The most notable achievement of the movement was Hampton Institute, whose foundations were so wisely laid by General Armstrong. At once our Board of Missions organized a Freedman’s Bureau; and through its co-operation there were opened, by 1870, a score or more of schools in North and South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, and Kentucky. Of these, St. Augustine’s, Raleigh, has had a continuous and distinguished career, the story of which appears later.
In 1873, the Petersburg School became a Normal School under Major Giles B. Cooke, a Confederate officer who, entering the ministry, became rector of St. Stephen’s Church for Negroes. The story of this school is interesting as the model of other less noted ones throughout the South.
Early in 1866, our Church Freedman’s Bureau sent, to Petersburg, Miss Amanda Aiken (whose memory has ever since been revered) as the teacher and organizer of St. James’ School which was first opened in a private room. After many vicissitudes, the school was finally established in a house which, though inconvenient and distant a mile from the old site, served to shelter a good number of the 320 pupils formerly enrolled. Under the name, St. Stephen’s, a new and attractive church and school were completed in 1868, and the Rev. Jos. S. Atwell, a colored priest, took charge the following year and conducted the parochial school until 1873. Then “Major Cooke,” as he was generally called, already a teacher of the Negroes in the neighborhood, became rector. The greatest need of the time was for negro teachers, hence the expansion into the Normal School. About as great a need was for ministers, and soon the Normal School added a course for their training under the Rev. Dr. Spencer, and became a branch of the Virginia Seminary. The “Major’s School” became a recognized institution, gaining the complete confidence of both races in a day when such an achievement was not easy. Among the first pupils sent out was the Rev. J. H. M. Pollard, later Archdeacon of his native Diocese. The Rev. Jos. W. Cain had received his early schooling under Miss Aiken, and later was a deputy to General Convention from Texas. The Rev. James S. Russell was the first student of the Theological Training School, which laid the foundation for the Payne Divinity School. During its fourteen years of life, many were the teachers sent out by Major Cooke’s School, and they were in great demand because of the excellence of their training.
One other type of school of this period (the type of many) should attract the interest of the student of the subject—i. e., the country schools. There is no better sample, perhaps, than the Clarkson School in Middle South Carolina on the Wateree River. The first Clarkson was an Englishman who settled in his Wateree home, east of Columbia, early in the last century. He at once built chapels on his plantations for his Negroes, and had them taught by a clergyman in catechetical schools. At his death, he left a substantial sum for this purpose; but the laws were adverse, and the bequest could not be fulfilled. It was to their honor that each generation should have desired to do more than compensate their Negroes for this loss. The last of the immediate family, Miss Julia Clarkson, is now the devoted teacher and lay missionary. The war and its aftermath were very destructive to the region, and the Chapel in Middleburg fell a victim, with other property. Only occasional Services could be held, and instruction was intermittent. The Rev. B. B. Babbitt, a graduate of Amherst, with a spirit and zeal holier than a crusader, had left his New England home to make good the promises for the Negroes. He took orders and was a welcome helper and pastor to the Clarkson’s Chapel whenever his duties in Columbia allowed.
It was not until 1879 that Mr. Thomas Clarkson, in middle life, was ordained. He served his entire ministry fulfilling the ancestral trust as pastor and teacher. He rebuilt the Middleburg church largely with his own hands, and preached and taught until his death. His wife continued the school to her death; and, since then, the daughter. Both have also taken the duties of lay-reader as necessity required. Mrs. Clarkson moved the school to her home in the Sand Hills. Services and school being held under a great maple tree at first, or, when the weather required, in a farm house, until, through the kindness of the Rev. Dr. Saul of Philadelphia, a chapel was built and later a separate school house.
The ideal had been a boarding-industrial-school, for two obvious reasons which the terms suggest. Then another fire destroyed the Chapel; but again it was restored, largely by the negro members, and renamed St. Thomas in memory of their beloved rector, Mr. Thomas Clarkson.
The transformation in the life of the neighborhood is strikingly described by Miss Clarkson. The moral tone appears immeasurably better, marriage relations far more constant, embarrassment of inquiry about the parentage of children immensely relieved as compared with the postwar period of retrogression, and families quiet and reverent at Chapel, and sending their children to school. “The school house is the center of community life, the clubs meet there, the Woman’s Auxiliary, and other organizations. We have sociables, wedding receptions, sometimes dances, and, last January, a Golden Wedding!” Sewing and cooking are taught, the former during the summer, and, at present, the latter in Miss Clarkson’s kitchen, there being no domestic science outfit. A small canning outfit serves the school and community, and is used to the limit in summer. A colored missionary, the Rev. J. C. Perry, now serves the mission, baptizes the babies, and administers the Holy Communion. Miss Clarkson is the tireless day-by-day minister to all needs of the needy.
This description is extended to the present. It is a fair sample of the rural schools—more than fifty—throughout the Fourth, or Sewanee, Province, some of them with long histories and some recently opened. Scarcely one of the older schools but illustrates some motive of devotion on the part of white churchmen toward their negro friends; and most of the later ones illustrate equally the zeal and self-sacrifice of more fortunate Negroes for their less favored brethren. The story of each is a tempting romance of missions, into which lack of space forbids our entrance in this study.
There were in 1922 fourteen such parochial schools in the Diocese of South Carolina with an enrollment of over 1,000 children, and in North and East Carolina there were twenty-one similar schools. These schools furnish the bulk of the students who attend such institutions as St. Paul’s, Lawrenceville, and St. Augustine’s, Raleigh. Many of them give courses in cooking, sewing, and manual training, with rudiments of a good high-school education.
In any discussion of the education of the Negro is involved naturally the all-important question, what is the purpose of his education? It has already been mentioned that a general prejudice against higher education existed, because of the fear that an educated Negro might be a trouble-maker. The weak points in much of the education of the Reconstruction Period have also been noted. But present-day conditions have brought the education of the Negro prominently to the fore among our national problems as we realize what it means to the nation to have within its heart not only a race within a race, but an illiterate race within an educated democracy.