ent J. W. Robinson.

HIGHER EDUCATION OF NEGROES

It did not require much argument to show that the schools could not
make much progress without some provision for developing its own
teaching force. The State Superintendent was early authorized,
therefore, to arrange with some school in the State for the
professional training of Negro teachers. For a number of years the
State depended largely upon such normal training as could be given at
Storer College at Harper's Ferry. The reports of the State
Superintendent of Schools carried honorable mention from period to
period of the successful work being accomplished there under the
direction of Dr. N. C. Brackett, which work was the only effort for
secondary education for Negroes in the State at that time. This was
given an impetus by a measure introduced in the legislature by Judge
James H. Ferguson of Charleston, providing for an arrangement with
Storer College by which eighteen persons as candidates for teachers in
this State should be given free tuition at that institution. As this
school was in the extreme northeastern section of the State and was
geographically a part of Maryland and Virginia, however, the Negroes
of the central and southern portions of Virginia soon began the
movement for the establishment of a Negro school providing for normal
instruction nearer home. Mr. William Davis and his corps of teachers
in Charleston, West Virginia, were among the first in West Virginia to
direct attention to this crying need. Impetus was also given the
movement by the rapid development of higher grades in Point Pleasant,
Saint Albans, Montgomery, Lewisburg and Eckman, necessitating better
trained teachers. In the summers of 1890, 1891, and 1892, Byrd
Prillerman and H. B. Rice undertook to supply this need by conducting
a summer school in the city of Charleston. Still further stimulus came
later from the establishment of promising high schools in Parkersburg,
Wheeling, Clarksburg, Huntington, and Charleston.

During this same period, however, a systematic effort was being made
to interest a larger group in the more efficient training of Negro
leaders. The Baptists of the State, led by C. H. Payne, undertook to
establish a college in West Virginia. Payne toured the State in behalf
of the enterprise, setting forth the urgent need for such an
institution and showing how this objective could be attained. Rallying
to this call, the people of the State raised a sum adequate to