Black and White

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eir shattered manhood. Indeed, there have been times when I have seriously debated the question, whether the black man had any manhood left, after the missionaries and religious enthusiasts had done picturing, or, rather, caricaturing his debased moral and mental condition. He has been made the victim of the most exalted panegyric by one set of fanatics, and of the most painful, malignant abuse and detraction by another set. The one has painted him as a sort of angel, an

recognition of those who may be called their equals, is not denied; but that they were the pampered children of fortune, laboring simply for God and humanity, which zealous persons have painted them to be in newspapers and magazines, religious and other, is simply making a mountain out of a mole-hill. They were neither millionaires nor paupers, but they were educated men and women, like thousands throughout the North and West, who went into the field to labor because it was rich unto the harvest and the laborers were few. To say that salaries offered were not accepted always with promptness would be to get on the wrong side of a correct statement of fact. There are hundreds and thousands of educated men and women in the North and West to-day "waiting for something to turn up," and who would not hesitate a moment to embrace an opportunity, honorable and lucrative, which should present itself. There was little romance in the undertaking; there was far less in the work to be performed. I simply desire to protest against the correctness of the distorted pictures drawn ostensibly to magnify the sacrifices, which were many, and to belittle the rewards, which were great, in the performance of an ordinary piece of work, by a class of persons now rapidly disappearing from the scenes that once knew them. Their work is fast being tra

uld the people be called upon to support two schools within speaking distance of each other to preserve an infamous distinction, a sneaking caste prejudice? Why! Because the people are wise in their own conceit-perfectly rational upon all other questions save the color question. The South is weighted down with debt, almost as poor as the proverbial "Job's turkey," and yet she supports a dual school system simple to gratify a prejudice. I notic

life. The persistence with which this one "idea" has been forced upon colored students has produced the reverse of what was anticipated in a large number of cases, and very naturally. It is a false theory to suppose all the people of any one class to be specially fitted for only one branch of industry: for I maintain that preaching has largely become a trade or profession, in which the churches with large salaries have become prizes to be contended for with almost as much zeal and partisanship

ble grade in our dwarfed civilization, where the fittest does not always survive; the drossiest, flimsiest, most selfish and superficial often occupying the high places, social and political. But I have still higher aspirations for my race. There is hope for any people who are social in disposition, for this suppos

und them, and devote columns upon columns of newspaper, magazine and book argument-imaginary pictures-to the immorality, mental sterility and innate improvidence of this people; and they do this for various reasons, none of them honorable, many of them really disreputable. In dealing with this negro problem they always start off upon a false premise; their conclusions m

st laudable act of justice and generosity that the State of Georgia paid out annually for the maintenance of colored schools more money than the aggregate taxes paid into the treasury of the State by the Negro property owners of the State; while the

life and insure proper respect for the so-called rights of property? Such an experiment would in time require the deportation to New York of the entire male adult population of Ireland, to be turned into the "finest police in the world," to stem the tide of crime and immorality which such premium upon ignorance would entail. Since even under the present munificent and well ordered school system, it is almost impossible to elect a Board of Alderm

ian classes generally, white and colored. They stoutly maintain that these people really add nothing to the stock of wealth, really produce nothing, and that, therefor

nd dollars, properly applied, would prove to be a more humane, a more profitable preventive. The poor school teacher is paid twenty-five dollars per month for three months in the year, while the prison guards is paid fifty dollars per month for twelve months

f a savage. The convict systems of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Arkansas are a burning disgrace to the Christian civilization which we boast. Nothing short of a semi-barbarous public opinion would permit them to exist. Governors have "called attention" to them; legislatures have "investigated" and "resolved" that they should be purified, and a

among that people which requires an annual outlay of millions of dollars and thousands of employees; and to maintain the work, to keep up the interest of the charitable, it is necessary to picture, as black as imagination can conceive it, the present and prospective condition of the people who are, primarily, the beneficiaries. The work and its maintenance has really become a heavy strain upon the patience and generosity of the liberal givers of the land-whose profuse behests have n

e a thousand dollars to aid in the education of the black heathen than to give a black scholar and gentleman an opportunity to honestly earn a hundred dollars. He has no confidence in the capacity of the black man. He has seen him pictured a savage, sunk in ignorance and vice-an object worthy to receive alms, but incapable of making an honest living. So that when a black man demonstrates any capacity, shows any signs of originality or genius, rises just a few inches above the common, he at once

ucation as it has been operated amo

r class upon whom he was to operate-ignorant of their temperament, receptive capacity and peculiar, aye, unique, idiosyncrasies. Thus thousands upon thousands of dollars were expended upon the erection and endowment of "colleges" in many localities where ordinary common schools were unknown. Each college was, therefore, necessarily provided with a primary department, where the child of ten years and the adult of forty struggled in the same classes with the first elements of rudime

