My Southern Home: Or, the South and Its People

by William Wells Brown

At Petersburg I found a large, fine building for public schools for colored youth; the principal, a white man, with six assistants, but not one colored teacher amongst them. Yet Petersburg has turned out some most excellent colored teachers, two of whom I met at Suffolk, with small schools. These young ladies had graduated with honors at one of our best institutions, and yet could not obtain a position as teacher in a public school, where the pupils were only their own race.

At Nashville, the School Board was still more unjust, for they employed teachers who would not allow their colored scholars to recognize them on the streets, and for doing which, the children were reprimanded, and the action of the teachers approved by the Board of Education.

It is generally known that all the white teachers in our colored public schools feel themselves above their work; and the fewest number have any communication whatever with their pupils outside the school-room. Upon receiving their appointments and taking charge of their schools some of them have been known to announce to their pupils that under no circumstances were they to recognize or speak to them on the streets. It is very evident that these people have no heart in the work they are doing, and simply from day to day go through the mechanical form of teaching our children for the pittance they receive as a salary. While teachers who have no interest in the children they instruct, except for the salary they get, are employed in the public schools and in the Freedman’s Colleges, hundreds of colored men and women, who are able to stand the most rigid examination, are idle, or occupying places far beneath what they deserve.

It is to be expected that the public schools will, to a greater or less extent, be governed by the political predilections of the parties in power; but we ought to look for better things from Fisk, Hampton, Howard, Atlanta, Tennessee Central and Virginia Central, whose walls sprung up by money raised from appeals made for negro education.

There are, however, other educational institutions of which I have not made mention, and which deserve the patronage of the benevolent everywhere. These are: Wilberforce, Berea, Payne Institute, in South Carolina, Waco College, in Texas, and Storer College, at Harper’s Ferry.

Wilberforce is well known, and is doing a grand work. It has turned out some of the best of our scholars,—men whose labors for the elevation of their race cannot be too highly commended.

Storer College, at Harper’s Ferry, looks down upon the ruins of “John Brown’s Fort.” In the ages to come, Harper’s Ferry will be sought out by the traveller from other lands. Here at the confluence of the Potomac and the Shenandoah Rivers, on a point just opposite the gap through which the united streams pass the Blue Ridge, on their course toward the ocean, stands the romantic town, and a little above it, on a beautiful eminence, is Storer, an institution, and of whose officers I cannot speak too highly.

I witnessed, with intense interest, the earnest efforts of these good men and women, in their glorious work of the elevation of my race. And while the benevolent of the North are giving of their abundance, I would earnestly beg them not to forget Storer College, at Harper’s Ferry.

The other two, of which I have made mention, are less known, but their students are numerous and well trained. Both these schools are in the South, and both are owned and managed by colored men, free from the supposed necessity of having white men to do their thinking, and therein ought to receive the special countenance of all who believe in giving the colored people a chance to paddle their own canoe.

I failed, however, to find schools for another part of our people, which appear to be much needed. For many years in the olden time the South was noted for its beautiful Quadroon women. Bottles of ink, and reams of paper, have been used to portray the “finely-cut and well-moulded features,” the “silken curls,” the “dark and brilliant eyes,” the “splendid forms,” the “fascinating smiles,” and “accomplished manners” of these impassioned and voluptuous daughters of the two races,—the unlawful product of the crime of human bondage. When we take into consideration the fact that no safeguard was ever thrown around virtue, and no inducement held out to slave-women to be pure and chaste, we will not be surprised when told that immorality pervaded the domestic circle in the cities and towns of the South to an extent unknown in the Northern States. Many a planter’s wife has dragged out a miserable existence, with an aching heart, at seeing her place in the husband’s affections usurped by the unadorned beauty and captivating smiles of her waiting-maid. Indeed, the greater portion of the colored women, in the days of slavery, had no greater aspiration than that of becoming the finely-dressed mistress of some white man. Although freedom has brought about a new order of things, and our colored women are making rapid strides to rise above the dark scenes of the past, yet the want of protection to our people since the old-time whites have regained power, places a large number of the colored young women of the cities and towns at the mercy of bad colored men, or worse white men. To save these from destruction, institutions ought to be established in every large city.