The American Missionary | Page 3

may be reasonably inferred from the resolution passed by the last Triennial National Council. Let the American Missionary Association have the sinews of war with which to employ the ablest counsel."
From the Outlook:
"The State of Florida not long ago took action which is a disgrace to itself and a blot on the fair fame of our republic. Let our people squarely face this issue. While we are protesting against the treatment of missionaries in Turkey and calling upon the Government to use all its power in their protection, Christian teachers widely known and honored in one of the great States of this republic are arrested simply because they presumed to instruct a few white children under the same roof with colored children. It is hard to speak of such conduct in mild words. The question as to whether this is in reality a free republic is once more at issue. The action of the State of Florida is as barbaric as the persecutions of the Middle Ages."
From the Independent:
"Let the reader observe that this is not a law applying merely to the public schools of the State. Such a law we condemn, but we could not be surprised at it. This law is directed at this particular institution, which is not a public school but a private academy supported by the American Missionary Association. We have been amazed that in this nineteenth century Christians could be massacred by the thousands for not accepting the Moslem faith and no hand raised to defend them. But that was in Turkey. Here in the United States more than thirty years after the Proclamation of Emancipation in one of the sovereign States of the Union, half a dozen men and women are arrested for the crime of treating black children and white children alike, for not drawing a caste line in their own private grounds in a school they conduct at no expense to the State. It is a curious humiliating occurrence for this Jubilee year of the American Missionary Association."
From the Advance:
"Florida's disgraceful Sheats law, specially designed for the teachers and supporters of Orange Park Academy, has at last been put in force. The teachers of the Academy, the pastor of the church, and the parents of the white pupils have been arrested for violation of this law, which forbids any one to maintain or patronize a school in which white persons and Negroes shall be taught or boarded within the same building.
And this is the State of Senator Call, who is declaiming so eloquently in behalf of the Cuban insurgents, more than half of whom are of Negro blood."
From the Boston Standard:
"A year ago the unconstitutional and vile Sheats law was passed by the legislature of Florida. It was understood that this law was particularly aimed at the Orange Park School, of the American Missionary Association, whose fiftieth anniversary is to be celebrated in this city next fall. This villainous statute was enforced in the case of the Orange Park School on the entire body of teachers, white men and women of spotless character and self-sacrificing devotion to the mission, because of educating teachers for the elevation of American citizenship. The normal school is one of the best and most useful of the educational agencies at work in the South, but had dared to ignore the outrageous statute which makes it a crime for any school, public or private, to teach black and white scholars in the same building or have any white teachers to eat and sleep in the same house with their Negro pupils. If these discretionary rights are not guaranteed by our national Constitution to American citizens, then the professed abolition of slavery and of the color line in citizenship is a wretched farce. Nobody can question the intent of the proclamation of emancipation of the constitutional amendment that places the Negro on the same legal plane with the white citizen of this country. We do not doubt the supreme and binding authority of this legislature. We mistake the temper of the American people if a blaze of indignation is not kindled by this outrage from the Atlantic to the Pacific."
From Frank Leslie's Weekly:
"Under these provisions no citizen of Florida, it will be noted, can under certain conditions educate his child. He is excluded absolutely from the best educational institutions in the State if these admit pupils of both white and colored parentage. The defiance of the law was in obedience to a definite determination on the part of the American Missionary Association to make a distinct test of the statute."
From the Boston Daily Advertiser:
"The Sheats law in Florida was passed through the influence of malice, prejudice, and partisan venom. Efforts have been made in other Southern States to perpetrate similar outrages, but for the most part without avail.