Last May the Governor of Florida signed a bill, now well known, framed by Superintendent Sheats, of the State Educational Department, which was aimed directly at the Orange Park school. What Mr Sheats' real intentions are in regard to the colored race is but too plain. One can but perceive, if his policy is followed, that their education in Florida practically ceases. During the last session of the Florida Legislature he requested it to enact a law prohibiting any others than negroes from teaching schools for negroes, except in normal instruction in institutes and summer schools. This did not become a law, but it was not the superintendent's fault.
Last May in Lake County only nine candidates obtained certificates. There were sixty-seven schools to be supplied with teachers. This closed the schools. During last year one hundred and sixteen schools in the State, mostly colored, for the want of teachers were not held at all. A county official remarked that this examination law would probably "result in retiring nearly or quite all the colored teachers in a few years." Such a law "is a barbarous souvenir to make the country remember its bloody dealings with its black brother." "Though slavery is dead, its spirit yet lives; 'the serpent's head is crushed, but his tail still writhes, and sometimes it lashes out spitefully.'" We who are engaged in teaching in Orange Park are glad that the American Missionary Association is to test, and is already testing, the validity of this law. In contesting this law aimed at the Orange Park school, the Association takes up a question which has arisen before, but has never been settled. Theoretically, in the United States all men, whether white or black, enjoy equal civil liberties; practically, in the South, they do not. If the law is found to be unconstitutional, that will go a long way in establishing equal liberties for all.
Meanwhile the school continues as before. The school and the Association need your assistance. The great work before the Association requires both the money and the prayers of the Christian people.
ADDRESS OF MRS. HARRIS,
GRADUATE OF FISK UNIVERSITY, NASHVILLE, TENN.
Miss Emerson has invited me to say a few words to this meeting in behalf of the women of my own race. As I have sat here and listened to the helpful and sympathetic words which have been spoken, I have felt that I bore upon my heart the burden of gratitude of all the negro women in the South, certainly of all the women and girls who have been under the influence of such schools and such teachers as the American Missionary Association has supplied. I do wish that I could show you enough of the need and tell you enough about the results to encourage you in the magnificent work you are doing for womanhood, wifehood and motherhood among us. My own father, years ago, studied for a time in Fisk University before it was really Fisk University; my mother's people, her brothers and sisters, also studied in Fisk University, so they were very anxious that their children should be in the same institution. For that reason, as it meant a good deal out of the family purse to board three or four children in such an institution as that, eight or nine years ago the family moved from a little town in the northern part of Kentucky to Nashville. We were reared in a quiet Christian home and early placed in Fisk University.
I did not have an opportunity to come into personal contact with the class of colored people who make up the great mass in the South until after I had left school and gone to a little town in western Tennessee to teach. There I was placed in charge of the young women in the boarding department, and I sought to come most intimately in contact with their lives. Many of these young women came straight from the cotton plantations, and, although they could not sing and play as well as we who had been at Fisk, many of them boasted that they could handle a plow as well as a man. We undertook mission work in connection with the circle of King's Daughters which I organized among the girls, and the condition of the people as we found it in the two years I was there among the poor negroes of the city was very painful to me. Very often I came in from my visits in the poorer districts and closed the door of my room, feeling that I must leave it all to the Saviour, it seemed so discouraging and so much more than we could do. We found, among other things, that we needed to teach the women the most common and necessary habits of life, how to put the children to bed, how to feed and clothe them. Yet I would say that it is through the students of such schools as Fisk University that the Northern teachers whom you send to us can hope to reach the masses of our colored people. We get the life from our Northern teachers and then the great mass of the colored people look to us for it, for we can get into the home and into the life of the people as they cannot. And we begin to feel the responsibility; we begin to realize how much the race depends upon the mother and the sister and the wife. We begin to realize that we as negro women must be especially alive to the quickening influence of all that is noble and grand and true. We realize that we are indeed
"Living in a grand and awful time,
In an age on ages telling,
To be living is sublime."