Southern States -- Social conditions; United States -- Race relations
As DuBois says: "If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing,
the races are to live for many years side by side, united in economic
effort, obeying a common government, sensitive to mutual thought and
feeling, yet subtly and silently separate in many matters of deeper human
intimacy,--if this unusual and dangerous development is to progress amid
peace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call for
social surgery at once the delicatest and nicest in modern history. It
will demand broad-minded, upright men, both white and black, and in its
final accomplishment American civilization will triumph." DuBois
calculates that in the twenty-five years from 1875 to 1900 there were only
1,200 or 1,300 negro graduates from all the colleges open to them North
and South, an average of about fifty a year out of a race numbering during
that period, on the average, six millions. Out of this amount about half
have become teachers or heads of institutions, and most of the rest are
professional men.
Many of the academic and normal training schools of various grades are
situated in the midst of large colored populations, and take upon
themselves a work similar to that of the college settlements in Northern
cities. Such is the flourishing school at Calhoun, Ala., which is in the
midst of one of the densest and most ignorant Negro populations in the
South, and besides training the children sent to it, it has supervised the
work of breaking up the land, which is sold to negro farmers in small
tracts, thereby giving an object lesson of the comfort and satisfaction in
owning one's own land. Most such schools aim to be centers of moral
influence upon the community about them. Here, again, they encounter the
hostility of their neighbors on the ground that they are putting notions
into the heads of the Negroes, and are destroying the labor system of the
community. On the other hand, many of the Whites take a warm interest in
these schools, although not a single one has ever received any
considerable gift of money from Southern white people. The testimony is
general that they are well taught, preserve good order, and inculcate
decency of person and life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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