Chapter 44

In thus reviewing the early history of the world we also find that the peoples who sat in darkness were brought to the light only through the agency of the teachers of the times in which they lived. Who made Egypt renowned? Were they not her great teachers, whose pupils came from far and near to learn, as it were, the foundation steps of our great civilization? Who in China is better known to the world than the great teacher Confucius? Who gave to Greece her renown for philosophy and art? Was it not Aristotle and Plato? Mention Rome, and the names of Quintilian and Cicero are recalled to our minds as the foremost educators. The Israelites had their prophets to instruct them, until the Great Teacher came to earth to enlighten all mankind. What was best and noblest in the systems of the famous teachers before the advent of Christ was crystallized into the method adopted by the Son of Man. He came to elevate the whole man, to shed light into his whole being--his mind, his body, and his soul.

Many and various have been the devices of mortal man to imitate the plan of the Master; and yet, after centuries of earnest endeavor, we have but recently begun to recognize the fact that complete success in the education of man lies in the secret of training the whole man--mind, body and soul.

Passing over the long period of scholastic apathy in European history, we come to a more recent epoch of intellectual awakening in the founding of great universities and stately colleges. These several institutions, through the instructions given by their most eminent teachers, have of themselves made the respective places of their establishment famous in both hemispheres.

Between the periods of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars in America, educational interests seemed to be centered mainly in the cultivation of the intellect as the only part of man that required special training.

The abolition of slavery and the consequent endeavor to enlighten the freedmen gave rise to a new phase of educational activity. This new ideal was the training of the body and the soul along with that of the mind. This system naturally reduced the length of time usually devoted to mind culture in proportion as time was required for the training of the hand and the cultivation of the moral side of man.

Foremost among the early teachers to inaugurate this system were Mrs. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mrs. Sarah J. Early, and Bishop John M. Brown. As a result of their efforts in this direction we have Wilberforce University, the first school by Negro teachers to follow the plan of the Great Teacher. Since the establishment of Wilberforce in the North, many similar institutions have been founded in order to give the "brother in black" an opportunity to show to the world what the Negro teacher is doing and can do towards uplifting his race.

It is a difficult matter to estimate the good that a true teacher can do, be he of whatever race-variety. But to calculate on the noble work of the majority of the self-sacrificing and virtuous Negro teachers is a task beyond the ability of man. Bishop Daniel A. Payne, the apostle of an educated ministry, is known throughout the country for the noble work he did in teaching the people at large as well as his immediate pupils both how to live and how to die. Almost every educated Negro preacher has at some period of his scholastic career served in the capacity of a teacher, and therefore, after his advent to the gospel, ministry has continued to instruct the people under the same principles of teaching.

To be a teacher in the strict sense of the word requires the possession of certain qualities of mind and soul, and the power to exercise these qualities in such a manner as to awaken in the mind of another thoughts similar to those of the person assuming to teach, and thereby causing the mental activity on the part of the learner to become knowledge and power. We, therefore, hold that the Negro teacher has acted along the method here described, and has thus been the means of enlightening the masses of the colored people that lay claim to any degree of education whatever. What the Negro teacher has accomplished has been done not from a selfish motive or a mercenary point of view, but primarily because he has endeavored to do his part toward elevating the race with which he is identified. If it is true that the salvation of the Negro lies in his being educated, then to the Negro teacher must be attributed the greater portion of his salvation.

Again, the majority of the Negro teachers are Christian men and women of high moral character, and as such are shining lights in the community in which they may be engaged in teaching. The good they thus do is not confined to the school or class-room, but permeates every sphere of society, ennobling and enriching the thoughts and minds of all with whom they may have dealings, both by their chaste conversation and by their upright and godly lives. The Negro teacher, therefore, wields an influence for good, not only by precept, but what is considered far better, also by example. Furthermore, the Negro teacher in the day school invariably becomes a teacher in the Sunday-school of the town where he happens to be living. And here again he exerts a power for good, confirming and strengthening the teachings of the past week.

Aside from his professional duties, the Negro teacher is often called upon to decide on matters of grave importance. In many cases he is the attorney for individuals who are unable to secure the services of a competent lawyer. In this capacity he often acts as justice of the peace, as well as a peacemaker, thereby allaying strife and contention. From early morn till late at night the Negro teacher is besieged by questions of every sort and kind, which he must satisfactorily answer to the benefit of the inquirer, be he farmer or blacksmith, preacher or vagrant. In fact, the Negro teacher in the rural districts answers the purposes of a bureau of information.

