Education of the Negro

THE EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO
By Charles Dudley Warner

At the close of the war for the Union about five millions of negroes
were added to the citizenship of the United States. By the census of
1890 this number had become over seven and a half millions. I use the
word negro because the descriptive term black or colored is not
determinative. There are many varieties of negroes among the African
tribes, but all of them agree in certain physiological if not
psychological characteristics, which separate them from all other races
of mankind; whereas there are many races, black or colored, like the
Abyssinian, which have no other negro traits.
It is also a matter of observation that the negro traits persist in
recognizable manifestations, to the extent of occasional reversions,
whatever may be the mixture of a white race. In a certain degree this
persistence is true of all races not come from an historic common stock.
In the political reconstruction the negro was given the ballot without
any requirements of education or property. This was partly a measure
of party balance of power; and partly from a concern that the negro
would not be secure in his rights as a citizen without it, and also upon
the theory that the ballot is an educating influence.
This sudden transition and shifting of power was resented at the South,
resisted at first, and finally it has generally been evaded. This was due
to a variety of reasons or prejudices, not all of them creditable to a
generous desire for the universal elevation of mankind, but one of them
the historian will judge adequate to produce the result. Indeed, it might
have been foreseen from the beginning. This reconstruction measure
was an attempt to put the superior part of the community under the
control of the inferior, these parts separated by all the prejudices of race,
and by traditions of mastership on the one side and of servitude on the

other. I venture to say that it was an experiment that would have failed
in any community in the United States, whether it was presented as a
piece of philanthropy or of punishment.
A necessary sequence to the enfranchisement of the negro was his
education. However limited our idea of a proper common education
may be, it is a fundamental requisite in our form of government that
every voter should be able to read and write. A recognition of this truth
led to the establishment in the South of public schools for the whites
and blacks, in short, of a public school system. We are not to question
the sincerity and generousness of this movement, however it may have
halted and lost enthusiasm in many localities.
This opportunity of education (found also in private schools) was
hailed by the negroes, certainly, with enthusiasm. It cannot be doubted
that at the close of the war there was a general desire among the
freedmen to be instructed in the rudiments of knowledge at least. Many
parents, especially women, made great sacrifices to obtain for their
children this advantage which had been denied to themselves. Many
youths, both boys and girls, entered into it with a genuine thirst for
knowledge which it was pathetic to see.
But it may be questioned, from developments that speedily followed,
whether the mass of negroes did not really desire this advantage as a
sign of freedom, rather than from a wish for knowledge, and covet it
because it had formerly been the privilege of their masters, and marked
a broad distinction between the races. It was natural that this should be
so, when they had been excluded from this privilege by pains and
penalties, when in some States it was one of the gravest offenses to
teach a negro to read and write. This prohibition was accounted for by
the peculiar sort of property that slavery created, which would become
insecure if intelligent, for the alphabet is a terrible disturber of all false
relations in society.
But the effort at education went further than the common school and
the primary essential instruction. It introduced the higher education.
Colleges usually called universities--for negroes were established in
many Southern States, created and stimulated by the generosity of

Northern men and societies, and often aided by the liberality of the
States where they existed. The curriculum in these was that in colleges
generally,--the classics, the higher mathematics, science, philosophy,
the modern languages, and in some instances a certain technical
instruction, which was being tried in some Northern colleges. The
emphasis, however, was laid on liberal culture. This higher education
was offered to the mass that still lacked the rudiments of intellectual
training, in the belief that education--the education of the moment, the
education of superimposed information, can realize the theory of
universal