As DuBois says: “If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing, the races are to live for many years side by side, united in economic effort, obeying a common government, sensitive to mutual thought and feeling, yet subtly and silently separate in many matters of deeper human intimacy,—if this unusual and dangerous development is to progress amid peace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call for social surgery at once the delicatest and nicest in modern history. It will demand broad-minded, upright men, both white and black, and in its final accomplishment American civilization will triumph.” DuBois calculates that in the twenty-five years from 1875 to 1900 there were only 1,200 or 1,300 negro graduates from all the colleges open to them North and South, an average of about fifty a year out of a race numbering during that period, on the average, six millions. Out of this amount about half have become teachers or heads of institutions, and most of the rest are professional men.
Many of the academic and normal training schools of various grades are situated in the midst of large colored populations, and take upon themselves a work similar to that of the college settlements in Northern cities. Such is the flourishing school at Calhoun, Ala., which is in the midst of one of the densest and most ignorant Negro populations in the South, and besides training the children sent to it, it has supervised the work of breaking up the land, which is sold to negro farmers in small tracts, thereby giving an object lesson of the comfort and satisfaction in owning one’s own land. Most such schools aim to be centers of moral influence upon the community about them. Here, again, they encounter the hostility of their neighbors on the ground that they are putting notions into the heads of the Negroes, and are destroying the labor system of the community. On the other hand, many of the Whites take a warm interest in these schools, although not a single one has ever received any considerable gift of money from Southern white people. The testimony is general that they are well taught, preserve good order, and inculcate decency of person and life.
Probably the most effective argument in favor of negro education is the success of Hampton and Tuskegee, two endowed schools, practically kept up by Northern benefactors, which are the great exemplifiers of industrial education. They are successful, both in providing for large numbers of students—about 3,000 altogether—and in producing an effect upon the whole South. The number of graduates is but a few score a year, and many of them go into professions for which they were not directly prepared in these schools. But great numbers of men and women who have spent only a year or two in these institutions carry out into the community the great lesson of self-help; and hundreds of schools and thousands of individuals are moved by the example of these two famous schools and similar institutions scattered throughout the South. They preach a gospel of work; they hold up a standard of practicality; they are so successful as to draw upon themselves the anathemas of men like Thomas Dixon, Jr., who says: “Mr. Washington ... is training them all to be masters of men, to be independent.... If there is one thing a Southern white man cannot endure it is an educated Negro.”
The question is imperative. With all the efforts at education, notwithstanding the great reduction in the percentage of illiteracy, the number of negro adult men and women in the South who are unable to read and write is actually greater than at any time since by emancipation they were brought within the possibilities of education. The actual task grows greater every day, and if the resources of the South are more than correspondingly increased, it is still a question how much of them will be devoted to this pressing need. Education will not do everything; it will not make chaste, honest, and respectable men and women out of wretched children left principally to their own instincts. Education is at best a palliative, but the situation is too serious to dispense even with palliatives.
Perhaps the first necessity is to improve the character and the training of the negro teachers. Both in the rural and the city schools appointments are in many cases made by white school board men who have little knowledge and sometimes no interest in the fitness of their appointees. The colleges and industrial schools all have this problem in mind. State normal schools for Negroes in many of the Southern states try to meet this necessity, but a great many of the country teachers, some of them in the experience of the writer, are plainly unsuited for the task. Some of them are themselves ignorant, few have the background of character and intellectual interest which would enable them to transmit a moral uplift.
One of the most serious difficulties of negro education is the attendance, or rather nonattendance. Within a few weeks after the beginning of school, pupils begin to drop out; often perhaps because the teacher cannot make the work interesting. One of their own number says: “Many of our children do not attend school because our teachers are incompetent; because many of the parents simply dislike their teachers; because some parents prefer Baptist teachers; because many children have their own way about all they do; because many children do not like a strict teacher; because some parents contend for a fine brick building for the school; because, as a whole, many parents are too ignorant and prejudiced and contentious to do anything, yet we have enrolled about 150 pupils this session in spite of the devil.”
Some of the schools are overcrowded. There have been cases where 6 teachers were assigned for 1,800 children, of whom 570 enrolled, yet the average earnings of the six teachers would not be more than $100 a year. Against these instances must be placed a great number of intelligent, faithful teachers who make up for some deficiencies of knowledge by their genuine interest in their work.
For negro education as for white, but perhaps with more reason, it is urged that the federal government ought to come in with its powerful aid. The argument somewhat resembles that of the blind Chinese beggar who was sent to the hospital where he recovered his sight, and then insisted that, having lost his livelihood, he must be made porter to the hospital. Aside from any claim of right, it is true that the problem of elevating the Negroes concerns the whole nation, and is a part of the long process of which emancipation was the beginning. Federal aid for colored schools, however, can never be brought about without the consent of the Southern states, and they are not likely to ask for or to receive educational funds intended solely for the Negroes; while Northern members of Congress are not likely to vote for taxing their constituents who already pay two or three times as much per capita for education as the South, in order to make up the deficiencies of the other section. It is impossible to discover any way in which federal aid can be given to the Negroes without reviving sectional animosity; and it is a fair question whether such gifts could be so hedged about that they would not lead to a corresponding diminution in the amount spent by the Southern states. The Government grants to state agricultural colleges and experiment stations inure almost wholly to the advantage of the Whites; if a part of that money could be devoted to the education of the Negro, it might be helpful.
Several educational trusts created years ago for the benefit of the Negroes have now ceased their work. The Peabody fund of about three million dollars was much depleted by the repudiation of the Mississippi and Florida bonds, and has now been entirely distributed. For some years it was devoted to building up primary teaching on condition that the localities benefited should themselves spend larger sums. Then it went into normal schools. In 1882 the Slater fund of one million dollars was given solely for the education of Negroes. The General Education Board in its allocations to Southern institutions has liberally remembered several of the negro institutions as well as the white.