hemselves endeavored to provide their own educational facilities in
opening in 1820 the first colored school in that city. This school
did not continue long, but another was established the same year.
Thereafter one Mr. Wing, who kept a private institution, admitted
persons of color to his evening classes. On account of a lack of
means, however, the Negroes of Cincinnati did not receive any
systematic instruction before 1834. After that year the tide turned in
favor of the free blacks of that section, bringing to their assistance
a number of daring abolitionists, who helped them to educate
themselves. Friends of the race, consisting largely of the students of
Lane Seminary, had then organized colored Sunday and evening schools,
and provided for them scientific and literary lectures twice a week.
There was a permanent colored school in Cincinnati in 1834. In 1835
the Negroes of that city contributed $150 of the $1000 expended for
their education. Four years later, however, they raised $889.03 for
this purpose, and thanks to their economic progress, this sacrifice
was less taxing than that of 1835.[1] In 1844 Rev. Hiram Gilmore
opened there a high school which among other students attracted P.B.S.
Pinchback, later Governor of Louisiana. Mary E. Miles, a graduate
of the Normal School at Albany, New York, served as an assistant of
Gilmore after having worked among her people in Massachusetts and
Pennsylvania.[2]

[Footnote 1: _Ibid._, p. 83.]

[Footnote 1: Delany, _The Condition of the Colored People_, etc.,
132.]

The educational advantages given these people were in no sense
despised. Although the Negroes of the Northwest did not always keep
pace with their neighbors in things industrial they did not permit
the white people to outstrip them much in education. The freedmen
so earnestly seized their opportunity to acquire knowledge and
accomplished so much in a short period that their educational progress
served to disabuse the minds of indifferent whites of the idea that
the blacks were not capable of high mental development.[1] The
educational work of these centers, too, tended not only to produce men
capable of ministering to the needs of their environment, but to serve
as a training center for those who would later be leaders of their
people. Lewis Woodson owed it to friends in Pittsburgh that he became
an influential teacher. Jeremiah H. Brown, T. Morris Chester, James T.
Bradford, M.R. Delany, and Bishop Benjamin