CHAPTER VI.
EDUCATION UNDER DIFFICULTIES.
Some time as many as a half dozen funerals a day occurred in the coast region from malarial fever or small pox. The chances for recovery were rendered difficult by the absence of any physician, the nearest one being sixty miles away.
Among the medicines sent Miss Schofield from friends of the North was a bottle of port wine. This was sent in 1876, when she was attacked by a hemorrhage of the lungs, with instructions from a physician that she must take it three times a day. But the fear of setting an example which might prove the ruin of many people in her charge caused her not to open it. She took it to Aiken, and during the construction of her residence there it was deposited in the walls and no one except Miss Schofield to the day of her death, on February 1, 1916, knew where to break the wall; no one on earth knows just where to this very day.
She despised the avarice and greed that caused men to manufacture intoxicants but hated with the venom of the devil the lust for gain by the municipalities and States which caused them to issue licenses for the manufacture of alcohol. She taught and lived that the greatest criminal in the history of criminology was the criminal who issued the license for the commission of crime. In her opinion this was not only a crime against society but a crime against criminals as well.
The pernicious influence of alcohol on the Negro was largely responsible for her antagonism to the liquor traffic. Opposed to it naturally, as every educated and thinking person must be, she was more so after observing its destructive influence among the ignorant and vicious.
It was confidently believed by her that if every Negro capable of complying with the registration laws regulating the qualification of voters, was registered and allowed to vote, uninfluenced by any outside influence, that the legal sale of alcoholic stimulants in the South at least, would be a thing of the past. She believed also that if positions on the police force were available to colored men for service in the Negro sections of the cities that not only would the illegal sale of intoxicants be stopped but crimes of every character would be largely suppressed.
Martha Schofield, having lived to see accomplished the task to which her life had been dedicated on the day her father rescued Laura Duncan from the blood hounds of the slave holding oligarchy, died as happy and serene as an angel, perfectly confident that the work she had been doing would gain momentum and go on more splendidly each year, until illiteracy and physical and moral degradation would be an exceptional thing among the Negroes.
Between the years of 1890 and 1910 the percentage of Negro illiteracy had fallen from 57.10 to 30.40 per cent. among children between the ages of ten and fourteen years. For those fifteen years of age and under nineteen, the percentage of illiteracy was only 18.90 per cent.
The greater illiteracy in the higher age classes is very marked, the illiteracy of Negroes of 55 to 64 years of age being about 67 per cent. of the total, and nearly every one of those of 65 years and above were found to be unable to read or write when the 1910 census was taken.
Negroes of sixty years and above, it will be recalled, were past childhood before emancipation, when little or no provision was made to teach them to read and write, and this accounts for the high percentage of illiteracy in the old people and the rapidly decreasing percentage of illiteracy among their children.
At the rate of advance in education among the Negroes at present there will be less than 10 per cent. of the population between ten and fourteen illiterate in 1920, and every child of sane mind and sound body will be able to read and write by 1930, when the Fourteenth Census shall have been taken. This all in the space of fifty years. Remarkable!
And yet there are well informed influential people who still maintain that the progress of the Negro has been slow, superficial and unworthy of the effort and money expended on it.
Maybe so, but all admit, that it is very helpful to every human being to be able to read and write, to be able to assimilate the thoughts of others and to express his thoughts and hand them on to others of his kind by other means than by the word of mouth. To deny this would be equal to denying one the right to be taught the use of his mind or tongue, the two organs which God in His infinite wisdom put no ban upon, but made free as the air of Heaven, restricting their use only to the accomplishment of honorable and noble undertakings, thus dethroning the power of all, who though possessed of powerful intellect, would use their talent in the interest of the base and ignoble.
While the peoples of all races are born with a knowledge of good and evil they are not possessed at birth with the knowledge which science is supposed to endow them with, and therefore, it should be the pleasure, as it certainly is the imperative duty of the State to provide liberally for the diffusion of knowledge among even the humblest of all its citizens.
Martha Schofield taught more emphatically than anything else the economic necessity which exists among all races for the performance of duty, one to another. She argued that unrighted wrongs retard the progress of races, and if not checked by the refinements of civilization, through the enlightenment of the mind, become the instruments which at last wreck and destroy the strongest ships of State. She wanted her work to prove to the country that great measures of service in the field of education was the price to be paid for the salvation of our land against the misery and death, which others through ignorance and greed, had sown. She made the man at the North without principle or scruple to modify his ambition in the selfish accumulation of wealth equally as culpable as the man of the South, in producing the suffering and misery which attended the great civil conflict for freedom. She exhibited the chaos attending the Reconstruction period as the awful penalty for benighted stupidity and ignorance of an earlier day, for which none of the present day is accountable, and whose fruits none, in an earlier past, foresaw.
Her doctrine of the elevation of the Negro so as to meet the necessities of the new standard of civilization which freedom had thrust upon him, spread like wild fire on a western prairie, and was, of course, shocking, even inconceivable to the imagination of the Southern white mind, which had been taught and religiously believed that education impaired the usefulness of the colored people, both as productive machines in the hard field of toil and as mediums for the expression of the divine messages of power.
“No amount or kind of learning,” they argued, “can be made available to the ‘nigger’ because of his inability to assimilate it. He’s a brute, pure and simple, and has anyone ever succeeded through teaching in making a brute anything but a brute?”
“Pigs will be pigs.”
Laws by the General Assembly of South Carolina forbade the whites the privilege of teaching Negroes, but it was ignored by many good men and women who devoted much time and money to the education of the race.
An influential Southern man, a former Governor of one of the great States of the South and now an honored member of the Senate of the United States once wrote a book in which he delved deep into history and anthropology and proved to the complete satisfaction of the voters of his State and to a great number of the learned professors of the sciences in some of the Southern colleges, that the Negro by every fact known to the scientists and evolutionists was a member of the families of the lower animals, and, therefore, an impossibility in the matter of intellectual development.
The influence of this propaganda at the South exerted itself strongly to the detriment of the work undertaken by Miss Schofield, and others who came after her, in that it aroused the passions of the ignorant whites and determined them in the course of lawlessness, which but for the zeal and strength of heart expressed by Martha Schofield might have succeeded in delaying for many years the phenomenal rise and progress of the black people of the Southern States.
One Sunday morning, the sun in all its radiance and splendor lighting up the whole world, doing for the earth and every creature and plant on it (giving them light and warmth and moisture that they might develop and grow to perfection) just what God would have us do—help along everything good that we can—on such a morning as this—a band of armed men approached Miss Schofield’s home and demanded that she quit teaching Negro children and return to her home or she would be forced to do so.
To these she replied as follows: “Thee can kill my body and hide it away, but my soul is of God, that is the one invincible thing, which thee can not kill.”
A noble life consecrated absolutely, even in the face of death, to the uplift and service of a lowly, impoverished race! Everywhere she went, she reached righteousness, law, order, temperance, truth, cleanliness, thoroughness and economy.
After fifty years of toil, of social ostracism, of infinitely wicked persecution, which in later years by her patience, by her kindness and charity was greatly modified, she fell in the harness, full of achievements from the work which God had given her to do. At both the funeral service at Aiken, S. C., where she died on the night before the event arranged by friends to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of her service to the colored people and her helpfulness to all who met her socially or in a business way, and at Darby Meeting House, in Pennsylvania, where the interment of the body took place, solemn covenants consecrating mind and heart and hand, amid the tears and sobs of blacks and whites alike, were made by many to keep alive forever the spark of truth and life she was first to express the courage to plant in a land of enemies, surrounded on every side by the dangers of assassination and the ravages of small pox, malaria, and dengue fevers.
