The Southern South Part 15

These are probably fairly typical of the rural negro schools throughout the South, and better than some. As a matter of fact, thousands of negro children have no opportunity to go to school, because the commissioners simply refuse to provide school in their district; perhaps because the number of children is thought too few; perhaps merely because they do not wish to spend the money. In a town with perhaps 2,000 Negroes there is sometimes only one negro teacher.

Here comes in the effect of the separate school system which prevails in every Southern state, in the District of Columbia, in Indianapolis, and in parts of New Jersey. The system was inaugurated just as soon as the Whites obtained control of the Reconstruction government after the Civil War, and it goes all the way through: separate buildings, separate teachers, separate influences, separate accounts. The reasons for it are: first, the belief of white parents that negro children, even the little ones, have a bad influence on the white children; second, the conviction that mixed schools would break down the rigorous separation of races necessary to prevent eventual amalgamation; third, the blacks are n.i.g.g.e.rs. In cities and towns it adds little to the expense to keep up separate buildings and corps of teachers, but in rural districts, where the number of children is small, the expense of double schools may be a serious matter.

One reason why the schools are poor is that the pupils are irregular, and one reason why they are irregular is that the schools are poor. The wretched facilities of the rural schools, both white and negro, tend to drive children out; and the incompetent teachers do not make parents or children fonder of school. For the white schools a supply of reasonably intelligent young men and women is now coming forward. As to the Negroes, with few exceptions, every teacher is a Negro, though appointed by and supervised by some white authority; it is doubtful whether half the negro teachers have themselves gone through a decent common school education.

Many of them are ignorant and uneducated. The superintendent of the town schools at Valdosta, Ga., says: "There are to-day outside of the cities, not more than one half dozen teachers in each county in the state, upon an average, who can honestly make a license to teach. The custom in most counties is to license so many as we are compelled to have to fill the schools from among those who make the most creditable show upon examination. School commissioners do not pretend to grade their papers strictly. If they did three-fourths of the negro schools would be immediately closed."

Conditions are not much better in the towns, where many negro teachers earn only $150 to $200 a year; but in the cities the negro teachers are more carefully selected, for they can be drawn from the local negro high schools or the normal schools. But the colored people are said to scheme and maneuver to get this teacher out and that one in. They have been known to pet.i.tion against a capable and unblemished teacher on the ground that she was the daughter of a white man, and it was immoral for her to be teaching black children.

If the negro common schools are inferior to the white, this is still more marked in their secondary public schools, such as they are. No principle is more deeply ingrained in the American people than that it is worth while to spend the necessary money to educate up to about the eighteenth year all the young people who show an apt.i.tude, and whose parents can get on without their labor. The Southern states accept this principle, but for such education the Negroes have few opportunities. Out of 151,000 Southern young people in public and private high schools, 6,500 high school pupils and 2,600 in the private schools are Negroes. That is, a third of the population counts a seventeenth of the secondary pupils. Most of the so-called negro colleges are made up of secondary and normal pupils who get a training very like that of the Northern academies, and some favored cities have public high schools for the Negroes. This is the case in Baltimore, and was the case in New Orleans until about 1903, when the high schools were discontinued, on the ground that the Negro could not profit by so much education, although the lower branches of the high schools were still taught in the upper rooms of the negro grammar schools.

It must not be forgotten that there are more than a hundred inst.i.tutions for training the colored people, which draw nothing from the public funds.

These schools, in part supported by the colored people themselves, in part by Northern gifts, which during the last forty years have amounted to between thirty and fifty million dollars, are usually better than the public schools, and have more opportunities for those lessons of cleanliness and uprightness which the Negro needs quite as much as book learning. Those schools are a thorn in the side of the South--so much so that for years it was hardly possible to get any Southern man to act as trustee; they are supposed to teach the negro youth a desire for social equality; they are thought to draw the Negroes off from cordial relations with the Southern Whites; above all, they include the higher inst.i.tutions which are credited with spoiling the race with too much Greek and Latin.

To a considerable degree the schools of this type are mulatto schools, probably because the people of mixed blood are more intelligent and prosperous, and more interested in their children's future; but many of them are planted in the darkest part of the Black Belt--such as the Penn School in the Sea Islands. Wherever they exist, they appeal to the ambition and the conscience of the Negro, and help to civilize the race; they are not only schools but social settlements. Alongside the earlier schools and colleges planted by Northerners in the regular academic type, during the last thirty years have arisen first Hampton, then Tuskegee, and then many like schools, built up on the principle of industrial training, which will be described in the next chapter.

