gro and making him the tool,
the slave of corrupt taskmasters. Education is a natural consequence
of citizenship and enfranchisement... of freedom and humanity. But with
deliberate purpose to subject the Southern States to Negro domination,
and secure the States permanently for partisan ends, the education
adopted was contrary to commonsense, to human experience, to all noble
purposes. The curriculum was for a people in the highest degree of
civilization; the aptitude and capabilities and needs of the Negro were
wholly disregarded. Especial stress was laid on classics and liberal
culture to bring the race per saltum to the same plane with their former
masters, and realize the theory of social and political equality. A race
more highly civilized, with best heredities and environments, could
not have been coddled with more disregard of all the teachings of human
history and the necessities of the race. Colleges and universities,
established and conducted by the Freedmen's Bureau and Northern churches
and societies, sprang up like mushrooms, and the teachers, ignorant,
fanatical, without self-poise, proceeded to make all possible mischief.
It is irrational, cruel, to hold the Negro, under such strange
conditions, responsible for all the ill consequences of bad education,
unwise teachers, reconstruction villainies, and partisan schemes."

* Quoted in "Proceedings of the Montgomery Conference on
Race Problems" (1900), p. 128.

Education was to be looked upon as a handmaid to a thorough
reconstruction, and its general character and aim were determined by
the Northern teachers. Each convention framed a more or less complicated
school system and undertook to provide for its support. The Negroes in
the conventions were anxious for free schools; the conservatives were
willing; but the carpetbaggers and a few mulatto leaders insisted in
several States upon mixed schools. Only in Louisiana and South Carolina
did the constitutions actually forbid separate schools; in Mississippi,
Florida, Alabama, and Arkansas the question was left open, to the
embarrassment of the whites. Generally the blacks showed no desire for
mixed schools unless urged to it by the carpetbaggers. In the South
Carolina convention, a mulatto thus argued in favor of mixed schools:
"The gentleman from Newberry said he was afraid we were taking a wrong
course to remove these prejudices. The most natural method to effect
this object would be to allow chi