Le
2801
147
HOW SHALL THE COLORED YOUTH OF THE
SOUTH BE EDUCATED?

水
​EXT to the preserva-
tion of the Union the
most notable result of
the great Civil War
was the emancipation
of more than. six mil-
lions of Negroes and
their sudden and perilous elevation,
in defiance of all historic prece-
dents, from the lowest to the highest
position in modern civilization,—com-
plete legal citizenship of the United
States. For more than thirty years the
people of the old fifteen slave states
have been wrestling with the problem
of bringing the actual condition of
these new citizens into conformity
with their legal civic status as recorded
in the Constitution and laws of every
American commonwealth. By com-
mon consent the only lever that can
lift this nation within a nation to its
final position in American life is found.
in that group of agencies which,
"working together for good," is known
as education. The present essay is an
attempt to outline the educational
status of the American Negro citizen
in our Southern states, and to suggest
some of the more evident and impera-
tive methods by which the great edu-
cational movement of the colored race,
begun with its emancipation in 1865,
can now be reorganized in the light
of past experience and carried forward
to a successful issue.
But first let me indicate the point of
view from which this observation and
estimate are taken.
I. I trace the direct hand of God's
providence in the real of this peo-
ple from the da
agan bar-
barism and be
con-
ness
1
By A. D. Mayo.

N
ago, to a new continent, destine to
become the seat of the world's chief
republic. No other portion of this
race, either in Africa or elsewhere, has
at. any time been so favored by divine
Providence as in this calling out of
Egypt, at the beginning of a forty
years in the wilderness, in the journey
toward the land of promise.
2. I trace the hand of God through
the two hundred and fifty years of the
life of this people in the English col-
onies and the southern United States
before its final emancipation, a gener-
ation ago. I have no apologies for its
darker shades, and make no claim for
the "peculiar institution" as a mission-
ary enterprise. But this I see: While
the masses of the European peoples,
without exception, came up to their
day of deliverance through a thousand
years of war, pestilence and famine,
which destroyed as many as now live
on that continent, this people was
trained for civilization through a pro-
longed childhood under the direction
and by the consent of the superior class.
in the most progressive nation on
earth. This is the only people that has
made the passage from barbarism to
civilization without passing through a
wilderness dominated by the three
furies of the prayer-book. -"sword.
pestilence and famine." Up to 1860 it
never strewed the continent with its
bones or watered its fields with its
blood in war. Its people never died in
thousands, like every European peo-
ple, by famine. And so well were they
guarded against pestilence that no peo-
ple on earth has so increased and mul
tiplied, until to-day we behold a nj
tion three times as numerous as t
American republic under the pr
dency of George Washingto



