[1248] S. G. Greene, president of the association.
[1249] President Hill of Harvard College.
[1250] Reports, Proceedings, and Lectures of the National Teachers’ Association, 1865 to 1880; Reports of the Freedmen’s Aid Societies of the Methodist Episcopal Church. For results of the mistaken teachings of the radical instructors, see Page’s article on “Lynching” in the North American Review, Jan., 1904.
[1251] Miss Alice M. Bacon, in the Slater Fund Trustees, Occasional Papers, No. 7, p. 6. Armstrong, at Hampton, Va., was a shining exception to the kind of teachers described above.
[1252] The Reconstruction government was now in power. There were, at this time, thirty-one Bureau schools at thirty-one points in the state.
[1253] Freedmen’s Bureau Reports, 1867-1870.
[1254] Atlantic Monthly, March, 1901.
[1255] Sir George Campbell, “White and Black,” pp. 131, 383; Thomas, “The American Negro,” p. 240; Washington, “The Future of the American Negro,” pp. 25-27, 55; DeBow’s Review, 1866; Slater Fund Trustees, Occasional Papers, No. 7. Washington tells of the craze for the education in Greek, Latin, and theology. This education would make them the equal of the whites, they thought, and would free them from manual labor, and above all fit them for office-holding. Nearly all became teachers, preachers, and politicians. “Up from Slavery,” pp. 30, 80, 81; “Future of the American Negro,” p. 49.
[1256] From the surrender of the Confederate armies, to his death in 1903, Dr. Curry was a stanch believer in the work for negro education. No other man knew the whole question so thoroughly as he. And he had the advantage of a close acquaintance with the negro from his early childhood. His observations as to the effects of alien efforts to educate the black will be found in the Slater Fund Occasional Papers, and in an address delivered before the Montgomery Conference in 1900. See also [Ch. XIV].
[1257] I have talked with many who uniformly assert that they were unable to conform to the Bureau regulations. It was better to let land remain uncultivated. Wherever possible no attention was paid to the rules. The negro laborers themselves have no recollections of any real assistance in labor matters received from the Bureau. They remember it rather as an obstruction to laboring freely.