The American Missionary — Volume 41, No. 8, August, 1887

by Various

This school has a classical course of study covering a period of seven years, for pupils who have completed the common English branches. From this have been graduated forty students in ten classes averaging four to a class. This university has also a normal course of four years, for admission to which the same is required as for admission to the classical course. From this have been graduated in thirteen classes one hundred pupils, averaging about eight to a class.

Of the forty graduates from the classical course, five are dead, eight are in the service of the U.S. Government, four are pastors of churches, one is a lawyer, two are in the theological seminary, one is engaged in business in Atlanta, and the remaining nineteen are teaching. None are unemployed and all are engaged in occupations in which considerable education is required, and a thorough one is desirable. It ought to be added that two of these graduates are professors in colleges, one is editing a respectable weekly newspaper, besides teaching, and one of those in the service of the Government has been promoted three times upon merit alone.

Of the one hundred graduates from the normal department, six have died, seventeen are keeping house for their husbands, one is in a medical school, one is pursuing a college course, one is a mail carrier, one is still living at home, one is a hired housekeeper, and the remaining seventy-two are teaching.

With reference to putting an education to a practical use, how many schools in the United States can show a better record?

It may be said that a thorough education is not required to fit a person for a government position, such as clerks in departments, postal route agents and letter-carriers. But if such an education enables one who has it to get from sixty to one hundred and thirty dollars a month instead of seventy-five cents a day in the city whenever he can obtain a job, or ten dollars a month and “rashuns” in the country, it becomes to him an eminently and interestingly practical thing. Even in the case of this young Negro porter, the gentleman under whom he works says he could hire some one else to do the same work for half his wages, but he prefers his services at the double cost. If three years of Latin and two and a third years of Greek and the mathematics that go with them double the value of the services of a colored youth, let us challenge studies that are usually considered more practical to show a better record and be careful how we speak sneeringly of higher education.

But are occupations for the fullest use of a higher education by colored people limited? They certainly are. A white pastor may minister to a colored church, a white teacher may instruct colored children, a white physician may prescribe for a colored patient, a white attorney may counsel for a colored client, a white mechanic may employ colored laborers, a white merchant may serve colored customers, but in none of these spheres does the rule work both ways except in a few rare instances. So the services of educated colored people in the professions and in business are confined to their own race, and in that they are crowded by their white competitors. Furthermore they are not welcomed to these higher walks of life even among their own people by their neighbors of the more powerful race; but the general and almost universal public sentiment is in favor of keeping them down. More than this, many of their own race prefer the services of white lawyers, physicians, ministers, teachers, mechanics and merchants.

Under all these adverse circumstances and others that might be named, it requires great courage and perseverance in a colored youth to complete a full course of study.

But should they be encouraged or dissuaded?

If the philosophy of civilization teaches anything it teaches that Nature intended that every man should make the most of himself, and every race should attain the highest possible development; and if Christianity teaches anything it teaches the same lesson. Unless some one knows for certain that the Negro is the descendant of Ham, and that the descendants of Ham have not yet served their time in hewing wood and drawing water, why not test the virtue of this rather queer theory by trying, on a small scale, the experiment of giving Negroes the opportunity of acquiring all the education their mental capacity is capable of receiving, and looking on to see what they will do with it, and what effect it will have upon the race, and not expect that every individual will be a success or achieve high place among men?