Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [362]
But the critical question, as every educator understood, came down to a comparison of their pupils with white students in the North, both in the rapidity with which they acquired basic skills and their demonstrated aptitude in more advanced subjects. Few needed to be reminded that the manner in which they decided this issue went to the very heart of their efforts, indeed to the legitimacy of the “experiment” itself. Nearly every teacher and supervisor made the inevitable comparison, some with greater detail than others. The clear consensus was that black pupils learned as rapidly as the average white child in a northern school. When they proceeded to particularize that observation, however, many of them seemed to suggest an inequality of intellectual talents and perhaps even of capacity. Not unlike the stereotype already formed of black pupils in northern schools, the freedmen were generally thought to excel in subjects entailing rote memory and imitation and to be less proficient than whites in fields of study requiring the application of logic and induction, “powerful reasoning,” and “inventive” and reflective powers. Having made these distinctions, some teachers added that such powers were not beyond the reach of blacks once they were permitted to develop their full potential. In the meantime, black pupils might have taken some consolation in the observations of their teachers that they were more emotional and affectionate than whites, more “graphic and figurative in language,” and clearly superior in wit, cunning, and musical expression. “How musical they are!” more than one teacher would remark, and Mary E. Burdick apparently exploited that faculty every chance she had. “I doubt if the same number of whites could produce half the melody they can in simply singing the multiplication table. I thought it exceeded every thing!”63
To display the talents of their students, both white and black teachers in the freedmen’s schools scheduled periodic programs and recitations, many of them specifically designed to impress the host of northern visitors, officials, and correspondents who descended upon these schools. No day passed without some visitation, Elizabeth Botume observed, and she confessed a low regard for the ways in which the guests often conducted themselves in the presence of her pupils.
I wish to ask why so many well-intentioned people treat those who are poor and destitute and helpless as if they were bereft of all their five senses. This has been my experience. Visitors would talk before the contrabands as if they could neither see nor hear nor feel. If they could have seen those children at recess, when their visit was over, repeating their words, mimicking their tones and gestures, they would have been undeceived.
In the typical school program, the students recited various exercises, engaged in carefully rehearsed dialogues with their teacher, and culminated the proceedings with a rousing chorus of “John Brown’s Body” or perhaps an old spiritual. And the northern guests would invariably leave the school very much impressed with this “startling” exhibition of black talent.64
But these displays raised a troublesome question. Did the “surprise” and “astonishment” registered by teachers, superintendents, and visitors alike over the intellectual attainments of black pupils reflect a different standard of expectation and measurement than they would have applied to white pupils? Long before the Civil War, a black newspaper in the North had raised this question in noting the praise lavished on black students by school visitors and wondered if the same performance from white pupils would have excited the slightest attention. If anything, the temptation to magnify black achievements in the classroom would have been far greater