The negro problem of which we hear so much does not seem to us as difficult to solve as the labor problem of the North, complicated as that is by the mixture of races and religions. The negroes, on the contrary, are a homogeneous race, Afro-Americans, knowing no other country than the United States, and desiring no other; agricultural in their habits and tastes, intensely attached to the soil, loyal to the government, and mostly Protestant in faith, except in Louisiana and parts of Florida.
The Afro-American to-day in the five central Southern States is not so degraded or ignorant as was the French peasant before the revolution of 1792. In fact he is less degraded, for while his poverty and ignorance are no greater, he is not unjustly oppressed nor weighed down by taxation.
Mr. Arthur Young, whose account of his travels in France on the eve of the revolution is quoted authoritatively by historians, states:[3] “Husbandry is not much further advanced than among the Hurons, and the people almost as wild as their country. Their houses brutally filthy, no windows, no other light than the door, mud floors and chimneys. The people can neither read nor write, girls and women terribly ragged, if possible worse clad than with no clothes at all. All without shoes and stockings. People so ignorant that they know nothing of their own weights and measures.”
From this deplorable condition, the French peasant has risen in a hundred years to be the most thrifty, industrious and intelligent agriculturist in Europe.
With this example before us, one may reasonably expect, judging from his progress in the last twenty-five years, that the Afro-American, by the middle of the 20th century, may stand side by side with the other races now crowding into the Republic. We were told at Hampton that the students who now apply for entrance are nearly as advanced as those who graduated twenty years ago, and at the Scotia School for girls they are commencing to receive the daughters of their first graduates, and find these know nearly as much on entering as their mothers did when they left.
In 1890, only a generation after they were emancipated, not less than forty-three out of every hundred negroes of ten years of age and over were able to read and write. In 1870 only three per cent. of all negroes attended school, and in twenty years the increase was nearly nineteen per cent. of all negroes. The proportion of negro school children increased at a far more rapid rate than white school children, and in 1890 the proportion was nearly equal.[4]
In 1877-78 the attendance in private institutions was 12,146; in 1894-95 the attendance was 25,717.[5]
But help from the North must still continue, and if possible increase. Matters have not yet so adjusted themselves in the South as to warrant the leaving the educational interests of the colored race altogether to the hands of the Southern whites, and the negroes instinctively turn to the Northern teachers for education and guidance, notwithstanding the large appropriations made for schools by the Southern whites.
The leaders of the race, both white and black, are now alive to the importance of industrial education, and most of the schools we visited had introduced manual labor of various kinds as a part of the curriculum, and where it had not been done the additional expense had been the obstacle. Everywhere we found the strongest desire on the part of a large number of girls to learn the profession of nursing, and those who have already acquired it have been very successful, the whites willingly employing them at high wages—from $10 to even $20 a week. Some schools already announce a course of training, but they seem to be unaware that a nurse can no more be trained without a hospital, than a cook without a kitchen. We found but two training schools attached to hospitals during our travels, the Dixie at Hampton, which is doing excellent work and should be assisted in order to strengthen and extend it, and that at Spelman, Atlanta, where there is a small hospital in which they nurse their own sick under an excellent Superintendent, and have already sent out some nurses with satisfactory results, and would be glad to extend the work if they could receive assistance in paying teachers.
In Savannah at a meeting where we met nineteen of the leading colored men of the place, they assured us of their ability to start a small hospital, if they could be assisted in the salaries of teachers to train the pupil nurses. None ask support, merely help.