214
EDUCATION OF THE COLORED YOUTH.
3. When at last the republic, like
every great people, was called upon to
make the grand decision whether it
was indeed one nation or a confeder-
acy of thirty nations which one of the
number could sever, this people was
providentially so placed that neither
the Union nor the confederacy could
boast that it had received the greater
aid auts hands. Among the three mil-
lion soldiers and sailors of th: Union, at
most were found not more than a quar-
ter of a million òrcolored fohters and
workers. But until the close of the
great conflict the confederacy received
the aid of probably five millions of the
colored people, in raising supplies, car-
rying on the home life, and working in
the various ways whereby the effective
strength and number of its armies wasferring on this people at once the
prodigiously increased. And it was no world's highest opportunity the su-
small gain for the freedmen that, when preme right of full American citizen-
peace and freedom came, every gen- ship, with all that belongs thereto. But
erous and thoughtful family in the I see that, under the same directing
South acknowledged a debt of grati- providence, even this, the most daring
tude to them and laid no charge and perilous experiment in govern-
against them for what had happened. ment recorded in history, awoke the
Meanwhile, the North and the nation, entire country at once to the necessity
which had liberated the slaves as an act and duty of providing that education
of civil war, felt bound by every con- for the coming generation without
sideration of justice and humanity to which freedom itself would have been
do its uttermost for their protection only a mockery and a phantasm.
and elevation.
5. I do not discuss the wisdom er
unwisdom of the last great act of this
"strange eventful history"
the con-
At once the national government
stretched forth its hand to the two mil-
lions of colored children and youth.
The great philanthropist, George Pea-
body, born and reared in the common
schools of Massachusetts, a citizen of
the South, a resident in and illustrious
benefactor of the metropolis of the
British empire, included the Negro
children in the greatest personal gift at
that time ever made for the education
of a whole people. The board of Pea-
body trustees, the most distinguished
body of men that ever served as a
"common school board of education,"
under the presidency of Robert C.
Winthrop, the descendant of Governor
e most illustrious of
John Winthr
model American
his gre
1-
citiz
and left and
P
4. And when the war cloud lifted
and the six millions of this people stood
up for the first "dress parade" of the
grand army of freedmen, the whole civ-
ilized world looked on with amazement
at what appeared. For during that
period of less than three centuries the
race had made a greater progress
than any other people in the his-
tory of mankind. During those mem-
orable years the African negro had
learned the three fundamental lessons
of civilization: How to work under
intelligent supervision; the language
and the religion of a civilized, Chris-
tian country. And that country was
the world's foremost republic, and all
he experiences of slave life had
een during the years when it was
owing from thirteen colonies to the
tates of America. It was not
remarkable, under those circum-
stances, that among these five or six
millions was found a body of men and
women who became the foremost lead-
ers of the race, by the natural selection
of superior intelligence, superior char-
acter and superior executive ability.
Freedom came to the Negro in a coun-
try by climate adapted to his condition;
where good land was a drug in every
market; so fertile that no family need
starve; so sparsely populated that one
of its states to-day could support the
entire colored population of eight mil-
lions anu' still call aloud for millions
more.
EDUCATION OF THE COLORED YOUTH.
215
final effort to establish the common
school for "every sort and condition"
of its people. And, most wonderful of
all the wonders of this era of miracles,
the old master class of the South
joined hands with the educational pub-
lic of the North in the glorious enter-
prise of educating the children of its
freedmen for the new American citi-
zenship. All honor to the North and
the nation for what it has done in giv-
ing to this people the greatest oppor-
tunity, to train its superior youth for
the leadership of a nation within a na-
tion. But we must not forget that for
every dollar expended from the mar-
velous wealth of the richest nation and
the wealthiest states of Christendom in
behalf of the Negro the sixteen states
of the South, in the day of their pov-
erty, have given four dollars for the
education of these children in the new
Southern common schools.
6. So here our "nation within a na-
tion" stands,to-day. The North and
the republic have given the Negro per-
sonal emancipation and, as far as con-
stitutions and laws can go, political
freedom. But the only highway to the
real use and enjoyment of complete
American citizenship is the education
of the head, the heart and the hand,
which leads a people through the paths
of peace and by the methods of a
Christian civilization, up from every
possible depth to every possible height
of human achievement. The South
has struck hands once and forever with
the North and the nation, and, in the
establishment and support of the
American common school, at a cost,
during the past twenty-five years, of
more than four hundred and eighty-
three million dollars,
dollars, — eighty-five
million dollars for its colored citizens,
has done such a work as no people
under similar circumstances ever did
before.
❖
The only question now in order is:
in view of what God and the Republic
have done, what does this people pro-
do for itself? What must
On within a nation" do
?
I answer, without one word of hesi-
tation: Turn its back upon the past.
Return thanks to Almighty God that
it now stands on the threshold of the
world's highest position, sovereign cit-
izenship in the world's greatest repub-
lic. Let it behold in this opportunity
for the education of the two millions
of its children and youth in the Amer-
ican common school, the final proof
of the gracious providence that "thus
far has led it on." Now let it gird up
its loins, face the sunrise, and along
this highway of civilization begin its
upward march toward the future that
can only be achieved through that ed-
ucation which is but another name
for the Christian method of rising out
of the lower places of the earth toward
the sunlit summits that front the heav-
ens and scan the horizon.

With the best light at my command
I therefore hold that the absolute im-
pending duty of the colored citizens of
the South is to combine and by every
practical method inaugurate a grand
revival in behalf of the country and
village common school.
The graded school for colored chil-
dren and youth in the cities and larger
towns in these states is now in a fair
way to success. /But it is in the vast
majority of the common schools for
the colored children and youth, in the
open country and smaller villages, that
the great field for educational work in
the South is now found.


