The American Missionary. Volume 42, No. 04, April, 1888
TextSPECIMENS OF SCHOOL ENDEAVOR
THREE COMPOSITIONS
LETHER
Lether is mad from the hide of animals. They first kill the animal then the hide is sent to a tan yard and there it is tan are made lether from, then to a shoemaker's shop where it is made into boots shoes saddles. The finest of gloves is the kid skin glove, that is all I will say about kid skin gloves. Most of the bad boots and shoes we have is horse lether or mule lether, that is all I will say about mule lether and horse lether. All the good boots and shoes we have is young calf lether, that is all I will say about young calf lether.
All the boots shoes and every thing else we have made of lether is second thing because some poor animal was rob-ed of his coat that we might have boots and many other things.
–—, aged 16.
NETELY
Netely are clean always and handsome to everybody. It are good in the cite of God and man for it are a good thing to be netely always for it make a man look netely. If we all are netely it are a good thing to be clean for it are a good thing in the time of life so to be. Netely is deserving of everybody and grate with all mankind. It are a good thing to be netely for it is beautiful and pretty. It are correct always and never rong to nobody an it make a man feel better when he are netely an a nice looking person when he are netely are clean before every body.
–—, aged 25.
DRIVE WAGGON
That the kind of work I likes to do. When I drive waggon I rides a plenty. Riding are a good thing because when folks is sick it are good for the helt. I likes to drive it because I have been loadin it. This summer I hall fody. When I would load the barn yard wagon full of fody it would be high from the groun, that is nice but sometimes it would turn over, that would be truble. Truble are a bad thing.
–—, aged 17.
ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS AT AN EXAMINATION OF TEACHERS IN GEORGIA
What is writing?
"Writing is the Representation of the human voice on the 11th part of a noun."
How long since writing was invented?
"From the creation of the world, or from the birth of Christ."
What are the chief products of the State of Georgia?
"The chief products are Agriculture, Turpentine, rail-roads, lumber and grate deel of merchandice bussyness."
A SERIOUS ALARM IN GEORGIA
The American Missionary is not published for the entertainment of its readers. It has a more serious purpose. It speaks for races who have suffered grievous wrongs, and for peoples whose condition is exceedingly sad. It has to do with tragic facts, and much of what it has to say must excite compassion, and must appeal both to the consciences of our readers and to their sense of duty. To call upon those whom God has blessed, to insert themselves into the woes and spiritual wants of others who need their help, is grave and serious.
This is one feature. There are others. The joy of the work and the joy of the worker, which we are called to record, are a relief to the stories of necessity, and are like beautiful pictures painted upon the dark background. When "Our eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord," we can for the time forget the darkness upon which the light shines, and sing our hallelujahs. If it is saddening to tell of the night, it is cheering to mark the fact that the providences of God are working out his promises, and are surely bringing in God's day.
Over and above the evils to which we must call earnest heed, the dangers which are not far away, and the exigencies of the cause of Christ, we are sure that no one can read the MISSIONARY without being cheered and quickened in gratitude to God for what he is graciously doing for his needy ones through his people.
With the serious duty on the part of those who are working together with God for the salvation of men, there drift along in the current of his providences certain incidents that are exceedingly droll.
As we have seen some very ludicrous manifestations of character and conduct in the terrible struggles of a battlefield, and have brushed aside our tears at times for an irrepressible bon mot in a hospital, so in the weighty and solemn considerations which continually appeal to us, and while we are anxiously asking how we can make the most bricks for the Lord's building with the least straw, incidents arise which not only throw light upon our serious work, but which are irresistibly amusing.
We think we should share with our readers a recent one which, when we read it in the detail, impossible to be repeated here, made us smile. Every time we re-perused it we thought it, as Alice in Wonderland said, "curiouser and curiouser."
Our readers are not strangers to the name and fame of the leading editor of the chief paper in Georgia. They have heard of him as an eloquent orator with a brilliant imagination which saw a New South in almost millennial array, and told of it with an enthusiasm so contagious that to the sons of the Pilgrims after the fulness of a great dinner it seemed that the "Promised day of Israel" had at last arrived. It is true that when this dinner had been thoroughly digested, certain ones, removed from the afflatus of the occasion began to ask, "Are these things so?" And when the Glenn Bill sought the endorsement of public opinion, and substantially received it with no word of reprobation from the eloquent orator and editor, some recalled the speech of Sheridan in reply to Mr. Dundas, "The right honorable gentleman is indebted to his imagination for his facts."
