The American Missionary — Volume 42, No. 04, April, 1888

by Various

THE EDUCATIONAL WORK IN THE SOUTH.

BY REV. W.F. SLOCUM.

We may remember at the outset that in this matter of the education of the Negro we are treating a question which must be considered, to a certain extent, ethnically. We are dealing with a people with race peculiarities: but it seems to me that it is very useless to ask whether we are training an inferior stock. There was a time when the Anglo-Saxon stock was far inferior to its present condition. We ourselves are not enough removed from heathenism and barbarism to become very pharisaical.

Here is a race with its idiosyncrasies, and its peculiar latent possibilities, which we cannot know until Christian education has unfolded them through many years. We ought not to wonder that in many respects this people is yet in its moral and intellectual infancy; but who dares say that it has not a future before it, with its statesmen, its poets, its painters, its men of letters; that it is not to have its own peculiar literature, its art, and even its own characteristic religious expression, just as marked and important as those produced by any other race? Certainly we have as much reason for believing it as that the Teutonic race of the second century should produce its Goethe and its Schiller, its Kant and its Hegel, its Luther and its Melanchthon; or that the Frank of the fifth century should develop its Victor Hugo, its Lamartine, its Madam de Stael; or that out of the barbarism, the cannibalism, the paganism of Norseman, Briton and Saxon, there should come Shakespeare, Spencer, Macaulay, Browning and Gladstone. And we may not have to wait as long; for in spite of slavery's binding chain thrice drawn round his soul, the American Negro has been absorbing during the past from a civilization which has been fitting him somewhat for the large Christian movement of the present. We are working for a people which in all probability will form at least one-eighth of our whole population; and we have the problem of lifting them as a race up into Christian enlightenment. The dark skin is growing darker. There will be less and less of intermixture of blood between the two races. Hence all study of this educational question must have in view the large moral and intellectual enterprise of dealing with a race as a race. I believe that there is nothing in all history to compare with this opportunity which has come to our very doors. Here is a nation in our land and with it every perplexity, every difficulty, every embarrassment, and also every encouragement, every hope, and every inspiration for work, that can appeal to any foreign missionary. Here is this God-given task laid at our very thresholds and with all the sentiments of patriotism and Christian devotion urging us to our large privilege.

What the race needs now is right leadership, and for many years to come we are to equip men and women religiously and intellectually, who, in home, in church, in social and business life, will be moral and social leaders. And by this power of leadership I mean something far other than those foolish conceits which have taken possession of a few who have touched only the surface of the new life that is coming to this people.

I have rather in mind leaders who shall have that moral and intellectual fitness which produces reverence, earnestness and humility, leaders who can draw their people away from their foolishness, weakness and self-consciousness into the larger life that is possible for them. Without a doubt, what is needed is true leaders, and I wish to show where these leaders are now demanded.

Before the war, the South knew nothing of the benefits of public schools, and the private school was in harmony with its social and political conceptions; but of late, and especially during the last decade, a remarkable change has taken place which is doing as much to affect the whole Southern problem as anything that has occurred there during half a century. It is a movement in the South, which, however imperfectly it has been developed as yet, has come to remain, and will ultimately affect every institution, social, political and religious, in our section of the country.

It is now being recognized in every Southern State that free government is based upon a public common-school system. It has taken two decades to incorporate this public school policy upon Southern institutions, but it has now the evidence of permanency and it is offering to Christian philanthropy an unparalleled opportunity, such as God seldom gives to any people, and one which should rally the churches as never before in support of the great enterprises of the American Missionary Association.

There has been forced upon the New South the conclusion that the best way to increase its wealth is to increase the number of educated, intelligent producers, and with this conclusion it realizes that it cannot afford to let two million colored children grow up in hopeless illiteracy. It perceives that its very institutions will be imperiled by such a condition. I have through personal interviews with leading educators in a recent trip through the South, by correspondence and by a careful examination of documents and reports from nearly all the Southern States, undertaken to find just what is being done at the present time in the public colored schools of the South.

The significance of this public school movement will be understood when it is remembered that the acceptance of the idea that the constitution of a free State rests on universal education, marks a great change in theory; that this has come against the opinions of the old Bourbon party, which never forgets, and, it is to be feared, never learns; whose political economy is represented by the expression, "keep the negro down"; which regards his enfranchisment as a political outrage and his education as a mistake and a failure; that it has risen in the face of the poverty of the South and in the midst of its most intense prejudices. For when the new educational movement began, the property and a large part of the intelligence belonged to the opponents of the new educational policy, but now, in the words of a prominent Southern gentleman: "The conviction has become very deep that in the altered condition of our people the only hope left us is to do all that can be done towards elevating the masses irrespective of race." This certainly represents a tremendous transformation. Without stopping to trace the causes that produced it, or even the large place the American Missionary Association work has in it, let me simply quote from a Southern Christian man, whose sympathies are full of prejudice against the North, but who has wakened with the awakening of the New South.