Part 2

The most of the teachers who have returned report nothing remarkable, no doubt the best kind of a report to have to make. Honest, legitimate labor has never much to say for itself. Among the things mentioned in addition to the paid labor of the work are these: securing libraries, papers, Testaments for Sunday-school, teaching infant class, teaching Bible class, leading singing, superintending; and one did all this, organizing his entire school into one class. He also rented an organ which he played. One or more held prayer meetings. All had religious exercises in school. A few gave temperance lectures. One had a temperance glee club. Several gave musical entertainments, especially at close of school, white and colored in attendance. One county in this State is almost exclusively occupied by students from Fisk. They organized themselves into an institute, meeting once a month for the discussion of methods and the interests of education in general. By invitation Prof. Bennett attended the last meeting, delivering addresses and preaching on the following Sunday. He found the colored people gathered _en masse_ and the interest up to fever heat.

About the usual number of misfortunes has befallen our students this year. One is shortsighted and wears spectacles; he is also quite light colored. Both these damaged him. He was taken for a Jew trying to pass himself off as a colored man. White and colored alike looked upon him with suspicion. He succeeded in persuading the colored people that he was one of them, but the whites had no use for the “white nigger in spectacles.” By continued insult and threats his nervous system was so worn upon that he fell sick and left after teaching a month. Two young men teaching in a river county in Mississippi had, briefly told, the following experience: The boat could not land at the place sought, but they were put ashore at midnight, three miles away. There were two houses at the landing, one being unoccupied. In this they got permission to spend the night. They lay on bags of cotton-seed. There being no means of fastening doors, one of them put his money, two dollars and fifty cents, in his shoe, under his foot, for safe-keeping. The next day they walked through mud and rain to the town, and from there set out in search of schools.

To secure a school is frequently a thing of no small difficulty. The young men or women must make a journey of miles through blind ways on foot or with such conveyance as can be found. The neighborhood being reached, the leading colored people must be approached as the first step. The community is Baptist or Methodist, and the school will be held in the church. “What are you?” “I am a Congregationalist.” “What is that?” If denominational difficulties are overcome, the next thing to do is to meet the white trustees. They may be in favor of _home talent_. These foreign students carry money out of the country. They look independent and may teach things not in the book. But here is Sam. He can read. He owes ’Squire So-and-so. If he gets the school he will pay him. We favor Sam. If, however, Sam cannot by every contrivance pass the examination, the Fisk student appears before the County Superintendent. But here a new difficulty. The Superintendent holds an institute to prepare persons to pass his own examination, charging them five dollars apiece. Those who attend are quite sure to pass. It is wise for the Fisk student to be at that institute, pay his fee and pass, for when that institute is over the time for getting a school in that county is up. This state of things does not exist in all places, let us hope not in many, but it does in some. It is quite a common rule never to give a first-class certificate, no matter what the scholarship, to a colored student, as in most States it increases his pay, and perhaps it would not seem fit for a colored boy or girl to get a better certificate than some white young man or woman. There are exceptions to this rule. In one examination in which there were forty candidates, two got first-class certificates. These two were from Fisk.

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A WANT—READING ROOMS.

PROF. ALBERT SALISBURY.

It is hard to realize, even when we make the conscious effort, how much of the general culture, intelligence, and power of the American people is due to the habit of reading. That there is not a more marked and easily discernible difference between the intelligence and practical efficiency of the college-bred man and of the man of less training is largely due to the fact that the one reads as widely and continually as the other. Even superficial and omnivorous reading is an efficient source of intelligence and power. So universal is this habit of reading among the native-born people of the Northern States, that it is hard for them to conceive of its absence. It costs us an effort to imagine the mental status of a person who cannot or does not read. Yet there are millions of people in the South who cannot read and millions more who do not. It is one thing to teach a child how to read; it is quite another thing to make him _love_ to read, to give him the _habit_ of reading. And the first has comparatively little value without the other. It is of little moment that a million children have been taught the art of reading if they do not practice it freely.

Now the fact is that of the hundreds of thousands who have been in the freedmen’s schools but a very small part have ever formed the reading habit. And, as one consequence, even college graduates of the colored race have far less general intelligence and intellectual efficiency than white people of much more limited education.

There is nothing singular or unaccountable about this. It is the natural consequence of the circumstances existing. The parents of these young people were slaves, to whom reading was a forbidden art. In their houses, highly as the ability to read may be prized, and earnestly as it may be sought for their children, there are as yet no books, no magazines, no newspapers even. If, indeed, there be any printed thing there, it is almost without exception of the most trashy, crude, and worthless, if not vile and corrupting, sort, from both the literary and the moral point of view. The dime novel, the “Fireside Companion,” the sloshy, ungrammatical local newspaper are, at the best, all that one may hope to find. In cultured homes, children acquire the habit of reading by contagion. It is fairly _bred_ into them. But in the homes of the freedmen there is no contagious example, and there can be none. There is for the colored youth no inheritance of culture in any way. Children in Northern homes take in more of culture through the skin, by unconscious absorption, in the first ten years of life than the freedmen’s children can ever acquire except by long years of schooling.