In all this time no one suspected the Atlanta Constitution of possessing the humorous character which it has lately revealed. In late issues of February it has, in the garb of gravity, about two columns that are ridiculously funny.
It appears that Prof. Sumner Salter, a graduate of Amherst College, a son of an honored pastor of Iowa, a musical director of exceptional gifts and a teacher of eminent ability, was solicited by parties in Atlanta to take his residence there in the interest of the musical cultivation of such as could secure his services. He soon attracted the patronage of society, and all went smoothly until the tempter came. Alas, there was a serpent in Eden, so there was a skeleton in the closet of the Atlanta Constitution. It was a dreadful skeleton. The Constitution seriously publishes the fact that "it was whispered about for some time," until patience ceased to be a virtue, when it sent a guardian of public safety in the form of a reporter to investigate. "Was it really true that a white man who was giving music lessons to white people was also teaching a colored class at another time and place? If so, what about the New South? The black man had no business to be black, but he was all the same, and being so what right had Prof. Salter to teach colored people to sing? Let the matter be thoroughly searched out. The reporter departed on his mission, with a countenance more in sorrow than in anger, and returned vice versa.
"'Tis true, 'tis pity,
And pity 'tis 'tis true."
The professor was actually doing this very absurd thing. He had taken charge of a colored class in the church of which Rev. Evarts Kent is minister and was teaching them how rightly to use the talents with which God had so richly endowed them.
Accordingly, in the year of grace 1888, the Atlanta Constitution publishes the astounding fact, and calls the world to heed it, in conspicuous head lines:—
"WHITE OR BLACK—A PROMINENT MUSICIAN WHO TEACHES BOTH COLORS—HIS BUSINESS SAID TO BE INJURED."
Then followed the whole sad story. The musician had been interviewed and investigated. He did not deny the serious charge to this superintendent of public proprieties. With a heart as hard as old Pharaoh's he proposed to go on and do more likewise. In short, the representative of the Constitution could do nothing with this intractable professor. Hence "he did not stand upon the order of his going, but went at once," and reported that "according to Mr. Suiter's own statement, he is teaching a colored class, and he has lost a white pupil, which shows that his course is hurting his business." "Diligent inquiry has failed to bring to light any proof that he has notified his white pupils that he is teaching colored people."
Leaving out the meanness of this, has anyone read anything published lately more ridiculous? It is not necessary to quote the professor's public reply. It simply claimed the right of manhood and common sense, and doubtless left the Constitution wondering how a man capable of making it appear so foolish could yet descend to such depths of ignominy as to teach people whose ancestors came from Africa, the unpardonable sin of singing praises to the Author of their being. To what deeps some will descend! Why should colored people add to the criminality of being born black, the fearful temptation of pay in advance to one who could teach them while he had pupils who had the merit of having been born white?
This was really transpiring in the city of Atlanta several days in the month of February in the year 1888, and was in successive issues of the Constitution, which shows among other things that there is latitude, if not longitude, at a Brooklyn New England dinner. Meanwhile we think we hear Uncle Rastus quoting the prophecy, "The morning cometh and also the night," but he can't help laughing because it is "awful funny."
THE EDUCATIONAL WORK IN THE SOUTH
BY REV. W.F. SLOCUM.
We may remember at the outset that in this matter of the education of the Negro we are treating a question which must be considered, to a certain extent, ethnically. We are dealing with a people with race peculiarities: but it seems to me that it is very useless to ask whether we are training an inferior stock. There was a time when the Anglo-Saxon stock was far inferior to its present condition. We ourselves are not enough removed from heathenism and barbarism to become very pharisaical.
