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 RTY YEARS 
 
 A Review of the Work of 
 
 Benedict College, Columbia, S.C. 
 
 By A. C OSBORN, D. D. 
 
 N any great enterprise the question 
 may be justly asked: What are 
 the results? Have the methods 
 adopted been practical? Has the 
 administration been wise? What 
 has been actually accomplished? 
 
 The imperative demand for educational 
 mission work for the emancipated slaves 
 as they came suddenly out of bondage, 
 with limitations and disabilities in every 
 direction, appealed powerfully to the 
 Christian world, Missionary Societies re- 
 sponded. Men and women, moved by 
 Christian sympathy, took up the work. 
 From that beginning the work has gone 
 on enlarging and with enlarged expendi- 
 tures, up to this present time. 
 
 Properties have been bought, acade- 
 mies, colleges, and universities have been 
 established and maintained. 
 
 The Societies spent large money and 
 sent many men upon the fields. The 
 fields were ripe for the harvest. What 
 has the harvest been? 
 
 Instead of dealing in generalties, 
 which, by their largeness often bewilder 
 and confuse, because not fully grasped, 
 let us take one concrete illustration: the 
 Benedict College, at Columbia, South 
 Carolina. Other schools of this Society, 
 as those at Richmond, at Raleigh, and at 
 Atlanta, may show larger results. Here 
 is a school that has been less in the 
 public eye. 
 
Has it accomplished a work that has 
 demonstrated the wisdom of its found- 
 ing, and justified the expenditure for^its 
 support? ^ ' ^ V^^IS) \ 
 
 A SPECIFIC CASE. \>> ^^^ 
 
 The school was opened as a mission in 
 1871. The first students were few in 
 number. More than half were men and 
 women past middle age. Some were 
 preachers who came to learn to read. 
 Humble indeed were the beginnings. 
 
 But the school, as Benedict Institute, 
 grew. It had so grown that in 1894, . 
 twenty-three years after its founding, it 
 was incorporated as Benedict College, 
 with full college powers. It is co-educa- 
 tional. It is not for the teaching of^ 
 trades. Like the colleges for the white 
 youth, its work is the intellectual, the 
 moral, and the religious culture of its 
 students. 
 
 In OctX)ber, 1895, the speaker became 
 identified with it. In the sixteen years 
 that followed, 3133 students were ad- 
 mitted to that college. Of these 444 
 completed required courses of study and 
 went out as graduates, 308 of them with 
 college degrees. 
 
 The ultimate end of all the work of a 
 Missionary Society is the extension of 
 the Redeemer's kingdom. The Society's 
 school mission work has been so pros- 
 ecuted as to look not to those gathered 
 for their personal culture only as the 
 end sought, but to the extension of the 
 Lord's kingdom through them.* They 
 were educated, qualified, ^nd sent out to 
 organize churches, to be pastors of 
 churches, to build church edifices, and to 
 secure full pastoral support with no fi- 
 nancial help except as they developed it 
 on their respective fields. 
 
 WHERE THE STUDENTS GO. 
 
 To be specific, graduates of this one 
 
 .^mm r- 
 
mission school are pastors of Baptist 
 Churches in South Carolina in the fol- 
 lowing cities and larger towns: In 
 Charleston, Columbia, Beaufort, Flor- 
 ence,' Anderson, Sumter, Orangeburg, 
 Darlington, Union, Spartanburg, Green- 
 ville, Georgetown, Barnwell, Camden, 
 Winnsboro, Laurens, Greenwood, Clin- 
 ton, Belton, Hartsville, Society Hill, 
 V'erdery, Blairs, Hopkins, Blackstock, 
 Greeleyville, Dovesville, Seneca, and 
 Bamberg.' In some of these cities there 
 are two, three, or four churches, whose 
 pastors are graduates of the college. 
 
 In other States, graduates of the col- 
 lege, are pastors in New York City, 
 Chester, Pa., Jenkintown, Pa., Kansas 
 City, Mo., Knoxville, Tenn., Houston, 
 Texas, Elberton, Ga., Jacksonville, Fla., 
 Montgomery, Ala., and Wilmington, 
 N. C. 
 FORMER GRADUATES. 
 