The Northern schools for the education of the Negroes have brought about one of the unpleasant features of the Southern question in the boycotting of the Northern teachers, both men and women, who have come down to teach them. This practice is a tradition from Reconstruction times when it was supposed that the Northern teachers were training colored youth to a.s.sert themselves against Whites. They expected only to furnish examples and incitements to the Southern people themselves; hence a feeling of bewilderment and grief, because from the very beginning the white teachers in these inst.i.tutions have been under a social ban the relentlessness of which it is hard for a Northerner to believe. An educated and cultivated white family has lived in a Southern city, superior intellectually and morally to most of the community about it; yet no friendly foot ever crossed its threshold. The beautiful daughter, easily first in the girls'

high school, never exchanged a word with her cla.s.smates outside the school, except when called upon, as she regularly was, to help out her less gifted fellows, as an unpaid and unthanked tutor--because her father was spending his life in trying to uplift the Negro. The att.i.tude of the South toward most of those schools is one of absolute hostility. Even an inst.i.tution so favorably regarded in the South as Hampton Inst.i.tute has been prohibited by the Legislature of Virginia (which makes it a small money grant) from selling the products of its industrial department.

The negro colleges in the South are far from prosperous; planted in the day of small things with limited endowments, frequented by people who have little money to pay for tuition, they have been supported from year to year by Northern gifts which are not sufficient to keep them up to modern demands. Though some of them have tolerable buildings, few have adequate libraries, laboratories, or staff of specialist instructors. The state inst.i.tutions of this grade open to blacks are nearly all rather low in standards, and offer little inducement for academic training; they are either normal or industrial in type. The better off of the Negroes send their sons to Northern white colleges where they may receive the best instruction but have little contact with their fellow students. So far from the number of negro college graduates being too great, it is entirely too small for the immediate needs of the race. They must have educated teachers and trained professional men; the negro schools will never flourish without competent teachers and supervisors of the negro race. In many respects the colleges are the weakest part of negro education. One school in which numbers have had good training, Berea College, Kentucky, has now been abandoned under an act of the state legislature forbidding the teaching of Whites and Negroes together, but an industrial school of high grade will be provided exclusively for the colored race.

As DuBois says: "If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing, the races are to live for many years side by side, united in economic effort, obeying a common government, sensitive to mutual thought and feeling, yet subtly and silently separate in many matters of deeper human intimacy,--if this unusual and dangerous development is to progress amid peace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call for social surgery at once the delicatest and nicest in modern history. It will demand broad-minded, upright men, both white and black, and in its final accomplishment American civilization will triumph." DuBois calculates that in the twenty-five years from 1875 to 1900 there were only 1,200 or 1,300 negro graduates from all the colleges open to them North and South, an average of about fifty a year out of a race numbering during that period, on the average, six millions. Out of this amount about half have become teachers or heads of inst.i.tutions, and most of the rest are professional men.

Many of the academic and normal training schools of various grades are situated in the midst of large colored populations, and take upon themselves a work similar to that of the college settlements in Northern cities. Such is the flourishing school at Calhoun, Ala., which is in the midst of one of the densest and most ignorant Negro populations in the South, and besides training the children sent to it, it has supervised the work of breaking up the land, which is sold to negro farmers in small tracts, thereby giving an object lesson of the comfort and satisfaction in owning one's own land. Most such schools aim to be centers of moral influence upon the community about them. Here, again, they encounter the hostility of their neighbors on the ground that they are putting notions into the heads of the Negroes, and are destroying the labor system of the community. On the other hand, many of the Whites take a warm interest in these schools, although not a single one has ever received any considerable gift of money from Southern white people. The testimony is general that they are well taught, preserve good order, and inculcate decency of person and life.

