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himself. If color has anything to do with intellect, it should appear when the two colors or races are brought into contact and competition. The best source of information, therefore, is a study of the negro at school. We have seen, however, that the common-school teacher is now ruled out of court as an interested party. To find white teachers we must go to the colleges. I have recently asked presidents of fifteen colleges these three questions: (1) About what proportion of your pupils are full-blooded negroes? (2) What difference, if any, have you perceived in the average ability of full-blooded negroes as compared with those of mixed blood? (3) What difference, if any, is manifest between your pupils as a whole in intellectual ability and those of white schools under similar conditions? The replies to these questions are before me. The substance of them is this: Not more than one-fifth of all the pupils are full-blooded negroes. The rest are of all degrees from quadroon to blonde. In the second place, there is no difference of mental ability clearly traceable among them; if there be any, it is in favor of the full-blooded negro. Thirdly, as compared white pupils, there is no perceptible difference, when their environments are taken into account. Of course, there is some difficulty in measuring the force of environments. This consensus of opinion among Southern educators coincides with my own observations. Having been a teacher for over thirty years, over twenty of which were spent in theological schools in the North and in Europe, I have now spent ten years in the South, and in daily contact with so-called negro pupils, and I can truly say that I find no appreciable difference in original capacity. If they have come from ignorant districts and dark surroundings, their vocabulary is limited, and their first exhibitions of intelligence are inferior to those who come from cultivated homes, though often their greater eagerness to learn counterbalances this disability. We must not, however, be misled by an assumption that the American negro is merely a transplanted savage. Two centuries of life in the midst of the foremost civilization of the world is a long way from savagery. There were intelligent Christian men and women in daily contact with the American bondsmen; they were able Christian ministers, from whose lips they received their doctrine. Though schools were forbidden, there were lovely Christian daughters, white angels, who defied the law in their loving sympathy for the lowly. Life in many a Southern family was an education inferior only to that of their master's children. Only by the intellectual brightness of Southern people, and the Christian character which illuminated Southern homes, can we account for the mental development of thousands of negroes, as they came out of the war too old to come into our schools, but constituting, nevertheless, the present influential leaders of the people.

And it must be in part the memories of those refining influences which are blossoming out all over the South in the neat, attractive homes which these people are building for themselves. The Southern negroes are not all living in one-room cabins, of which we have heard much recently. There are better homes than mine owned by negroes in New Orleans. There are plenty of ex-slaves in Louisiana who are richer than their former masters. There are over 300,000 homes and farms owned by negroes in the South without encumbrance. Six years ago Southern negroes were paying taxes on nearly $300,000,000. The white Baptists of the South had a church property worth $18,000,000, the accumulation of two hundred years. The negro Baptists at the same date (twenty-six years out of slavery) had acquired a church property of over nine millions. There must have been an ante bellum civilization behind all this.

Said Rev. A. D. Mayo, at the Mohonk Conference in 1890: "It has never been realized by the loyal North what is evident to every intelligent Southern man, what a prodigious change had been wrought in this people during its years of bondage, and how, without the schooling of this era, the subsequent elevation of the emancipated slave to a full American citizenship would have been an impossibility. In that condition he learned the three great elements of civilization more speedily than they were ever learned before. He learned to work, he acquired the language and adopted the religion of the most progressive of peoples. Gifted with a marvelous aptitude for such schooling, he was found in 1865 farther out of the woods of barbarism than any other people at the end of a thousand years."

