CHAPTER XIX Negro Education Not a Failure
Several persons holding high official position have said recently that it does not pay, from any point of view, to educate the Negro; and that all attempts at his education have so far failed to accomplish any good results. The Southern States, which out of their poverty are contributing rather liberally for the education of all the people, as does individual and organised philanthropy throughout the country, have a right to know whether the Negro is responding to the efforts they have made to place him upon a higher plane of civilisation.
Will it pay to invest further money in this direction? In seeking to answer this question, it is hardly fair to compare the progress of the American Negro with that of the American white man, who, in some unexplained way, got thousand of years ahead of the Negro in the arts and sciences of civilisation. But to get at the real facts and the real capability of the black man, compare for a moment the American Negro with the Negro in Africa, or the black man with the black man. In South Africa alone there are five million black people who have never been brought, through school or other agencies, into contact with a higher civilisation in a way to have their minds or their ambitions strengthened or awakened. As a result, the industries of South Africa languish and refuse to prosper for lack of labour. The native black man refuses to labour because he has been neglected. He has few wants and little ambition, and these can be satisfied by labouring one or two days out of the seven. In the southern part of the United States there are more than eight millions of my race who, both by contact with the whites and by education in the home, in school, in church, have had their minds awakened and strengthened—have thus had their wants increased and multiplied many times. Hence, instead of a people in idleness, we have in the South a people who are anxious to work because they want education for their children; they want land and houses, and churches, books, and papers. In a word, they want the highest and best in our civilisation. Looked at, then, from the most material and selfish point of view, it has paid to awaken the Negro's mind, and there should be no limit placed upon the development of that mind.
Does the American Negro take advantage of opportunities to secure education? Practically no schoolhouse has been opened for the Negro since the war that has not been filled. Often hungry and in rags, making heroic sacrifices, the Negro youth has been determined to annihilate his mental darkness. With all his disadvantages, the Negro, according to official records, has blotted out 55.5 per cent. of his illiteracy since he became a free man, while practically 95 per cent. of the native Africans are illiterate. After years of civilisation and opportunity, in Spain, 68 per cent. of the population are illiterate; in Italy, 38 per cent. In the average South American country about 80 per cent. are illiterate, while after forty years the American Negro has only 44.5 per cent. of illiteracy to his debit. I have thus compared the progress of my race, not with the highest civilised nations, for the reason that, in passing judgment upon us, the world too often forgets that, either consciously or otherwise, because of geographical or physical proximity to the American white man, we are being compared with the very highest civilisation that exists. But when compared with the most advanced and enlightened white people of the South, we find 12 per cent. of illiteracy for them and only 44 per cent. for our race.
Having seen that the American Negro takes advantage of every opportunity to secure an education, I think it will surprise some to learn to what an extent the race contributes toward its own education and works in sympathetic touch with the whites at the South. In emphasising this fact, I use the testimony of the best Southern white men. Says the State Superintendent of Education of Florida in one of his recent official reports: "The following figures are given to show that the education of the Negroes of Middle Florida (the Black Belt of Florida) does not cost the white people of that section one cent." In those eight Black Belt counties, the total cost of the Negro schools is $19,457. The total contributed by the Negro in direct and indirect taxes amounted to $23,984, thus leaving a difference of $4,527, which, according to the Superintendent, went into the white schools. In Mississippi, for the year ending in 1899, according to an eminent authority, the Negroes had expended on their schools about 20 per cent. of the total school fund, or a total of about $250,000. During the same year they paid toward their own education, in poll taxes, State, county and city taxes, and indirect taxes, about $280,000, or a surplus of about $30,000. So that, looked at from any point of view, it would seem that the Negroes in that State are in a large measure paying for their own education.
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