Probably the most effective argument in favor of negro education is the success of Hampton and Tuskegee, two endowed schools, practically kept up by Northern benefactors, which are the great exemplifiers of industrial education. They are successful, both in providing for large numbers of students--about 3,000 altogether--and in producing an effect upon the whole South. The number of graduates is but a few score a year, and many of them go into professions for which they were not directly prepared in these schools. But great numbers of men and women who have spent only a year or two in these inst.i.tutions carry out into the community the great lesson of self-help; and hundreds of schools and thousands of individuals are moved by the example of these two famous schools and similar inst.i.tutions scattered throughout the South. They preach a gospel of work; they hold up a standard of practicality; they are so successful as to draw upon themselves the anathemas of men like Thomas Dixon, Jr., who says: "Mr. Washington ... is training them _all_ to be masters of men, to be independent.... If there is one thing a Southern white man cannot endure it is an educated Negro."

The question is imperative. With all the efforts at education, notwithstanding the great reduction in the percentage of illiteracy, the number of negro adult men and women in the South who are unable to read and write is actually greater than at any time since by emanc.i.p.ation they were brought within the possibilities of education. The actual task grows greater every day, and if the resources of the South are more than correspondingly increased, it is still a question how much of them will be devoted to this pressing need. Education will not do everything; it will not make chaste, honest, and respectable men and women out of wretched children left princ.i.p.ally to their own instincts. Education is at best a palliative, but the situation is too serious to dispense even with palliatives.

Perhaps the first necessity is to improve the character and the training of the negro teachers. Both in the rural and the city schools appointments are in many cases made by white school board men who have little knowledge and sometimes no interest in the fitness of their appointees. The colleges and industrial schools all have this problem in mind. State normal schools for Negroes in many of the Southern states try to meet this necessity, but a great many of the country teachers, some of them in the experience of the writer, are plainly unsuited for the task. Some of them are themselves ignorant, few have the background of character and intellectual interest which would enable them to transmit a moral uplift.

One of the most serious difficulties of negro education is the attendance, or rather nonattendance. Within a few weeks after the beginning of school, pupils begin to drop out; often perhaps because the teacher cannot make the work interesting. One of their own number says: "Many of our children do not attend school because our teachers are incompetent; because many of the parents simply dislike their teachers; because some parents prefer Baptist teachers; because many children have their own way about all they do; because many children do not like a strict teacher; because some parents contend for a fine brick building for the school; because, as a whole, many parents are too ignorant and prejudiced and contentious to do anything, yet we have enrolled about 150 pupils this session in spite of the devil."

Some of the schools are overcrowded. There have been cases where 6 teachers were a.s.signed for 1,800 children, of whom 570 enrolled, yet the average earnings of the six teachers would not be more than $100 a year.

Against these instances must be placed a great number of intelligent, faithful teachers who make up for some deficiencies of knowledge by their genuine interest in their work.

For negro education as for white, but perhaps with more reason, it is urged that the federal government ought to come in with its powerful aid.

The argument somewhat resembles that of the blind Chinese beggar who was sent to the hospital where he recovered his sight, and then insisted that, having lost his livelihood, he must be made porter to the hospital. Aside from any claim of right, it is true that the problem of elevating the Negroes concerns the whole nation, and is a part of the long process of which emanc.i.p.ation was the beginning. Federal aid for colored schools, however, can never be brought about without the consent of the Southern states, and they are not likely to ask for or to receive educational funds intended solely for the Negroes; while Northern members of Congress are not likely to vote for taxing their const.i.tuents who already pay two or three times as much per capita for education as the South, in order to make up the deficiencies of the other section. It is impossible to discover any way in which federal aid can be given to the Negroes without reviving sectional animosity; and it is a fair question whether such gifts could be so hedged about that they would not lead to a corresponding diminution in the amount spent by the Southern states. The Government grants to state agricultural colleges and experiment stations inure almost wholly to the advantage of the Whites; if a part of that money could be devoted to the education of the Negro, it might be helpful.

Several educational trusts created years ago for the benefit of the Negroes have now ceased their work. The Peabody fund of about three million dollars was much depleted by the repudiation of the Mississippi and Florida bonds, and has now been entirely distributed. For some years it was devoted to building up primary teaching on condition that the localities benefited should themselves spend larger sums. Then it went into normal schools. In 1882 the Slater fund of one million dollars was given solely for the education of Negroes. The General Education Board in its allocations to Southern inst.i.tutions has liberally remembered several of the negro inst.i.tutions as well as the white.

CHAPTER XXIII

OBJECTIONS TO EDUCATION

In the two previous chapters white and negro education have been described as parts of the social and governmental system of the South; there, as in the North, the tacit presumption is that education is desirable, that it is essential for moral and material progress, that both the parents and the community must make great sacrifices to secure it. White education hardly needs defense in the South; most of the people wish to see the opportunities of life open to promising young people, believe in the spread of ideas, and look on education as the foundation of the republic.

