The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

CHAPTER XXIII

OBJECTIONS TO EDUCATION

In the two previous chapters white and negro education have been described as parts of the social and governmental system of the South; there, as in the North, the tacit presumption is that education is desirable, that it is essential for moral and material progress, that both the parents and the community must make great sacrifices to secure it. White education hardly needs defense in the South; most of the people wish to see the opportunities of life open to promising young people, believe in the spread of ideas, and look on education as the foundation of the republic.

Does the principle, as in the North, apply to all the elements of population? Is the education of the Negro as clearly necessary as that of the White? Should the same method apply to the training of the two races? On the contrary, there is in most Southern white minds hesitation as to the degree of education suitable for the blacks; and a widespread disbelief in any but rudimentary training, and that to be directed toward industrial rather than intellectual ends.

The first objection to negro education is that the race is incapable of any but elementary education and that all beyond is wasted effort. Has the Negro as a race an inferior intellectual quality, a disability to respond to opportunities? With all the effort to educate the race, and with due regard to the fact that the proportion who can read and write is rapidly rising, the Negroes are alarmingly ignorant, the most illiterate group in the whole United States; and therefore they need special attention. In addition, they are subjected to the smallest degree of home training, and enjoy the smallest touch with those concentrated forces of public opinion which force the community upward. Some of the Negroes seek intellectual life at home, for occasionally you see a family grouped about the fire with the father reading a book to them; but hardly any of the rural people and probably few of the townsmen own a shelf of books and magazines and newspapers. Their journalism is in general rather crude. A class of patent inside newspapers is carried on by the heads of one or the other negro order; and they contain good advice, news of the order, advertisements of patent hair dressings which “make harsh, stubborn, kinky, curly hair soft, pliant and glossy”; and descriptions of the experiments of surgeons in making black skin white by the use of X-rays. Some of these papers are well edited, and all of them have discovered the great secret of modern journalism, which is to put as many proper names as possible into the paper.

One difficulty with the negro newspaper is that it cannot fill up entirely with colored news; and on general questions and the progress of the world the regular white newspapers, with their greater resources, are certain to be more readable. Still, few Negroes outside the cities read either weekly or daily papers regularly; and one of the necessities for raising the race is to cultivate the newspaper habit. To be sure, there is a type of highly successful white journalism that does not edify the white race. Yet even a bad newspaper cannot help telling people what is going on in the world. In spite of its freight of crime, such a paper carries people out of themselves, makes them feel a greater interest for mankind, brings in a throng of new impressions and experiences, helps to educate them.

Outside of newspapers the Negroes have access to the written works of members of their own race, which are at the same time a proof of literary capacity and a means of teaching the people. Of course it is always urged that such men as Booker Washington, the educator and uplifter; Dunbar, the pathetic humorist; Chesnutt, author of stories of Southern life that rival Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page; DuBois, who in literary power is one of the most notable Americans of this generation; Kelly Miller, the keen satirist; and Sinclair, the defender of his people—prove nothing as to the genius of the races because they are mulattoes; but they and their associates are listed among the Negroes, included in the censure on negro colleges, and furnish the most powerful argument for the education of at least a part of the race. Few men of genius among the Negroes are pure blacks; but it is not true that the lighter the color the more genius they possess. So far as the effects of a prolonged and thorough education are concerned, those men from any point of view prove that the mulattoes, who are perhaps a fifth of the whole, are entitled to a thorough education. Has not DuBois the right to say:

“I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?”

On the other hand, the history of the last thirty-five years proves conclusively that the great mass of negro children can assimilate the ordinary education of the common schools. Mr. Glenn, recently Superintendent of Education in Georgia, declares that “the negro is ... teachable and susceptible to the same kind of mental improvement characteristic to any other race,” and Thomas Nelson Page admits that the “Negro may individually attain a fair, and in uncommon instances a considerable degree, of mental development.” About three fourths of the young people have already learned to read.