• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1310 0

drives of a white man? … Being trained for office he will demand office. Being taught as a Negro child the same things and in the same way as the white child, when he becomes a Negro man he will want the same things and demand them in the same way as a white man.” That was reason enough to be doubly cautious about the teachers and curriculum in the education of blacks. And if the path from the schoolhouse led to the courthouse and the white man’s parlor and bedroom, then perhaps this enterprise should be resisted before it gained any foothold in southern society.71

Although whites continued to disagree about the wisdom of educating black children, the opposition mounted in some areas made it virtually a moot question. “There are no colored schools down in Surry county,” a Virginia black testified; “they would kill any one who would go down there and establish colored schools.… Down in my neighborhood they [the blacks] are afraid to be caught with a book.” Those whites who opposed his efforts, a freedmen’s school official observed, were usually more “tacit and concealed” in their methods than violent, manifesting their resistance in agreements among themselves not to rent homes or buildings that might be used for schools and to declare as “nuisances” any schoolhouses erected by the black residents. Even some of the black churches which had initially permitted classes to meet in their basements were forced to reconsider the offer in the wake of threats to deny them insurance because they had suddenly become fire risks. To read the daily press or the reports of freedmen’s school officials was to appreciate, in fact, why any building housing classes for black pupils became by definition a poor actuarial risk.72

In nearly every part of the South, but especially in the rural districts, the destruction of schoolhouses, usually by fire, only begins to suggest the wave of terror and harassment directed at the efforts to educate blacks. “We are advised by friends not to be out evenings,” a white teacher wrote from Little Rock, Arkansas. Amos McCollough, an aspiring black teacher in Magnolia, North Carolina, pleaded for Federal troops to protect him in his efforts to establish a school: “I [intended] to open school here in Magnolia which I did but only proceeded one day. Why? Because the house which I taught in was threatened of being burnt down.” If not humiliated, beaten, or forced into exile, many teachers found it nearly impossible to obtain credit in local stores or to find living quarters, thus forcing them to board with black families and subjecting them in some states and counties to arrest as vagrants for cohabiting with black women. The mayor of Enterprise, Mississippi, defended the arrest of a freedmen’s teacher by noting that he had been “living on terms of equality with negroes, living in their houses, boarding with them, and at one time gave a party at which there were no persons present (except himself) but negroes, all which are offences against the laws of the state and declared acts of vagrancy.” At the same time, the mayor affirmed his belief that no one had any objection—“None whatever”—to a Negro school in the town.73

The case of the Mississippi teacher illustrates only the more absurd manifestations of native white resistance to schools for the freedmen. More often than not, the violence and harassment required no explanation. When blacks in Canton, Mississippi, raised money among themselves to build a schoolhouse, they were told that the structure would be burned to the ground, and a citizens’ committee headed by a local attorney warned the prospective teacher to leave on the first train or face a public hanging. When a young female teacher in a freedmen’s school in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, was killed by a militia patrol, authorities called it an “accidental” shooting, thereby moving the New Orleans Tribune to observe: “This is a series of ‘accidents’ as seldom accidentally occur in this world.” After describing a number of recent beatings, stabbings, and whippings, most of them in the outlying parishes,