Does the principle, as in the North, apply to all the elements of population? Is the education of the Negro as clearly necessary as that of the White? Should the same method apply to the training of the two races?

On the contrary, there is in most Southern white minds hesitation as to the degree of education suitable for the blacks; and a widespread disbelief in any but rudimentary training, and that to be directed toward industrial rather than intellectual ends.

The first objection to negro education is that the race is incapable of any but elementary education and that all beyond is wasted effort. Has the Negro as a race an inferior intellectual quality, a disability to respond to opportunities? With all the effort to educate the race, and with due regard to the fact that the proportion who can read and write is rapidly rising, the Negroes are alarmingly ignorant, the most illiterate group in the whole United States; and therefore they need special attention. In addition, they are subjected to the smallest degree of home training, and enjoy the smallest touch with those concentrated forces of public opinion which force the community upward. Some of the Negroes seek intellectual life at home, for occasionally you see a family grouped about the fire with the father reading a book to them; but hardly any of the rural people and probably few of the townsmen own a shelf of books and magazines and newspapers. Their journalism is in general rather crude. A cla.s.s of patent inside newspapers is carried on by the heads of one or the other negro order; and they contain good advice, news of the order, advertis.e.m.e.nts of patent hair dressings which "make harsh, stubborn, kinky, curly hair soft, pliant and glossy"; and descriptions of the experiments of surgeons in making black skin white by the use of X-rays. Some of these papers are well edited, and all of them have discovered the great secret of modern journalism, which is to put as many proper names as possible into the paper.

One difficulty with the negro newspaper is that it cannot fill up entirely with colored news; and on general questions and the progress of the world the regular white newspapers, with their greater resources, are certain to be more readable. Still, few Negroes outside the cities read either weekly or daily papers regularly; and one of the necessities for raising the race is to cultivate the newspaper habit. To be sure, there is a type of highly successful white journalism that does not edify the white race. Yet even a bad newspaper cannot help telling people what is going on in the world.

In spite of its freight of crime, such a paper carries people out of themselves, makes them feel a greater interest for mankind, brings in a throng of new impressions and experiences, helps to educate them.

Outside of newspapers the Negroes have access to the written works of members of their own race, which are at the same time a proof of literary capacity and a means of teaching the people. Of course it is always urged that such men as Booker Washington, the educator and uplifter; Dunbar, the pathetic humorist; Chesnutt, author of stories of Southern life that rival Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page; DuBois, who in literary power is one of the most notable Americans of this generation; Kelly Miller, the keen satirist; and Sinclair, the defender of his people--prove nothing as to the genius of the races because they are mulattoes; but they and their a.s.sociates are listed among the Negroes, included in the censure on negro colleges, and furnish the most powerful argument for the education of at least a part of the race. Few men of genius among the Negroes are pure blacks; but it is not true that the lighter the color the more genius they possess. So far as the effects of a prolonged and thorough education are concerned, those men from any point of view prove that the mulattoes, who are perhaps a fifth of the whole, are ent.i.tled to a thorough education.

Has not DuBois the right to say:

"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?"

On the other hand, the history of the last thirty-five years proves conclusively that the great ma.s.s of negro children can a.s.similate the ordinary education of the common schools. Mr. Glenn, recently Superintendent of Education in Georgia, declares that "the negro is ...

teachable and susceptible to the same kind of mental improvement characteristic to any other race," and Thomas Nelson Page admits that the "Negro may individually attain a fair, and in uncommon instances a considerable degree, of mental development." About three fourths of the young people have already learned to read.

Many people intimately acquainted with the race a.s.sert that, although about as quick and receptive as white children up to twelve or fourteen years of age, the negro children advance no further; that their minds thenceforward show an arrested development. Certainly anyone who visits their schools, city or rural, public or private, is struck with the slowness of the average child of all ages to take in new impressions, and with the intellectual helplessness of many of the older children. Whether this is due to the backwardness of the race, or to the uncouthness of home life, or to the want of other kinds of stimulus outside of school, is hard to determine. That there is any general arrested development is contradicted by thousands of capable youths, mulatto and full blood.