Here is a race with its idiosyncrasies, and its peculiar latent possibilities, which we cannot know until Christian education has unfolded them through many years. We ought not to wonder that in many respects this people is yet in its moral and intellectual infancy; but who dares say that it has not a future before it, with its statesmen, its poets, its painters, its men of letters; that it is not to have its own peculiar literature, its art, and even its own characteristic religious expression, just as marked and important as those produced by any other race? Certainly we have as much reason for believing it as that the Teutonic race of the second century should produce its Goethe and its Schiller, its Kant and its Hegel, its Luther and its Melanchthon; or that the Frank of the fifth century should develop its Victor Hugo, its Lamartine, its Madam de Stael; or that out of the barbarism, the cannibalism, the paganism of Norseman, Briton and Saxon, there should come Shakespeare, Spencer, Macaulay, Browning and Gladstone. And we may not have to wait as long; for in spite of slavery's binding chain thrice drawn round his soul, the American Negro has been absorbing during the past from a civilization which has been fitting him somewhat for the large Christian movement of the present. We are working for a people which in all probability will form at least one-eighth of our whole population; and we have the problem of lifting them as a race up into Christian enlightenment. The dark skin is growing darker. There will be less and less of intermixture of blood between the two races. Hence all study of this educational question must have in view the large moral and intellectual enterprise of dealing with a race as a race. I believe that there is nothing in all history to compare with this opportunity which has come to our very doors. Here is a nation in our land and with it every perplexity, every difficulty, every embarrassment, and also every encouragement, every hope, and every inspiration for work, that can appeal to any foreign missionary. Here is this God-given task laid at our very thresholds and with all the sentiments of patriotism and Christian devotion urging us to our large privilege.
What the race needs now is right leadership, and for many years to come we are to equip men and women religiously and intellectually, who, in home, in church, in social and business life, will be moral and social leaders. And by this power of leadership I mean something far other than those foolish conceits which have taken possession of a few who have touched only the surface of the new life that is coming to this people.
I have rather in mind leaders who shall have that moral and intellectual fitness which produces reverence, earnestness and humility, leaders who can draw their people away from their foolishness, weakness and self-consciousness into the larger life that is possible for them. Without a doubt, what is needed is true leaders, and I wish to show where these leaders are now demanded.
Before the war, the South knew nothing of the benefits of public schools, and the private school was in harmony with its social and political conceptions; but of late, and especially during the last decade, a remarkable change has taken place which is doing as much to affect the whole Southern problem as anything that has occurred there during half a century. It is a movement in the South, which, however imperfectly it has been developed as yet, has come to remain, and will ultimately affect every institution, social, political and religious, in our section of the country.
It is now being recognized in every Southern State that free government is based upon a public common-school system. It has taken two decades to incorporate this public school policy upon Southern institutions, but it has now the evidence of permanency and it is offering to Christian philanthropy an unparalleled opportunity, such as God seldom gives to any people, and one which should rally the churches as never before in support of the great enterprises of the American Missionary Association.
There has been forced upon the New South the conclusion that the best way to increase its wealth is to increase the number of educated, intelligent producers, and with this conclusion it realizes that it cannot afford to let two million colored children grow up in hopeless illiteracy. It perceives that its very institutions will be imperiled by such a condition. I have through personal interviews with leading educators in a recent trip through the South, by correspondence and by a careful examination of documents and reports from nearly all the Southern States, undertaken to find just what is being done at the present time in the public colored schools of the South.
The significance of this public school movement will be understood when it is remembered that the acceptance of the idea that the constitution of a free State rests on universal education, marks a great change in theory; that this has come against the opinions of the old Bourbon party, which never forgets, and, it is to be feared, never learns; whose political economy is represented by the expression, "keep the negro down"; which regards his enfranchisment as a political outrage and his education as a mistake and a failure; that it has risen in the face of the poverty of the South and in the midst of its most intense prejudices. For when the new educational movement began, the property and a large part of the intelligence belonged to the opponents of the new educational policy, but now, in the words of a prominent Southern gentleman: "The conviction has become very deep that in the altered condition of our people the only hope left us is to do all that can be done towards elevating the masses irrespective of race." This certainly represents a tremendous transformation. Without stopping to trace the causes that produced it, or even the large place the American Missionary Association work has in it, let me simply quote from a Southern Christian man, whose sympathies are full of prejudice against the North, but who has wakened with the awakening of the New South.
Writing of the educational movement, in a recent book, he says: "Not a few of the best men and women of the North have come to teach in these institutions for colored youth: their motives and their work have not always been understood, but the Great Day will make manifest how they have been constrained by the love of Christ, to spend years in work which has had many discouragements." ('The New South' by J.C.C. Newton.) A few statistics may give some general idea of the extent of this movement.
The State of Alabama has 104,150 colored pupils enrolled in the public schools. It pays an average of $25.97 per month to nearly 2,000 colored teachers, and expends altogether $198,221 upon these colored schools. Georgia has 49 per cent. of its negro school population enrolled; that is, 119,248. In 1871, this State had 6,664 only in all public and private colored schools. Its teachers of this race now number 2,272. 40,909 colored children are enrolled in Louisiana, with 672 negro teachers, who receive an average of $23.73 per month.