After a far too brief visit, I left Tuskegee with the liveliest admiration for its methods and results. |A Reflection and a Query.| It is beyond all question a radiating centre of materially helpful and morally elevating influences. Mr. Washington is assuredly doing a great and an indispensable work for his race; nor is he doing it in any such spirit of contempt for academic and literary culture as his critics attribute to him.
But two reflections occurred to me as I returned through the red twilight to Montgomery. The first was obvious enough—namely, that the men and women turned out by such an institution as Tuskegee cannot possibly be taken as representing the average of negro capacity. They are a select company before they go there—or, rather, in the very fact of their going there. They are impelled by individual and exceptional intelligence, thirst for knowledge, desire for betterment. Some, it is true, are sent by their parents, very much as white boys are sent to school or college; but whereas the white boy’s parents are merely following a social tradition, the black boy’s parents are taking a clear step in advance, and showing not only ambition but (in all probability) a good deal of self-denial. Almost every one, in short, who enrols himself at Tuskegee is animated from the outset by some measure of Mr. Washington’s own spirit; and not a few show, in the pursuit of knowledge, something of the heroism which marked his early career.
My second reflection took the form of a query. I did not doubt for a moment that Mr. Washington’s work was wise and salutary; but I wondered whether the material and moral uplifting of the negro was going to bring peace—or a sword. In other words, do the essential and fundamental difficulties of the situation really lie in the defects of the negro race? May not the development of its qualities merely create a new form of friction? And far beneath the qualities and defects of either race, may there not lie deep-rooted instincts which no “Atlanta Compromise” will bring into harmony?
Tuskegee marks an inevitable stage of the conflict; but is it the beginning of the end? I wonder.
[33]. It is said that in the State of Georgia the negroes pay only one-fifteenth of the taxes, but receive about one-third of the State appropriation for public schools. E. G. Murphy: “The Present South,” p. 39.
[34]. Among the native (as opposed to foreign-born) white population of the Southern States, there were in 1900 about 11 per cent. of illiterates of ten years old and upwards, as against a percentage of 4·6 for the whole United States. But this 11 per cent. showed a great improvement during twenty years; for in 1880 there were over 20 per cent. of illiterates. Among the coloured population of the same States, the illiterates in 1900 numbered about 48 per cent., as against 75 per cent. in 1880. It must be remembered that nearly 85 per cent. of the people of the South live in sparsely populated rural districts, where it is difficult for the schoolmaster to reach the children or the children the schoolmaster. In the whole United States, the annual expenditure per head of the pupils in average attendance at public schools is over $21, whereas in Alabama and the Carolinas it is only $4·50; yet in these States 50 per cent. of the whole State revenues for general purposes is appropriated to public education. See an admirable paper in “The Present South,” by Edgar Gardner Murphy. At the close of the war, says Mr. Murphy, “the South—defeated, impoverished, desolate—was forced to assume the task of providing for the education of two populations out of the poverty of one.”
[35]. This is so in Atlanta, according to Mr. Stannard Baker. I cannot resist quoting from Mr. Baker’s book a letter written by “a well-to-do white citizen” to a South Carolina newspaper, apologizing for an act of courtesy to a negro school—
“I had left my place of business here on a business trip a few miles below; on returning I came by the above-mentioned school (the Prince Institute, coloured), and was held up by the teacher and begged to make a few remarks to the children. Very reluctantly I did so, not thinking that publicity would be given to it, or that I was doing anything that would offend any one. I wish to say here and now that I am heartily sorry for what I did, and I hope after this humble confession and expression of regret that all whom I have offended will forgive me.”
Was there ever a more abject document?