The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

One of the most obstinate Southern conventional beliefs, widely held, constantly asserted, and diametrically contrary to the facts, is that the Negroes have been spoiled by classical education which has totally unfitted them for ordinary life. Thus even Murphy holds that “We have been giving the Negro an educational system which is but ill adapted even to ourselves. It has been too academic, too much unrelated to practical life, for the children of the Caucasian.” The intelligent man on the cars will tell you that the negro college graduates with their Greek and Latin are spoiling the whole race. Never was there such an advertisement of the vigor of college education; since the official statistics show that the actual number of Negroes studying Greek and Latin in 1906, both in the secondary and higher schools (except the public schools), was 1,077 men and 641 women, a total of 1,718 persons. With some possible additions from those in high schools, and higher institutions, the total number of colored people who are now taking any kind of collegiate training is not above 3,000, of whom only 180 took degrees in 1906; there are also 4,500 normal students, of whom 1,270 graduated. Of professional students there were in all (1906) about 1,900 Negroes, a third of whom were in theology and another third in medicine. Of negro colleges and technical schools and private academies, 127 are enumerated, ranging all the way from the Arkadelphia Baptist Academy with 50 students, up to Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute with 1,621 students; but in all such colleges those ranked as taking a college course are comparatively few.

These figures throw light on the further conventional belief that it is the Northern endowed colleges that have made the trouble in the colored race, through efforts to teach the colored youth that they were the equals of the Whites. By far the greater number of Negroes who are really getting training above the secondary grade in the South are in the state-sustained institutions—many of them, of course, still of low grade; and full credit should be given to the South for developing this type of negro education, of which the North knows little. State Agricultural, Normal or Industrial colleges are to be found in every former slaveholding state, except Arkansas and Tennessee, and together include more than 5,000 students.

The attacks, chiefly from Southern Whites, upon negro college education have of late been transformed into a controversy as to the relative importance of academic and industrial training. The schools of the Tuskegee type furnished manual work to their students apparently not in the first instance because it was thought to be educative, but because they had to earn part of their living. This is apparently the main source of the bitter hostility of Dixon to the work of Tuskegee. The form his criticism takes is that Booker Washington, instead of teaching the Negro to be a good workman, is training him to take independent responsibility; that if he is a good workman he will compete with the Whites, and if he is a good leader he will aim to make the Negroes a force in the community. This line of objection to education of the black is really based upon the belief that they are a race capable of education, that the Negro is not a clod, but may be improved by the systematic efforts of superior men; he has in him the potentiality of vital force.

Meanwhile throughout the country has been running a current in favor of a more practical education than that furnished by the ordinary schools, and the result has been the Technical, Manual Training, and Commercial schools scattered throughout the Northern states. The controversy is not at all confined to questions of negro education. The Southern white people have been well inclined toward the new type of education for Negroes, although on the whole much preferring the academic type for their own children.

A hot discussion has raged as to which of the two systems is most necessary to the Negro. The champions of the academic side dwell upon the right of the Negro to the same type of education as the white man. In many white minds lies a lurking feeling that academic negro training leads to discontent with present conditions; and that industrial training is more likely to bring about contentment with the things that are. In fact, both types are most necessary. The fifty millions poured into the South by Northern generosity would have been worth while if they had done no more than maintain a Hampton which could train a Booker Washington. His ideas of thrift, attention to business, building decent houses, putting money into banks, are ideals specially needed by the negro race; but they also need the DuBois ideal of a share in the world’s accumulated learning; of the development of their minds; of preparation to educate their fellows. That a supply must be kept up of people acquainted with the humanities, having some knowledge of literature, able to express themselves cogently, competent to train the succeeding generations, is as true for the negro race as for any other; if it is a low race it has the greater need for high training for its best members.

The two difficulties with manual training for either Whites or Negroes are, first, that it may be simply practice in handicrafts, without intimate knowledge of tools or processes, possessing no more educative value than the apprenticeship of a carpenter or a blacksmith. The other danger is that the manual part will be dilettante; and anyone who has ever visited any large industrial school for Whites realizes how hard it is to keep students busy with things that actually tell. The weekly hours available for shop work where there are large classes are too few to induce skill. Hence manual training may be simply a means of keeping young men and women in elevating associations for a series of years, without much positive education. The success of Hampton and Tuskegee and like institutions is due to a judicious mixture of book learning and hand learning, backed up by the personality of the founders, General Armstrong in Virginia and Booker Washington in Alabama, and of their successors and aids.

Against both industrial and academic training many people in the South feel a strong prejudice, because they believe that both tend to produce leaders who may dangerously organize the fellows of their race. A favorite form of slander has been to charge that the graduates of colleges furnish the criminals, and practically the worst criminals, of the negro race. Never was there a more senseless or a more persistent delusion. The total number of male graduates of all the Southern colleges during the last forty years is not above two thousand, besides perhaps five hundred graduates of Northern colleges who have found their way into the South. Many of those institutions have kept track of their graduates and are able to assert that the cases of serious crime among them are remarkably few, no more in proportion probably than among the graduates of Southern and Northern colleges for Whites. The moral effect of the colleges among Negroes is in the same direction as among Whites; the students include the more determined of the race or the children of the more determined. The negro college students are still only about one in one thousand of the children and young people of the race. The total number of living graduates of negro colleges or other institutions of college grade are not one in two thousand of the Negroes in the South.

It is true that even that number find it hard to establish themselves in professions or callings which can reward them for the sacrifices and efforts of their education. The negro doctors and lawyers have almost no white practice and not the best of negro practice, but there is an opening for thousands of Negroes in the development of the education of their people. The thousandth of the race in secondary schools and the two thousandth or more in colleges are enough to prove that a large number of individuals in the race are capable of and ought to have the advantages of higher training.

The denial to the Negroes of public secondary education at the expense of the state practically means that most of them will not have it at all. It is denied on the ground that it unfits boys and girls for life—exactly the argument which has been unsuccessfully brought against schools of that grade in the Northern states. It is denied on the ground that beyond twelve years of age most of the Negroes are stationary and cannot profit by a secondary education, a conclusion which does not seem justified by the experience of the few high schools and the numerous private and benevolent schools. Still more serious, the denial of secondary education means that the Negroes are deprived of the most obvious means of training for teachers of their own race.

In the last analysis most of the objections to negro education come down to the assertion that it puts the race above the calling whereunto God hath appointed it. The argument goes back to the unconscious presumption that the Negro was created to work the white man’s field, and that even a little knowledge makes him ambitious to do something else.