common branches to enable them
to understand the principles of Christianity; next the colored people
as an enlightened class became such a menace to southern institutions
that it was deemed unwise to allow them any instruction beyond that
of memory training; and finally, when it was discovered that many
ambitious blacks were still learning to stir up their fellows, it was
decreed that they should not receive any instruction at all. Reduced
thus to the plane of beasts, where they remained for generations,
Negroes developed bad traits which since their emancipation have been
removed only with great difficulty.

Dark as the future of the Negro students seemed, all hope was not yet
gone. Certain white men in every southern community made it possible
for many of them to learn in spite of opposition. Slaveholders were
not long in discovering that a thorough execution of the law was
impossible when Negroes were following practically all the higher
pursuits of labor in the South. Masters who had children known to be
teaching slaves protected their benevolent sons and daughters from the
rigors of the law. Preachers, on finding out that the effort at verbal
education could not convey Christian truths to an undeveloped mind,
overcame the opposition in their localities and taught the colored
people as before. Negroes themselves, regarding learning as forbidden
fruit, stole away to secret places at night to study under the
direction of friends. Some learned by intuition without having had the
guidance of an instructor. The fact is that these drastic laws were
not passed to restrain "discreet" southerners from doing whatever they
desired for the betterment of their Negroes. The aim was to cut off
their communication with northern teachers and abolitionists, whose
activity had caused the South to believe that if such precaution were
not taken these agents would teach their slaves principles subversive
of southern institutions. Thereafter the documents which mention the
teaching of Negroes to read and write seldom even state that the
southern white teacher was so much as censured for his benevolence.
In the rare cases of arrest of such instructors they were usually
acquitted after receiving a reprimand.

With this winking at the teaching of Negroes in defiance of the law a
better day for their education brightened certain parts of the
South about the middle of the nineteenth century. Believing that an
enlightened laboring class migh