In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

8 The Kind of Education the Afro-American Most Needs In his article “The Kind of Education the Afro-American Most Needs,” published in Hampton Institute’s Southern Workman, Fortune emphasizes the importance of industrial education. This idea was promoted by schools such as Hampton and Booker T. Washington ’s Tuskegee Institute and by Fortune himself in his 1884 Black and White. As in his argument laid out in Black and White, Fortune does not undervalue the necessity of higher education but rather calls for both to be employed for the betterment of the race. The Kind of Education the Afro-American Most Needs —Southern Workman 27, no. 1 (1898): 4–6 The question of popular education has received more general attention from the states and from individuals and from philanthropic organizations North and South, East and West, during the past thirty years than any other question of vital moment.1 Interest in other questions of national concern has occupied the public attention for a brief period, and has then subsided, from one cause and from another, having been either rejected as dangerous to the general welfare or accepted by enactment into law; but there has been no subsidence of interest anywhere in the subject of education, in all of its multiform phases, from the kindergarten to the university, from the munificence of the state to the munificence of the individual. The conviction that the perpetuation of the republic depends upon the intelligence of its citizenship has been, and is, the mainspring of this interest, of this movement for the general diffusion among the masses of the people of the principles of a liberal education. The impulse is and has been national in character and scope. It has grown with the national growth, and had reached such proportions and strength as to serve as an object lesson, to admire and to imitate, 86 / T. Thomas Fortune to all the nations of the earth. Indeed, the educational system of the United States has become its chief glory and defense. In how far the abolition of slavery, thirty-two years ago, and the incorporation into the national life of 4,500,000 people, who had served an apprenticeship of 245 years in slavery, and who were destitute, as far as it was possible to make an estimate, of all the requirements of successful citizenship, served to arouse the people of the country to the imminent and menacing danger of an illiterate electorate, and to stimulate them to do all in their power to educate it, cannot be easily estimated; but that it operated powerfully with gratifying results is admitted by all candid persons conversant with the facts. It is true that the public and private interest which aroused the North especially, to the importance of lifting into the glorious sunlight of knowledge the great mass of Afro-Americans who had so long stumbled and fallen and groveled in the darkness of ignorance and superstition and immorality, with which the institution of slavery was compelled to hedge itself about in order to insure existence, has no parallel in the history of mankind. We seek in vain for philanthropy so instant and generous and continuous, and for missionary spirit so noble and capable and self-sacrificing , as that which answered the Macedonian cry that came out of the log cabins of the South, When the war drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled, In the parliament of man, the federation of the world.2 And what a Herculean task was theirs! The New England men and women who went into the waste places of the South, following closely upon the heels of the warlike host that stacked their arms at Appomattox Court House, formed an army as heroic as ever went forth under the standard of the cross to “redeem the human mind from error.”3 No wealth could have purchased the service and the sacrifice they undertook for God and humanity , and no memorial of affection or granite shaft can ever adequately commemorate their works. There are some services and sacrifices which it is impossible to reward. These evangels went into a hostile country, armed with Puritan faith and New England culture, and by singleness of purpose and gentleness of character disarmed the intense prejudice of the whites and won the respect and confidence of the suspicious blacks, who had been educated in the hard school of slavery to distrust all Greeks, even those bearing [3.21.97.61] Project...

Share