Such is the lot of the average Negro teacher. That there are exceptions need not here be stated. From what he has done on a small scale may be inferred what is being done on a larger basis of operation by the best and most renowned of the Negro teachers.

In nearly every Southern state of the Union may be found some one or two famous educators and teachers of Negro descent. Prof. Jno. R. Hawkins of North Carolina, Commissioner of Education of the A. M. E. Church, has established Kittrell College. Prof. J. C. Price gave us Livingston College in North Carolina. Prof. E. A. Johnson of Virginia has written a worthy history of the Negro race, now in use as a text-book in many public schools. In South Carolina we find results of the great work in science by Prof. J. W. Hoffman. Georgia is proud of Prof. R. R. Wright, President of the State Industrial College at Savannah, orator and historian; also Prof. W. H. Crogman, scholar and author. In Florida the names of Prof. T. de S. Tucker, Prof. T. V. Gibbs, and Prof. T. W. Talley stand high as eminent scholars and professional teachers. Alabama is rich in having the foremost men of the race as her great teachers--Prof. B. T. Washington, founder and principal of Tuskegee Institute, and Prof. W. H. Councill, President of the State Normal and Industrial College at Normal. And thus we might mention each state and her eminent Negro teachers; but it is not necessary; the above suffices our purpose. And yet we would not conclude without referring to the noble work of Prof. W. S. Scarborough, of Wilberforce, Ohio. He has gone a step beyond the ordinary and given us a Greek text-book that has been adopted in many schools. Moreover, his contributions to the leading magazines and periodicals are eagerly sought and read by the best scholars of the day, without reference to race.

With this accumulated force of intelligence, radiating its numerous beams of light in every section of the land, one need not seek far to find an answer to the query: "What is the Negro teacher doing in the matter of uplifting his race?"

As we endeavored to show in the beginning that it was through the instrumentality of their teachers that many countries acquired fame and gave to posterity a name honorable and glorious, so now the Negro teacher in his weak strength is laying the foundation for successive generations to build upon--a foundation more durable than stone or granite, more valuable than rubies or diamonds--the cultivation of the morals, the training of the hand, and the enlightenment of the mind. With an informed mind, a skillful hand, and an upright conduct, there is no reason why the Negro should not take his place upon the stage of action; play well his part in the drama of life, and meritoriously receive the plaudits of the gazing nations of the world.

SECOND PAPER.

WHAT IS THE NEGRO TEACHER DOING IN THE MATTER OF UPLIFTING HIS RACE?

BY PROF. E. L. BLACKSHEAR.

PROF. E. L. BLACKSHEAR.

Prof. E. L. Blackshear was born in Montgomery. Ala., in 1862. He was educated in the negro public schools of Montgomery. So rapid had been his progress that he graduated from Tabor College at the age of eighteen.

Prof. Blackshear is now principal of Prairie View State Normal School and Industrial College of Texas.

The following is the testimony of Prof. Blackshear concerning his grandmother. These words give us a glimpse of the bright side of slave life, and of the ideal "mammy" of the ante-bellum Southern plantation home.

"My grandmother was a remarkable woman. She idolized my mother, the only child that slavery had allowed her to keep. When grandma was sold from Georgia to Alabama, the humanity of her Georgia owners caused them to sell mother and child to the same people.

"My grandmother, although ignorant, had a profound belief in education. But if she knew absolutely nothing of the world of letters, she had something as good, perhaps better--a warm, honest, loving heart and Christian principles. She had genuine hatred for dirt and disorder, a regard, amounting to a fearful reverence, for white people of 'quality,' and a great and ill-disguised contempt for common, shiftless, 'darkies,' and low-bred whites. She was the best type of the faithful and efficient slave. But it was as a cook that 'Grandma's' reputation was known in two States. To my youthful imagination she was a magician; things she cooked for the white folks seemed so good to me. I think now of the batter-cakes, the light rolls, the syllabub, the sally-lunn, the ship-ships and the wafers grandma made. The light-bread she made is made no more. It is a lost art, an art that died with grandma."

