American Missionary | Page 9

opposed by the old-time
preachers and church-officers of their own race, and sometimes
opposed by the whites. So the leaven has spread far and wide. A great
work has been accomplished by these schools and churches. These ten
years have seen a most decided uplifting of character and power among
the colored race. They are steadily acquiring property, building homes
and improving their surroundings. There are now over eighty
newspapers published by colored men in the former slave States of the
South. Some of these are very creditable specimens in typography and
in ability, and they have great and increasing influence. The great
majority of these editors and teachers have been educated in the A.M.A.

schools. There are also several colored lawyers, dentists and physicians,
who have almost without exception been educated in our schools. The
direct results in our Congregational church work are not as plainly
apparent, because most of the students when coming under our
influence are already connected with other churches, or else their
parents are, which amounts almost to the same thing. So the Baptists
and Methodists have reaped rich harvests through the training of their
sons and daughters in our schools. But these same denominations have
been through this means greatly uplifted and purified, so that great
good has come to all these strong and numerous churches, besides the
steady growth of Congregationalism as well. Rev. Dr. Curry, one of the
leaders of Southern thought, said in a recent address before the Georgia
Legislature, "The Congregationalists have done more than all other
denominations for the education of the Negro--they have done grandly,
patriotically." To my eyes, which have been wide open during these ten
years, there are most marked and gratifying signs of progress apparent
in every way. Far and near the leaven has spread, the older
denominations are improving, the principles of industrial and Christian
education are accomplishing untold good.
2.--There is also manifest in these ten years a marked improvement in
the feeling between the races. When a man has lived for ten years in the
South, he will begin to see how deeply rooted and immovably
imbedded in the Southern mind is the sentiment of inborn contempt for
the Negro. This was greatly intensified and brought to the surface by
the passions and prejudices of the war, with the volcanic upheavals and
chaotic events of the "carpet-bag period" which followed. Considering
all these things, there has been in my opinion a remarkable loosening of
the grasp of prejudice, a gradual melting of the caste principle,
especially in the minds of the better class among the whites. I say this
deliberately, with personal knowledge of the agitation of the infamous
"Glenn Bill" in Georgia, and notwithstanding the prejudice in Alabama
which broke up the colored normal school formerly existing in Marion,
and afterward successfully opposed its re-establishment in
Montgomery, or rather refused the previous State aid. Having been for
many years on the Board of Trustees of Atlanta University, and being
personally acquainted with a number of the members of the Georgia

Legislature, yet I am prepared to state this astonishing paradox--that
even the legislators who voted for the Glenn Bill have a much higher
regard for the colored race and for the A.M.A. schools than they
formerly had. I cannot take time to explain this singular phenomenon,
but it is true. One of the prominent members of the Georgia Legislature
said to me on the streets of Macon, when he heard the news of
President Ware's sudden death at Atlanta University: "Mr. Ware was a
hero of the nineteenth century, and deserves a monument to his
memory from the State of Georgia." So, notwithstanding Col. Glenn
and his followers, the same Legislature of Georgia has recently added
two million dollars to the school fund of the State. The efforts of such
brave and fearless leaders as Rev. Dr. Haygood, Rev. Dr. Curry, Hon.
Walter B. Hill and others have not been in vain, and the good results of
the A.M.A. work have commanded respect and even wonder from its
bitterest opponents, whose number and zeal decreases. Wisdom and
discretion in future will rapidly increase its friends.
3.--I could say much more concerning the colored work, in which (at
Macon, Georgia) I spent eight and a half of the happiest years of my
life. That branch of work needs to be sustained and extended for years
to come. Having now been for eighteen months in the mountain white
department of work, and having visited nearly all its most important
posts, I am prepared to say that this, also, is a most needy part of the
great missionary work which this Society has undertaken. Here are
nearly two millions of people, scattered here and there over this great
Cumberland Plateau, who because of their inaccessibility, their