The scholastic education of the negro began in carnest only about twenty years ago, 1876 being the date of the complete inauguration of the public school system of the South. This is too short for us to expect great results. The educated generation are not yet fairly out of school, but there have already appeared some isolated cases which show signs of promise. In the class of 1888 at Harvard University were two negroes, one of whom was selected by the faculty to represent his class on commencement day, as being the foremost scholar among his 250 classmates; the other was elected by the class for the highest honor in their gift by being made their orator on class day. The circumstance reflects honor not merely on him, but on the democratic spirit of our oldest university, which recognized merit without regard to color. Boston University has also yielded first honors to a negro. A negro professor of theology at Straight University at New Orleans is a graduate of Vermont University,

who afterwards took the prize for traveling scholarship from Yale Theological Seminary, and spent a year in Germany upon it. Professor Bowen, of the Gammon Theological Seminary, delivered at the Atlanta Exposition opening an address which in classic finish will bear comparison with the best orations of Edward Everett. The principal of one of our auxiliaries, Mr. E. N. Smith, a perfect gentleman and an excellent teacher, is a full-blooded negro, a graduate from Lincoln University and Newton Theological Institution, and pronounced by Dr. Hovey one of the best scholars that have been educated there.

Said President Merrill E. Gates, of Amherst College (The Independent, Dec. 5, 1895): "My observation leads me to believe that the proportion of truly successful men, tried by the highest standards of success, among the colored men who study in our Northern colleges, is quite as great as is the proportion of successful men among the whites who have the same, or equally good, opportunities for an education."

We might multiply examples-they are not necessary. There seems to be nothing better established than the essential manhood of the negro. Intelligent men of the South do not question it. Their recent cordial response to our proposal for cooperation is a good illustration of this.

There are two points of importance to which I wish to call your attention before leaving this subject-one relates to the continued use of our colleges in the South for giving primary instruction, the other is the relation of industrial training to the education of the negro.

We have seen that the public schools of the South are fairly equal in quality for both races, and that negro schools are taught by negro teachers. There is a truth beyond that. In the present deficiency of provision for common-school instruction, the colored people are ready and willing, with proper encouragement, to supplement these with schools supported by themselves. There are twelve such institutions already established in Louisiana. Now, if this be so-if the negro, with the help of the State, is providing his own primary education, and doing it successfully, what propriety is there in our continuing to furnish college endowments and employ college teachers to do primary work? It is a first principle of true beneficence to do nothing for any man which he can be led to do for himself. Certainly we ought not in any way by rivalry to discourage the work of self-education. It has been well said by the Hon. J. L. M. Curry: "An educational charity would sadly fail of its purpose if the least impediment were placed in the path of the free school. In so far as these institutions not under State control impair the efficiency of or divert attendance from the public schools, they are mischievous, for the great mass of children, white and black, must, more in the future than at present, depend almost exclusively upon the State schools for the common branches of education."

In the United States statistics of 1893 and 1894 it appears that in the 158 private schools designed for the secondary and higher education of colored people in the South, there were 18,595 primary pupils, while only 13,262 belong to the secondary or high-school class, and 940 were in collegiate classes. As these schools of higher education are situated for the most part in larger towns and cities, where the best provision for public schools is usually made, it is fair to presume that those 18,000 pupils are drawn from the free schools by the attractive name of "college" or "university," which veils their low grade of standing, and that these learned faculties of 1,320 professors must be largely engaged in rudimentary instruction. Would it not be far better for these pupils to set before them the prize of admission to the college, at least as far as the normal grade, as a motive for excellence in the common schools, and would it not be better for the professors to be allowed to confine their work of instruction to those higher branches for which they are specially fitted?

Of course, the change of policy here recommended would considerably diminish the show of numbers in our so-called colleges, but it would greatly improve the efficiency and thoroughness of their legitimate work, and directly help and stimulate the free schools to better attainment. Said Commissioner Harris, in his discussion of the education of the negro in the Atlantic Monthly for June, 1892: "It is clear from the above consideration that money expended for the secondary and higher education of the negro accomplishes far more for him. It is seed sown where it brings forth an hundred fold, because each one of the pupils of these higher institutions is a center of diffusion of superior methods and refining influences among an imitative and impressible race. State and national aid, as well as private bequests, should take this direction first. There should be no gift or bequest for common er elementary instruction. This should be left to the common schools, and all outside aid should be concentrated on the secondary and higher instruction."

