Excerpts from a book on race 100 years ago (sh!t never changes)

[Hawaiian Punch]

We remember this sally of John C. Calhoun: "If I could find Negro who knew Greek syntax, I would believe that the Negro was a human being and ought to be treated as a man." This happened in 1834, when the Senator of South Carolina was able with impunity to promise the Negroes his special consideration on impossible conditions. As the most severe punishments were meted out to any person who undertook to teach the alphabet to a coloured child, it was improbable that any Negro would comprehend the tongue of Homer and Plato.

In the South the hostile feelings directed against the education of the Negroes persisted up to the time of the War of Secession. It is thus that in Carolina alone there were, in 1874, 200 Negro judges who did not know how to read or write. The same fact applies to the members of the School Commission, who, illiterate as they were, presided over the destinies of the negro schools. The majority of the Negro senators during the eight years reconstruction of the southern states which followed the war, were unable to write three lines. some did even know how to read, and yet these were recruited from among the Negro élite.

The impediments placed before the work of education by the fanatics of the south and by want of judgment on the part of the legislators of the North caused irreparable harm. On the other hand, negroes, deceived by their illusions on the subject of a liberal education came to regard instruction with aversion. The negro masses could only have great contempt for an education which only have served to make them more despicable and wretched. The unbridled ambition of these children of nature suffered cruelly in their contact with life and its mortifications. Their ride was wounded by the jests of the Whites and by their own unsatiated hunger. As all doors were closed to them they became subject to criminal temptations. In pointing to the results without seeking the causes, the best-intentioned Whites began to doubt the morality and intellectual capacity of coloured folks. It became the fashion to speak of their innate evil instincts, and of their inability to assimilate real White civilisation. The hatred of their enemies and the impatience of their friends had mournful consequences. Both the one and the other forgot this elementary truth, that the delay of a moral reaction is at least proportional to the duration of the original evil. The ill-omened work of centuries cannot be wiped out by the influence of a few years of justice.

 

[Hawaiian Punch]

Let us remember, therefore, in the first place, that during very long period the schools in the South lacked masters. Professors refused to teach there, for fear of being hated by their fellow citizens. It became necessary to approach the people of the North. These replied to the appeal with the ardor and faith of true missionaries. People went to instruct in the South as they went to convert savages Central Africa. contact with the prejudices of the Whites, however, was exceedingly dangerous, for their reception was more hostile and their hatred more implacable than that of savages. The White professors of both sexes who came from the North were banned by society. They were regarded with disgust and shunned like people infected with the plague. A pastor of Georgia declared, reply to a commission of inquiry, "I know nothing of those females from the North who have come to teach in our coloured schools. I have never spoken to none of them. They are rigorously excluded from society. The professors, discouraged, took refuge in the North, abandoning their schools. Teaching was thus often interrupted. If scorn and innumerable petty artifices did not suffice to deter masters from their duty violence was resorted to. Schools were burnt, at the risk of destroying both the accursed buildings and their evil genii, the teachers. If these attempts failed, they did not hesitate at nocturnal attacks. White teachers, male and female, were often beaten and whipped.

The members of the Ku Klux Klan succeeded in closing the numerous schools in the State of Mississippi. The Governor, R C, Powers, even announced this monstrous fact at the Congress, that for eight months no Negro school had been tolerated in the county of Winston, and that all the houses which had served as schools save one had been burnt down. The other slave States were in the same predicament. In Georgia, for example, there was in 1871 a number of localities where no school for people of colour was tolerated. Here The burning of schools and churches was very frequent. The persecution of schools was prolonged for a number of years. The Whites ostensibly showed greater sympathy towards illiterate Negroes than those who had had the misfortune to pass through the schools.

Nevertheless, in spite of all these obstacles, Negroes have succeeded in realising a progress which is altogether astounding.