The very slowness of the black children is a reason for giving them the best educational chance that they can take. That is why the Southern Education a.s.sociation which met in 1907 pa.s.sed a unanimous resolution that: "We endorse the accepted policy of the States of the South in providing educational facilities for the youth of the negro race, believing that whatever the ultimate solution of this grievous problem may be, education must be an important factor in that solution."

Another point of view is represented by the statement of Thomas Nelson Page that the great majority of the Southern Whites "unite further in the opinion that education such as they receive in the public schools, so far from appearing to uplift them, appears to be without any appreciable beneficial effect upon their morals or their standing as citizens."

Governor Vardaman, of Mississippi, as late as 1908 recommended the legislature to strike out all appropriations for negro schools on the ground that "Money spent to-day for the maintenance of the public school for negroes is robbery of the white man and a waste upon the negro. It does him no good, but it does him harm. You take it from the toiling white men and women; you rob the white child of the advantages it would afford him, and you spend it upon the negro in an effort to make of the negro that which G.o.d Almighty never intended should be made, and which man cannot accomplish." He a.s.serts that the most serious negro crime is due to "The manifestation of the negro's aspiration for social equality, encouraged largely by the character of free education in vogue, which the State is levying tribute upon the white people to maintain."

In Cordova, S. C., in 1907, a business man who had visited a colored school and spoken encouragingly to the pupils, felt compelled by public sentiment to print an apology and a promise never to do anything so dreadful again. This criticism comes not simply from demagogues like Vardaman or weaklings like the Cordovan; intelligent planters will tell you that they are opposed to negro education because it makes criminals; and think their accusation proven by instances of forgeries by Negroes, which of course they could not have committed had they been unable to write. A superintendent of schools in a Southern city holds that even grammar school education unsteadies the boys so that they leave home and drift away; though he candidly acknowledges that it keeps the girls out of trouble and provides a respectable calling as teachers to many negro women.

Side by side with this feeling of disappointment or hostility, as the case may be, is the conviction of most Southern people that enormous sacrifices have been made for the negro schools. Thomas Dixon, Jr., with his accustomed exactness and candor, wrote a few years ago: "We have spent about $800,000,000 on Negro education since the War." These figures show a poverty of imagination: it would be just as easy to write "eight thousand millions" as "eight hundred." The estimate of the Bureau of Education is that in the thirty-five years since 1870 about $155,000,000 has been spent to support common schools for the negro race, which is about a fifth of the amount spent on the white common schools in the same period, and not a hundredth of the supposed present wealth of the South; in addition, heavy expenditures are made out of the public treasury for secondary and higher education in which the Negro has a slender share.

Another more specious complaint with regard to Negro education is that it is an unreasonable burden on the Whites to make them pay for negro education, and repeated attempts have been made to lay it down as a principle that the Negroes shall have for their schools only what they pay in taxes. Thus Governor Hoke Smith, of Georgia, says: "Is it not folly to tax the people of Georgia for the purpose of conducting a plan of education for the Negro which fails to recognize the difference between the Negro and the white man? Negro education should have reference to the Negro's future work, and especially in the rural districts it is practicable to make that education really the training for farm labor. If it is given this direction it will not be necessary to tax the white man's property for the purpose. A distribution of the school fund according to the taxes paid by each race would meet the requirements."

In at least two states this idea has been to some extent carried out. In Kentucky the state school fund is apportioned among the school children without regard to race, but for local purposes the Negroes appear to be thrown on their own payments. And in Maryland, under various statutes from 1865 to 1888, all the taxes collected from Negroes were devoted to negro schools, the state adding a lump sum per annum.

This point of view involves a notion of the purpose of education and the reasons for public schools so different from that which animates the North that it is hard to deal with the question impartially. Ma.s.sachusetts makes the largest expenditure per capita of its population in the whole Union, almost the largest expenditure per pupil, and certainly the largest aggregate expenditure, except the more populous states of New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio; Ma.s.sachusetts spends on schools two fifths as much every year as all the fifteen former slaveholding states put together. In that state people think that school taxes are not money spent but money saved: that they get back every cent of their $17,000,000 a year, several times over, in the increased efficiency of the people, in the diminution of crime, in the addition to the happiness of life.

Schooling is insurance, schooling is the savings bank that can't break, schooling is that sane kind of poor relief which prevents poverty. The last thing which any Ma.s.sachusetts community thinks of reducing is school expenditure!

