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Afterword
- The University of Alabama Press
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Afterword [34.230.84.106] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:01 GMT) THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY ASSOCIATION obviously was imperfect . It was too paternalistic, too enamored with northern white middle-class culture, and, at first, too naive about the strength of racial prejudice. It only belatedly recognized that entrenched southern tradition and national racial discrimination allowed even educated blacks few of the opportunities granted to most other Americans. Moreover, northern weariness with "black problems," increasing difficulty in fund collecting, and political compromise caused the association to become more circumspect in its dealings with white southerners . By 1880 "the great crusade" for the full integration of blacks into American society had apparently lost its momentum.1 Despite its shortcomings, the AMA was the most significant of the many missionary societies engaged in training blacks, and it made notable contributions. It helped convince the North that blacks should be freed and assisted in their transition to freedom. It protected freedmen from the military, saved hundreds oflives with relief, and tried to help the freedmen acquire land. It organized scores of schools and colleges in which it trained thousands of teachers who taught many thousands more. These mission schools were often derided as unrealistic in curriculum and in appraisal ofthe freedmen's needs, yet many of them were eminently successful. They became a significant force in acculturation and in training black teachers, ministers, attorneys, physicians , businessmen and women, and community leaders. These leaders guided their people through the trying years of lynching, poverty, discrimination , and disfranchisement, and in later years were instrumental in changing the pattern of American race relations. W. E. B. DuBois believed that without black schools and colleges freedmen "to all intents and purposes" would "have been driven back to slavery."2 The AMA's concern for blacks did not cause it to ignore other needy 259 260 Afterword members of society. It established schools for mountain whites in Kentucky , Tennessee, and Georgia, and for the Chinese and Japanese in California. When 1920s immigration laws excluded Orientals, the AMA was one of the few voices of protest. During World War I the association concluded that Mexican-Americans were largely neglected by American benevolence. It established schools in New Mexico and Utah. It began schools for Eskimos in Alaska after futile attempts to persuade the government to do so. Soon after the Spanish-American War the AMA sent teachers to Puerto Rico, where it maintained schools until public education was provided.3 The association's major service was to blacks, however, and its contributions to blacks did not end in 1890. Although the momentum for full integration had been slowed, the AMA never abandoned its original goals. Despite occasional attempts to cooperate with the white South, it remained one of the most progressive organizations working with southern blacks well into the twentieth century. The AMA continued to support schools and colleges, gradually allowing them greater self-government. It retained integrated faculties and taught equality by example, even though the rhetoric had been muted. It never lost sight of the black need for land and during the 1930s renewed its efforts to improve conditions for southern tenant farmers. In 1934 the AMA began the Brick Rural Life School in North Carolina where tenant farmers lived for five years and learned improved farming methods and management. At the end of their tenure the farmer-students were to have good credit ratings and enough money for down payments for their own land. A cooperative credit union and store were created to assist local residents. By 1946 there were five hundred people in the Brick Community Cooperative.4 The AMA opposed disfranchisement, white primaries, and segregation . The latter was condemned as "a dangerous, short-sighted policy." In 1896 the AMA successfully contested a Florida law that prohibited educating black and white youth in the same school. It advocated "securing the full rights and privileges of citizenship of Negro Americans and their complete integration in American life." Long before the Brown decision, the AMA claimed that separate could never be equal, that segregation was "a false social distinction, a self-defeating economic goal, and an undemocratic practice." When it created the department ofrace relations at Fisk University in 1942, it acted on the [34.230.84.106] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:01 GMT) Afterword 261 long-held conviction that "segregation is as incompatible to the American democratic ideal as was 'taxation without representation' and equally as offensive and unjust. Prejudicial law and customs which...