[Footnote 1: In 1827 John B. Russworm and Samuel B. Cornish began the publication of The Freedom's Journal, appearing afterward as Rights to All. Ten years later P.A. Bell was publishing The Weekly Advocate. From 1837 to 1842 Bell and Cornish edited The Colored Man's Journal, while Samuel Ruggles sent from his press The Mirror of Liberty. In 1847, one year after the appearance of Thomas Van Rensselaer's Ram's Horn, Frederick Douglass started The North Star at Rochester, while G. Allen and Highland Garnett were appealing to the country through The National Watchman of Troy, New York. That same year Martin R. Delany brought out The Pittsburg Mystery, and others The Elevator at Albany, New York. At Syracuse appeared The Impartial Citizen established by Samuel R. Ward in 1848, three years after which L.H. Putnam came before the public in New York City with The Colored Man's Journal. Then came The Philadelphia Freeman, The Philadelphia Citizen, The New York Phalanx, The Baltimore Elevator, and The Cincinnati Central Star. Of a higher order was he Anglo-African, a magazine published in New York in 1859 by Thomas Hamilton, who was succeeded in editorship by Robert Hamilton and Highland Garnett. In 1852 there were in existence The Colored American, The Struggler, The Watchman, The Ram's Horn, The Demosthenian Shield, The National Reformer, The Pittsburg Mystery, The Palladium of Liberty, The Disfranchised American, The Colored Citizen, The National Watchman, The Excelsior, The Christian Herald, The Farmer, The Impartial Citizen, The Northern Star of Albany, and The North Star of Rochester.]
CHAPTER XII
VOCATIONAL TRAINING
Having before them striking examples of highly educated colored men who could find no employment in the United States, the free Negroes began to realize that their preparation was not going hand in hand with their opportunities. Industrial education was then emphasized as the proper method of equipping the race for usefulness. The advocacy of such training, however, was in no sense new. The early anti-slavery men regarded it as the prerequisite to emancipation, and the abolitionists urged it as the only safe means of elevating the freedmen. But when the blacks, converted to this doctrine, began to enter the higher pursuits of labor during the forties and fifties, there started a struggle which has been prolonged even into our day. Most northern white men had ceased to oppose the enlightenment of the free people of color but still objected to granting them economic equality. The same investigators that discovered increased facilities of conventional education for Negroes in 1834 reported also that there existed among the white mechanics a formidable prejudice against colored artisans.[1]
[Footnote 1: Minutes of the Fourth Annual Convention for the
Improvement of the Free People of Color, p. 26.]
In opposing the encroachment of Negroes on their field of labor the northerners took their cue from the white mechanics in the South. At first laborers of both races worked together in the same room and at the same machine.[1] But in the nineteenth century, when more white men in the South were condescending to do skilled labor and trying to develop manufactures, they found themselves handicapped by competition with the slave mechanics. Before 1860 most southern mechanics, machinists, local manufacturers, contractors, and railroad men with the exception of conductors were Negroes.[2] Against this custom of making colored men such an economic factor the white mechanics frequently protested.[3] The riots against Negroes occurring in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington during the thirties and forties owed their origin mainly to an ill feeling between the white and colored skilled laborers.[4] The white artisans prevailed upon the legislatures of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Georgia to enact measures hostile to their rivals.[5] In 1845 the State of Georgia made it a misdemeanor for a colored mechanic to make a contract for the repair or the erection of buildings.[6] The people of Georgia, however, were not unanimously in favor of keeping the Negro artisan down. We have already observed that at the request of the Agricultural Convention of that State in 1852 the legislature all but passed a bill providing for the education of slaves to increase their efficiency and attach them to their masters.[7]
[Footnote 1: Buckingham, Slave States of America, vol. ii., p. 112.]
[Footnote 2: Du Bois and Dill, The Negro American Artisan, p. 36.]
[Footnote 3: Du Bois and Dill, The Negro American Artisan, pp. 31, 32, 33.]
[Footnote 4: Du Bois and Dill, The Negro American Artisan, p. 34, and Special Report of the U.S. Com. of Ed., 1871, p. 365.]