When the Negroes were set free the first aim of thousands was to learn to read and write. Gray-haired veterans of the plantations sat side by side in the day schools as well as in the night schools with the smallest pickaninnies. And all seemed eager to learn the mysterious arts of the schoolroom. The school-book, in the eyes of the unlettered slave, was a sort of fetich to which he attributed the power of the white man. The young slave could follow his master to the door of the schoolhouse, but thus far and no farther. The mysterious rites and ceremonies which went on within were forbidden him. Human nature has ever been curious to know that the knowledge of which is prohibited, and so the slave had a great curiosity to master the printed page and to be admitted to the privileges of the schoolroom. It was not surprising that the whole race tried to go to school, and it need not surprise us if, in the enthusiasm for book-learning, from which the race had been so strictly debarred, too much stress may have been placed on mere book learning and too much confidence placed in the formal processes of the schoolroom. But, better even this exaggerated enthusiasm than indifference to all education of the schoolroom. The race would soon learn that the blue-back Webster's Speller was not the magic wand that would turn all troubles and difficulties into success and prosperity; that the ability to spell B-a-Ba, k-e-r-ker, baker, would buy no bread of the baker; while the power to read, "Do we go up by it!" with painful praiseworthy effort, would help the ex-slave but little as he strove to "go up by" the dangers ahead of him.

But they went to school, all of them at first, or all that could possibly do so, either by day or by night. It is not recorded that the chickens of that time had rest, but it must be that they did, for verily, in the first mad rush of letters, even chickens must have been forgotten by a race whose predilection for them has furnished the point for many a joke, as well as the occasion for painful if not indignant regret on the part of those whose fowls may have been abstracted. And it is a hopeful sign for the future of the Negro that while his first wild enthusiasm for the school-house has been moderated, his real desire for educational improvement continues strong and steady. He will go to school--the public school--when he can, and the higher institutions for his race are all filled to their capacity and are expanding. Will not this thirst for knowledge on the part of a so lately savage race bear good fruit both for the Negro and for humanity?

But who were to teach these black fanatics, seeking initiation for the first time, in the long and gloomy history of their race, into the mysteries, elusinian, of a modern, and, to them, totally foreign cult? A faithful band of Christian missionary white women gave answer by coming in the face of an inevitable social ostracism to light the torch of thought in a region hitherto unblessed by a single ray of education's light. The first Negro schools were taught by these white ladies at Charleston, at Atlanta, at Montgomery, at New Orleans, at Austin, and at the other great centers of the South's Negro population. The success of the first labors of this devoted band led to the foundation of permanent institutions for the elementary and later for the normal and collegiate instruction of the Negro youth. At Nashville, at Atlanta, at Raleigh, at Memphis, and at New Orleans institutions were founded which have become great schools and have contributed beyond measure to the process of civilizing the Negro as a mass--a process confessedly still far from completion. Complicated and annoying as the race problem assuredly is and will be for years to come at the South, it would be far worse--much farther away from even a hopeful degree of solution--but for the work done by the missionary colleges.

The missionary schools, of which Fisk, Atlanta, Straight, Roger Williams and Central Tennessee may be taken as types, furnished the first Negro school teachers and the Negro owes to these schools, founded and maintained in the spirit of the purest Christian philanthropy, a debt he can never repay in either kind or equivalence. The nearest like payment he can make is to imitate the beautiful, pure, devoted, lives of the missionary teachers. Too much cannot be said in praise of their labors. Perhaps if only the missionary Christian teachers had come and the political missionaries had remained at home, all might have been better.

But the missionary schools could reach but few. How was the great mass of the colored population to be educated? This was the question, and it was a most serious one. But the answer came not from the federal government, as some expected--that source from which so many had looked to get the mythical "mule" and the legendary "forty acres"--it came from the South, from the wasted resources of the former master. History furnishes no precedent as it affords no parallel to the action of the ex-slaveholders--a dominant race--in entering at once--before any opportunity had been afforded for recuperation from the losses of the Civil War--on the expensive work of giving a public school system to their former slaves--now technically, at least, their political equals. And nothing can be gained by the Negro in refusing gratitude to the South for this most magnanimous act and policy. An instance of this unselfish policy of the South in its attitude toward Negro education is seen in the history of Texas, the most liberal as well as the most progressive of the Southern commonwealths. The Constitutional Convention of 1876, which of course was Democratic, framed the present state constitution of Texas, and in it absolutely equal provision is made for both the elementary and the higher education of the Negro youth of Texas. And it is to the credit of Texas as an enlightened state as well as fortunate for her Negro population, that in the distribution of the magnificent school fund of the state, no discrimination is made between the races.

The Negro public schools are doing a great work for the elevation of the colored people. In a silent, unobtrusive way, these schools are leavening the thought and life of the race. The status and progress of the Negro are too commonly gauged by the deeds of the loafing and criminal element. The honest, law-abiding Negro who has a home, is getting a little property, has a small bank account, and is educating his children to useful citizenship, attracts little or no attention. But a race that has in a generation since chattel slavery gotten property worth by reliable estimate upward of $400,000,000 has been doing something. All of such a race are not either lazy, vicious, or immoral. The public school is doing effective work for the Negroes of the South in awakening in them a desire for better ways of living and higher ideals of conduct. Much remains to be done but that already accomplished is an earnest of better work yet to be done.