From the consideration of these facts, two conclusions follow—first, that for the intellectual uplifting of the colored race it is absolutely essential that the reading habit be established in some way; and, second, that it should be the active endeavor of all the missionary schools to devise and employ the best agencies for stimulating and establishing this habit.

Now comes the practical question, What are the instrumentalities by which we can implant and cultivate the love of profitable and elevating reading?

Of course, something may be done in the regular course of instruction. Reading in school may be so taught as to give real culture of taste and appreciation. The sips of good literature found in the reading-books may be so used as to create a desire to drink freely at the fountain-head; though it is to be confessed that many teachers fail lamentably in this direction. The student of history or geography may and should be pushed out of his text-book into the wide field from which text-books are gleaned. Yet all this has much of the flavor of the daily task about it. Can anything be done to make the act of reading more spontaneous, to make it seem more like an indulgence and a recreation than an exaction and a duty?

The answer need not be a negative. It is to be found in reading-rooms, wisely placed and planned. And much stress is to be laid on these qualifications.

The first requisite for a reading-room is accessibility. It must be placed where it can be got at easily and continually. A locked-up library, open only once or twice a week at a stated hour, with the issue of books held under formal regulations is utterly futile as a means of creating the reading habit; it is useful only for those who have the habit already formed. A reading-room must not only be conveniently placed where the pupils can not escape it, as it were, but it must also be open at all times; so that in all the moments of leisure, whether in the hours set apart for labor or those for recreation, there may be the freest access, that even “he that runs” may read a little. It, therefore, becomes almost a necessity in a boarding-school that there be two reading-rooms, one for each sex.

The second requirement for success is that the reading matter be well chosen, selected with regard to the ends in view. It is absurd to suppose that reading matter so stale, dull or obstruse as to have no longer any value among a reading people should be worth sending to a people who have not yet learned to read. Musty libraries of defunct ministers are even more useless in a freedmen’s school than at the North. Discarded Sunday-school books are little better; for in any library the readable books are worn to pieces before the rest are given away. Old files of religious or other newspapers have their uses; but to make a reading-room tempting is not one of them.

The matter in a reading-room should be fresh, interesting, and adapted to the mental condition of those for whom it is provided; otherwise it cannot be either profitable or inspiring. The newspapers must contain _current_ news. The magazines must be adapted to the pupil’s stage of development, which is, so far as reading is concerned, usually the juvenile stage. Freedmen’s children are not yet ready, to any considerable extent, for philosophy or high art.

The books—for there should be books as well as papers in our reading-rooms—should be fresh, well printed, and, above all, illustrated. Good pictures, such as are found in the recent publications of the Harpers and Scribner, illuminate the words of the book for these young people as nothing else can. And a book closely printed, on poor paper, without illustration, is a tax on any reader but the confirmed book-worm. The books should relate, largely, to the world in its external aspects and to human achievement—books of travel and adventure, of history in its romantic phases, the great deeds of great men, whether knights of war or labor.

To be specific, such books as Knox’s Boy Traveler series, Coffin’s Histories, Butterworth’s Zizzag Journeys, Swiss Family Robinson, and even the productions of Jules Verne, placed within the easy and constant reach of our pupils, would be the most effective means imaginable for securing the valuable result desired.

Were they well printed and illustrated, I would add to the above list the old-time “Rollo Books.” Indeed, the list given is but a fragment of that which might now be made up. Among the periodicals, _Wide Awake_, _St. Nicholas_, and _Harper’s Young People_ should have a prominent place alongside the _Century_ and _Harper’s Weekly_ and _Monthly_.

I have not time to dwell upon the moral results, even more important than the intellectual ones, sure to come from the employment of the means herein imperfectly indicated; but I am sure that reading-rooms such as I have in mind can be made a most valuable auxiliary of our work in its best and highest purposes.

If any persons chancing to read this, desire fuller information with a view to co-operation in a good work, I shall be happy to receive communications from them at any time.

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A GENEROUS WORD FROM THE SOUTH.

FROM THE MEMPHIS APPEAL.

