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By Root 1075 0

school systems, some white parents unable to afford private instruction for their children chose to send them to the only available alternative—the freedmen’s schools, where they were sometimes taught in the same classrooms as the black pupils. Almost as often, however, the white parents were forced to withdraw their children because of overwhelming community pressure. The townspeople “made so much fuss,” one mother told a teacher, that she had no choice. “I would not care myself, but the young men laugh at my husband. They tell him he must be pretty far gone and low down when he sends his children to a ‘nigger school.’ That makes him mad, and he is vexed with me.”77

Seeking to allay native white fears, and well aware of the strong feelings on the question of race mixing, the freedmen’s aid societies would have preferred to avoid the issue. Although official policy called for integrated schools, implementation varied with local circumstances and also depended on the willingness of missionary teachers to undertake the instruction of poor whites as well as blacks. The controversy that erupted in Beaufort, North Carolina, was unique only because H. S. Beals, an educational officer of the American Missionary Association, maintained a separate school for poor whites and because a co-worker chose to make an issue of it. Defending the schools, Beals considered them an accommodation to white sensitivities and to the urgent need to educate any child, white or black, who chose to come to them. To integrate the white school, he warned, would “scatter that school in a day.” (That was precisely what had happened in nearby Raleigh.) He did not question the ideal of integrated education but thought it less important than reaching as many children as possible.

We are right, but the prevailing sentiment of the white people here, is wrong. Shall we wait to convert them to our ideas, before we give them what alone will secure that conversion.… The whole race of poor white children are crying out for this life giving influence. Is it our policy, or our principle, to hold this multitude, clamoring for intellectual light, outside the benign influence of schools, till we force them to adopt our ideas?

Whatever the merits of that question, the Reverend S. J. Whiton, also an AMA representative in Beaufort, felt a critical principle had been sacrificed, and he charged that the two schools provoked “much excitement and hard feeling” among the blacks. “The colored people here are watching curiously to see the result. In their minds the AMA is convicted of saying one thing and through its agents doing another.” But Whiton’s protest to AMA officers resulted only in a reprimand for “meddling” and for making “a very unfortunate and unwise” issue out of a delicate matter, and he thereupon submitted his resignation from the AMA rather than be identified with the perpetuation of racial distinctions. Several black students also indicated their displeasure with “the White School,” among them Hyman Thompson, who urged the AMA to return to its original principles. More of his brethren would have joined the protest, he added, but they feared “Mr. Beals will not give them clothes or hire them to work if they do.”78

To black parents, the opportunity to educate their children seemed to take precedence over whether they would share the same classrooms with whites. Even while pressing for full and equal access to public facilities and transportation, without regard to color, many blacks willingly conceded and some even preferred separate schools, but only if those schools were equal in quality, comfort, and the allocation of funds to the schools reserved for whites. In opting for separation, some parents simply wanted to avoid subjecting their children to the taunts, derision, and harassment of white pupils. “No, Sir,” a black woman in New Orleans responded when asked if she would like to see the school system integrated. “I don’t want my children to be pounded by dem white boys. I don’t send them to school to fight, I send them to learn.”79

During the early