The American Missionary — Volume 41, No. 9, September, 1887Various
Religion
The American Missionary — Volume 41, No. 9, September, 1887
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
The Glenn Bill in the Georgia Legislature, to impose a penalty
commensurate with a felony upon the teaching of persons of
the two races in any public or private school in the State,
is an outburst of barbaric sentiment which will do a vast
deal of harm. We may as well say at the outset that we do not
favor co-education of the races at the South, so long as the
people there do not want it. In Massachusetts, white and black
children attend the same school, and are treated just the same.
If half or more of our population were colored, we do not
doubt it would be a different question, but we do not see that
the mingling of youth at school produces any social mixing,
or mixture of races. At the South, where there is a large
body of each race, separate schools and institutions are well
enough, but separate streets, railroad cars, ferry-boats and
other public utilities would be a ridiculous and uncalled-for
extension of the effort to separate the races.
While a State may plainly indicate its policy by providing
separate schools for the two races, and assigning the colored
youth to one and the white to the other, to make it a felony
for any person to teach youth of different races together, is
essentially barbarous, more barbarous than Turkey.
The great Southern excuse for such doings is that the social
intercourse of the races is against nature. Very well; if it
is against nature, let nature take care of the problem. But
the bald and naked fact is that while the South is dreadfully
sensitive about the appearance of the two races in the same
parlor, or school-room, or opera house, or in the same
Episcopal Convention, it is profoundly indifferent to their
association together immorally.
Now if the State of Georgia proposes to condemn the Northern
men who have gone there to teach, to the chain-gang, for
instructing their own children in the classes, it will be
guilty of a ridiculous display of race feeling and petty
insularity, of a fine exhibition of ingratitude, and of a
political blunder of some magnitude. We trust Gov. Gordon, who
has been about the world a little, may be able to view this
matter in a broader light than the backwoods members of the
Legislature.
THE BOSTON EVENING TRAVELLER.
It is possible that the aroused public sentiment of the nation
may force the Legislature to drop this shameful, barbarous
measure, but nothing short of this will. This is the Empire
State of the South—the New South which Editor Grady so
eloquently described last Forefathers’ Day in New York, about
which so much gush and sentiment have been spoken and written.
The question cannot help suggesting itself, whether a little
less of boastful sentiment and a little more of civilized
humanity would not become the much-talked-of New South.
THE PHILADELPHIA PRESS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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