 These, all, are graduates. There is, 
 however, a much larger number of form- 
 er students that did not graduate, who 
 are pastors of churches. There is not in 
 South Carolina a city, or a county, and 
 not many large Negro communities, in 
 which there is not a Baptist pastor form- 
 erly a student in Benedict College. Many 
 of these pastors organized the churches 
 where they are preaching, built the 
 houses in wh'ch they are worshipping, 
 and none have looked to other sources to 
 supplement their salaries. Furthermore, 
 of the graduates of Benedict, two are 
 Presidents — ohe, of a college, and one of 
 a university. Fifteen are professors or 
 teachers in colleges. Eight are princi- 
 pals of city high schools. Two hundred 
 and nineteen are teachers in public 
 schools. These are graduates. A still 
 larger number who did not graduate are 
 teaching in the public schools. 
 
 Nine of the graduates are practising 
 
physicians. Among the graduates are 
 lawyers, dentists, pharmacists, and mer- 
 chants beside farmers, mechanics, and 
 others. A large number passed civil ser- 
 vice examinations, and are in the service 
 of the United States. 
 
 These, pastors, professional men, 
 teachers, and others were all either slaves 
 or the sons or daughters of slaves. They 
 are now living exhibits of what the col- 
 lege has been doing. 
 
 Does any one ask for further evi- 
 dence of the work of these schools of this 
 and other denominations? Go South. 
 Get a little out of the beaten lines of 
 travel. Look for things the ordinary 
 tourist does not see. Go to the sections 
 in the cities where the better class of 
 negroes live; go into the black belts in 
 the country, where ordinary tourists do 
 not go. Then look around. 
 
 NEGRO SCHOOLS AND CHURCHES. 
 
 In every city and hamlet, and by every 
 highway along which you may travel, 
 you may see negro churches, and negro 
 schools; churches in the cities and in the 
 country with over a "thousand communi- 
 cants, well organized, well administered, 
 presided over by pastors of high culture, 
 worshipping in houses, spacious, some- 
 times elegant, which they themselves 
 have built — or churches also in city and 
 in the country with but a little handful 
 of believers, gathered in th^ plainest and 
 rudest kind of a shelter, taught once a 
 month, by some devout man who is 
 building them up in the faith, and per- 
 haps leading them sometimes into a wild 
 ecstasy of religious rapture. 
 
 In the cities you will find high-schools 
 with colored principals, and corps of 
 colored assistants, under city supervision, 
 pursuing the same courses of study as is 
 required in the white schools. Or, out in 
 the pine woods, or in the sand hills, 
 
groups of youngsters, in miserable shacks 
 called school houses, taught, it may be, 
 but two or three months in the year, but 
 by thoroughly competent young women. 
 
 Back of it all — for churches and 
 schools — for preachers, and teachers, and 
 professional men — was the mission 
 school fitting the workers, and making 
 possible the achievements. 
 
 However, this is Christian work. So 
 far as known every one of the teachers 
 and professional men that went out from 
 Benedict College is an avowed Christian. 
 In their college life they had had a les- 
 son in the Bible every school day 
 through all the years of their residence, 
 as a study in which they were required 
 to pass examination, as in other studies. 
 Wherever they went, therefore, they 
 went with no small knowledge of the 
 Word of God, to be workers in churches, 
 and Sunday Schools, and centers of per- 
 sonal Christian influence in their com- 
 munities. 
 
 A BROADER VIEW. 
 
 But there is yet a broader view. There 
 is no serious negro problem in South 
 Carolina. The upheavings and over- 
 turnings from collisions between the 
 races predicted by alarmists are ground- 
 less forebodings, arising out of ignor- 
 ance of conditions. 
 
 By the census of 1900 the negroes in 
 the Southern States owned 173,352 farms, 
 valued at $300,000,000. Beside the farms 
 they owned 373,414 homes. In Louisi- 
 anna the negroes owned 50 per cent, of 
 the farms, and in Mississippi 55 per cent.; 
 that is, more farms than the whites, 
 though smaller in size. The farms in 
 the Southern States which they owned, 
 and those which they occupied as tenants, 
 covered 38,233,933 acres; an area of 
 59,741 square miles; an area much great- 
 er than the State of New York. In 
 
Virginia there are lOO counties; in 8i of 
 those counties there are more negro 
 than white farmers. These figures are 
 from the census of 1900. The census of 
 1910, when available, will show a great 
 increase. The peaceful acquisition and 
 occupation of these millions of acres, by 
 a race that fifty years ago owned not one 
 acre, would have been impossible in a 
 disturbed social condition. The negroes 
 at the South are living in peaceful har- 
 monious relations with their white neigh- 
 bors. They are under some restrictions 
 and disabilities, but the progress made, 
 notwithstanding those disabilities, is 
 only the more remarkable. Personal 
 wrongs, abuses and outrages, do occur; 
 but, they are there, as elsewhere, the 
 rare exceptions. 
 
