Negro Education Quotes

In the hands of the Negro teacher rests the destiny of the race.

The children of the white families in town were not permitted to associate with me, because my father was committing the then unpardonable crime, in Southern eyes, of educating negroes.

Educating Negroes is pointless and dangerous. The state should ensure that tax dollars from white citizens should only go to white schools.

The colored population voluntarily sustain several churches, schools, and mutual assistance and improvement societies, and there are evidently persons among them of no inconsiderable cultivation of mind.

Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority.

I must tell you something about the Ku Klux, they are raging on the other side of the River. They have whipped several white men, whipped and killed several Negroes. They whipped Colonel Huggins, the Superintendent of the free schools nearly to death, and everybody rejoiced when they heard it, for everybody hated him. He squandered the public money, buying pianofortes, organs, sofas, and furniture for the Negro School house in Aberdeen. The people are taxed beyond endurance. The Ku Klux gave him seventy lashes, and then gave him ten days to leave the country. he left and went to Jackson. There was a Regiment of Militia came into Aberdeen Friday. They are sent here to put down the Ku Klux. Huggins has come back with the Militia, but I wouldn't give a straw for his life, for he will be killed. It is the opinion of most everybody there will be war. the Yankees coming here will make the Negroes more insolent. With Country full of Yankees, things are going too far, for the free whites of the South are determined not to put up with it.

Have we become inoculated with prejudice of race that an American government professedly based on the principles of freedom ... can make distinctions between such citizens ... simply because of their respective races?

The advocates of the higher education of the Negro would be the last to deny the incompleteness and glaring defects of the present system: too many institutions have attempted to do college work, the work in some cases has not been thoroughly done, and quantity rather than quality has sometimes been sought. But all this can be said of higher education throughout the land.

I have never seen any good resulting from educating the Negro.

The severest charge that can be brought against the Christian education of the Negro in the South during the last thirty years is the reckless way in which sap-headed young fellows, without ability, and, in some cases, without character, have been urged and pushed into the ministry.

The most successful educational approach to the Negro is throgh a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the Minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

Before and after emancipation, the Negro, in self-defense, was propelled toward the white employer. The endowments of wealthy white men have developed great institutions of learning for the Negro, but the freedom of action on the part of these same universities has been curtailed in proportion as they are indebted to white philanthropies.

The greatest success of the Freedmen's Bureau lay in the planting of the free school among Negroes

It is precisely because education is the road to equality and citizenship, that it has been made more elusive for Negroes than many other rights. The walling off of Negroes from equal education is part of the historical design to submerge him in second class status. Therefore, as Negroes have struggled to be free they have had to fight for the opportunity for a decent education.