Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama

by Walter L. Fleming

Besides the purely unselfish reasons, there were other reasons why the leading whites wanted the negro educated by southern teachers. It would be a step towards securing control over the negro race by the best native whites, who have always believed and will always believe that the negro should be controlled by them. The northern school-teachers did not have an influence for good upon the relations between the races, and thus caused the southern whites to be opposed to any education of the negro by strangers, as it was felt that to allow the negro to be educated by these people and their successors would have a permanent influence for evil.[1771]

The whites generally aided the negroes in their community to build schoolhouses or schoolhouses and churches combined. Schoolhouses were in the majority of cases built by the patrons of the schools; if rented, the rent was deducted from the school money; the state made no appropriation for building. In Dallas County forty negro schoolhouses were built with the assistance of the whites. This was usually done in the Black Belt, but was less general in the white counties. In Montgomery the prominent citizens gave money to help build a negro “college”; some paid the tuition of negro children at schools where charges were made. White men were often members of the board of colored schools. All this was before the negro was seen to be hopelessly in the clutches of the northerners.[1772]

JABEZ LAMAR MONROE CURRY.

In spite of the fact that for several years there were southern whites who taught negroes, the schools were judged by the results of the teaching of the northerners. The Freedmen’s Bureau brought discredit on negro education.[1773] The work of the various aid societies was little better. The personnel of both, to a great extent, passed to the new system, Bureau and Association teachers becoming state teachers; and in the transfer the teachers tried to secure a better standing for themselves than the native teachers had. Many of the northern teachers were undoubtedly good people, but all were touched with fanaticism and considered the white people hopelessly bad and by nature and training brutal and unjust to negroes. The negro teachers who were trained by them, both in the North and in the South, and who occupied most of the subordinate positions in the schools, had caught the spirit of the teaching. The native negro teacher, however, never quite equalled his white instructor in wrong-headedness. He persisted in seeing the actual state of affairs quite often. But the results of some of the educational work done during Reconstruction for the negro was to make many white people, especially the less friendly and the careless observers, believe that education in itself was a bad thing for the negroes. It became a proverb that “schooling ruins a negro,” and among the ignorant and more prejudiced whites this opinion is still firmly held. Not all of the northern teachers were of good character, and the others suffered for the sins of these. Almost from the first the doors of the southern whites were closed against the northern teacher, not only on account of the character of some and the objectionable teachings of many, but because they generally insisted on being personally unpleasant; and, had all of them been above reproach in character and training, their opinions in regard to social questions, which they expressed on every occasion, would have resulted in total exclusion from white society. They really cared little, perhaps, but they had a great deal to say on the subject, and made much trouble on account of it.[1774]

At first, when they wished it, some northern teachers were able to secure board with white families. After a few weeks such was not the case, and, except in the cities where the teachers could live together, they were obliged to live with the negroes. This could produce only bad results. It at once caused them to be excluded from all white society, and gained for them the contempt of their white neighbors, at the same time losing them the support and even the respect of the negroes. For the negro always insists that a white person to be respected must live up to a certain standard; otherwise, he may like, or fear, or despise, but never respect. Again, some of the doubtful characters caused scandal by their manner of life among the negroes, and in several instances male teachers were visited by the Ku Klux Klan because of their irregular conduct with negro women. One in Calhoun County was killed. Negro men who lived with white women teachers were killed, and in some cases the women were thrashed. Others were driven away.[1775] But on the whole there was little violence, the forces of social proscription at length sufficing to drive out the obnoxious teachers.[1776]

Much was said during Reconstruction days about the burning of negro schoolhouses by the whites. There were several such cases, but not as many as is supposed. In the records only one instance can be found of a school building being burned simply from opposition to negro schools. As a rule the schoolhouses (and churches also) were burned because they were the headquarters of the Union League and the general meeting places for Radical politicians, or because of the character of the teacher and the results of his or her teachings. Regular instruction of the negro had been going on for two years or more before the Ku Klux Klan began burning schoolhouses. When one was burned, the Radical leaders used the fact with much effect among the negroes; and in several instances it was practically certain that the Radical leaders, when the negroes were wavering, fired a church or a schoolhouse in order to incense them against the whites, who were charged with the deed. When a schoolhouse was burned, the negroes were invariably assisted to rebuild by the respectable whites. The burnings were condemned by all respectable persons, and also by the party leaders on account of the bad effect on political questions.[1777]

Some teachers of negro schools fleeced their black pupils and their parents unmercifully. Teachers of private schools collected tuition in advance and then left. In Montgomery, a teacher in the Swayne school notified his pupils that they must bring him fifty cents each by a certain day, and that he, in return, would give to each a photograph of himself.[1778] In Eutaw, Greene County, the Rev. J. B. F. Hill, a Northern Methodist preacher who had been expelled from the Southern Methodist Church, taught a negro school and taxed his forty little scholars twenty-five cents each to purchase a forty-cent water bucket.[1779]

In the cities where there were several negro schools, it was found difficult at first to keep the small negro in attendance in the same school. A little negro would attend a school until he discovered that he did not like the teacher or the school, and then he would go to another. A rule was made against such impromptu transfers, and then the small boy changed his name when he decided to try another school. Finally, the teacher was required to ask the other children the newcomer’s name before he was admitted.[1780]

The negro children were poorly supplied with books, and what few they did have they promptly lost or tore up to get the pictures. The attendance was very irregular. For a few days there would be a great many scholars and perhaps after that almost none, for the parents were willing to send their children when there was no work for them to do, but as soon as cotton needed chopping or picking they would stop them and put them to work.[1781] If the negroes suspected that the trustees, who were (later) Democrats, had appointed a Democratic teacher, they would not send their children to school to him, and in this they were upheld by their new leaders.[1782]