There is an important reason for this wise counsel of Dr. Harris which now presses itself upon our attention. We have reached a crisis in the progress of negro education. The work of the common school now carried on by the people themselves has created all over the South a new generation of educated youth, wiser than their parents, wiser than their ministers, approaching manhood and womanhood, ready soon to take control of affairs and of public sentiment. They already know the

difference between learning and ignorance, between religion and superstition. They have no knowledge of slavery. They are a new generation of free-born people. Their improvement is phenomenal, but no corresponding improvement has come to the ministry. That the ministry has greatly improved during this twenty years no one who has visited their churches or attended their associations can doubt. Considering their advantages, they are a very able body of men. Some of them rank among the best preachers of the South. Many of the younger of them have had more or less training in our colleges. The Richmond, Atlanta, and Gammon theological seminaries have sent out a small quota. But as yet not a thousand in all the South have had even a college education. Nearly the whole educational machinery thus far has been occupied in supplying the great demand for teachers, and the whole force of educated talent has been drawn to the schools.

The fact mentioned a while since that less than 1,000 in the whole South are at this moment engaged in collegiate study is to be accounted for not by want of capacity for higher studies, but for want of motive. Education costs them a great deal. Nearly every one earns every dollar which he pays for his learning. With most it has been a great struggle to reach the point of normal graduation, and then the best salary for teaching at present available is open to them. Every influence urges them to stop here and reap the fruits of their hard-earned attainment. Moreover, the influences around them all tend to discourage higher attainment. Some have brothers and sisters to educate, and must stay at home to earn the money. Others have mothers and fathers who are struggling with poverty and debt, and who now claim their services to help them out. All their neighbors say, "You know enough now, since you have been teaching the whole neighborhood." To break away from all this requires higher incentive and a stronger pressure than comes to most of them. Meanwhile, the old people and their ministers go on in the ruts of ignorance and superstition. The uneducated ministers (however good and gifted with natural ability) are unable to keep pace with the young people in intelligence or to retain their influence over them. A breach is growing. A moral drift away from religion is beginning to manifest itself. There is danger ahead for which no adequate provision is in sight. What shall that provision be? Ministers' institutes? Some helpful suggestions can be doubtless made to the existing ministry by their educated white brethren. But he must have great faith in the receptive pow ers of the average negro who supposes that a mature man can be transformed from ignorance to erudition by a week or ten days annually of lecturing. Shall we take them into our colleges? It is too late. They are too old to begin a course of study. They are ashamed to expose their ignorance. Many have families. Gladly as we would help them in their conscious need, and deeply as our hearts are stirred by their struggle, the problem is insoluble in that direction. The only hope for a ministry which will really lead and properly teach the next generation of the colored race is through the legitimate methods of education.

How shall this be reached? How shall we bridge this chasm between an educated people and an ignorant ministry? To meet this crisis wisdom and generalship are needful. It is our duty as their friends to point out the danger and to provide the remedy. The motive which is lacking should be somehow supplied. Six hundred years ago illiteracy in England well-nigh approached that of the negro American of to-day. It is said that only five of the twenty-five barons who signed the Magna Charta could write their names. Her Christian philanthropists saw the evil, and established prizes, denominated "bursaries," "scholarships," and "fellowships," to stimulate high attainments in study. The accumulation of these prizes by the wise forecast of our English ancestors really constitutes the basis of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

The duty of the hour for us toward our Southern brethren is not only to endow the colleges which we have established, but to offer to those who by their own exertions have attained the rank of college students a prize sufficient to enable and stimulate them to go on to the full stature of intellectual manhood. Here is an opportunity for the use of consecrated wealth. Who will avail himself of it, as Daniel Hand has done for the American Missionary Association?

