“If a system of public schools can be maintained for ten or fifteen years in any State, there will be no danger of its abandonment.
“An educated community will demand suitable educational facilities for the education of all classes of children. So that we may reasonably hope that the appropriation from the national treasury need not extend beyond a period of ten or fifteen years.”
ADDRESS OF MR. BUTLER R. WILSON
AT THE BOSTON ANNIVERSARY, MAY 31, 1882.
If I fail to be a good specimen, do not attribute it to my race; for my people were converted from a condition of chattel slavery into that of American citizenship, depending almost entirely upon themselves. What has been the result? In spite of nearly 20,000 political murders since the war, they have not all been killed; nor, at the present rate of increase, is it reasonable to suppose that they all will be. The prophecy of many good people, many worthy people, many earnest people, that the ballot in the hand of the negro was a stick with which to break the government’s head, finds its answer in the fact that the most loyal and law-abiding citizens south of Mason and Dixon’s line, to-day, are the ex-slaves.
With not enough land for a burial ground, had they all died immediately after the war, they now pay taxes on millions of dollars worth of real estate and personal property, being assessed for nearly $10,000,000 in the State of Georgia alone. Prior to the war there was a law throughout the South prohibiting a colored person from learning to read and write on penalty of losing the thumb or index finger, so that what they now know in that direction they have acquired since the war; and to-day ten per cent. of the entire colored race in the South can read and write. This ability, on the part of the colored man, is a great step in his progress, for it introduces a new rule of computation in the Southern arithmetic—the old rule being, as you probably know, in Southern vernacular:
“A naught is a naught and a figger is a figger;
Put down the naught and carry the figger.
A naught is a naught and a figger is a figger.
All the cotton for the white man and none for the nigger.”
What has produced these results? Mainly two things: The inherent desire of the colored man to better his condition, thus differing from his poor white neighbor; and the work of the American Missionary Association. Taking up the work for which your honored dead died, the Association planted schools and churches in the South, and supplied these schools and churches with men and women, who had pluck enough and backbone enough to defy Southern prejudice and ostracism; and wherever one of these schools has been planted, the change is marked. Lawlessness disappears, property increases in value, and the colored people purchase homes. An ex-mayor of the city of Atlanta, at the dedication of the Congregational Church, said that the thrift, orderly habits and acquisition of property in a certain portion of that city were mainly due to the school and church of the American Missionary Association. Does the colored man sit with folded arms, while the North, Great Britain and Africa—let me repeat Africa—contribute for his civilization? I say Africa, because, sitting in the old Midway Church, in Liberty County, Ga., sometime ago, I heard read, in the list of donations, “One dollar contributed by a church in South Africa for the civilization of the heathen in America;” and there was nothing said in that donation, either, about the color of the heathen! But are the colored people idle? In one of the classes which graduated from the Atlanta University not long ago, were two married women who did their own house-work, walked more than three miles through the red mud of Georgia to school, were punctual in attendance and graduated with honor. In the same class was a married man who earned money to support his family, kept up with his class in school, preached for three country churches, helped edit a readable newspaper, and graduated with honor. In one of the schools across the city, an American Missionary Association school, there is a woman who entered the night school, finished that, entered the day school, has plodded on from class to class, to-day in the graduating class holding a place of honor, and she has earned her living and has purchased a home by sewing at the same time. This school has done a great work; yet the loyal people of that city, of whom you heard not long ago such a beautiful report on this platform, for some reason took a great antipathy to that school, and, in order to break it down, established another school on the next corner, a public school. Did the A. M. A. school suspend operations? The 400 students, paying one dollar a month, increased to 600; two new teachers were called from the Oswego training school and a kindergarten school is soon to be annexed. But, in order that this school on the next corner might not suspend operations, a woman who does her own washing and ironing, cooks the meals of her husband, and sends him off to his work early in the morning, goes to the A. M. A. school till 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and sends two of her children to the public school. Hundreds of such examples might be given, even in the district schools taught by the students—examples of work and of sacrifice upon the part of both parents and scholars. What would you think of a man fifty years old going to school that he might learn to read the Bible, earning his living by bottoming chairs at night by the light of a pine-knot fire? No, my friends, the colored man is not idle; if he were, filibustering would not to-day be an item of business in the United States Congress.
We know the American Missionary Association in the South; we feel toward her as a man should toward his mother. I remember that the Association picked up from the streets of Atlanta an intimate friend of mine, followed him through the grammar school, the training school and college; taught him the lesson of Yankee push and independence; started him out with a prayer for his safety; and to-day stands with out-stretched hands bidding him God-speed in his way onward and upward. The work has not all been done. Our schools need to be increased ten-fold. Each school needs a training department as an annex, for mechanical ability is to play no small part in the progress of the colored man. Some people in the South say, “Keep the colored man where his vote will be useful.” The American Missionary Association has recognized him as a brother, and says, “Give him a man’s chance.” We thank the American Missionary Association for that; and under the inspiration of just such treatment we mean to stay in the South and fight it out. We are there “to the manner born.”