The Negro public school teacher has been more than a mere schoolkeeper. No class of educators in any race has done more, all things considered. The colored teacher has been a herald of civilization to the youth of his people. His superior culture and character have acted as a powerful stimulus to the easily roused imagination of the colored youth, and the black boy feels, in the presence of the black "professah," to him the embodiment of learning, that he too can become "something." At first he does not know what that something is, but he determines to be "somebody" and to make a place and a standing for himself in the world. In this way the colored school teacher is leading his race "up from slavery;" that is from the slavery of ignorance and superstition, of intellectual and moral inertia, of aimlessness and shiftlessness, into the freedom of intelligence, of energy, ambition and industry. Lincoln removed the formal yoke of a legal bondage, but the colored teacher is helping his race to get free a second time from a bondage just as galling--the bondage of intellectual and moral blindness and of industrial independence. Booker T. Washington is such a teacher--a teacher, indeed, and the leader of a race. And what Mr. Washington, himself a product of the missionary schools, is doing in a large way as the teacher and leader of the entire Negro race in America, hundreds, yea, thousands, of colored teachers in city and village, in the malarial river bottoms and among the pine-clad hills, are doing in a local but no less effective, though less comprehensive way. These colored men and women, many of whom are people of genuine culture and character, are giving their lives to the upbuilding of a race. And it is for them a labor of love.

These teachers teach by example as well as by precept. Their homes are models in neatness and refinement that are readily imitated by the other colored people of the community. It is to the credit of the colored teacher that he is, with rare exceptions, a model in his moral conduct and home life, and sets a high standard for his race, which they invariably--some of them--seek to follow. The colored teacher, too, has always been conservative and has been the wise adviser of his people. Himself dependent on the sentiment of the best white people of the community, he has usually won the confidence and respect of the white people, and they in turn have given him their moral support in the work of improving the minds, morals, and habits of the Negro youth of the community. In this way it is throughout the entire South--the best white people of the community by maintaining public schools for the Negro youth and by co-operation with the colored teacher, and often by personal interest in the work of both teacher and pupil, are actually aiding most effectively if not really directing the educational development of the colored race.

It is also greatly to the credit of the colored teacher in the South that he has not gotten above his race or tried to leave them, but has remained at his post and in his place doing the duty Providence has assigned and content to leave results to God and the future.

THIRD PAPER.

WHAT IS THE NEGRO TEACHER DOING IN THE MATTER OF UPLIFTING HIS RACE?

BY T. W. TALLEY.

PROF. THOMAS WASHINGTON TALLEY.

Thomas Washington Talley is a native of Bedford County, Tenn. His boyhood was spent upon his father's farm where he imbibed a love for nature. Some of the experiments made by him, as a child, with some of the lower animals, have proven most valuable aids in answering scientific problems encountered in later years.

In 1883 he entered the preparatory department of Fisk University, and after three years of study was admitted to college.

He began teaching in the public schools of his native state at the age of twelve. By teaching during his summer vacations, and by obtaining state scholarships through competitive examinations, he secured the larger portion of the means necessary for his support in college. He graduated from the classical course of Fisk University in 1890, receiving the degree of A. B. From 1890 to 1891 he was a member of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, who raised funds for the building of the Fisk Theological Seminary. In this company it was his duty aside from singing, to present the needs of the school. This he did with much eloquence and his appeals were always answered by liberal contributions.

In 1892 he received the degree A. M. from his alma mater for special work done in Natural Philosophy, Latin and German.

On October 1, 1896, he matriculated in the Graduate Department of Central Tennessee College (now Walden University), having spent the two preceding summers in resident work along the lines indicated by his courses of study in the institution. He selected courses leading to the degree of Doctor of Science.

He has been chiefly engaged in educational work and has held the following positions: Instructor in Mathematics and Music, Alcorn A. & M. College, Westside, Miss., two years; Professor of Natural Sciences, five years, and Vice-President two years in the State N. & I. College, Tallahassee, Fla. He at present occupies the chair of Natural Philosophy and General, Analytical and Industrial Chemistry in the Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Ala.

He is a member of the American Ornithologists Union, the Michigan Ornithological Club, a Vice-president of the Florida Audubon Society, and a Fellow of the American Negro Academy. He is considered an authority in Biology and Chemistry.

As soon as the clouds of the Civil War had cleared from our country and the Negro had become a free man, the question immediately presented itself as to how he could be made worthy of citizenship and capable of exercising the rights and privileges of free government.