A STRONG APPEAL.
We present below a forcible appeal for student aid. Such aid is essential, and the question of obtaining it in sufficient amount to meet the demand lies at the bottom of the whole possibility of educating the colored youth of the South. If scholarships and educational funds are important to the white students of the North, how much more to the colored students at the South, where employment is so poorly paid, and the money so hard to be collected when earned! This appeal is but a sample of the cry that comes from all our institutions—Atlanta, Talladega, Tougaloo, New Orleans, and the rest. An illustration may be seen in the foregoing article by Rev. W. S. Alexander, President of Straight University.
But we must warn our patrons not to divert their contributions from our ordinary work to this special object, for if this is done, we might as well furnish this student help directly from our treasury. Then where would be the money to sustain the teachers?—and they must be sustained, or the schools closed. The only solution of the problem is for the friends of the Freedmen to enlarge their contributions to meet both wants. We most importunately urge our patrons not to starve the teacher in order to aid the scholar, but help both.
What Shall We Do?
Will a goodly number of the readers of the American Missionary tell us?
The case can be best set forth by giving a single illustration. On the Saturday evening preceding the Monday on which the new school year of Fisk University was to begin, a young man was brought to my room by one of our former students, who introduced him as being from Montgomery, Alabama. I found on inquiry, and from a letter which he brought from a prominent colored man of that city, that he had determined to get an education, and having but little money, had made up his mind to walk from Montgomery to Nashville, a distance of three hundred miles, with the hope of finding some way by which he might be admitted as a student in Fisk University. Fortunately, a prominent citizen of Montgomery was able to secure him a pass on the railroad, one hundred miles, to Birmingham, and a student of Fisk University who happened to meet him at Columbia, Tenn., used the little spare money he had in his pocket to help him on his way twenty miles toward Nashville.
What do the friends of education among the colored people of the South wish us to do with such cases? The University has no means of its own with which to help such young people, and this instance is but an illustration of very many similar cases which we are compelled to decide every year.
From the correspondence of teachers, and through the cases known personally by the comparatively few of our old students who have already returned from their summer’s work, we could number up to-day, which is only the fourth day after the opening of the school, at least forty instances of young men and young women of known character and ability who are eager and anxious to come to Fisk University to fit themselves for teaching and other Christian work among their people, who cannot come because they have not and cannot get sufficient money. The number will be doubled by the time this article reaches our friends through the American Missionary. In many cases they can pay from five to seven dollars of the twelve dollars a month required for their board and tuition. We find from actual experience that an average of fifty dollars will help at least one such struggling student to support for a year in Fisk University. The balance and the money necessary to purchase books they can generally provide for themselves. We ask the readers of the American Missionary what we shall do with these cases. Any one who will send us a thousand dollars will answer the question for at least twenty. Every fifty dollars will give the answer in the case of one. Our hearts ache when we are compelled to refuse, for the want of money, these eager applications. Every one who has an answer to give us can send it to H. W. Hubbard, Assistant Treasurer of the American Missionary Association at New York—and we know the answer will suffer no long delay in his hands—or to E. P. Gilbert, Assistant Treasurer of Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn. All students helped will in due time communicate by letter with those who thus befriend them.
Will not every individual or Sabbath-school that contributed last year to help aid students continue that help for the coming year, and give us the earliest possible information of such intention?
E. M. Cravath, Pres. Fisk University.