The Black Struggle for Public Schooling in Nineteenth-Century Illinois

7. Partidipating in Mainstream Community Life

7 Participating in Mainstream Community Life The assurance of receiving suffrage rights now that the 15th Amendment of the federal constitution had been ratified and Article 7, Section 1, of the proposed state constitution favorably introduced in the convention was celebrated in April by Illinois blacks from Rockford in the north to Cairo in the south. Artillery salutes, brass bands, parades, and oratory almost everywhere highlighted the occasion.1 In Springfield a twelve-pounder fired a hundred rounds beginning probably, as at Galesburg, just after five o'clock in the morning. Later the blacks assembled downtown, marching to Lincoln's home and then to the city rink where Governor Palmer, who had shocked the more staid of the white citizenry by riding in the parade with two Negroes in his carriage, addressed the multitude. Palmer gave them his usual advice. They must work hard so as to buy the homes and the property that would win them respect and influence in the community. They must educate their children, and if the public schools shut them out, they possessed the power of the elective franchise and ought to use it to pressure the schools to open to them.2 In Chicago the celebration started at dawn with the roar of cannon and ended at night with speeches and song. The morning parade, over two miles in length, had been in a sense a Grand Review, a parade down Wabash Avenue by the victorious veterans of the battles for black rights waged in the 1850S and sixties, with leaders of the dissident black factions also in the ranks. The black organizations, those that were helping to bind individuals together in ties of cultural association and brotherly Participating in Mainstream and sisterly feeling despite cleavages, had stepped along, too, behind their commanders, generalissimos, and captains-general. On view had been the black ministers, the blacks' one dentist, their one lawyer, their one employee in a department of government , and their one foreman in a large industry. Joining them had been the owners of black businesses in cleaning, tailoring, lumber supplies, carpentry, building, barbering, and hairdressing and the black employees of the white hotels, restaurants, stores, office buildings, railroad stations, and other conveniences tending to the needs and comforts of the white residents of the city. Some five thousand persons had marched, and as they were mostly black males who would have the vote, it had been a display of potential power that the Republican and Democratic parties could not with impunity ignore.3 That night in the finale at Farwell Hall the orators jubilantly pictured what their present was now that they had the ballot, and they painted in glowing sentences a future in which, as the caption on the side of a float in the morning's parade had emblazoned it, the American nationality would be IIcomposite." But this vision of the future, they recognized, could not be achieved without education in the present. Through the speeches and resolutions of the evening ran two themes. Having IIfought right," they must "vote right"; they must vote as they "shot" and be loyal to the Republican party. Besides being faithful to Republicanism , they must apply themselves to the task of education and schooling. Voting rights had put into their possession the greatest of all political powers available to Americans. Blacks must make sure that this new power was exerted responsibly; they must prepare themselves for a "higher station" in the community . They were fully cognizant, so they declared in one of their evening's resolutions, that their voting power could be used in a way detrimental to the general welfare and subversive to good order or in a way that would be of benefit to the community and the society. Which it would be depended on education, agreed the speakers. The connection between the blacks' attainment of voting rights and the resulting necessity of providing education and schooling for them was also the theme of white political party analyses of the meaning and effects of the 15th Amendment and the state's Article 7. In Washington President Grant in his pro- Black Struggle for Public Schooling mulgation of federal adoption of the amendment had called upon Congress to "promote and encourage popular education" and upon the people to "see to it that all who possess and exercise political rights shall have the opportunity to acquire the knowledge which will make their share...