The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 / A History of the Education of the Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War

by Carter Godwin Woodson

[Footnote 6: African Repository, vol. i., p. 276, and Griffin, A
Plea for Africa, p. 65.]

[Footnote 7: African Repository, vol. iv., pp. 186, 193, and 375; and vol. vi., pp. 47, 48, 49, and Report of the Proceedings of the African Education Society, p. 7.]

[Footnote 8: Ibid., pp. 7 and 8 and African Repository, vol. iv., p. 375.]

[Footnote 9: What would become of this plan depended upon the changing fortunes of the men concerned. Kosciuszko died in 1817; and as Thomas Jefferson refused to take out letters testamentary under this will, Benjamin Lincoln Lear, a trustee of the African Education Society, who intended to apply for the whole fund, was appointed administrator of it. The fund amounted to about $16,000. Later Kosciuszko Armstrong demanded of the administrator $3704 bequeathed to him by T. Kosciuszko in a will alleged to have been executed in Paris in 1806. The bill was dismissed by the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, and the decision of the lower Court was confirmed by the United States Supreme Court in 1827 on the grounds that the said will had not been admitted to probate anywhere. To make things still darker just about the time the trustees of the African Education Society were planning to purchase a farm and select teachers and mechanics to instruct the youth, the heirs of General Kosciuszko filed a bill against Mr. Lear in the Supreme Court of the United States on the ground of the invalidity of the will executed by Kosciuszko in 1798. The death of Mr. Lear in 1832 and that of William Wirt, the Attorney-General of the United States, soon thereafter, caused a delay in having the case decided. The author does not know exactly what use was finally made of this fund. See African Repository, vol. it., pp. 163, 233; also 7 Peters, 130, and 8 Peters, 52.]

The schemes failed, however, on account of the unyielding opposition of the free Negroes and abolitionists. They could see no philanthropy in educating persons to prepare for doom in a deadly climate. The convention of the free people of color assembled in Philadelphia in 1830, denounced the colonization movement as an evil, and urged their fellows not to support it. Pointing out the impracticability of such schemes, the convention encouraged the race to take steps toward its elevation in this country.[1] Should the colored people be properly educated, the prejudice against them would not continue such as to necessitate their expatriation. The delegates hoped to establish a Manual Labor College at New Haven that Negroes might there acquire that "classical knowledge which promotes genius and causes man to soar up to those high intellectual enjoyments and acquirements which place him in a situation to shed upon a country and people that scientific grandeur which is imperishable by time, and drowns in oblivion's cup their moral degradation."[2]

[Footnote 1: Williams, History of the Negro Race, p. 67.]

[Footnote 2: Ibid., p. 68; and Minutes of the Proceedings of the Third Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Color, pp. 9, 10, and 11.]

Influential abolitionists were also attacking this policy of the colonizationists. William Jay, however, delivered against them such diatribes and so wisely exposed their follies that the advocates of colonization learned to consider him as the arch enemy of their cause.[1] Jay advocated the education of the Negroes for living where they were. He could not see how a Christian could prohibit or condition the education of any individual. To do such a thing was tantamount to preventing him from having a direct revelation of God. How these "educators" could argue that on account of the hopelessness of the endeavors to civilize the blacks they should be removed to a foreign country, and at the same time undertake to provide for them there the same facilities for higher education that white men enjoyed, seemed to Jay to be facetiously inconsistent.[2] If the Africans could be elevated in their native land and not in America, it was due to the Caucasians' sinful condition, for which the colored people should not be required to suffer the penalty of expatriation.[3] The desirable thing to do was to influence churches and schools to admit students of color on terms of equality with all other races.

[Footnote 1: Reese, Letters to Honorable William Jay.]

[Footnote 2: Jay, Inquiry, p. 26; and Letters, p. 21.]