By the report of the National Bu-
reau of Education for 1892-93 we learn
that in sixteen states and the District
of Columbia there are now (estimated)
2,630,331-colored children between the
ages of five and eighteen. Of these
1,267,828 are enrolled in the common
schools. The average daily attendance.
varies in different states; in Virginia
one-half, in South Carolina a larger,
in Maryland a smaller proportion; in
the District of Columbia, where the
colored schools are best, 11,000 of the
14,500 enrolled. It would probably be
an approximate estimate to say that
one-third the number of colored chil-
dren in the South between 1.
216
EDUCATION OF THE COLORED YOUTH.
eighteen are in average daily attend-
ance on common schools, in session
never more than five and rarely four
months in the year, during a period
probably not exceeding four years in
the life of the pupil. These children.
are under the instruction of 25,615 col-
ored teachers.
"In the academies, schools, colleges,
etc., for colored youth there are, as far
as known, 10,191 male and 11,920
female students. In all these schools re-
ported in 1892-93 there are 25,859 stu-
dents. In the elementary departments
of seventy-five of these institutions are
13,176 pupils; in the secondary,
7,365; in the collegiate, 963; and in the
professional 924. In the collegiate de-
partment of these institutions only
twenty-five per cent are women." The
highest per centage of colored illiter-
acy of persons above the age of ten in
1890 was found in Alabama; 69.1 per
cent. During the twenty years from
1870 to 1890 the per centage of col-
ored illiteracy was reduced from 85 to
60 per cent of the entire population.
In Kentucky the colored school enrol-
ment has reached 78 per cent of the
colored youth of school age, while in
nine states it falls below 60 per cent.
Alabama, with the exception of
three states, is giving education to the
largest number of colored children in
secondary schools. In the number of
colored students in normal school
courses in 1895 Alabama led the entire
South, with 785; also in the number
of colored students receiving industrial
training, 3,427. It is estimated that
the Hampton school in Virginia and
the Tuskegee in Alabama now receive
nearly one-half the entire sum contrib-
uted by the North for the education of
the Southern Negro; more than three-
hundred thousand dollars annually.
But, with the best effort of the Na-
tional Bureau of Education, owing to a
chronic habit of neglect in forwarding
school returns, these statistics of
Negro education can be regarded as
little better than a tolerably accurate
annrovimation. Other estimates give
entire South, 162 schools of the
*
·
.
secondary and higher type, with 37,100
students and 1,550 teachers. But, at
the highest estimate, of probably
800,000 colored children and youth in
daily school attendance, not 50,000 will
be found in any grade above the ele-
mentary and lower grammar schools.
If these institutions, especially those
largely supported by the North for the
secondary and higher schooling of the
colored youth in all these states are
wise in time and correctly gauge the
drift of sentiment in the educational
and religious public in the nation, they
will at once do four things:
1. With all possible despatch con-
sistent with existing arrangements
they will relieve themselves of their
elementary department and concen-
trate their work on the training of
competent youth for leadership in all
the positions where superior ability
and character are in demand.
-
2. These institutions are waking up
to the importance of giving better in-
struction and in many cases improving
the quality of their teaching force.
3. They will co-operate, to the ex-
tent of their ability and with a heart
in their co-operation, in the attempt to
make sound industrial training for
both sexes, not an annex to, but a per-
manent feature of their course of study
and discipline.
4. They will discourage the attempt
of some of our Southern educational
missionary associations and home
churches to force the sectarian paro-
chial system of elementary schools
upon the colored people.
With these four reforms these insti-
tutions can rely upon the continued
favor of the friends of education
throughout the country; at present for
temporary supplies, and finally for sub-
stantial endowment, to establish them
as the future collegiate and profes-
sional seminaries for this people.
So we are thrown back upon our
fundamental position, the almost
absolute dependence of the colored
people of the South upon t
district and village common
the education of the genera´
•

EDUCATION OF THE COLORED YOUTH.
217
dren and youth now on the ground.
More than ninety-five per cent of
these two million six hundred thou-
sand, from five to eighteen, will there.
receive the schooling that will largely
determine their ability, twenty years
hence, to become the American Mace-
donian phalanx, the chosen ten thou-
sand on which our "nation within a na-
tion" must depend for its direction in
all public and private affairs.
Hitherto, this work of education,
including a good deal of aid and com-
fort for the colored churches, has
borne very largely upon the white peo-
ple of both sections of the country.
There are no very reliable statistics of
the amount of money contributed by
the whole country to the schooling of
the colored people during the past
thirty-five years. It will probably not
be very wide of the truth to say that
from the outbreak of the Civil War not
less than one hundred and ten million
dollars has been paid for this purpose.
Of this eighty-five million has been ex-
pended by the people of the South for
the education of the colored children
and youth in the common school, and
not less than twenty-five million by the
national government and the churches
and people of the states that remained
in the Union in 1862.
within a nation must realize, as its edu-
cated leaders everywhere declare, that
the present condition of affairs is tem-
porary and cannot be prolonged with-
out danger of a decided reaction, not
only among the benevolent people of
the North, but from the roundabout
common sense of the American people.
The conviction is abroad, even in a
more dangerous form in the South
than elsewhere, that a people, eight
millions strong, virtually the reliable
laboring class of a dozen great states,
which from a condition of absolute
poverty in 1865, in thirty years has
gathered together $300,000,000 of
taxable property; the church prop-
erty of one religious denomination
amounting to nine million dollars;
the majority of its intelligent, moral
and industrial people to-day handling
more money than the settlers
of
New England during the first half-
century of their occupation; its
average church and social gather-
ings displaying a better style of dress
than entire classes of people in all the
states; with the sympathy of Christen-
dom behind it; should not so largely
as at present rely on the prodigious
system of solicitation that makes every
Northern city from June to October a
lively imitation of a new administra-
tion. Ordinary, even "sanctified"
human nature, cannot forever endure
this tremendous pressure.
It is useless to ignore or in any gen-
eral way to attempt to resist this im-
pression, or to evade the danger of its
becoming more influential in certain
sections of the country. The question
comes louder every year: "Why can-
more to build up their own school sys-
not the colored people themselves do
tem, which is practically their one reli-
ance for the training of the generation
of their children now on the ground?
Why do their people of means so often
ignore their own public schools and
spend their money on expensive sem-
inaries elsewhere, or even inferior
schools at home? And why do so
many of these more prosperous fami-
lies compel their most valuable school
Probably no hundred million dollars
was ever expended anywhere with bet-
ter results. Nothing that has hap-
pened south of Mason and Dixon's
line since the foundation of the govern-
ment has been so honorable to the
leading class. of the South as the vol-
untary contribution of this eighty-five
million dollars, under the peculiar con-
dition of the givers, for the establish-
ment of the American common school/
for the children of their former bond-
men.
But, as a grim old railroad president
once remarked to me, as he very leis-
urely extracted a five-dollar gold coin
from his vest pocket as his contribution
to my "ministry of education," "I don't
take much stock in trying to educate
two million of Southern children by
passing round a hat.” Our nation


