Education and Jeanes Fund Boards |
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| Copyright, 1907, by Pach Bros. | Photograph by Wharton & Tyree |
| R. C. OGDEN of New York, President of the Southern Education Board. | J. Y. JOYNER Superintendent of Public Instruction of North Carolina. |
The South, the North, and the Negro at Last Work Together
Since that time another highly significant movement has arisen. In 1907 Miss Jeanes, a wealthy Quakeress of Philadelphia, gave $1,000,000 for the encouragement of Negro primary education. She placed it in the hands of Dr. H. B. Frissell of Hampton and Dr. Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee. In the organisation of the board for the control of this fund and its work, a further step forward in nationalisation and, indeed, in the direction of democracy, was made. It marks a new development in the coöperation of all the forces for good in the solution of this difficult national problem. The membership of the board includes not only Southern and Northern white men, but also several leading Negroes. The president and general director is a Southern white man, coming of an old family, James H. Dillard, dean of Tulane University of New Orleans. It will be of interest to publish here a full list of the members, because they represent, in more ways than one, the new leadership not only in the South, but in the nation:
Southern white men:
James H. Dillard, President.
David C. Barrow, chancellor University of Georgia.
Belton Gilreath, manufacturer and mine-owner, Alabama.
Dr. S. C. Mitchell, of Richmond College, Richmond, Va.
Northern white men:
Robert C. Ogden, of New York.
Andrew Carnegie, of New York.
Talcott Williams, of Philadelphia.
George McAneny, president of the City Club of New York.
William H. Taft, of Ohio.
To these must be added:
Dr. H. B. Frissell, of Hampton Institute, a Northerner, whose work and residence has long been in the South.
George Foster Peabody, treasurer, a Georgian, trustee of the University of Georgia, who resides in the North.
Walter H. Page, the editor of the World’s Work, a North Carolinian who has long lived in the North.
Negro membership:
Booker T. Washington.
Bishop Abraham Grant, of Kan.
R. R. Moton, of Hampton Institute, secretary of the board.
J. C. Napier, a banker of Nashville, Tenn.
R. D. Smith, a farmer of Paris, Tex.
In a true sense the Southern Education Board and the Jeanes Fund Board represent organisations of working idealists. Such coöperation as this, between reasonable, broad-minded, and unselfish men of the entire country, is, at the present moment, the real solution of our problems. It is the solution of the Negro problem—all the solution there ever will be. For there is no finality in human endeavour: there is only activity; and when that activity is informed with the truth and inspired with faith and courage, it is not otherwise than success, for it is the best that human nature at any given time can do.
In making this statement, I do not, of course wish to infer that conditions are as good as can be expected, and that nothing remains to be done. As a matter of fact, the struggle is just beginning; as I have shown in previous chapters, all the forces of entrenched prejudice and ignorance are against the movement, the political leaders who still dominate the South are as hostile as they dare to be. The task is, indeed, too big for the South alone, or the North alone, or the white man alone: it will require all the strength and courage the nation possesses.
Universities Feel the New Impulse
Besides the campaign for better common schools, the educational revival has also renewed and revivified all the higher institutions of learning in the South. The state universities, especially, have been making extraordinary progress. I shall not soon forget my visit to the University of Georgia, at Athens, nor the impression I received while there of strong men at work, not merely erecting buildings of mortar and brick, but establishing a new sort of university system, which shall unify and direct to one common end all of the educational activities of the state: beginning with the common school and reaching upward to the university itself; including the agricultural and industrial schools, and even the Negro college of agriculture. The University of Georgia is one of the oldest state colleges in America, and the ambition of its leaders is to make it one of the greatest. Mr. Hodgson drove me around the campus, which has recently been extended until it contains nearly 1,000 acres. He showed me where the new buildings are to be, the drives and the bridges. Much of it is yet a vision of the future, but it is the sort of vision that comes true. I spent a day with President Soule of the Agricultural College, on his special educational train, which covered a considerable part of the state of Georgia, stopping at scores of towns where the speakers appeared before great audiences of farmers and made practical addresses on cotton and corn and cattle-raising, and on education generally. And everywhere the practical work of these public educators was greeted with enthusiasm.
