Redirection and Reorganization of the College for Negroes

Abstract

At the time that this is being written there are a few more than one hundred institutions of higher learning in these United States of America, Year of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and thirty-six, which claim to be offering courses for the education of Negro youth. For the most part, but not entirely, these institutions are situated South of the Mason-Dixon line in that section of the nation which by legal enactment requires the separation of the white and Negro pupils in the school system. In most of these Southern states pupils of the two races may not legally attend the same school be it public or private; however, there is virtually no restriction on the race or races represented on the staff and in the teaching personnel of the institutions. Legally, in so far as the statutes read, the pupils must either be Negroes or whites, they must not be a mixed group, but the staff may be either Negro, white, or Negro and white in any sort of school. Thus, theoretically (and legally) at least, Negro teachers might serve in a white-pupil school, or a mixed faculty of whites and Negroes may serve such an institution. Actually, we know that this is not the case; rather is it true that the schools for Negroes in the South will have either all Negro or mixed faculties and that the schools for whites dare not break away from the custom of an all-white staff. If one goes into the history of these institutions of higher learning for Negroes, one is very likely to discover that approximately seventy per cent of these schools began with all-white staffs and teaching corps. These schools (colleges, universities, institutes) began in the period immediately following the American Civil War at a time when the Southern states had not generally accepted the idea of a free public school system for white children. It followed, then, that these same states if left to their own devices would not rush to educate the erstwhile slave children at the expense of the public treasury. When the carpetbagger, the scalawag and the Negro came to control most of these states during the period of Congressional Reconstruction, they did take steps towards establishing sound systems of public instruction for both races in the South. During the interval between Appomattox and The Rule of the Major Generals the education of the ex-slave was not neglected. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands had taken unto itself this problem of education along with other problems of this post-war period. While this federal agency, generally recognized as the Freedmen's Bureau, was the first in the field, it was not alone. The American Missionary Society, the American Baptist Home