218
EDUCATION OF THE COLORED YOUTH.
men and women, who are needed at
their posts of home service, to wear
out their lives in tramping from the
Atlantic to the Pacific and from the
Lakes to the Gulf, beseeching the gift
of student aid, which, if applied in their
home common schools, would give an
additional month of instruction to
fifty children instead of supporting one
common school pupil in a ‘univer-
sity'?"
I repeat,
I see no help in this
emergency save by a great revival in
behalf of the common school among
the colored masses of all these states.
That revival must be led by the teach-
ers and the educational public, — that
portion of this people which appreci-
ates the situation and feels the tremen-
dous issues impending on the response
to the demand. No political party in
state or nation; no system of evangeli-
zation in any or all of the churches; no
new departure of private benevolence
can meet the emergency. "There is
no other way under heaven known
among men" whereby this nation with-
in a nation “can be saved"; as far as its
salvation concerns its earthly destiny,
except by a great awakening among
these eight millions aroused by their
own trusted and most influential lead-
ers; not a revival that comes as a
cyclone and leaves a spiritual wreck in
its wake; but an intelligent, far-reach-
ing, practical awakening of whole
communities, counties, cities, states;
"growing while men sleep"; extending
from commonwealth to common-
wealth; giving the partisan politician
notice to be "up and doing" and every
enemy of the common school a “fear-
ful looking for of judgment," until it
compels the "powers that be" to pro-
vide for the training of the young
American Negro for the momentous
duties already thundering at the door.
"The way to resume specie pay-
ments is to resume," said Horace
Greeley, while the statesmen at Wash-
ington were pounding their solemn.
brows over the financial problem of
twenty-five years ago. Booker T.
Washington, after his own vivid and
Sp
practical manner of speech, has told
us the way in which this work was
done in one case:
"Ten years ago a young man born in
slavery found his way to the Tuskegee
school. By small cash payments and work
on the farm he finished the course with a
good English education and a practical and
theoretical knowledge of farming. Return-
ing to his country home, where five-sixths
of the citizens were colored, he still found
them mortgaging their crops, living on
rented land from hand to mouth, and
deeply in debt. School had never lasted
longer than three months, and was taught
in a wreck of a log cabin by an inferior
teacher. Finding this condition of things,
the young man took the three months pub-
lic school as a starting point. Soon he or-
ganized the older pupils into a club that
came together every week. In these meet-
ings the young man instructed as to the
value of owning a home, the evils of mort-
gaging, and the importance of educating
their children. He taught them how to
save money, how to sacrifice-to live on
bread and potatoes until they could get out
of debt, beginning buying a home and stop
mortgaging. Through the lessons and in-
fluence of these meetings the first year of
this young man's work these people built
up by their contributions in money and
labor a nice frame school-house that re-
placed the wreck of the log cabin. The
next year this work was continued, and
those people, out of their own pockets,
added two months to the original three-
months' school term. Month by month
has been added to the school term till it
now lasts seven months every year. Al-
ready fourteen families within a radius of
ten miles have bought and are buying
homes, a large proportion have ceased to
mortgage their crops and are raising their
own food supplies. In the midst of all was
the young teacher with a model cottage and
a model farm as an example and center of
light for the whole community."

In all save exceptional cases, at first
by private contributions, and ulti-
mately by some method of local taxa-
fion, it may be possible to extend the
common school in the country and
village of the South even two or three
months; put the school-house in better
repair, insist on a more competent
teacher, and generally to lift up the
entire business of country school-keep-
ing to an assured and progressive con-
dition.

