Martha Schofield, pioneer Negro educator / Historical and philosophical review of reconstruction period of South Carolina

by Matilda A. Evans

At the rate of advance in education among the Negroes at present there will be less than 10 per cent. of the population between ten and fourteen illiterate in 1920, and every child of sane mind and sound body will be able to read and write by 1930, when the Fourteenth Census shall have been taken. This all in the space of fifty years. Remarkable!

And yet there are well informed influential people who still maintain that the progress of the Negro has been slow, superficial and unworthy of the effort and money expended on it.

Maybe so, but all admit, that it is very helpful to every human being to be able to read and write, to be able to assimilate the thoughts of others and to express his thoughts and hand them on to others of his kind by other means than by the word of mouth. To deny this would be equal to denying one the right to be taught the use of his mind or tongue, the two organs which God in His infinite wisdom put no ban upon, but made free as the air of Heaven, restricting their use only to the accomplishment of honorable and noble undertakings, thus dethroning the power of all, who though possessed of powerful intellect, would use their talent in the interest of the base and ignoble.

While the peoples of all races are born with a knowledge of good and evil they are not possessed at birth with the knowledge which science is supposed to endow them with, and therefore, it should be the pleasure, as it certainly is the imperative duty of the State to provide liberally for the diffusion of knowledge among even the humblest of all its citizens.

Martha Schofield taught more emphatically than anything else the economic necessity which exists among all races for the performance of duty, one to another. She argued that unrighted wrongs retard the progress of races, and if not checked by the refinements of civilization, through the enlightenment of the mind, become the instruments which at last wreck and destroy the strongest ships of State. She wanted her work to prove to the country that great measures of service in the field of education was the price to be paid for the salvation of our land against the misery and death, which others through ignorance and greed, had sown. She made the man at the North without principle or scruple to modify his ambition in the selfish accumulation of wealth equally as culpable as the man of the South, in producing the suffering and misery which attended the great civil conflict for freedom. She exhibited the chaos attending the Reconstruction period as the awful penalty for benighted stupidity and ignorance of an earlier day, for which none of the present day is accountable, and whose fruits none, in an earlier past, foresaw.

Her doctrine of the elevation of the Negro so as to meet the necessities of the new standard of civilization which freedom had thrust upon him, spread like wild fire on a western prairie, and was, of course, shocking, even inconceivable to the imagination of the Southern white mind, which had been taught and religiously believed that education impaired the usefulness of the colored people, both as productive machines in the hard field of toil and as mediums for the expression of the divine messages of power.

“No amount or kind of learning,” they argued, “can be made available to the ‘nigger’ because of his inability to assimilate it. He’s a brute, pure and simple, and has anyone ever succeeded through teaching in making a brute anything but a brute?”

“Pigs will be pigs.”

Laws by the General Assembly of South Carolina forbade the whites the privilege of teaching Negroes, but it was ignored by many good men and women who devoted much time and money to the education of the race.

An influential Southern man, a former Governor of one of the great States of the South and now an honored member of the Senate of the United States once wrote a book in which he delved deep into history and anthropology and proved to the complete satisfaction of the voters of his State and to a great number of the learned professors of the sciences in some of the Southern colleges, that the Negro by every fact known to the scientists and evolutionists was a member of the families of the lower animals, and, therefore, an impossibility in the matter of intellectual development.