TWENTY YEARS OF NEGRO EDUCATION. 29 



the one ray of positive liglit in all that darkness. Elsewhere and farther 

 South there were only glimmers to encourage the mere " handful of 

 men and women " who were laboring for the advancement of the negro. 

 Governor " Joe " Brown, of Georgia, furnished one of these. As a 

 result of the examination of the pupils of Atlanta University, he re- 

 ported that " many of the pupils exhibited a degree of mental culture 

 which, considering the length of time their minds have been in train- 

 ing, would do credit to members of any race." This was valuable 

 and timely testimony from a high and reliable quarter. In the same 

 year Dr. J. L. M. Curry, now of the Peabody Fund, in a speech in 

 Brooklyn, admitting the defects in the public-school system at the 

 South, declared that the people were awakening to the necessity of 

 education, and " the colored people as citizens and wards of the nation 

 need to be qualified for their exalted responsibilities. Especially do 

 they need trained and educated teachers of their own race. If prac- 

 ticable, a degraded race should be elevated and delivered by their own 

 class, as the patronage of the superior has a tendency to degrade 

 character." This was as the voice of the awakened South, rising out 

 of the ashes of despair and once more asserting her place in the Union 

 and her responsibilities in helping to advance the work of American 

 civilization. It found an echo here and there. A planter, witnessing 

 the school examination at Athens, Alabama, in that year, said he had 

 " no prejudices against the education of the colored race," and hoped 

 " the children would improve their time." These were the breaks in 

 the dense mass of oi^position to the education of the negro. Few 

 as they were, these echoes were encouraging to the noble and ever- 

 to-be-revered band of men and women engaged in the work, the 

 servants of Northern institutions or churches whose voluntary con- 

 tributions to sustain the work had by the beginning of 1871 reached, 

 with the expenditures of the Freedman's Bureau, the grand total of 

 $7,317,311. Of this sum, expended in from six to eight years, the 

 American Missionary Association paid out 11,663,756 ; the Freedman's 

 Bureau, $3,711,235 ; and in other things than cash, $1,551,276, mak- 

 ing a total of $5,262,511 ; the Presbyterian Church (North), $220,704 ; 

 the Freedman's Aid Society, $134,340 ; and the Baptists of the Dis- 

 trict of Columbia, $36,000. A noble return, surely, for the scorn, 

 contumely, hate, and malevolent opposition with which the teachers 

 of negro schools were met by communities stung to the quick by the 

 outrages put upon them by disfranchisement and political subordina- 

 tion to an ignorant race, the ready tools of designing knaves. 



In 1871 but little improvement had been made. The general public 

 was still indifferent, and there was much opposition to colored schools. 

 A convention of Southern Baptists at Marion, Alabama, denounced the 

 common-school system as fostering infidelity, and declared that the 

 " only hope was in Christian education in our own schools." In Louisi- 

 ana persons were deteiTcd from accepting the position of school direct- 



