PROF. HORACE BUMSTEAD, D.D.
Anniversary exercises are apt to afford but meagre indication of the real work accomplished by any school. To those of us who know the work of Atlanta University, such exercises seem especially inadequate to the faithful telling of what is being done here. When our good Christian friend, Philander Veryrich, hints that he is ready to come down here with a hundred thousand dollars in each pocket, to be emptied out wherever they will do the most good, I shall not especially urge his attendance upon our Commencement exercises. I shall ask him to spend with us either the first or the last Sunday evening of the school year. I shall beg him to preserve a strict incognito, and allow me to conceal him outside one of the windows, or behind one of the doors of our assembly room, with a peep-hole conveniently arranged. If it is the last Sunday evening before the vacation, he will hear many of the scholars speak with grateful appreciation of what the year’s work has done for them, and with enthusiastic hope of what they mean to do for others during their summer’s work of teaching. The members of the graduating class will recall their experience of six or seven or eight years in the Institution, and tell what a home it has been to them, and how much of what they have acquired in the training of mind and character is due to the Christian home influence of the school. If it is the first Sunday evening of the new school year, our benevolent friend will hear many of these same scholars tell of their summer’s work—how they have succeeded in some things and failed in others; what they have done in Sunday-school and temperance work; what obstacles they have met and conquered; what increasing favor they have found in the communities where they have labored. At either of these Sunday evening family gatherings (for such they are), I think our visiting friend will be struck with the simple straightforward way in which our scholars express themselves, with the extremely limited amount of what is sometimes called “gush,” and with the clear revelation which will be made to him that before, behind, around, and underneath everything else, the development of a thoroughly Christian character, and of a true manhood and womanhood, is the all-absorbing purpose of our work. But I am stultifying myself in trying to convey an impression of these gatherings to others. Even to our own corps of workers here, they come, twice a year, almost as a surprise and as a most inspiring revelation to ourselves of what God is permitting us to do.
And still, however inadequate, our anniversary exercises have been full of interest, and have revealed much to those who have visited us for the first time. The Baccalaureate sermon was preached June 12th, by our college pastor, Rev. Cyrus W. Francis, from 1st Tim. i. 19, “Holding faith and a good conscience;” and it was an earnest plea for the supremacy of the higher motives in the Christian warfare upon which the graduates were about to enter. Three days of public examinations followed, each day’s session being concluded by an exercise in music and light gymnastics. On the last day there was a display of what our girls have learned in the way of head-making. The walls of the front hall and one of the stairways were covered with specimens of the students’ drawing and map-making, indicating great progress in this department during the year. The normal work also has been making a decided advance. It is evident that those of us who teach the Greek, Latin and other higher branches will have to look well to our laurels. Fewer visitors to the school ask to hear the classics translated; more wish to see how the three R’s are taught. No exercise of the examination days riveted the attention of our friends more firmly than the exercise in teaching one of the grammar-school grades, by one of the members of the senior normal class, with following criticisms from the other members of the class. However, we classical instructors rejoice in all this, for we know that hereafter we shall have better equipped pupils for grappling with Xenophon and Cicero. It ought to be mentioned here that one of the most valuable exercises of our winter term this year was a three days’ Teachers’ Institute, in which all the teachers and scholars participated, and in which much light was thrown upon the improved methods of teaching, now attracting such wide attention. A further impetus was given to thought and effort in this direction by the visit of our friend, the Rev. A. D. Mayo, co-editor of the Journal of Education, whose four lectures and one sermon before our students, and whose private talk and counsel with our teachers on certain phases of our work, will not soon be forgotten.
A very large audience, as usual, packed the Friendship Baptist church on Thursday, to listen to the essays of eleven of the graduating class, and to the address of the invited orator of the day. Five young men and twelve young women received the diplomas of the school. The Commencement address was delivered by Rev. Atticus G. Haygood, D.D., President of Emory College at Oxford, in this State. Those who are now reading his recently published book, “Our Brother in Black,” will not need to be told that his address was listened to with the greatest pleasure and approval by all who were present. It was a plain, forcible and thoroughly wholesome presentation of some of the ways in which the true greatness of the State must be secured, and the relation thereto of education and of such institutions as ours. Dr. Haygood represents, most nobly, that rapidly multiplying element among the Southern people which believes in the motto, “Look up and not down, out and not in, forward and not backward, and lend a hand.” May his tribe increase.
One of the most excellent features of the address was, as one auditor suggested, the fact that it would have been just as appropriate for delivery before the Athens (State) University as before the Atlanta University.
The Alumni meeting, Thursday afternoon, brought together a goodly number of the graduates of former years. The spirit of the remarks made at this gathering gives, every year, an increasing assurance of the stability and self-propagating character of the work in which we are engaged.
The report of the Visiting Committee, appointed by the Governor of the State, has just been published. It furnishes renewed evidence of the growing favor which our work is meeting with among the people of Georgia. The remarks made to the school on the last day of the examinations, by Rev. Mr. Wilkes, the chairman of the sub-committee, who prepared this report, were full of good sense and kindly feeling. The speaker told of his life-long service as a teacher, and how it had begun with the instruction of a little colored boy, his father’s slave, in the safe seclusion of the corn-crib, in the days when such teaching was a criminal offense. None who heard him could doubt the entire sincerity of his words of sympathy and encouragement. It is astonishing how rapidly and widely the work of Atlanta University is coming to be appreciated. Among the applications for teachers which have lately been received, have been several from county school commissioners, who say, in substance, “The teachers we have met with from your Institution are of such a quality that we desire now to supply all our schools from the same source.” Let our friends at the North take courage. Their investments, so far, are bearing compound interest at a high rate. When these lines reach the eyes of the readers of the Missionary, some ten thousand children, all over this great State, will be gathered under the instruction of our pupils. Next October we shall get the reports of this work. As soon as our friend, Philander Veryrich, will send me his address, I will give him the date of the Sunday evening gathering, from which he can learn more about our work than from whole volumes of the American Missionary.
TALLADEGA COLLEGE.
MRS. THOS. N. CHASE.