What shall we say, now, about the relation of industrial training to our problem? Industrial training is good and useful to some persons, if they can afford time to take it. But in its application to the negro several facts should he clearly understood: 1. It appears not to be generally known in the North that in the South all trades and occupations are open to the negro, and always have been. Before the war slaves were taught mechanics' arts, because they thereby became more profitable to their masters. And now every village has its negro mechanics, who are patronized both by white and colored employers, and any who wish to learn the trade can do so.

2. It is a mistake to suppose that industrial education can be wisely applied to the beginnings of school life. Said the Rev. A. D. Mayo, than whom no man in America is better acquainted with the condition and wants of the South: "There are two specious, un-American notions now masquerading under the taking phrase, “industrial

education:" First, that it is possible or desirable to train large bodies of youth to superior industrial skill without a basis of sound elementary education. You can not polish a brickbat, and you can not make a good workman of a plantation negro or a white ignoramus until you first wake up his mind, and give him the mental discipline and knowledge that comes from a good school;

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second, that it is possible or desirable to train masses of American children on the European idea that the child will follow the calling of his father. Class education has no place in the order of society, and the American people will never accept it in any form. The industrial training needed in the South must be obtained by the establishment of special schools of improved housekeeping for girls, with mechanical trainimg for such boys as desire it. And this training should be given impartially to both races, without regard to the thousand and one theories of what the colored man can not do."

3. Industrial training is expensive of time and money, as compared with its results as a civilizer. When you have trained one student you have simply fitted one man to earn an ordinary living. When you have given a college education to a man with brains you have sent forth an instrumentality that will affect hundreds or thousands. Said Chauncey M. Depew, in his address at the tenth convention of the University of Chicago, in April, 1895: "I acknowledge the position and the usefulness of the business college, the manual training school, the technological institute, the scientific school, and the schools of mines, medicine, law, and theology. They are of infinite importance to the youth who has not the money, the time, or the opportunity to secure a liberal education. They are of equal benefit to the college graduate who has had a liberal education in training him for his selected pursuit. But the theorists, or rather the practical men who are the architects of their own fortunes, and who are proclaiming on every occasion that a liberal education is a waste of time for a business man, and that the boy who starts early and is trained only for his one pursuit is destined for a larger success, are doing infinite harm to the ambitious youth of this country.

"The college, in its four years of discipline, training, teaching, and development, makes the boy the man. His Latin and his Greek, his rhetoric and his logic, his science and his philosophy, his mathematics and his history, have little or nothing to do with law or medicine or theology, and still less to do with manufacturing, or mining, or storekeeping, or stocks, or grain, or provisions. But they have given to the youth, when he has graduated, the command of that superb intelligence with which God has endowed him, by which, for the purpose of a living or a fortune, he grasps his profession or his business and speedily overtakes the boy who, abandoning college opportunities, gave his narrow life to the narrowing pursuit of the one thing by which he expected to earn a living. The college-bred man has an equal opportunity for bread and butter, but beyond that he becomes a citizen of commanding influence and a leader in every community where he settles."

4. Industrial training is liable to divert attention from the real aim and end of education, which is manhood. The young scholar can not serve two masters. It requires all the energy there is in a boy to nerve him to the high resolve that in spite of all difficulties he will patiently discipline himself until he becomes a man. This is one reason why our northern colleges, which in many cases began as manual-labor schools, have abandoned it. Ought we to insist on "putting a yoke upon the necks" of our brethren in black "which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear?" Finally, experience seems to show that industrial education does not educate, oven in trades.

In the report of the Bureau of Education for 1889-90 is a full statistical table of the lines of business in which the graduates of 17 colored schools are employed. In all these schools industrial instruction is given, such as carpentry, tinning, painting, whip making, plastering, shoemaking, tailoring, blacksmithing, farming, gardening, etc. Out of 1,243 graduates of these schools there are found to be only 12 farmers, 2 mechanics, 1 carpenter. The names of the universities are Allen (S. C.); Atlanta (Ga.); Berea (Ky.); Central Tennessee (Tenn.); Claflin (S. C.); Fiske (Tenn.); Knoxville (Tenn.); Livingstone (N. C.); New Orleans (La.); Paul Quinn (Tex.); Philander Smith (Ark.); Roger Williams (Tenn.); Rust (Miss.); Southern, New Orleans, La.; Straight, New Orleans, La.; Tuskegee (Ala.); Wilberforce (Ohio).

