The noble gift of Mrs. Stone, while supplying some of the great and most pressing wants in certain directions, creates new ones in others. It gives additional buildings, but these mean more students, more teachers, more student aid, more libraries, and more apparatus.
Buildings are needed where the gift of Mrs. Stone, great as it is, does not reach—needed as imperiously as where it does. At Talladega, the original building erected before the war at a cost of $30,000, bought by us after the war, used and oft repaired, is thus described by President DeForest: “The walls are staunch, but the roof leaks, and within and without, from foundation to bell-tower, it needs repair. It is estimated that $3,000 are required for this purpose.” A house is also needed as a home for the President, to save room for teachers and pupils in the main buildings. In addition to the $15,000 from the Stone donation, Talladega needs for these buildings and repairs, $10,000. The wants of Tougaloo are even more pressing. The crowd of students defies all means of accommodation. Temporary barracks have been erected, out-buildings and garrets have been used as lodging places, and yet students have been turned away for want of room. The buildings now on the ground need extensive repairs to save them from decay, and additions should be made to the farm buildings to give adequate shelter to the stock and products of the 500 acres of land connected with the school. But what shall we more say? for the time would fail us to tell of the needs of Wilmington, N. C., of Greenwood and Orangeburg, S. C., Mobile, Montgomery and Athens, Ala.
Besides all this we ought to establish, at some eligible point in North Carolina, a chartered institution of higher grade, with a boarding department. We have for a long while felt the need of this, and have only been deterred by the lack of means. We ought also to found an institution in Arkansas, similar to that in Austin, Texas. We are just beginning efforts among the Refugees in Kansas, and these should be greatly increased, and include churches, schools and lady missionaries.
Endowments are an absolute necessity for our institutions at the South. Here are eight institutions, carefully managed, efficient in work, and furnished with buildings equal in number and size with some at the West of much greater age. These Western schools have in most instances the nucleus of an endowment, if not a complete one. Those in the South need endowments much more, and have almost nothing of the sort.
2. But enlargement should far transcend the limits of the work already in hand among the Freedmen. We take it for granted that every portion of the population of this country must have equal facilities open to it for education and advancement. No part of that population is so inadequately supplied as the four and a half millions of colored people in the South. There were in 1875, in this country, 1,932 schools of grades above the primary. Of this whole number, the four and a half millions of colored people have access to but 91! It must be borne in mind that in this number of schools (1,932) Harvard, Yale and Oberlin are but units, with their ample endowments, teachers of finest culture, libraries and apparatus of the best and largest; and to balance them the colored people can only point to a few new and inadequately furnished schools, of which those of this Association are among the best.
There were in 1875 in this country, 3,647 libraries, numbering 300 volumes and upwards in each. Of that number, the colored people of the South have access to 25! The same disparity is found here in regard to the size and quality of the libraries open to them as in regard to the schools and colleges.
It will not do to say that these people need only primary schools. No race can rise unless it has leaders who can teach and encourage the masses; nor will it suffice to say that the few seeking special advantages can go to colleges at the North. The people of the West cannot send their sons to Eastern colleges in adequate numbers. The West has, and must have, its own colleges. How can the poor ex-slaves of the South send their children to the North for education, when most of them have a life struggle with the wolf at the door?
Here, then, are glimpses at the great duty that this nation owes to the Freedmen for its own sake as well as theirs. But that duty involves enlargement, fifty-fold, of what is now done for them.
3. The work of the A.M.A. beyond the South needs enlarging.
The Chinese schools in California need the permanency of having buildings under their own control, and Bro. Pond earnestly desires the means to reach the “Chinese in the mines.”