Nowhere in this republic is an
able, religious, tactful, dead-in-earnest

EDUCATION OF THE COLORED YOUTH.
219
young man or woman so powerful for
good as the thousands of teachers in
the colored schools of the sixteen
states once called the South. Any
state association of colored teachers in
five years could place their state as far
in advance of its present position in the
people's common school as it is to-day
beyond the old field-school of the
grandfathers.
Now, if any reliable or competent
man or woman would
appear in
any metropolitan city of the North or
South, properly indorsed and sup-
ported, bringing the "good news" that
five hundred country and village com-
mon school districts of the colored peo-
ple of any of these states would, this
coming year, by voluntary contribu-
tion, raise each the sum of twenty-five
dollars that would furnish the salary
of one good teacher indorsed by a
principal of a state normal school for
one additional month's instruction for
its thirty to fifty children, I believe an
additional twelve thousand five hun-
dred dollars could be raised in a month
and all these fifteen to twenty-five
thousand pupils receive two additional
months of instruction from a teacher
who teaches and does not "fumble"
with his little constituency.
This proposition is no visionary the-
ory of my own. During my entire
ministry of education in the South,
since 1880, I have never asked a South-
ern community to do what many other
Southern communities, no better off
than itself, had not successfully done.
Hundreds of district schools in all
these states are thus being improved
by the voluntary contributions of their
own people, often assisted from with-
out. I am convinced that if this
method of local aid were organized and
thoroughly tried, with the indorsement
of responsible educators in both sec-
tions, it would become not only a suc-
cess, but one of the most popular
methods of giving aid and comfort
where most needed by the colored
people.
There is yet another reason for the
of this
's grand re-
vival in the interest of the children and
youth of their nation within a nation.
The American people's common
school is a public university of good
manhood, good womanhood, good cit-
izenship in a republican government
and order of society. It is from begin-
ning to end an arrangement “of the
people, for the people, by the people,”
acting through a flexible majority, for
educating the children in the great
American art of living together; each
pupil acquiring the mastery of his own
mental, moral and executive faculty in
preparation for a responsible and in-
spiring career of full American citizen-
ship at the coming of legal manhood
or womanhood. Here the people or-
ganize, support and, through respon-
sible officials elected by a legislative
school board, teach and train their own
children. The pupil is neither a slave
under a schoolmaster, nor the subject
of a government his parents did not
create and control. He is a "minor"
citizen, in training for his "majority"
in a miniature commonwealth, whose
"rules and regulations" are the laws
enacted or approved by a popular body
and administered by a teacher respon-
sible to the people for every act within
his jurisdiction.
pag
stan
Here for the first time the child steps
out from the limited and exclusive life
of the family, where he is often the "all
in all," into the broad society of a little
republic where no superiority in the
wealth, ability, culture, social, personal
or public position of his family tells on
his standing among his fellows. As in
his future life, he stands for himself and
rises or falls according to his own per-
sonal merit or demerit.

Another superiority of the Ameri-
can common school over all its rivals
is that it is no less a seminary for the
adult people than for the children. Be-
fore the year 1860 several of the states
of the South endeavored to put on the
ground the public school system for
the white race devised by Thomas Jef-
ferson, at the time of its publication
in some ways the broadest and most
enlightened that had appeared in this

220
EDUCATION OF THE COLORED YOUTH.
or any land. Although the South was
not lacking in good scholars, far-
sighted educational statesmen, and an
increasing body of superior people,
who realized the peril to the lower
class of its population from the illiter-
acy that, like a great pestilential
great pestilential
slough, there as in Europe, festered at
the bottom of society, there was never
any very satisfactory or permanent re-
sult until the close of the war.
-
civil war and the criminal and vagrant
class of its six millions of freedmen
afloat; with no effective labor laws to
protect the children from the ignor-
ance or greed of the parent or the
tyranny of the corporation; no efficient
vagrant law to save the open country
from the nuisance and peril of the idle,
vicious, depraved, often fiendish tramp
who wandered about at his own
wicked will until he ran against an in-
dignant man with a shotgun or an in-
furiated mob, too crazy with drink and
revenge to await the slow motion of a
trial in a court, where a swarm of furi-
ous criminal lawyers were bound to
move heaven and earth in defense of
the most flagrant offender.
A potent cure of this and other dis-
orders of the present rural Southern
society is the building up of a more
efficient style of local government; so
that in every neighborhood may be
found a body of people accustomed to
public activity and administration; not
merely voting in a fiercely contested
election, but making and administering
public ordinances for their own protec-
tion and the development of all the
conditions of a well-ordered state.
This course must be the growth of
a generation. But, meanwhile, as by
a special political providence, the be-
ginning of this great movement has al-
ready come to the Southern people in
the establishment and administration
of the people's country and village dis-
school.
All these interesting experiments
were finally stranded on the most dan-
gerous reef in the old-time Southern
order of society, - the lack of efficient
local government. The old-time sys-
⚫tem of government in the wide,
sparsely settled district of a Southern
county was at best a government at
long range, always in danger of falling
into the hands of a court-house "ring"
at the county town; in many ways the
feeblest possible arrangement. The
most beneficent and powerful influ-
ence was the social and moral
power exerted by the superior fami-
lies, one of the ablest and best
of the aristocratic families in Chris-
tendom, held together by one central
interest, the preservation of the social
and political order of which it was the
head. This arrangement did good ser-
vice through the first half-century
transition period of the republic and
produced a state of affairs that some of
its literary admirers even now laud as
the golden age of Southern American
society. There was little vagrancy, fortrict
the colored folk were under the strict
police control of the plantation; the
poor white man of the district was an
easy-going dependent; and the non-
slave-holding farmer generally lived in
a different portion of the state.
Thomas Jefferson early saw the peril
of such a condition and urged Virginia
to adopt the New England system of
town local government, which, in a
modified form, was afterwards ex-
tended to the new Northwest. But that
was then impossible. The coming of
emancipation found the vast rural dis-
tricts of this section almost destitute of
local government, with the drift of the

