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EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS

ONE of the laws most rigidly enforced south of Mason and Dixon's Line was that prohibiting the teaching of colored people to read and write. There was no greater, no more ardent desire on their part than to obtain an education. Every artifice to evade this law and to obtain by stealth an education was employed. During the Civil War philanthropic associations followed victorious armies, and schools were opened in the centers of Negro population all over the South Old and young flocked to these, all eager to get an education. While not under the operation of positive law, they enjoyed, nevertheless, a kind of national governmental supervision-that of the Freedmen's Bureau.1 The teachers as a rule were Northern young men and women, especially the latter, who were fired with enthusiasm for the work and exhibited the self-denying consecration of the foreign missionary. The progress of the pupils in these schools was phenomenal. The establishment of normal schools and academies at which the brightest of the colored youth could be prepared for the work of teachers rapidly followed. Almost about the same time Howard University at Washington, Atlanta University in Georgia, Fisk University at Nashville, Straight University in New Orleans, Shaw University at Raleigh, Colver Institute in Richmond, Va., Wayland Seminary in Washingtonthese last two now merged in the Union University at Richmond, Va., and Hampton Institute, were established-all the outgrowth of missionary effort or philanthropy. In faculty and other equip1 See Appendix.

ment these schools matched the secondary institutions at the South for the whites. Thus was laid the foundation for the schoolteachers, the doctors, lawyers and ministers of the gospel needed in the popular instruction, professional work, the religious and secular leadership of the Negro. From the private philanthropy that maintained these schools were evolved the Peabody, Slater and Hand Funds, and in later years the General and the Southern Educational Board and the Jeanes Educational Fund.

The common schools of the South came into being with the reconstruction of the new State governments, and may be said to have had a fair beginning with the year 1871. Four of the State Superintendents of Instruction in the period of Reconstruction were colored men, Rev. now Bishop J. W. Hood in North Carolina, Thomas W. Cardozo in Mississippi, William G. Brown in Louisiana, and Rev. Jonathan G. Gibbs of Florida. It may be claimed without fear of successful contradiction that the establishment of the common school in the South is attributable to the political forces which the Negro's vote placed in power.

ΧΙ

THE EARLY CONVENTION MOVEMENT

WITH the period immediately following the Second War with Great Britain, begins a series of events which indicate a purpose of the nation to make the condition of the free man of color an inferior status socially and politically. That this was resisted at every step, revealed more clearly the national aim and purpose

In 1820 the passage of the Missouri Compromise permitted the westward extension of slavery and as far north as 36° 30'.

Local legislation, harmonizing with this national action against extending the domain of freedom and making the country undesirable for the colored freeman, followed. Two years after the enactment of the compromise, "the martyrs of 1822" went bravely and heroically to their fate in South Carolina. In 1827, the Empire State completed its work of emancipation of the slave, begun 28 years before, and saw the birth of Freedom's Journal, the first Negro newspaper within the limits of the United States, edited by John B. Russwurm 1 and Samuel E. Cornish. In 1831, Virginia was convulsed and the entire Southland shocked by the Insurrection of Nat Turner. In the State of Ohio along the Kentucky border, the feeling against the free Negro had become acute. Mobs occurred, blood was shed and the people were compelled to look to some spot where they could abide in peace.

1

In these stirring times the Convention Movement came into

1 First college-bred Negro, Bowdoin College, one year after Longfellow and Hawthorne.

existence. The forces which it evoked were conserved and correlated until the dynamics of Civil Revolution had wrought desolation and destruction far and wide, sweeping away forever what had been a basis of the social and political strength of the Nation.

A glance at the list of the officers of this pioneer deliberative convention of colored people of which we have as yet any data, shows that the men who led in this meeting were among the foremost colored citizens whose names have come down to us from that distant past.2 James Forten was President, and Russell Parrott, the assistant to Absalom Jones at St. Thomas, P. E. Church, was the Secretary. Prominent also in this anti-colonization convention, were Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, Robert Douglass, and John Gloucester-the first settled pastor of a colored Presbyterian Church.

This Convention of 1830 was the first conscious step toward concerted action and was in no sense local in its conception, its constituency or its purpose.

The prime mover was Hezekiah Grice, a native of Baltimore. In his early life, he had met Benjamin Lundy, and in 1828-9, William Lloyd Garrison, editors and publishers of The Genius of Universal Emancipation, published at that time in Baltimore. In the spring of 1830 he wrote a circular letter to prominent colored men in the free States requesting their views on the feasibility and imperative necessity of holding a convention of the free colored men of the country, at some point north of Mason and Dixon's Line, for the exchange of views on the question of emigration or the adoption of a policy that would make living in the United States more endurable. For several months there was no response whatever to this circular. In August, however, he received an urgent request for him to come at once

2 The first public demonstration of hostility to the colonization scheme was made January 24, 1817, by free colored inhabitants of Richmond, Va. Garrison's "Thoughts on African Colonization."