EDUCATION AMONG THE COLORED PEOPLE OF THE SOUTH.
The following testimony of a colored lady teacher in the south gives a valuable hint as to the practicability of reaching the masses of that race through the education of teachers from among their own people:— “My own father, years ago, studied for a time in Fisk University before it was really Fisk University; my mother’s people, her brothers and sisters, also studied in Fisk University, so they were very anxious that their children should be in the same institution. For that reason, as it meant a good deal out of the family purse to board three or four children in such an institution as that, eight or nine years ago the family moved from a little town in the northern part of Kentucky to Nashville. We were reared in a quiet Christian home, and early placed in Fisk University. “I did not have an opportunity to come into personal contact with the class of colored people who make up the great mass in the south until after I had left school and gone to a little town in western Tennessee to teach. There I was placed in charge of the young women in the boarding department, and I sought to come most intimately in contact with their lives. Many of these young women came straight from the cotton plantations, and, altho they could not sing and play as well as we who had been at Fisk, many of them boasted that they could handle a plow as well as a man. We undertook mission work in connection with the circle of King’s Daughters which I organized among the girls, and the condition of the people as we found it in the two years I was there among the poor negroes of the city was very painful to me. Very often I came in from my visits in the poorer districts and closed the door of my room feeling that I must leave it all to the Saviour, it seemed so discouraging and so much more than we could do. We found, among other things, that we needed to teach the women the most common and necessary habits of life,—how to put the children to bed, how to feed and clothe them. Yet I would say that it is through the students of such schools as Fisk University that the northern teachers whom you send to us can hope to reach the masses of our colored people. We get the light from our northern teachers, and then the great mass of the colored people look to us for it, for we can get into the home and into the life of the people as they can not. And we begin to feel the responsibility; we begin to realize12that we, as negro women, must be especially alive to the quickening influence of all that is noble and grand and true. We realize that we are indeed “Living in a grand and awful time,
In an age on ages telling,
To be living is sublime.”