The Memphis _Appeal_, in an editorial column upon the Education of the Negro, taking as a text the recent Episcopal Congress of colored men in this city and the Louisville Convention, says to certain representative men:

“We recommend them to get the annual reports of the American Missionary Society, of the Southern and Northern Methodist Churches, and of the African Methodist and Baptist Churches. From these they will find that more than $20,000,000 have been expended by these religious organizations since 1864 in building and maintaining handsome school-houses in which the Negro has been trained and educated and fitted for the noble task and important duty of training and educating others. They will find, too, from these reports that in all these years white men and women of learning and culture have labored, often in the face of prejudice and within earshot of contumely and hate. What these missionaries have done, the world at large has made little note of, but the days are not far distant when everywhere, through the South at least, it will be acknowledged as the greatest of all the great works accomplished in the United States since 1865. From the Potomac almost to the Rio Grande the academies and colleges of the American Missionary Society are to be found at nearly all the large centers of population, and they are flourishing because their work is a practical work and their purpose the plain one of widening and deepening the stream of learning at which the once slaves of the South may drink freely and at will. These institutions are the results of a generous benevolence, and have been maintained by a self-denying zeal worthy of the glorious Luther, whose birth a grateful world is everywhere celebrating with gladness. We recommend them to read the reports of the Rev. Atticus G. Haygood, of Oxford, Ga., who, since he wrote the _Brother in Black_, has launched into the work of furthering the education of the Negro with the zeal of a missionary, and the spirit of a soldier in a noble cause. Dr. Haygood, not long ago, made a tour of the South in the interest of the fund for which he is the dispensing agent, and the result is a more fervent devotion to the good work and more fervid and appealing speeches in its behalf. A gallant ex-Confederate, a Southerner by birth and breeding, and the son of a slaveholder, brought up, too, in a wealthy planting section of Georgia, he entered upon his, at first, self-appointed task as a mere private, a volunteer in the ranks where he found so many noble workers. But his knowledge of the Negro, of his capacity, and his needs, and the best methods of reaching practical educational results soon marked him for the high position he now occupies as the trusted and confidential agent of a fund bequeathed by a benevolent Northern man, whose desire for the advancement and betterment of the Negro Dr. Haygood is furthering by helping all the schools at the South that have these for their objects. Already, in the first year of the existence of the fund, this good, strong man finds encouraging results following upon what he has expended of it, and he pleads on every possible occasion with voice and pen for the extension of the practical system of education so long pursued by the American Missionary Association, and in which he sees the best possibilities of the dark race. Dr. Haygood speaks plainly, as well as eloquently. He calls a spade a spade. He does not spare any who set themselves in his way or in the way of the work he has so much at heart. He knows that education makes every man better, stronger and happier than he could be without it and he contends for its dissemination by compulsion if other means fail of making it general, of bringing it into every man’s house as essential to the maintenance of the peace that passes all understanding. It is in the nature of things that such a man should encounter opposition; that he should even be reviled, abused and misrepresented, but he has only to take counsel of those who have occupied the field he is now in during the past twenty years to find a sweet solace and a consolation for it all. He can read in their lives the opening chapters of his own career in the field of Negro education, but he can also read of a generous if tardy recognition of their labors by the best educated men and women of the South, who willingly acknowledge their indebtedness to them for the patient, earnest, laborious work by which in so short a time nearly forty per cent. of the Negro population has been taught to read and write, and so many thousands have been trained and fitted after the most approved technical methods to teach in Negro public schools and thus perpetuate the blessings they rejoice in the possession of.”

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AN APOSTOLIC SALUTATION.—At Birmingham, Ala., a city of only a decade, in its iron and coal interest worthy of its English namesake, Field Superintendent Roy found Congregational representatives of half a dozen of our other schools and churches, who had been drawn to that busy metropolis, as so many acquaintances of the Apostle Paul in Asia Minor had been drawn to Rome to be addressed by name in the salutatory chapter of his Epistle to the Romans before he had himself ever been to that city. Canon Farrar argues that that chapter must belong to some other Epistle, on account of the difficulty of the Apostle’s knowing so many people at Rome. If the Canon of Westminster had only been a Superintendent of Missions he would have had no such trouble. Dr. Roy could have given the apostolic salutation to the Saints of this new church.

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NOTICES ON THE OPENING OF SCHOOLS.

SELECTED FROM CORRESPONDENCE.

Storrs School, Atlanta.—We have enrolled three hundred and seventy pupils and have been obliged to refuse admittance to fifty on account of room. We are all wishing for more room and an increase in our teaching force so that we may receive all that apply. I have thought for several years that the necessity of the continuance of Storrs School would cease as the public schools for colored people increased in number, but I am becoming satisfied that it is a permanence. The increase in population of this fast growing city, and the desire of the people for a thorough education keep all the schools of any value full.

Talladega College.—So far as I can now judge we are to have all the students we can find room for, and I think more will pay at least a part of their expenses than heretofore.

