“The Sunday School conducted in Atlanta by my church is the outcome of the effort of some of the most earnest and thoughtful of our people to give careful religious training to the Negroes of this generation and thus to conserve the influence begun with the fathers and mothers and the grandfathers and grandmothers of these coloured children when they were taught personally by their devoted Christian masters and mistresses. The work is small in point of the number reached, but it has been productive of sturdy character and law-abiding citizenship.”
A white man or woman, and especially a Northern white man or woman, in Atlanta who teaches Negroes is rigorously ostracised by white society. I visited one of the Negro colleges where there are a number of white teachers from the North. We had quite a talk. When I came to leave one of the teachers said to me:
“You don’t know how good it seems to talk with some one from the outside world. We work here year in and year out without a white visitor, except those who have some necessary business with the institution.”
Explaining the attitude toward these Northern teachers (and we must understand just how the Southern people feel in this matter), a prominent clergyman said that a lady who made a social call upon a teacher in that institution would not feel secure against having to meet Negroes socially and that when the call was returned a similar embarrassing situation might be created.
Apologising for Helping Negroes
Just in this connection: I found a very remarkable and significant letter published in the Orangeburg, S. C., News, signed by a well-to-do white citizen who thus apologises for a kind act to a Negro school:
I had left my place of business here on a business trip a few miles below, on returning I came by the above-mentioned school (the Prince Institute, coloured), and was held up by the teacher and begged to make a few remarks to the children. Very reluctantly I did so, not thinking that publicity would be given to it or that I was doing anything that would offend anyone. I wish to say here and now that I am heartily sorry for what I did, and I hope after this humble confession and expression of regret that all whom I have offended will forgive me.
The sentiment indicated by this letter, while widely prevalent, is by no means universal. I have seen Southern white men address Negro schools and Negro gatherings many times since I have been down here. Some of the foremost men in the South have accepted Booker T. Washington’s invitations to speak at Tuskegee. And concerning the very letter that I reproduce above, the Charlotte Observer, a strong Southern newspaper, which copied it, said:
A man would better be dead than to thus abase himself. This man did right to address the pupils of a coloured school, but has spoiled all by apologising for it. Few people have conceived that race prejudice went so far, even in South Carolina, as is here indicated. Logically it is to be assumed that this jelly-fish was about to be put under the ban, and to secure exemption from this, published this abject card. To it was appended a certificate from certain citizens, saying they ‘are as anxious to see the coloured race elevated as any people, but by all means let it be done inside the colour line.’... The narrowness and malignity betrayed in this Orangeburg incident is exceedingly unworthy, and those guilty of it should be ashamed of themselves.
The Rev. H. S. Bradley, for a long time one of the leading clergymen of Atlanta, now of St. Louis, said in a sermon published in the Atlanta Constitution: