Reference elsewhere made in this book to the progress of the Negro in farming operations indicates that he is advancing more rapidly in agriculture than any of the other pursuits. In educational and church work it is shown, also, that he is well prepared to take care of himself should the separation of the races ever become a reality. The church denominational statistics show there are about 40,000 Negro Churches of Christ in America, with communicants numbering over 4,000,000. The value of Negro church property is about $60,000,000.00.
From $200,000.00 to $250,000.00 is spent annually on home missions. For foreign missions the race spends from $100,000.00 to $150,000.00 annually.
By every test or qualification and efficiency the Negro, in government, in the science of war, in the art of agriculture, in manufacturing, invention, medicine, law and literature is well prepared to assume the government of his race in a territory of his own. This insures him the same protection from the persecution and injustices of the stronger race that enabled the latter to succeed so famously when they, too, in the course of human events, found it necessary to dissolve the political bonds that united them to a dominant authority that gave them no justice.
INCIDENTS IN MISS SCHOFIELD’S LIFE.
Martha Schofield’s conception of an education included a great deal more than the mere matter of acquiring a fund of knowledge. She taught that knowledge without the ability to use it was worthless, and inspired every one coming under her influence with the necessity for a means of practicing what they were taught. This made her work intensely practical and enabled her students to succeed in overcoming difficulties as they saw her overcome them. The operation of her school, including the farm, the store and boarding house dormitories became a part of the curriculum and each student was provided with practical, concrete examples of every day business life with a solution for each worked out before the eyes of the whole school. The success which has and is attending the efforts of her students in many lines of endeavor is one of the best arguments we have to advance for the extension of practical instruction, especially among the Negroes who have evidenced a singular ability in assimilating it and imparting its usefulness afterwards.
While every Schofield scholar received a deep impression of the power which knowledge gives no want of attention was directed to the evil which invariably attends the wrong use of it. This developed a course in moral philosophy which, it is to be supposed, is responsible for the high average maintained by the graduates of this school in the deportment of their lives. Not one of the many receiving their education at the school has ever been convicted of crime or sentenced to jail or servitude in a penal institution. This contradicts and discredits the statement often heard that the education of the Negro has been attended by an increase of crime among the members of the race. While unsupported by the facts with regard to the students of all other Negro schools the statement could have basis only in those schools and colleges where the relation of morals to breeding is ignored altogether or made of secondary importance only. Certain it is that Martha Schofield impressed each one of her students with a higher regard for truth and virtue than for anything else in this world.
Without the morality to live and act honorably education to her was a curse, and she had the faculty of making her students a co-partner with her in sharing her convictions along lines of right conduct and moral grandeur as well as excelling in efficiency in all the arts taught.
Martha Schofield was impelled by a power in her heart which inspired sympathy to give the very best of her life in help of the Negro. So she was very particular in her work that what she imparted really should inspire her disciples to think right and live right. This enforced the necessity for a discipline that may be considered severe by some but many are there today who bless her from the bottom of their hearts for holding them strictly to account in their work that in the final result they might be the possessors of a future worthy of the instruction received at her hands. She never enforced iron-hand discipline without the glove of charity and her advice always sparkled with such sincerity and sympathy as to make it palatable.
Not only was the work of Miss Schofield opposed by the antagonism of race prejudice, but opposed by a want of a precedent. There were few Negroes of education to refer to as examples of what education may be expected to do for one with the intelligence and industry necessary to acquire it. Only a few years before Miss Schofield began her work the instruction of Negroes was made unlawful by some of the States in the South and as a result the greatest ignorance prevailed among them. Not five per cent. could either read or write and quite a number possessed no Christian name at all. They lived principally in one room cabins, whole families of them, and subsisted on the coarsest and most unwholesome food imaginable. There was no respect anywhere for sanitary science laws and all this had the effect to greatly handicap Miss Schofield at the beginning of her effort.
One of the rules of her school which she enforced early in her career was that no child could enter school who did not have a name. As all were eager to learn and made tremendous sacrifices that their children might do so this rule produced a mild sensation among some of the older people who had not the intuition to go about the work of obtaining a name for their offspring. But the ruling finally served to obtain names for all, and these in time became legal, some of them appearing just as Martha Schofield gave them on the tax books to this very day.