Wa
This school, although a part of the
educational system of the state and still
to a large extent dependent on the
state for support, is in fact a little re-
public set up in a limited area of terri-
tory through the entire vast rural do-
main of these sixteen states. Here the
people may and often do elect their
own local board of school trustees, who
administer the school law of the state
and supervise the school which con-
tains a representative of every style of
family in the district. The school
house becomes a little state house, the
one centre of the local public
ends
Every famil

EDUCATION OF THE COLORED YOUTH.
221
ested in it as in no political party,
church or secret society. The goings-
on therein are watched as nothing else
is watched in the neighborhood. Its
teacher is the "observed of all observ-
ers." Every good boy is known and
encouraged; every bad boy is "spot-
ted"; every superior girl aspiring to
the dignity of a school mistress is
"booked" for Tuskegee, Hampton,
Claflin or one of the one hundred and
sixty-two superior institutions where
she may be educated into all of which
she is capable.
The people, already possessed of
additional public influence, will more
and more seek to have their way in this
great public function. Here they are
trained to act together for the most im-
portant public interest, the education
of their own children. The public life
that revolves about the little school
house is of the most valuable and
stimulating sort. It need have none
of the vulgarity and ferocity of partisan.
political contest. It can dispense with
the sectarian fury and superstitious
fanaticism that too often make a devil's
normal school of a quarrelsome church.
It steers clear of the bitter rivalries of
social ambition; for the child of the
humblest mother may become the
- foremost leader of his race.
What a people's university can this
school be made! It is set up in sight
of every man's door, always waiting to
be improved, able by the self-sacrifice
and enlightened coöperation of its
families to become anything good they
demand. It is the most radical and
powerful training school of young and
old America for the new republic that
we all will face with the rising sun of
the twentieth century. It only needs
that the people of every school district
in all these states rise to the occasion;
take the schools into their own hands:
if the legislature will not permit them
under the law, improve it by calling in
the gospel of putting their own shoul-
der to the wheel, turning their backs
to the politicians and doing the work
emselves. Nobody will care or dare.
sist any sensible, practical, per-
<
sistent effort of the people in any coun-
try or village school district in the
South to make its school the best
in the country, in the state, in the
nation.
No Southern Legislature will per-
manently refuse to come to the relief
of a country school system when the
people are straining every nerve to
make the best of a hard situation and
send up a plea to the capitol for aid
and encouragement for the children.
And, better yet, any people of any state
in the Union that goes on educating
itself after this fashion, in the self-
helping American way of doing busi-
ness, as it can in the management of
the people's common school, will
sooner or later become a body politic
that no statesman, even the cross-roads
politician, can safely offend or ignore,
a. constituency that will know just
what it needs, and just how to get what
it wants, in the direct, peaceful, obsti-
nate American way. A people so
trained will vote, and be apt to vote
right, especially on education, and that
vote will be counted. And every as-
pirant “in a strait" for an office will
look that way, and every patriotic and
thoughtful man will rejoice that this
glorious right of suffrage, given to our
"nation within a nation," has finally
become a public blessing, the bulwark
of the children's right to education in
the people's common school.
The colored teachers must become
the leaders in the great revival of the
country district and village common
school. The young colored man or
woman graduate from any of the su-
perior seminaries of the race, espe-
cially if his instruction has been a
reality and not a sham, if he really
knows what he has studied and can
tell what he knows, and, beyond his
function as a pedagogue, has a broad
and generous outfit of intelligent,
moral and executive manhood or
womanhood, at once may become a
missionary of the higher Christian civ-
ilization to the entire community.
The colored schools of the Southern
country and village need a larger num-
છે