 BETTERING CONDITIONS. 
 
 Never in the history of civilization has 
 a people, from so low an estate, in so 
 few years, so bettered their condition, 
 and made such substantial progress in 
 intellectual developments, in the acquisi- 
 tion of property, in founding and main- 
 taining churches ana schools, in moral 
 culture, and in a higher type of religious 
 life and experience. 
 
 It was these mission schools that qual- 
 ified and inspired men to lead. From 
 these schools there went out young men 
 and young women into every nook and 
 corner of the land with new ideas for 
 their people, that, in their then condition, 
 were absolutely revolutionary. After 
 living, for example, for the years of 
 school life in a well-built and well 
 ordered house, it was impossible for the 
 student to go back home and be con- 
 tent in the one room of the negro quart- 
 ers, with a wooden shutter for a window, 
 and often only the bare earth for a 
 floor. After sleeping for months in a 
 well made bed with clean sheets, it was 
 
impossible to go home and be content to 
 roll one's self in a blanket, in one's work- 
 ing clothes, and sleep thus on a bed or 
 on the floor, in the one room cabin where 
 all the family lived and slept. 
 
 Thus, as an incidental result of these 
 schools, the ideas and usages of a 
 cleaner, more decent, more refined life, 
 the primary elements of civilization, were 
 unconsciously introduced into the fam- 
 ilies of the freed men throughout the 
 land. Thus a mighty impulse in the 
 home life was given for the marvelous 
 uplife that the passing years have 
 brought about. 
 
 WHAT RESULTS? 
 
 What have the Mission Schools, those 
 of other denominations, and Hampton 
 and Tuskegee included, accomplished? 
 Everything, in the intellectual, moral, 
 economic, and social progress of the 
 blacks since emancipation, are the results 
 of the Mission Schools, more than of all 
 other causes combined. 
 
 Some one may ask, if the conditions 
 are so improved, has not the time come 
 to abandon this work, and leave the 
 negroes now to their own resources? 
 By no means. Shall the farmer abandon 
 his field because the corn he planted 
 has made a good start? That is the rea- 
 son why he should carefully cultivate and 
 make more sure the prospective harvest. 
 The seed in these mission fields has been 
 sown; it has come up; it has grown; it 
 is bearing some fruit. But the abundant 
 harvest has not yet been gathered in. 
 There are millions yet unreached in the 
 ignorance of their primitive condition, 
 not even under the restraint of their 
 former master. The work should be en- 
 larged, and strengthened. There is need 
 of more teachers and better equipment. 
 But above everything else the schools 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 019 593 927 5 
 
 should be endowed. 
 
 leges and universitie 
 
 endowments, which 
 
 the extent of milli 
 
 these schools, for the colored people, 
 
 that have no wealthy constituencies to 
 
 look to. 
 
 WHAT ELSE? 
 
 Possibly there may be some brother, or 
 some sister, who has $100,000 that might be 
 laid upon the Lord's altar for the further 
 endowment of the college whose work 
 has been more specifically presented. 
 Such a sum added to its present endow- 
 ment would permanently relieve the 
 Home Mission Society from drafts 
 upon its mission funds for that college. 
 
 God has most wonderously blessed this 
 v/ork for the negroes. Let a like, or 
 even an approximate progress go on for 
 a few more decades of years, and who 
 can forecast the outcome? We have faith 
 to believe that Christian fidelity and 
 Heaven's blessings will so work together 
 that the negroes in the South will be- 
 come one of the most industrious, most 
 prosperous, most laW-abiding, most God- 
 fearing, and most conservative elements 
 in our national life. The needful char- 
 acteristics are inherent in the race. They 
 need only to be developed, that possibili- 
 ties may be changed into actualities. 
 
 Published by 
 
 THE AMERICAN 
 HOME MISSION 
 
 BAPTIST 
 SOCIETY 
 
 23 East 26th Street 
 
 New York City