Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [370]
We have always been directed by others in all the affairs of life: they have furnished the thoughts while we have been passive instruments, acting as we were acted upon, mere automatons.… The Anti-slavery Societies, the Abolition Societies, whose ostensible work has been to do battle for the Negro’s elevation have never … thought it safe for them to advance colored men to places of trust.85
With emancipation, such questions assumed a new and critical importance. Few understood that more clearly than the Reverend Cain. If southern blacks needed instruction in how to act as free men and women, he suggested, both northern and southern blacks were desperately in need of experience “in the affairs of direction and government.” The church and the schoolhouse seemed like ideal places in which to begin this necessary training. “We must take into our own hands the education of our race.… Honest, dignified whites may teach ever so well, it has not the effect to exalt the black man’s opinion of his own race, because they have always been in the habit of seeing white men in honored positions, and respected.” Anticipating by nearly half a century W. E. B. Du Bois’s call for a “talented tenth” of educated, professional blacks whose leadership and example would help to uplift the mass of their people, the Reverend Cain, on the eve of his departure for Charleston, envisaged “an infusion of the intellectual development of the Northern colored men and women” into the South.
Negro gentlemen and ladies must become teachers among them by example as well as by precept, teach them that though they be black, they are as good as any other class whose skin is whiter than theirs; teach them that complexions may differ but man is a man for all that. Finally, colored men in the North have got to come to this doctrine, that black men must think for themselves—act for themselves …86
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BEFORE THE MISSIONARY SOCIETIES had dispatched their first schoolmarms to the South, and even as Union Army officers wrestled with the legal status of the contrabands, southern blacks had taken the first steps to teach themselves. Some of these pioneers belonged to the free Negro class, but among the early teachers were also newly freed or escaped slaves who had managed to acquire some rudimentary skills and now sought to share their knowledge with the less fortunate. In Hampton, Virginia, an elderly black who had been a slave of ex-President John Tyler opened a school in the basement of the abandoned Tyler mansion, while in that same neighborhood Mary Peake, a free Negro who had taught clandestinely before the war, seized the opportunity afforded by Union occupation to expand her teaching to include the newly created class of contrabands. “Some say we have not the same faculties and feelings with white folks,” one of her pupils would observe. “What would the best soil produce without cultivation? We want to get wisdom. That is all we need. Let us get that, and we are made for time and eternity.”87
The migration of black teachers from the North would gain headway later in the war, most of them the agents of black churches and the freedmen’s aid societies. Charlotte Forten, who had previously taught school in New England and whose father had been active in the cause of black abolitionism and civil rights, accompanied the mostly white contingent of missionary teachers from Philadelphia to the Sea Islands of South Carolina, where she would spend nearly two years imparting not only basic reading and writing skills to her pupils but also an