222
EDUCATION OF THE COLORED YOUTH.
ber of well qualified women teachers.
The colored woman seems endowed
by nature with a genius and faculty for
the care of children. Amid all the dis-
cord and mutual political defamation
of the last thirty years, the first South-
ern man in his sober senses, is yet to
be found who has presumed in public
to raise his voice against his colored
"Mammy." Repeat that venerable
name in the Congress of the United
States and a freshet of eloquence will
burst all the barriers that even Speaker
Reed could pile up, and a score of
"great statesmen" will again become a
mob of juvenile wildcats in praise of a
loving black "mammy" who sunk her-
self so deep down into their hearts
that she could never be forgotten.
Now send the granddaughter of
that woman of the old time to a
good school; help her to drink
deep from the fountains of the
new education, and put her in charge
of the children in the country school
house; and there will come a revival
that will blossom like the flowery
April that reigns in glory in the open-
ing Southern spring.
Of course a great need of the South-
ern Negro youth is a training in the
new industrial education.
I say "the new industrial education."
For, after a very practical and effective
style, the colored citizen of the United
States has already graduated with re-
spectable standing from a course of
two hundred and fifty years in the uni-
versity of the old-time type of manual
labor. The South of to-day is what
we see it, largely because the colored
men and women at least during the
past two hundred and fifty years, have
not been lazy "cumberers of the
ground," but the grand army of labor
that has wrestled with nature and led
these sixteen states "out of the woods"
thus far on the high road to material
prosperity.
But the new industrial education
places the emphasis on the last word:
Education. It teaches that all effee-
tive work done by the hand is first done
by the soul. It is the man that works
MaU
the hand, not the hand that works the
man. No ordinary system of labor,
however plodding, faithful and persist-
ent, can develop the resources of the
least American state, unless it is organ-
ized, supervised and directed by intelli-
gence, character and trained executive
ability.
The state of Massachusetts, more
than two hundred and fifty years ago,
"started business" on the bleak north-
eastern Atlantic coast with two ideas:
1. That every man and woman should
"work for a living." 2. That every boy
and girl should be sent to school. The
little state “fought it out on that line"
for two hundred or more years before
there was within its borders what we
now call a school of industrial training.
But during this time it had raised up a
dozen generations of people of more
than ordinary intelligence and a habit.
of work as "steady-going" and persist-
ent as the procession of the seasons and
days and hours and minutes of the
revolving years. To-day the new Bay
State is one of the richest in the world.
The average wage-earning in the Com-
monwealth, including every man, wo-
man and child. is 73 cents a day,-
nearly twice the amount of the average
wage of the whole country; and the´
state earns $250,000,000 per year in
excess of the average earning of that
number of the American people. And,
beside this, there is no especial lack of
all that characterizes our higher Amer-
ican civilization.
mon
This does not mean that industrial
Massachusetts
education is useless.
was the first state, twenty-five years
ago, to move in the introduction
of industrial drawing into every com-
school, and she challenges
the republic to-day for the exccilence
of her schools of skilled industry
and the various useful ornamental
arts. But her example does re-
mind some of our zealous advo-
cates of industrial education that a
trained mind, a solid character, an
intelligent purpose and a determined
will behind the hand, are the creator
of all the genuine progress in

}
-




EDUCATION OF THE COLORED YOUTH.
223
I
material development of the republic.
The especial problem of industrial
education in the South is: How shall
the vast majority of its colored chil-
dren and youth who cannot live in
cities and can attend only the country
district or village common school for
a few months in the year and a few
years in a lifetime be introduced to
the wide field of intelligent and skilled
labor in its different departments?
\
of the masses is only another name for
laziness and "big head." They can in-
augurate a movement in thousands of
rural communities that will crowd all
the secondary schools with students,
well prepared by a good English ele-
mentary training for that union of a
thorough academical and industrial
outfit which will come like a fertilizing
flood upon the open country and lift
the people above the stagnation and
discouragement that now broods over
entire regions of the South-land.
It is so evident that we are almost
indignant that any man in his sober
senses fail to see it, that unless within
the coming twenty-five years the
young men and women of this race
do take up the mechanical and
operative occupations, as they have
not yet, they will be first invited and
finally compelled to "take a back seat"
in the ranks of the laboring and pro-,
ducing class.
I have no question that the South
has in its colored population the
material for one of the most valuable
operative classes in the world; a source
of boundless prosperity in the develop-
ment now awaiting it. What is needed
just now is a little less newspaper
"thundering in the index" about the
vast resources of the Southern country
to attract a rush of undesirable immi-
gration from abroad, and a good deal
more work put in on the practical side
of education to bring its own laboring
people up to their native capacity as
the enlightened and skilled working
class which the South now demands.
The colored graduates of the one
hundred and sixty schools of the sec-
ondary and higher education in the
South, if fitly trained, can be sent forth
as teachers to the open country and
village schools, where the vast ma-
jority of the children. are found,
and in numerous ways can awaken
a great interest in all that
lates to improved farming, house-
keeping, economical living, mechanical
training and operative industry. Antl
thus can they explode the most dan-
gerous public fallacy that still holds
captive multitudes of well-meaning but
informed people—that the education
re-
data
The time has come when the colored
clergy of the South should be called to
the aid of this greatest of needed revi-
vals. The history of every denomination
of Christian churches in America pro-
claims the fact that, in exact proportion
to the revival of popular intelligence,
good schools, improved industry and
moral reform in the affairs of this
world, has been the growth of "pure
and undefiled religion." The old-
time Congregational and Presbyterian
clergy of the eastern and middle
states of the Union, whose church
polity carried along, as upon a
strong current, the establishment of
schools for the whole people, were the
prophets of the prosperity, power and
beneficent influence of these churches
in the republic. The great revival of
interest in popular education in every
American church, at present, is one of
the most hopeful omens of the future
and largely accounts for the fact that
the American Christian church as a
whole to-day gives to the world the
most reasonable, truthful, moral and
spiritual interpretation of the Christian
religion ever given to any people in
any land since the great Teacher lived
and taught in Palestine.
#
And while all this is coming to pass,
let every man and woman of the race
who seeks the ultimate and highest
good of our "nation within a nation"
stand fast in his or her own place and
watch and pray and work for that
"good time coming," which always
does come when zeal is married to
wisdom and “righteousness and peace
have kissed each other” in any great
1



