Children's Children.
During the first decade, and in regularly decreasing ratio since, the most difficult problem has been how to provide competent teachers for the instruction of a race crowding and hungry for knowledge. Fortunately, perhaps, in the long view, the teaching of colored youth has never, from the first, in the South, been considered a popular calling, and so the work has in the main devolved upon the colored people themselves, a work to which, for years, from almost entire lack of opportunity for training, they could bring but the scantiest preparation and even less experience.
No more interesting or suggestive study could be undertaken than that, of tracing the progress of the colored teachers of a race so recently emancipated, as they have advanced in literary, mental and moral fitness for a work thrust upon them by the exigencies of the situation.
Reference to the tables of statistics compiled by the Commissioner of Education for 1895-6 shows how well the race is meeting the demand for teachers in its schools, everywhere in the South kept separate from the public schools for white children. For the year above mentioned there were employed 26,499 colored teachers, who had under their care 1,429,713 pupils. For the same year there were in the various Normal Schools for colored people 4,672 students, 966 of whom were graduated; 826 were graduated from high schools and 161 from college courses, making in all 1,953 graduates from courses of study considered sufficient in extent to fit more or less thoroughly for the work of teaching; not to mention the even greater numbers who engage in teaching before having completed any higher course of training. So much as to mere numbers. Now, in general, as to the advancement being made by schools of this class. Without exception, the reports of school officers give credit for constantly increasing excellency and proficiency of both schools and teachers, and certain it is, that the public appreciation and esteem is shown by an increasing patronage and a more substantial provision for the improvement and support of the schools.
In particular, while it is not always safe to draw sweeping conclusions from facts gathered within a limited area of observation, it may yet be confidently asserted, that what is true of the schools and teachers of any fairly representative city or community in the South, is likely to be measurably true wherever similar conditions and opportunities prevail. My own direct experience and observation have had to do with the colored schools and teachers of a single city of sixty to eighty thousand people, nearly one-half colored, and the counties and towns adjacent. These I have followed very closely for over twenty-five years. I can testify positively that there has been a steady raising of the standards of qualifications and proficiency with regard both to intellectual and moral attainments among the teachers of colored schools, and in this I shall be borne out by the testimony of superintendents and school officers, as well as by all observing people of these communities. In many cases teachers and schools of this class have attained an enviable reputation and are often mentioned as models of excellence in many ways.
The process of growth here, as elsewhere, has been one of the "survival of the fittest," the ill-trained, inefficient teachers gradually giving place to the better qualified, more capable class. The initial influence in this line of succession dates back but little more than thirty years, to the founding of "mission" schools at centres of influence throughout the South; "a handful of corn on the top of the mountain" from which has come the wide-spreading harvests of the present. It is a statement well within the facts that nine out of ten of the colored schools of all grades in the South are taught by those who had their training in these mission schools, or else by teachers who owe their education to those of their own race who were so trained. No more powerful or far-reaching influence was ever set in operation than that which had its origin in the cabin where taught the first humble missionary among the people freed by the war. The whole power and potency of all that has followed was represented in that first despised and humble effort.
From that day to this seems a long call. The passage has been made almost unobserved, like the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. It now not unfrequently happens that a colored public school stands accredited in a community with excellencies to distinguish it as an example worthy of imitation. Such is the colored high school in the city of my direct observation, in the two respects of self-control and government of its pupils, and in its movement toward a collection of miscellaneous books for a school library—excellencies not ascribed, so far as I know, in anything like the same measure to any other public school. It is perhaps needless to add that the principal of this school, as well as the teachers of a large percentage of the other best schools of the city and county, have had their training in one of the "mission" normal schools above mentioned.
To remove or weaken these centres of power would be to strike the most deadly blow at the education of the colored people. It would be the removal of so many nerve centres out from which still flow the stimuli needful to keep in active operation and growing power the entire system.
John F. Slater and Daniel Hand and a hundred other individual benefactors have seen this vital fact and have done what they could to build up and strengthen such influences. The church will make a great mistake if it ignores this fact or relaxes its efforts in the support of the institutions so wisely planned and so greatly efficient for good in the past.