At present the classes run through the 8th grade. “We teach also domestic art, mattress making, chair caneing, practical truck farming under an experienced truck gardener, and the rudiments of carpentry. We have a well equipped blacksmith shop, but haven’t the funds to supply a smith to teach the boys. We have at present (1922) eighty children, boys and girls, a majority of them orphans. I would give every child a good school education with manual training, and compel each to learn a trade, for I have observed in my travels through the State prisons that fully 90% of the prisoners have no trade. People who have trades are too busy earning a living to get in trouble.”
Two other schools—St. Mary’s, Columbia, S. C., and Hoffman-St. Mary’s, Keeling, Tenn.—are assisted by the Church Institute, and will doubtless develop, in time, as have those here briefly described, when the forward movement of the Church fully reaches them. Of St. Mary’s, Bishop Guerry writes: “Out of it is expected to come a diocesan school at the close of the Nation-Wide Campaign for the Church’s Mission.” Hoffman-St. Mary’s has a rural setting ready to be developed in order that it may minister to the great negro population in the Mississippi Valley of Tennessee. These are two golden opportunities for the Church.
In January, 1922, comes news of the adoption of St. Philip’s School, San Antonio, Texas, by the Province of the Southwest, this being the only school for Negroes in that Province. Bishop Capers of West Texas writes: “I have asked the Church Institute to include this school within the selected number of southern negro schools that it fosters. The purpose of St. Philip’s is to educate young negro women in practical learning, domestic science, etc.”
Every one of our schools, whether parochial or affiliated with the Institute, is crowded. With double the equipment the attendance would at once be doubled. There are nine million Negroes in the South. If an estimate may fairly be based upon the facts known regarding a half-dozen cities in two States, then quite one-fifth of the children have no room provided for them at all. If the overcrowded condition were relieved, another one-fifth would have to be provided for. The Church could quadruple its parochial-school equipment and still be unable to meet the demands.
In our Church Institute Schools, we are dealing with the smaller class who are able to go, some of them much beyond the common schools, and others to the College course, and still others to the University. From them must come the teachers, preachers and leaders. In most of our States, from twenty to thirty per cent of the teachers are not properly equipped. Here again, to supply the demand for good teachers alone, not to mention the ministers and other “learned professions,” we should quadruple our present provisions. For we must remember that schools of the character of ours are few indeed. If this does not constitute a clear call to service, what indeed does?
FOOTNOTES:
Chapter VII
THE CHRISTIAN DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEGRO IN AMERICA
In approaching the evangelization of the Negro in America it is necessary to go back to the primitive days of the colonists in order to picture the scene at the beginning.