The employments of the graduates were: Teachers, 693; ministers, 117; physicians, 163; lawyers, 116; college professors, 27; editors, 5; merchants, 15; farmers, 12; carpenter, 1; United States Government service, 36; druggists, 5; dentists, 14; bookkeepers, 2; printers, 2; mechanics, 2; butchers, 3; other pursuits, 30.

The money appropriated to these schools by the Slater fund from 1884 to 1894 was $139,981.78.

CHAPTER XXXII.

THE SLATER FUND AND THE EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO. Compiled from Occasional Papers published by the trustees of the John F. Slater fund, Nos. 1 to 6.']

Contents.-I. Difficulties, complications, and limitations connected with the education of the negro. II. Education of the negroes since 1860. III. Occupations of the negroes. IV. A statistical sketch of the negroes in the United States. V. Memorial sketches of John F. Slater. VI. Documents relating to the origin and work of the Slater trustees: (a) Charter from the State of New York; (b) letter of the founder; (c) letter of the trustees accepting the gift; (d) the thanks of Congress; (e) by-laws; (f) members of the board; (g) remarks of President Hayes on the death of Mr. Slater.

I.

DIFFICULTIES, COMPLICATIONS, AND LIMITATIONS CONNECTED WITH THE EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO.

[By J. L. M. Curry, LL. D., secretary of the trustees of the John F. Slater fund.] Civilization certainly, Christianity probably, has encountered no problem which surpasses in magnitute or complexity the negro problem. For its solution political remedies, very drastic, have been tried, but have failed utterly. Educational agencies have been very beneficial as a stimulus to self-government and are increasingly hopeful and worthy of wider application, but they do not cure social diseases, moral ills. Much has been written of evolution of man, of human society, and history shows marvelous progress in some races, in some countries, in the bettering of habits and institutions, but this progress is not found, in any equal degree, in the negro race in his native land. What has occurred in the United States has been from external causes. Usually human development has come from voluntary energy, from self-evolved organizations of higher and higher efficiency, from conditions which are principally the handiwork of man himself. With the negro, whatever progress has marked his life as a race in this country has come from without. The great ethical and political revolutions of enlightened nations, through the efforts of successive generations, have not been seen in his history.

When, on March 4, 1882, our large-hearted and broadminded founder established this trust, he had a noble end in view. For near thirteen years the trustees have kept the object steadily before them, with varying results. Expectations have not always been realized. If any want of highest success has attended our efforts, this is not an uncompanioned experience. As was to have been foreseen, in working out a novel and great problem, difficulties have arisen. Some are inherent and pertain to the education of the negro, however, and by whomsoever undertaken, and some are peculiar to the trust. Some are remedial. In this, as, in all other experiments, it is better to ascertain and comprehend the difficulties so as to adopt and adjust the proper measures for displacing or overcoming them. A general needs to

1 Announcement to the series.-The trustees of the John F. Slater fund propose to publish from time to time papers that relate to the education of the colored race. These papers are designed to furnish information to those who are concerned in the administration of schools, and also to those who by their official stations are called upon to act or to advise in respect to the care of such institutions. The trustees believe that the experimental period in the education of the blacks is drawing to a close. Certain principles that were doubted thirty years ago now appear to be generally recognized as sound. In the next thirty years better systems will undoubtedly prevail, and the aid of the separate States is likely to be more and more freely bestowed. There will also be abundant room for continued generosity on the part of individuals and associations. It is to encourage and assist the workers and the thinkers that these papers will be published.

Each paper will be the utterance of the writer whose name is attached to it, the trustees disclaiming in advance all responsibility for the statement of facts and opinions.

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