BEREA COLLEGE AFFAIR
Three incidents, occurring during the past six years under widely varying circumstances and in far separated localities, have brought the question of the separation of the white and colored races in schools into much prominence.
On the 22d of March, 1904, the legislature of Kentucky[[335]] enacted the following statute:
“Sec. 1. That it shall be unlawful for any person, corporation or association of persons to maintain or operate any college, school or institution where persons of the white and Negro races are both received as pupils for instruction; and any person or corporation who shall operate or maintain any such college, school or institution shall be fined one thousand dollars, and any person or corporation who may be convicted of violating the provisions of this act shall be fined one hundred dollars for each day they may operate said school, college or institution after such conviction.
“Sec. 2. That any instructor who shall teach in any school, college or institution where members of said two races are received as pupils for instruction shall be guilty of operating and maintaining same and fined as provided in the first section hereof.
“Sec. 3. It shall be unlawful for any white person to attend any school or institution where Negroes are received as pupils or receive instruction, and it shall be unlawful for any Negro or colored person to attend any school or institution where white persons are received as pupils, or receive instruction. Any persons so offending shall be fined fifty dollars for each day he attends such institution or school: Provided, That the provisions of this law shall not apply to any penal institution or house of reform.
“Sec. 4. Nothing in this act shall be construed to prevent any private school, college or institution of learning from maintaining a separate and distinct branch thereof, in a different locality, not less than twenty-five miles distant, for the education exclusively of one race or color.
“Sec. 5. This act shall not take effect, or be in operation before the fifteenth day of July, Nineteen Hundred and Four.”
This law was general in its terms, requiring, under heavy penalty, the separation of the white and colored races in all schools of the State, private as well as public. But at the time of the consideration of the bill, the legislators probably knew that there was only one school in the State which admitted both white and colored students. That was Berea College, which had been established about fifty years before for the purpose of “promoting the cause of Christ” and of giving general and nonsectarian instruction to “all youth of good moral character.” It was primarily for the benefit of the mountain whites of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and the Carolinas. After the Civil War, the doors of the school had been opened to Negroes, and in 1904, Berea had a student-body of nine hundred and twenty-seven, of whom one hundred and seventy-four were Negroes.[[336]] The President and Trustees of the college protested against the enactment of the above law, but to no avail. When the session of 1904–5 began, the colored students were refused admission. The college at once took steps to aid these Negro youths. It bore the transportation expenses of about a hundred of them to Fisk University, Knoxville College, Hampton Institute, and other distinctly colored schools. The white students left behind gave to the colored students leaving Berea the following expression of their regard for them:
“Friends and Fellow-Students: As we meet for the first time under new conditions to enjoy the great privileges of Berea College, we think at once of you who are now deprived of these privileges. Our sense of justice shows us that others have the same rights as ourselves, and the teaching of Christ leads us to ‘remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.’