The reports of the quality of the work thus accomplished have been most encouraging. Greater regularity of attendance has been attained than ever before, and the ambition to keep up with the classes entered has been marked. The same persistence in overcoming obstacles to entrance arising from poverty and distance from the schools which marked previous years, has been no less conspicuous during that just passed. The range of study and instruction has been much the same as heretofore. The work of the class-rooms has been too good to need to be materially altered.
The industrial and practical training has been that in which there has been the most marked improvement and expansion. How to work is quite as important a branch of knowledge for the colored boys and girls as how to teach. Indeed, that they maybe able to teach others how to work is a large part of their vocation. How to behave themselves on the farm, in the shop, in the work-room, sick-room and the kitchen, is as needful for them to know as how to behave themselves in the school-room and in the church of God. This training is receiving more and more wise and thorough attention, and we are sending out young men and young women better and better fitted to be the teachers and leaders of society, as well as of the school.
Our schools and teachers have been evidently growing in favor and esteem, both with the colored and white people of the South. A most noticeable instance of the attachment of the colored population to the schools, and their appreciation of their value, was given very recently at Athens, Alabama. It became necessary to give up the school at that place, or to rebuild at an expense of not less than $5,000, which latter it was deemed impossible to do. Word to that effect was sent to Athens. The grief of the people was intense. It did not, however, expend itself in tears, but became motive power. They offered themselves to erect the needful building, pledged over $2,000 at once, and by gifts of labor and material provided fully for it, and are at work upon it now. They propose to make brick sufficient for its completion, and a surplus to exchange for the lumber which will be required. They are all at it. A blind man, who can do nothing else, offered to turn the crank to draw the water. Whether they will be able, in their extreme poverty, to accomplish all they have undertaken, yet remains to be seen; but such zeal in a good thing is surely worthy of special notice. When the colored people attempt to co-operate with us to such an extent, we cannot desert them. The school will go on.
During this year it appeared to the Committee that a sufficient fund had been accumulated to warrant at least a beginning of the permanent building for the Tillotson Normal Institute, in Austin, Texas. The foundation is already laid, and the contract drawn for the enclosure of the building. This great State, with its rapidly increasing population of colored people, and its insufficient provision for their education, demands the earliest possible completion of this building, and the equipment of the institution for efficient work.
With the four buildings completed the previous year at Mobile, New Orleans, Macon and Savannah, we are now in possession of better and more permanent equipment for our school work than ever before. But it is yet quite insufficient for its pressing need, which is most felt in the necessity of enlarged provision for boarding pupils, for it is, after all, in those who are thus brought under the continuous influence of their teachers, and away from the debasing surroundings of cabin life, that the best results of mental and religious training are realized. The call for such relief has been continuous and increasing in its urgency; but we have been obliged almost to deny it a hearing in the poverty and pressure of these past years.
The near future will, however, we trust, do much to relieve this long-felt want, through the generous gift to the Association of $150,000 by Mrs. Daniel P. Stone, of Malden, Mass., from the estate of her late husband, of which, though it is not yet in our possession, we have been fully assured. In accordance with the expressed wish of the donor, this money is to be used in the erection of buildings at Nashville, Atlanta, New Orleans and Talladega. These buildings will largely increase the accommodations of these institutions for the class of pupils which has been named, and will greatly diminish the percentage of expense for their education, as but few additions to the corps of teachers already in the work will be required. In these normal and collegiate institutions it is the variety of studies rather than the number of students to which the teaching force must be adapted. We may add fifty per cent. to the number of pupils, and need to add only five per cent., perhaps, to the number of teachers. There can be no more acceptable gift than that of these new buildings for well-established schools—none which will so add to their effectiveness.
A few school buildings belonging to the Association have been, of late years, rented to local school boards, in cases where greater good could be accomplished for those for whose use they were intended than by retaining them in our hands. It has been a saving to our treasury, a widening of their usefulness, and a bond of fraternity between the friends of education North and South.
We may only, in passing, refer to the beginning in the accumulation of valuable libraries made in some of our institutions. There is yet room for much needed enlargement of this important branch of our educational service.
Two things yet remain to be done that our schools may be placed upon a permanent and satisfactory basis, and these are adequate provision for the maintenance of professorships and of scholarships. We have been compelled to confine ourselves chiefly to making appropriations for the salaries of teachers, simply because without them there could be no schools at all. This was the one thing indispensable from the very start. But, increasingly, the need of student aid makes itself manifest. Gifts have been secured from churches, Sunday-schools and individuals for this purpose, and more money must be raised from similar sources. Yet it is evident that this must not be taken from the fund by which the teachers are sustained. That would be to increase the number of applicants, and, at the same time, to close the doors at which they seek admission. We must not try to lengthen the skirts of our coats by cutting them off at the shoulders; they will fall off from us altogether if we do that. This is our problem: both to maintain our teachers and to support more students. It cannot be solved by any process of subtraction. Can it be done in any other way than by addition to our income? And it must be done, if we are to make our work tell as it ought upon the vast negro population of the South. To overcome the obstacles which stand at every step in the way of attaining the thorough education needed by those who are to be the leaders of their people, demands a power of will and an energy of perseverance such as few individuals of any race possess, unless they are assisted all along the way.
The origin and surroundings of these colored students must be continually borne in mind. They have nothing to help them in the homes from which they came; nothing to help them in the prevailing sentiment of the white people toward them; the fewest possible openings for such remunerative labor as is ready for white students in similar conditions, and checks on their ambition of every sort. Nor is it strange that they lack that stamina which generations of culture and self-restraint impart. Their help, both moral and material, must come from us, and those who, like us, believe that they can be and should be thoroughly trained before they are sent forth to lay foundations for the upbuilding of their race. Student aid must be freely and systematically given, or our higher schools will accomplish their beneficent design at great disadvantage, and only to a very limited extent.