I heard from Professor Stewart of his work in organising rural high schools, in encouraging local taxation, and in bringing the work of the public schools into closer correlation with that of the university.
Seeing the educational work of states like Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, and others, one cannot but feel that the time is coming shortly when the North will be going South for new ideas and new inspiration in education.
In a brief review like this, I have been able, of course, to give only the barest outline of a very great work, and I have mentioned only a few among hundreds of leaders; the work I have described is only illustrative of what is going on in greater or less degree everywhere in the South.
Many important developments have come from these campaigns for education. The actual building of new school-houses and the expenditure of more money for the struggle with illiteracy is only one of many results. For the crusade for education, supplemented by the new industrial impulse in the South, has awakened a new spirit of self-help. The success with which the public was aroused in the educational campaign has inspired leaders in all lines of activity with new courage and faith. It is a spirit of youthfulness which is not afraid to attempt anything.
Much printers’ ink has been expended in trying to account for the spread of the anti-saloon movement throughout the South. But there is nothing strange about it: it is, indeed, only another manifestation of the new Southern spirit, the desire to get things right in the South. And this movement will further stir men’s minds, develop self-criticism, and reveal to the people their power of concerted action whether the politicians are with them or not. It is, indeed, significant that the women of the South, perhaps for the first time, have become a powerful influence in public affairs. Their organisations have helped, in some instances led, in both the educational and the anti-saloon movement. No leaders in the Virginia educational movement have been more useful than Mrs. L. R. Dashiell and Mrs. B. B. Munford of Richmond.
Practically all the progress of the South, both industrial and educational, has been made by non-political movements and non-political leaders—often in opposition to the political leaders. Indeed, nearly every one of the hopeful movements of the South has had to capture some entrenched stronghold of the old political captains. In several states, for example, the school systems a few years ago were crippled by political domination and nepotism. Superintendents, principals, and teachers were frequently appointed not for their ability, but because they were good members of the party or because they were related to politicians.
New Statesmen Against Old Politicians
In Alabama I found prominent men attacking the fee system of payment of lesser magistrates. The evil in this system lies in the encouragement it gives to trivial litigation and the arrest of citizens for petty offences. Let me give a single example. A Negro had another Negro arrested for “’sault and battery.” Both appeared in court. The accused Negro was tried, and finally sent to the chain-gang. The justice suggested to the convicted man that if he wanted satisfaction he should turn around and have his accuser arrested; which he did, promptly accusing him of “’busive language.” Another trial was held; and in the end both Negroes found themselves side by side in the chain-gang; the magistrate, the constable, the sheriff, had all drawn liberal fees, and the private contractor who hired the chain-gang, and who also “stood in” with the politicians, had obtained another cheap labourer for his work. It is a vicious circle, which has enabled the politicians and their backers to profit at every turn from the weakness and evil of both Negro and low-class white man.
In attacking the fee system and the old, evil chain-gang system as the new leaders are doing in many parts of the South, in closing the saloons (always a bulwark of low politics), in building up a new school system free from selfish control, the new leaders are striking squarely at the roots of the old political aristocracy, undermining it and cutting it away. It is sure to fall; and in its place the South will rear a splendid new leadership of constructive ability and unselfish patriotism. There will be a division on matters of vital concern, and a turning from ancient and worn-out issues to new interests and activities. When that time comes the whole nation will again profit by the genius of Southern statesmanship and we shall again have Southern Presidents.
Already the old type of politician sees the handwriting of fate. He knows not which way to turn. At one moment he harps more fiercely and bitterly than ever before on the issue which has maintained him so long in power, the Negro; and at the next moment he seizes frantically on some one of the new issues—education, prohibition, anti-railroad—hoping thereby to maintain himself and his old party control. But he cannot do it; every force in the South is already making for new things, for more democracy, for more nationalisation.