FOURTH PAPER.
IS IT TIME FOR THE NEGRO COLLEGES IN THE SOUTH TO BE PUT INTO THE HANDS OF NEGRO TEACHERS?
BY MRS. PAUL L. DUNBAR.
MRS. PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR.
Mrs. Paul Laurence Dunbar (Alice Ruth Moore) was born in New Orleans, La., July 19, 1875. Attended public schools there and Straight University, and was graduated from the latter institution in 1892. Taught in the public schools of New Orleans until 1896, when she went to Boston and New York for study, taking a course in Manual Training at the Teachers' College. Was appointed a teacher in the public schools of Brooklyn, N. Y., in 1897, and taught there until her marriage to Mr. Paul Laurence Dunbar, in March, 1898.
In 1895, Mrs. Dunbar's first book, "Violets and Other Tales," was published by the Monthly Review Publishing Company, Boston. The next book, "The Goodness of St. Rocque," published by Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, in 1899, was favorably received by some of the best critics. Mrs. Dunbar has written a number of short stories for some of the leading magazines and newspapers in the country, among them McClures, the Smart Set, Ladies' Home Journal, the Southern Workman, Leslie's Weekly, the New York Sun, Boston Transcript, and for over a year did regular work on the Chicago News.
While teaching in Brooklyn, Mrs. Dunbar was actively interested in mission work on the East Side of New York, conducting classes in manual training and kindergarten after the regular hours of public school work was over. Since her marriage, Mrs. Dunbar has resided in Washington, and has done some of her best work in short story writing, as well as acting as secretary and general helpmeet for her husband.
It seems a rather incongruous fact that so many of our Negro colleges in the South, whose purpose is avowedly the insistence of higher education of Negro youth, should deny that youth not only the privilege of teaching in the very institutions which have taught him, but also deny him the privilege of looking up to and reverencing his own people. For so long have the whites been held up to the young people as the only ones whom it is worth while taking as models; for so long have the ignorant of the race been taught that their best efforts after all, are hardly worth while, that wherever possible, it behooves us to place over the masses those of their own race who have themselves attained to that dignity to which the education of the schools tend.
It has been my good or ill fortune to number among my acquaintances a number of young boys and girls who could rattle off with fluency the names of Greek philosophers of ancient days; who could at a moment's notice tell you the leading writers of the Elizabethan period, or the minor Italian poets of the fifteenth century, but who were hopelessly ignorant of what members of their own race had done. They had, perhaps, a vague idea of an occasional name here and there, but what the owner of that name had done was a mystery. Happily these instances are decreasing in proportion as our schools are filled with teachers of our own race who can teach a proper appreciation of, and pride in the deeds of that race.
It is unreasonable to suppose that any teacher of another race, no matter how conscientious and scrupulous, is going to take the same interest in putting before his pupils the achievements of that people in contradistinction to the accepted course of study as laid down by the text books. How many young students of history in the white-taught schools remember being drilled to revere the glorious memory of Lincoln, and Sumner and Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and how few remember being drilled to remember Crispus Attucks and the fifty-fourth and fifty-fifth Massachusetts? How many students of literature are taught of the first woman writer in America to earn distinction, Margaret Hutchinson, but how few are reminded of her contemporary, Phyllis Wheatley? How many students remember the lachrymose career of Byron and how few know of his contemporary, Poushkin? The student of natural science is taught about Franklin, but not of Benjamin Banneker; the elocution classes remember Booth and Macready, and even how excellent an actor was Shakespeare, but they seldom hear of Ira Aldridge. How many of the mathematical students remember that Euclid was a black man? And the elementary classes in art, how glibly they can discuss Turner and Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelites and the style of Gibson, but they are likely not to know the name of the picture that the Paris Salon hung for Henry Tanner.