The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

Many people intimately acquainted with the race assert that, although about as quick and receptive as white children up to twelve or fourteen years of age, the negro children advance no further; that their minds thenceforward show an arrested development. Certainly anyone who visits their schools, city or rural, public or private, is struck with the slowness of the average child of all ages to take in new impressions, and with the intellectual helplessness of many of the older children. Whether this is due to the backwardness of the race, or to the uncouthness of home life, or to the want of other kinds of stimulus outside of school, is hard to determine. That there is any general arrested development is contradicted by thousands of capable youths, mulatto and full blood.

The very slowness of the black children is a reason for giving them the best educational chance that they can take. That is why the Southern Education Association which met in 1907 passed a unanimous resolution that: “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.”

Another point of view is represented by the statement of Thomas Nelson Page that the great majority of the Southern Whites “unite further in the opinion that education such as they receive in the public schools, so far from appearing to uplift them, appears to be without any appreciable beneficial effect upon their morals or their standing as citizens.” Governor Vardaman, of Mississippi, as late as 1908 recommended the legislature to strike out all appropriations for negro schools on the ground that “Money spent to-day for the maintenance of the public school for negroes is robbery of the white man and a waste upon the negro. It does him no good, but it does him harm. You take it from the toiling white men and women; you rob the white child of the advantages it would afford him, and you spend it upon the negro in an effort to make of the negro that which God Almighty never intended should be made, and which man cannot accomplish.” He asserts that the most serious negro crime is due to “The manifestation of the negro’s aspiration for social equality, encouraged largely by the character of free education in vogue, which the State is levying tribute upon the white people to maintain.”

In Cordova, S. C., in 1907, a business man who had visited a colored school and spoken encouragingly to the pupils, felt compelled by public sentiment to print an apology and a promise never to do anything so dreadful again. This criticism comes not simply from demagogues like Vardaman or weaklings like the Cordovan; intelligent planters will tell you that they are opposed to negro education because it makes criminals; and think their accusation proven by instances of forgeries by Negroes, which of course they could not have committed had they been unable to write. A superintendent of schools in a Southern city holds that even grammar school education unsteadies the boys so that they leave home and drift away; though he candidly acknowledges that it keeps the girls out of trouble and provides a respectable calling as teachers to many negro women.

Side by side with this feeling of disappointment or hostility, as the case may be, is the conviction of most Southern people that enormous sacrifices have been made for the negro schools. Thomas Dixon, Jr., with his accustomed exactness and candor, wrote a few years ago: “We have spent about $800,000,000 on Negro education since the War.” These figures show a poverty of imagination: it would be just as easy to write “eight thousand millions” as “eight hundred.” The estimate of the Bureau of Education is that in the thirty-five years since 1870 about $155,000,000 has been spent to support common schools for the negro race, which is about a fifth of the amount spent on the white common schools in the same period, and not a hundredth of the supposed present wealth of the South; in addition, heavy expenditures are made out of the public treasury for secondary and higher education in which the Negro has a slender share.

Another more specious complaint with regard to Negro education is that it is an unreasonable burden on the Whites to make them pay for negro education, and repeated attempts have been made to lay it down as a principle that the Negroes shall have for their schools only what they pay in taxes. Thus Governor Hoke Smith, of Georgia, says: “Is it not folly to tax the people of Georgia for the purpose of conducting a plan of education for the Negro which fails to recognize the difference between the Negro and the white man? Negro education should have reference to the Negro’s future work, and especially in the rural districts it is practicable to make that education really the training for farm labor. If it is given this direction it will not be necessary to tax the white man’s property for the purpose. A distribution of the school fund according to the taxes paid by each race would meet the requirements.”

In at least two states this idea has been to some extent carried out. In Kentucky the state school fund is apportioned among the school children without regard to race, but for local purposes the Negroes appear to be thrown on their own payments. And in Maryland, under various statutes from 1865 to 1888, all the taxes collected from Negroes were devoted to negro schools, the state adding a lump sum per annum.

This point of view involves a notion of the purpose of education and the reasons for public schools so different from that which animates the North that it is hard to deal with the question impartially. Massachusetts makes the largest expenditure per capita of its population in the whole Union, almost the largest expenditure per pupil, and certainly the largest aggregate expenditure, except the more populous states of New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio; Massachusetts spends on schools two fifths as much every year as all the fifteen former slaveholding states put together. In that state people think that school taxes are not money spent but money saved: that they get back every cent of their $17,000,000 a year, several times over, in the increased efficiency of the people, in the diminution of crime, in the addition to the happiness of life. Schooling is insurance, schooling is the savings bank that can’t break, schooling is that sane kind of poor relief which prevents poverty. The last thing which any Massachusetts community thinks of reducing is school expenditure!

Furthermore, no principle is so ingrained in the Northern mind as that since education is for the public benefit, every taxpayer must contribute in proportion to his property. The rich corporations in New York or Pittsburg, childless old couples, bachelor owners of great tracts of real estate, wealthy bondholders educating their children in private schools, never dream of disputing the school tax on the ground that they, as individuals, make no demands on the school fund.

Still less would it enter the mind of any Northern community to divide itself into social classes, each of which should maintain its own schools. Such a proposition would go near to bring about a revolution. First of all, the non-taxpayer is a taxpayer; it is the pons asinorum of finance that the poor are more heavily taxed in proportion to their means than any other class of the community, through indirect taxes and the enhanced rents of the real estate which they occupy. As a matter of fact, all the taxes eventually paid by the Negroes in the South probably amount only to a third or a half of the three millions or so spent upon their schools. What of that? Are the Southern states the only communities in the country in which a comparatively small part of the population pays most of the taxes; it is altogether probable that in Boston or New York the payers of nine tenths of the taxes do not furnish one tenth of the school children. Who educates the Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Greek, and Syrian children of those cities? The well-to-do part of the community, and it does it uncomplainingly, with its eyes open, gladly. The South likewise is educating the Negroes principally for the advantage of the white race, for the efficiency of the whole region in which the Whites have the greatest stake, and from which they derive the greater benefit, material and moral.