224
EDUCATION OF THE COLORED YOUTH.
effort for the uplift of mankind. Let
not the young men and women waste
life in reckless and visionary efforts,
or in the attempt to carry by assault
the venerable fortress of preju-
dice and injustice that can only be
reduced through a siege of starvation
by the grand army of children and
youth which is now organizing and
drilling for a final campaign of educa-
tion. Man at the best is slow and
obstinate; and the barbarism which is
the growth of ages of human ignor-
ance, folly and sin will only yield to
the gradual but irresistible power of
a growing enlightenment, a broader
justice and a more profound and com-
prehensive love. Horace Mann used
to say "the difficulty with me is that I
am always in a hurry, while God is
never in a hurry." Certainly, on the
Certainly, on the
backward look, this people, least of all,
has reason to rail against Providence;
for never in the world before was a
community so numerous, in three brief
centuries, so tided over the period of
transition from the depths of human
abasement to the summit of human
opportunity.
It will not be through any crisis of republic that is to be; each still a “na-
Even so, whenever I "can get into
the quiet" of trust in God and hope
for man, do I seem to hear the steady
tramp of the gathering armies of the
violence and tumult and conflict of
races, classes and nationalities that the
grand army of the American people,
75,000,000 strong, will attain to its
complete organization and be mar-
shalled on the field to confront the
united ignorance, superstition, shift-
lessness, vulgarity and vice of the world
on some perhaps not far distant, event-
ful day to come. All that can be done
at present, in the unity and patience of
wisdom and love, to lift the masses of
our people to a higher plane of intelli-
gent and skilled industry, better home
living, economy, solid prosperity and
a wider and loftier view of life, through
the entire range of agencies included
in that greatest of all words, Educa-
tion, will hasten the day of deliverance
from every private and public hin-
drance to the complete success of any
class of the American people.
tion within a nation," but all under
orders from the Captain of Salvation
up in the heavens; approaching that
union of races which shall make the real
American people the chosen of God
for the leadership of mankind through
centuries to come. My prayer to God
is that through no "invincible ignor
ance" concerning the past, no frivolity,
no madness of impatience or failure
in the common ways of life, this "na-
tion within a nation" may be diverted
from its providential line of march and
be found wandering through unknown
regions to its own confusion and the
postponing yet farther the final destiny
of the land we love. For this republic
is the land that has led this people
forth out of the wilderness; and its
starry flag is the banner under which
we all may one day find ourselves look-
ing upward together, hearing once
more the last word of our great com-
mander, "Let us have peace.
Through a whole week before the
battle of Sedan, which closed the dis-
""
;
-
mal era of the despotism of Napoleon
III., the different armies of the Ger-
man powers were silently and steadily
marching, each by its own most avail-
able road, toward the concentration
of the hosts for the decisive conflict.
If the leaders and soldiers of any
special division had become discour-
aged and demoralized and gone
tramping off on its own account, it
would have come to grief and there
would have been no united Germany
and no republican France to-day. Hap-
pily each division of that mighty army,
in good faith, marched by orders from
above which it did not understand,
"trusting in God and keeping its pow-
der dry." And when on the final
morning, the fog lifted from above the
doomed city, and the hills all around it
were swarming with the combined sol-
diery of the coming German empire,
all men understood that the beginning
of a new era for Europe and mankind
was at its dawn.