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By Root 1478 0

of that city convened in the aftermath of Union occupation, they heard the Reverend James Lynch and other dignitaries urge them to organize among themselves and develop their own programs and courses of action. Acting on this call, they formed the Savannah Educational Association to establish in turn a system of schools for the freedmen which would be managed and sustained by the community. But when the Reverend S. W. Magill, an agent of the American Missionary Association, came to Savannah and assessed the situation, he was appalled that neither the black board of education nor the black teachers possessed any experience in the management of schools or in teaching. “What a field opens before the benevolent!” he informed a northern officer of the Association. “It will not do of course to leave these people to themselves.… I fear they will be jealous & sullen if I attempt to place the management in the hands of our white teachers. But this must be done to make the schools effective.” Ultimately, that was accomplished, but not until the director persuaded the black trustees to place confidence in their white friends. “It is a great point gained that they are convinced by their experience that they are not Sufficient of themselves.”98

What transpired in Savannah suggested the forcefulness of a common assumption underscoring the missionary effort in the South—that black people emerging from the debilitating thralldom of bondage would require for some time the counsel and direction of their white allies. Even as they advised blacks to depend more on their own efforts and sought to inculcate black children with the virtues of self-help and self-reliance, these same “friends” might withhold their support or fail to encourage independent black efforts, question the wisdom and expediency of such efforts, or oppose them outright if they threatened to undermine their own authority. Observing this phenomenon as early as 1864, a black critic had to wonder why societies established for the relief and education of the freedmen, in which blacks initially played a prominent role, invariably fell into the hands of white managers, many of whom seemed to mistrust “the ability of colored men to do anything without the aid of the Saxon brain.”99

Despite the occasional setbacks and discouragement, the energy expended by blacks to educate their children, like the simultaneous movement to worship by themselves, reflected a growing if not fully developed sense of community and racial pride, even as it sharpened the separation from and accentuated the differences with both their northern friends and native whites. It was not as though blacks consciously adopted a policy of self-imposed separation. But there did emerge a growing conviction that full admission to white society might have to be achieved through the development of independent and separate movements, organizations, and institutions. This would require not only self-recognition as a people and a community but the willingness to act on that consciousness. Neither illiteracy nor poverty, they also came to realize, would be extinguished in their own lifetimes, but even the poor and the illiterate in American society—white and black—possessed certain rights and could claim protection in the exercise of those rights. Ultimately, an elderly and illiterate freedman suggested, education would eliminate illiteracy among his people. But in exercising their freedom and attacking the critical problems that now beset them, they could ill afford to depend upon “book larnin’ ” alone.

De Chaplain say we can learn to read in short time. Now dat may be so with dem who are mo’ heady. God has not made all of us alike. Phaps some will get an education in a little while. I knows de next generation will. But we’se a down trodden people. We hasn’t had no chance at all. De most of us are slow and dull. We has bin kep down a hundred years and I think it will take a hundred years to get us back agin. Derefo’ Mr Chaplain, I tink we better not wait for education.100

To define themselves as a people and to act