By ATTICUS G. HAYGOOD, D.D.
FACTS ON THE SURFACE.
The records in the Department of Education, in Washington City, show that in the recent slave States of the Union the total school population was, in 1881, 5,814,261. Of these, 3,973,676 were white; 1,840,585 colored children. Counting both races the total school enrollment for 1881 was 3,034,896; of these 2,232,337 were white, 802,559 colored children. Nearly half the white, and more than half the colored school population was, in 1881, out of school. In some of these States the school term is from three to five months; in the cotton States not more than three. Perhaps five months each year is as long a school term as the conditions and needs of the laboring classes in these States will allow.
In 1881 these States expended upon their public schools $13,359,784; except perhaps in one state this money was expended without distinction of race. The races have schools of their own; doctrinaires would mix them by force of law; those who are actually doing the work of education in these States know that this can not be done, and that only harm would come of it, if the experiment were attempted. For neither race would do so well if taught together; the colored children do not desire mixed schools, and the white children will not attend them. In such conditions law is helpless, and force is folly; also ruin.
OTHER FACTS.
The official figures give the numbers; parole evidence is necessary to complete the statement of the case. In 1881 there were, as the Department of Education reports, in the Southern States 17,248 common schools for colored children. With exceptions so few that they are inappreciable in these statements, the teachers in these 17,248 common schools were colored—the large majority being women. The majority of these teachers are pitiably incompetent; some of them are well furnished for their work, and are doing it faithfully and successfully. Nearly all of these colored teachers who are of any use have received their preparation in the various schools for higher instruction established by societies and churches in the Northern States. Some of the best work is done in schools established and carried on by individual devotion—I will not say enterprise. Taking them all together there are nearly one hundred and fifty of these schools, called, as fancy or circumstances prompted or allowed, universities, colleges, institutes, seminaries, normal schools, etc., etc. There is hardly an “academy” among them.
OVER-NAMING.
Many will think me wrong in the opinion I now offer; some of the wisest of the teachers in the real work of teaching negroes will agree with me: it is a misfortune that the names given these schools are so out of proportion to their real work and character. None of them, even in catalogues, go beyond the ordinary college course; many of them do not come up to it; in none of them do more than a very small number complete this course. There is not a university, in any proper sense, among them all. It is not in the spirit of censure that I speak of these things, but of deep interest in the great and necessary work, that the good people engaged in these schools are trying, with rare consecration and in the teeth of a thousand discouragements, to accomplish.