Such a judgment would be a very hasty one. Nations are not educated in twenty years. There are certain white men who naturally gravitate also to these positions; and we must remember that it is only the present generation of negroes who have been able to appropriate any share of the nobler blessings of freedom. But the colored boys and girls of Virginia are to-day vastly different from what the colored boys and girls of fifteen or twenty years ago were. The advancement and improvement is so great that it is not unreasonable to predict from it a very satisfactory future.
The negro population here are greatly in the majority, and formerly sent a member of their own color to the State Senate, but through bribery and ballot-box stuffing, a white Senator is now in Richmond. One negro here at a late election sold his vote for a barrel of sugar. After he had voted and taken his sugar home, he found it to be a barrel of sand. I learn that his neighbors turned the laugh upon him, and made him treat the whole company, which cost him five dollars.
I would not have it supposed from what I have said about the general condition of the blacks in Virginia that there are none of a higher grade. Far from it, for some of the best mechanics in the State are colored men. In Richmond and Petersburg they have stores and carry on considerable trade, both with the whites and their own race. They are doing a great deal for education; many send their sons and daughters North and West for better advantages; and they are building some of the finest churches in this State. The Second Baptist Church here pulled down a comparatively new and fine structure, last year, to replace it with a more splendid place of worship, simply because a rival church of the same denomination had surpassed them. I viewed the new edifice, and feel confident it will compare favorably with any church on the Back Bay, Boston.
The new building will seat three thousand persons, and will cost, exclusive of the ground, one hundred thousand dollars, all the brick and wood work of which is being done by colored men.
CHAPTER XXIV.
The education of the negro in the South is the most important matter that we have to deal with at present, and one that will claim precedence of all other questions for many years to come. When, soon after the breaking out of the Rebellion, schools for the freedmen were agitated in the North, and teachers dispatched from New England to go down to teach the “poor contrabands,” I went before the proper authorities in Boston, and asked that a place be given to one of our best-educated colored young ladies, who wanted to devote herself to the education of her injured race, and the offer was rejected, upon the ground that the “time for sending colored teachers had not come.” This happened nearly twenty years ago. From that moment to the present, I have watched with painful interest the little progress made by colored men and women to become instructors of their own race in the Southern States.
Under the spur of the excitement occasioned by the Proclamation of Freedom, and the great need of schools for the blacks, thousands of dollars were contributed at the North, and agents sent to Great Britain, where generosity had no bounds. Money came in from all quarters, and some of the noblest white young women gave themselves up to the work of teaching the freedmen.
During the first three or four years, this field for teachers was filled entirely by others than members of the colored race, and yet it was managed by the “New England Freedmen’s Association,” made up in part by some of our best men and women.
But many energetic, educated colored, young women and men, volunteered, and, at their own expense, went South and began private schools, and literally forced their way into the work. This was followed by a few appointments, which in every case proved that colored teachers for colored people was the great thing needed. Upon the foundations laid by these small schools, some of the most splendid educational institutions in the South have sprung up. Fisk, Howard, Atlanta, Hampton, Tennessee Central, Virginia Central, and Straight, are some of the most prominent. These are all under the control and management of the whites, and are accordingly conducted upon the principle of whites for teachers and blacks for pupils. And yet each of the above institutions are indebted to the sympathy felt for the negro, for their very existence. Some of these colleges give more encouragement to the negro to become an instructor, than others; but, none however, have risen high enough to measure the black man independent of his color.