The educational advantages given these people were in no sense despised. Although the Negroes of the Northwest did not always keep pace with their neighbors in things industrial they did not permit the white people to outstrip them much in education. The freedmen so earnestly seized their opportunity to acquire knowledge and accomplished so much in a short period that their educational progress served to disabuse the minds of indifferent whites of the idea that the blacks were not capable of high mental development.[1] The educational work of these centers, too, tended not only to produce men capable of ministering to the needs of their environment, but to serve as a training center for those who would later be leaders of their people. Lewis Woodson owed it to friends in Pittsburgh that he became an influential teacher. Jeremiah H. Brown, T. Morris Chester, James T. Bradford, M.R. Delany, and Bishop Benjamin T. Tanner obtained much of their elementary education in the early colored schools of that city.[2] J.C. Corbin, a prominent educator before and after the Civil War, acquired sufficient knowledge at Chillicothe, Ohio, to qualify in 1848 as an assistant in Rev. Henry Adams's school in Louisville.[3] John M. Langston was for a while one of Corbin's fellow-students at Chillicothe before the former entered Oberlin. United States Senator Hiram Revels of Mississippi spent some time in a Quaker seminary in Union County, Indiana.[4] Rev. J.T. White, one of the leading spirits of Arkansas during the Reconstruction, was born and educated in Clark County in that State.[5] Fannie Richards, still a teacher at Detroit, Michigan, is another example of the professional Negro equipped for service in the Northwest before the Rebellion.[6] From other communities of that section came such useful men as Rev. J.W. Malone, an influential minister of Iowa; Rev. D.R. Roberts, a very successful pastor of Chicago; Bishop C.T. Shaffer of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; Rev. John G. Mitchell, for many years the Dean of the Theological Department of Wilberforce University; and President S.T. Mitchell, once the head of the same institution.[7] [Footnote 1: This statement is based on the accounts of various western freedmen.] [Footnote 2: Simmons, _Men of Mark_, p. 113.] [Footnote 3: Simmons, _Men of Mark_, p. 829.] [Footnote 4: _Ibid._, p. 948.] [Footnote 5: _Ibid._, p. 590.] [Footnote 6: _Ibid._, p. 1023.] [Footnote 7: Wright, "Negro Rural Communities in Indiana," _Southern Workman_, vol. xxxvii., p. 169.]