ic and the farmer-to whom the classics, theology and the sciences, in their extremely impecunious state, are unequivocable abstractions. There will be those who will denounce me for taking this view of collegiate and professional preparation; but I maintain that any education is false which is unsuited to the condition and the prospects of the

be instructed for the work to be done. Many a colored farmer boy or mechanic has been spoiled to make a foppish gambler or loafer, a swaggering pedagogue or a cranky homiletician. Me

olored youth of the South have been allured and seduced from their natural inclination by the premiums placed upon theological, clas

higher education" of colored youth had been expended in the establishment and maintenance of primary schools and schools of applied science, the race would have profited vast

ne, The Continent, the following reflections upon the subject, contributed to tha

manual training in public schools is up for discussion and decision. All this for white laboring men. As long ago as December, 1879, the Legislature of Tennessee authorized a brief manual of the Elementary Principles of Agriculture to be "taught in the public schools of the State," for the benefit of white farmers again. The Professor of Chemistry in the Vanderbilt University, Nashville, prepared the book-107 pages. Where in all this is there anything for the educational improvement of the black laborer just where he needs education most? The labor of the South is subject in these years to a marvelous revolution. The only opportunity the freedman has to rise is by furnishing such skilled labor as the great changes going on in that splendid section of the land require. How can he furnish it, unless the education given him is

se are to be obtained in the South as in the North, by apprenticeship and in schools specially provided for the purpose. Instead of spending three to seven years in mastering higher education, which presupposes favorab

even though the singer be Robert Burns at his plow in the remoteness of Ayr, or the philosophic ?sop in the humble garb of a Greek pedant's slave. Genius will take care of itself; it is the mass of mankind that must be led by the hand as we lead a small boy. It is therefore that I plead, that the masses

train of thought in the f

ite teachers, approved every word, and gave me most hearty thanks. I counseled aspiring young men to abstain from unsuitable attempts at merely literary training; from overlooking the intermediate links of culture in striving after something "beyond their measure;" from expecting any more to be shot up into the United States Senatorships, etc., by a revolution which had already wellnigh spent its first exceptional force (as a few extraordinary persons are thrown up into extraordinary distinction in the beginning of revolutions); from ambitious rejection of the steady, thorough, toilsome methods of fi

ed by those who have in hand the education of colored youth. A large number of colleges are adding industrial to the

ultural Institute under the management of General S.C. Armstrong. The success of this one institution in industrial education, and the favor with which it is regarded by

industrial features of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute for use in his capacity as a professor among the peop

m, and in which the stock have their shelter. We ascended a winding staircase, reached the top, and looked down upon the Institute grounds with their wide shell-paved walls, grassplots, flower-beds, orchards, groves and many buildings-the

lored boys. They make annually for the United States government two thousand pairs of shoes for the Indians. They also look after outside orders, and do all the repairing, etc., of boots and shoes for the faculty, officers, and students-making fully five thousand pairs of shoes a year, if we include the repairing in this estimate. At the head of this department is a practical shoemaker from Boston. Each

o the room. These young girls are the future wives and mothers; and the large majority of them will be married to poor men. In the kitchen, the laundry, and the sewing-room, they are acquiring a knowledge and habits of industry that will save their husbands' pennie

institution, and that I would like to have my boys spend three years here, from fourteen to seventeen, grow strong in the love for work, and educated to feel the dignity of labor, and get a trade: then if they have the cap

ouri & Pacific R.R., gave a saw mill, and as a result of these gifts large industrial operations were begun. The saw mill is certainly an extensive ent

res, is in charge of a graduate and his wife. Its receipts reach nearly three thousand dollars a year, and the farm promises to do invaluable service in time towards sustaining this gigantic work. All of the industries do not pay. For example, the deficit in the printing office last year was about seven hundred dollars. This is due to the employment and training of student la

iloring, sewing, printing, etc., over five hundred students were engaged in 1883. They earned over thirty thousand dollars-an average of seventy dollars each. Ther

and my own deductions, and is the very strongest argument for a complete and immediate recastin

e machine shop, the grain field, and the commercial pursuits. The moralist and missionary are no equals for the man whose ideas of honest toil are supplemented by a common school training and an educated hand. This is exemplified every day in the ready demand for foreign-born skilled labor over our own people, usually educated as gentlemen without means, as if they were to be kid-gloved fellows, not men who must contend for subsistence with the horny-handed men who have graduated from the machine shops and factories and the schools of applied sciences of Europe. Indeed, the absence of the old-time apprentices among the white youth of the North, as a force in our industrial organization to draw upon, can be accoun

ly, I protest, in this connection, against its application in the case of the colored youth in particular. What the colored boy, what

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rgently and admirably writing in advoca