Charleston, Avery Institute.—Our opening was admirable in order, large in numbers, and blessed by the presence of parents and patrons who gave me a most cordial welcome. There was every evidence of sincerity about it, and I am delighted with my induction and with the two days. The institution is one of the grandest in design, scope, and progress, and is sufficient to excite my highest pride.

Tougaloo University.—An unusually large number of independent applications have been sent in, so that we are likely to have an overflow of students. These will need to be provided for. You may, therefore, hear from us again, asking for provisions of shelter to meet the demand. We never had so many apply before the opening of school.

Nashville, Tenn.—Fisk University.—We are now able to speak of our opening as a very favorable one. The number of new students is larger than usual and of a more advanced class, and the spirit was never better.

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ITEMS FROM THE FIELD.

—Rev. Evarts Kent, of Atlanta, Ga., took his vacation in Vermont visiting his father, Rev. Cephas H. Kent, of New Haven, and preaching a historical sermon at Benson. He met a warm welcome upon his return to his field.

—The brothers, Rev. A. W. and Rev. C. B. Curtis, of Marion and Selma, Ala., having had their vacation in the Northwest, are back again upon their chosen spheres of labor.

—The health of President E. A. Ware’s wife having been greatly threatened, upon medical advice he spent the summer with her in the Adirondacks and is much encouraged by the improvement attained. He is now back at his post, as are also Professors T. N. Chase and C. W. Francis.

—Rev. Dr. Horace Bumstead and wife, of the Atlanta University, have been afflicted in the death of their youngest child, a son, which occurred on Lookout Mountain, whither they had fled for relief in the pure air of that locality.

—Prof. R. D. Hitchcock, of the Straight University, having been called to the presidency of the Southern University, New Orleans, has declined the same and remains at his post.

—Prof. Albert Salisbury, Superintendent of Education, having taken as a wife Miss Hosford, a teacher in the Whitewater Normal, Wisconsin, has installed his family in their Atlanta home, and he is now going his Southern rounds.

—The “Cassedy Hall” has been built this summer at Talladega for the use of the primary department and named for Mr. J. H. Cassedy, of this State, who gave the $5,000 needed for its erection.

—The “Whitin Hall,” at New Orleans, has been built this summer as a boy’s dormitory and named for the late Deacon J. C. Whitin, of Whitinsville, Mass., whose estate paid in $10,000, which, for the erection, was put with $5,000 given by Deacon Seymour Straight, for whom the university was named.

—Prof. J. A. Nichols, lately Superintendent of Schools at Yonkers, N.Y., has been made Principal of the Avery Institute at Charleston, S.C., in the place of Prof. A. W. Farnham, who resigned.

—Rev. Milton E. Churchill, a graduate of Knox College and of the New Haven Divinity School, a son of Prof. Geo. Churchill, of Galesburg, Ill., has been made Principal of the Emerson Institute, at Mobile, Ala.

—The Le Moyne Institute, at Memphis, Tenn., has been enlarged at a cost of $2,000, one-half of which, upon the solicitation of the Principal, A. J. Steele, was furnished by white citizens of that place.

—At Macon, Ga., to accommodate the library, which Rev. S. E. Lathrop has been gathering, a Library Building has been erected, with a basement for an industrial department. For this project, citizens of Macon, both white and colored, contributed liberally.

—Rev. B. A. Imes, pastor at Memphis, Tenn., having received an appointment in the Alcorn University, Mississippi, with a tempting salary, has decided to remain with his chosen people. He is popular in that city, and the teachers of the Le Moyne Institute seem to be as fond of their preacher as the parishioners who make up the body of his church.

—At Little Rock, Arkansas, a school has been opened this fall in the Congregational Church of Rev. Y. B. Sims, under Miss Rose M. Kinney as Principal, a lady of large experience in our work. This school is the precursor of the Edward Smith College, which is to go along in that city. Miss M. E. Keyes is associated with her as missionary.

—The new church at Mobile, Ala., was dedicated on the last Sabbath of September, Pastor Crawford and Revs. J. C. Fields and F. G. Ragland participating.

—Rev. O. D. Crawford, who has this summer had the supervision of the erection of the new church at Mobile and of the Whitin Hall at New Orleans, has resigned his pastorate at Mobile because of the incompatibility of that climate with the health of his family. He will be greatly missed upon the field. He will return to some pastoral charge at the North.

—Theological students, who have been supplying churches during the vacation, have now returned to their studies—Rev. S. N. Brown, from Florence, Ala., where he participated in a revival, to the Fisk University; Rev. F. G. Ragland, from Mobile, to Talladega; Rev. J. R. McLean, from Savannah, to Talladega.