Furthermore, no principle is so ingrained in the Northern mind as that since education is for the public benefit, every taxpayer must contribute in proportion to his property. The rich corporations in New York or Pittsburg, childless old couples, bachelor owners of great tracts of real estate, wealthy bondholders educating their children in private schools, never dream of disputing the school tax on the ground that they, as individuals, make no demands on the school fund.

Still less would it enter the mind of any Northern community to divide itself into social cla.s.ses, each of which should maintain its own schools.

Such a proposition would go near to bring about a revolution. First of all, the non-taxpayer is a taxpayer; it is the _pons asinorum_ of finance that the poor are more heavily taxed in proportion to their means than any other cla.s.s of the community, through indirect taxes and the enhanced rents of the real estate which they occupy. As a matter of fact, all the taxes eventually paid by the Negroes in the South probably amount only to a third or a half of the three millions or so spent upon their schools.

What of that? Are the Southern states the only communities in the country in which a comparatively small part of the population pays most of the taxes; it is altogether probable that in Boston or New York the payers of nine tenths of the taxes do not furnish one tenth of the school children.

Who educates the Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Greek, and Syrian children of those cities? The well-to-do part of the community, and it does it uncomplainingly, with its eyes open, gladly. The South likewise is educating the Negroes princ.i.p.ally for the advantage of the white race, for the efficiency of the whole region in which the Whites have the greatest stake, and from which they derive the greater benefit, material and moral.

One of the most obstinate Southern conventional beliefs, widely held, constantly a.s.serted, and diametrically contrary to the facts, is that the Negroes have been spoiled by cla.s.sical education which has totally unfitted them for ordinary life. Thus even Murphy holds that "We have been giving the Negro an educational system which is but ill adapted even to ourselves. It has been too academic, too much unrelated to practical life, for the children of the Caucasian." The intelligent man on the cars will tell you that the negro college graduates with their Greek and Latin are spoiling the whole race. Never was there such an advertis.e.m.e.nt of the vigor of college education; since the official statistics show that the actual number of Negroes studying Greek and Latin in 1906, both in the secondary and higher schools (except the public schools), was 1,077 men and 641 women, a total of 1,718 persons. With some possible additions from those in high schools, and higher inst.i.tutions, the total number of colored people who are now taking any kind of collegiate training is not above 3,000, of whom only 180 took degrees in 1906; there are also 4,500 normal students, of whom 1,270 graduated. Of professional students there were in all (1906) about 1,900 Negroes, a third of whom were in theology and another third in medicine. Of negro colleges and technical schools and private academies, 127 are enumerated, ranging all the way from the Arkadelphia Baptist Academy with 50 students, up to Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Inst.i.tute with 1,621 students; but in all such colleges those ranked as taking a college course are comparatively few.

These figures throw light on the further conventional belief that it is the Northern endowed colleges that have made the trouble in the colored race, through efforts to teach the colored youth that they were the equals of the Whites. By far the greater number of Negroes who are really getting training above the secondary grade in the South are in the state-sustained inst.i.tutions--many of them, of course, still of low grade; and full credit should be given to the South for developing this type of negro education, of which the North knows little. State Agricultural, Normal or Industrial colleges are to be found in every former slaveholding state, except Arkansas and Tennessee, and together include more than 5,000 students.

The attacks, chiefly from Southern Whites, upon negro college education have of late been transformed into a controversy as to the relative importance of academic and industrial training. The schools of the Tuskegee type furnished manual work to their students apparently not in the first instance because it was thought to be educative, but because they had to earn part of their living. This is apparently the main source of the bitter hostility of Dixon to the work of Tuskegee. The form his criticism takes is that Booker Washington, instead of teaching the Negro to be a good workman, is training him to take independent responsibility; that if he is a good workman he will compete with the Whites, and if he is a good leader he will aim to make the Negroes a force in the community.

This line of objection to education of the black is really based upon the belief that they are a race capable of education, that the Negro is not a clod, but may be improved by the systematic efforts of superior men; he has in him the potentiality of vital force.

Meanwhile throughout the country has been running a current in favor of a more practical education than that furnished by the ordinary schools, and the result has been the Technical, Manual Training, and Commercial schools scattered throughout the Northern states. The controversy is not at all confined to questions of negro education. The Southern white people have been well inclined toward the new type of education for Negroes, although on the whole much preferring the academic type for their own children.