Been in the Storm So Long (106 page)

Although whites continued to disagree about the wisdom of educating black children, the opposition mounted in some areas made it virtually a moot question. “There are no colored schools down in Surry county,” a Virginia black testified; “they would kill any one who would go down there and establish colored schools.… Down in my neighborhood they [the blacks] are afraid to be caught with a book.” Those whites who opposed his efforts, a freedmen’s school official observed, were usually more “tacit and concealed” in their methods than violent, manifesting their resistance in agreements among themselves not to rent homes or buildings that might be used for schools and to declare as “nuisances” any schoolhouses erected by the black residents. Even some of the black churches which had initially permitted classes to meet in their basements were forced to reconsider the offer in the wake of threats to deny them insurance because they had suddenly become fire risks. To read the daily press or the reports of freedmen’s school officials was to appreciate, in fact, why any building housing classes for black pupils became by definition a poor actuarial risk.
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In nearly every part of the South, but especially in the rural districts, the destruction of schoolhouses, usually by fire, only begins to suggest the wave of terror and harassment directed at the efforts to educate blacks. “We are advised by friends not to be out evenings,” a white teacher wrote from Little Rock, Arkansas. Amos McCollough, an aspiring black teacher in Magnolia, North Carolina, pleaded for Federal troops to protect him in his efforts to establish a school: “I [intended] to open school here in Magnolia which I did but only proceeded one day. Why? Because the house which I taught in was threatened of being burnt down.” If not humiliated, beaten, or forced into exile, many teachers found it nearly impossible to obtain credit in local stores or to find living quarters, thus forcing them to board with black families and subjecting them in some states and counties to arrest as vagrants for cohabiting with black women. The mayor of Enterprise, Mississippi, defended the arrest of a freedmen’s teacher by noting that he had been “living on terms of equality with negroes, living in their houses, boarding with them, and at one time gave a party at which there were no persons present (except himself) but negroes, all which are offences against the laws of the state and declared acts of vagrancy.” At the same time, the mayor affirmed his belief that no one had any objection—“None whatever”—to a Negro school in the town.
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The case of the Mississippi teacher illustrates only the more absurd manifestations of native white resistance to schools for the freedmen. More often than not, the violence and harassment required no explanation. When blacks in Canton, Mississippi, raised money among themselves to build a schoolhouse, they were told that the structure would be burned to the ground, and a citizens’ committee headed by a local attorney warned
the prospective teacher to leave on the first train or face a public hanging. When a young female teacher in a freedmen’s school in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, was killed by a militia patrol, authorities called it an “accidental” shooting, thereby moving the
New Orleans Tribune
to observe: “This is a series of ‘accidents’ as seldom accidentally occur in this world.” After describing a number of recent beatings, stabbings, and whippings, most of them in the outlying parishes, the same newspaper concluded: “The record of the teachers of the first colored schools in Louisiana will be one of honor and blood.” Although many native whites discountenanced attacks on schools, a missionary educator in Grenada, Mississippi, voiced a common belief among teachers that such protests were almost always to no avail. “Tho they [the perpetrators] may be a small minority, the majority dare not move their tongues against them; but must tacitly consent to what they do. The colored people are in perpetual fear of them, & well they may be; for they kill them with almost perfect impunity.” Even where freedmen schools were tolerated, moreover, teachers found themselves treated by these same “respectable” whites with “a studious avoidance,” and many a teacher and superintendent considered the maintenance of their schools dependent on the nearby Federal garrison.
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Despite the fears of educators, the withdrawal of Union Army garrisons did not result in a massive dismantlement of the freedmen’s schools. With each passing year, in fact, additional numbers of native whites came around to the view that the education of blacks—at least on a rudimentary level—had become an unavoidable consequence of emancipation and that the white South had best accommodate itself to this reality. That accommodation would be expedited and the dangers minimized, they suggested to their people, if steps were taken to control the educational apparatus and staff the schools with their own kind. This was not necessarily inconsistent with the belief of some Freedmen’s Bureau educational officers that more native whites should be employed as teachers, since “they understand the negro” and would be in a good position to combat the strong feelings against his education. But others were quick to point out that such teachers would also be in an ideal position to vent their own frustrations on those who had previously been their slaves, and there were sufficient examples to underscore that concern. In one school taught by two native whites, the children were not only whipped frequently but forced to address their teachers as “massa” and “missus.”
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Although some time would elapse before large numbers of native whites could be induced to teach in black schools, the number steadily grew in the immediate postwar years, in part because of the feverish search by some impoverished whites for any kind of remunerative employment. “While I am on the nigger question,” Sallie Coit wrote a friend, “I must tell you that my school for them [Negroes] still flourishes.… I hope I can do them some good. I have the satisfaction of knowing that I put good books into their hands, while if they went to Yankees they would doubtless have
books tainted with Abolitionism.” Outright control of the school systems, along the lines suggested by Sallie Coit, would have to await the overthrow of Radical Reconstruction; in the meantime, native whites tried to accommodate themselves to the idea of paying taxes for the support of public schools for both races. “Every little negro in the county is now going to school and the public pays for it,” wrote one disgruntled planter. “This is a hell of [a] fix but we cant help it, and the best policy is to conform as far as possible to circumstances.” Considering other possible reactions, this represented a triumph of sorts for the cause of black education in the South.
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Whatever toleration and public support native whites chose to accord the freedmen’s schools depended in large measure not only on the conduct of the teachers but on maintaining a strict segregation between white and black pupils. “Sir, we accept the death of slavery,” a prominent Savannah citizen explained, as he remonstrated against the proposed admission of blacks to the public schools; “but, sir, surely there are some things that are not tolerable. Our people have not been brought up to associate with negroes. They don’t think it decent; and the negroes will be none the better for being thrust thus into the places of white men’s sons.” Pending the establishment of public school systems, some white parents unable to afford private instruction for their children chose to send them to the only available alternative—the freedmen’s schools, where they were sometimes taught in the same classrooms as the black pupils. Almost as often, however, the white parents were forced to withdraw their children because of overwhelming community pressure. The townspeople “made so much fuss,” one mother told a teacher, that she had no choice. “I would not care myself, but the young men laugh at my husband. They tell him he must be pretty far gone and low down when he sends his children to a
‘nigger school.’
That makes him mad, and he is vexed with me.”
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Seeking to allay native white fears, and well aware of the strong feelings on the question of race mixing, the freedmen’s aid societies would have preferred to avoid the issue. Although official policy called for integrated schools, implementation varied with local circumstances and also depended on the willingness of missionary teachers to undertake the instruction of poor whites as well as blacks. The controversy that erupted in Beaufort, North Carolina, was unique only because H. S. Beals, an educational officer of the American Missionary Association, maintained a separate school for poor whites and because a co-worker chose to make an issue of it. Defending the schools, Beals considered them an accommodation to white sensitivities and to the urgent need to educate any child, white or black, who chose to come to them. To integrate the white school, he warned, would “scatter that school in a day.” (That was precisely what had happened in nearby Raleigh.) He did not question the
ideal
of integrated education but thought it less important than reaching as many children as possible.

