CHAPTER VI.
Education Under Difficulties.
Some time as many as a half dozen funerals a day occurred in the coast region from malarial fever or small pox. The chances for recovery were rendered difficult by the absence of any physician, the nearest one being sixty miles away.
Among the medicines sent Miss Schofield from friends of the North was a bottle of port wine. This was sent in 1876, when she was attacked by a hemorrhage of the lungs, with instructions from a physician that she must take it three times a day. But the fear of setting an example which might prove the ruin of many people in her charge caused her not to open it. She took it to Aiken, and during the construction of her residence there it was deposited in the walls and no one except Miss Schofield to the day of her death, on February 1, 1916, knew where to break the wall; no one on earth knows just where to this very day.
She despised the avarice and greed that caused men to manufacture intoxicants but hated with the venom of the devil the lust for gain by the municipalities and States which caused them to issue licenses for the manufacture of alcohol. She taught and lived that the greatest criminal in the history of criminology was the criminal who issued the license for the commission of crime. In her opinion this was not only a crime against society but a crime against criminals as well.
The pernicious influence of alcohol on the Negro was largely responsible for her antagonism to the liquor traffic. Opposed to it naturally, as every educated and thinking person must be, she was more so after observing its destructive influence among the ignorant and vicious.
It was confidently believed by her that if every Negro capable of complying with the registration laws regulating the qualification of voters, was registered and allowed to vote, uninfluenced by any outside influence, that the legal sale of alcoholic stimulants in the South at least, would be a thing of the past. She believed also that if positions on the police force were available to colored men for service in the Negro sections of the cities that not only would the illegal sale of intoxicants be stopped but crimes of every character would be largely suppressed.
Martha Schofield, having lived to see accomplished the task to which her life had been dedicated on the day her father rescued Laura Duncan from the blood hounds of the slave holding oligarchy, died as happy and serene as an angel, perfectly confident that the work she had been doing would gain momentum and go on more splendidly each year, until illiteracy and physical and moral degradation would be an exceptional thing among the Negroes.
Between the years of 1890 and 1910 the percentage of Negro illiteracy had fallen from 57.10 to 30.40 per cent. among children between the ages of ten and fourteen years. For those fifteen years of age and under nineteen, the percentage of illiteracy was only 18.90 per cent.
The greater illiteracy in the higher age classes is very marked, the illiteracy of Negroes of 55 to 64 years of age being about 67 per cent. of the total, and nearly every one of those of 65 years and above were found to be unable to read or write when the 1910 census was taken.
Negroes of sixty years and above, it will be recalled, were past childhood before emancipation, when little or no provision was made to teach them to read and write, and this accounts for the high percentage of illiteracy in the old people and the rapidly decreasing percentage of illiteracy among their children.