Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [363]
I find it a great fault, in nearly all the schools for Freedmen, that the children are advanced too rapidly. Before they can read one book with any degree of care and fluency, they are pushed into another still more difficult. Teachers do not seem to care about quality but have a great desire to send home reports of scholars beginning with the alphabet and their being able to read in the 3rd 4th or 5th readers—in as many months.
After visiting several freedmen’s schools in North Carolina, Jonathan C. Gibbs, a black minister, thought the pupils were “doing well as could be expected, and some much better than I had anticipated,” but he felt the teachers were doing far too much, “seemingly, for the sake of present impression, rather than for the solid interests of the children. When I remember that in a few years these black children will control largely the future destiny of this southern country and will make it either a hell upon earth or a paradise, I tremble for the responsible trust which has been placed in the hands of these improper persons.”65
That the quality of instruction varied with each teacher was hardly unique to the education of freedmen. For some teachers, the challenge of educating recently freed slaves demanded an understanding and patience they simply did not possess, resulting in a total breakdown in communication and an early return to the North. Nor did the often inadequate living quarters, the shortages of books and materials, and the open displays of white hostility make the life of a freedmen’s teacher any easier. For most of them, however, the level of commitment remained high enough to withstand the inconveniences, the threats, and, in a few instances, the initial suspicions of the pupils and their parents. The white teacher in Beaufort, South Carolina, suspended for using derogatory language in referring to blacks and for habitually using opium was quite exceptional, though such cases no doubt confirmed the black critics who thought some of the teachers academically sound but morally weak. Nor would it be easy to assess the charge of a black preacher in Wilmington, North Carolina, that “some of the teachers were setting the devil into his people.”66 In gauging black reaction to this massive educational effort, far more typical would be the consternation that swept over a black community when a teacher announced his or her departure. Although he loved his “southern friends,” a black student in Augusta, Georgia, wrote his former teacher, he knew that none of them could have faced up to the ordeal experienced by many of the Yankee teachers.
Now the white people south says that the yankee are no friend to the southern people. That’s a mistaken idea. The northerners do not advise us to be at enmety against any race. They teach us to be friends.… If you say the yankee is no friend how is it that the ladies from the north have left there homes and came down here? Why are they laboring day and night to elevate the collord people? Why are they shut out of society in the South? The question is plain. Answer it.… I’m going to school now to try to learn some thing which I hope will enable me to be of some use to my race. These few lines will show that I am a new beginner. I will try, and do better.… Thank God I have a book now. The Lord has sent us books and teachers. We must not hesitate a moment, but go on and learn all we can.67
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LEAST IMPRESSED by the public displays of black intellectual capabilities were the native whites, many of whom reacted to the educational experiment in their midst with varying degrees of amusement, skepticism, suspicion, and outright hostility. For some whites, the only uncertainty was whether to fear or to ridicule the strange spectacle of black youths and adults, only recently their slaves, marching off to places where they would imbibe lessons from Yankee schoolmarms.