Whatever the merits of that question, the Reverend S. J. Whiton, also an AMA representative in Beaufort, felt a critical principle had been sacrificed, and he charged that the two schools provoked “much excitement and hard feeling” among the blacks. “The colored people here are watching curiously to see the result. In their minds the AMA is convicted of saying one thing and through its agents doing another.” But Whiton’s protest to AMA officers resulted only in a reprimand for “meddling” and for making “a very unfortunate and unwise” issue out of a delicate matter, and he thereupon submitted his resignation from the AMA rather than be identified with the perpetuation of racial distinctions. Several black students also indicated their displeasure with “the White School,” among them Hyman Thompson, who urged the AMA to return to its original principles. More of his brethren would have joined the protest, he added, but they feared “Mr. Beals will not give them clothes or hire them to work if they do.”
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To black parents, the opportunity to educate their children seemed to take precedence over whether they would share the same classrooms with whites. Even while pressing for full and equal access to public facilities and transportation, without regard to color, many blacks willingly conceded and some even preferred separate schools, but only if those schools were equal in quality, comfort, and the allocation of funds to the schools reserved for whites. In opting for separation, some parents simply wanted to avoid subjecting their children to the taunts, derision, and harassment of white pupils. “No, Sir,” a black woman in New Orleans responded when asked if she would like to see the school system integrated. “I don’t want my children to be pounded by dem white boys. I don’t send them to school to fight, I send them to learn.”
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During the early years of Radical Reconstruction, black delegates to the constitutional conventions and black legislators in several states would argue vigorously to outlaw racial distinctions in the schools, and in New Orleans, the only city where such a system was maintained for a time, the black newspaper had been an early advocate of integration. In urging the mayor in 1867 to reject a city ordinance establishing separate schools, the
Tribune
maintained that equality before the law would never be fully realized until an equality of rights pervaded the entire community—“in customs, manners, and all things of everyday life.” Two years later, in commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the successful integration of public schools in Boston, the same newspaper wondered how much longer the white people of the South would be willing to pay for two sets
of teachers and two sets of schools.
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Three more generations, in fact, would attend separate schools before that dual system began to collapse under a decision of the United States Supreme Court which echoed the editorial sentiments of the
New Orleans Tribune
.

N
O LESS DISTURBING
to whites than race mixing in the classroom was the spectacle of Yankee schoolmarms fraternizing with local blacks and flaunting their notions of social equality. “They went in among the negroes, ate and slept with them, paraded the streets arm-in-arm with them,” one white southern woman recalled. If some white teachers indulged in such behavior, native whites relished every opportunity to report it, and the missionary teachers themselves were not above being “gossipy” about such matters. “To-day I am informed by letter of an engagement between a Colored physician and a Yankee teacher,” wrote a concerned instructor from Columbus, Georgia, to her supervisor. “What do you think of such alliances? … The rebs have reported a number of such matches. Now they can have their sensation and a real cause.”
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