Note (return) — Chapter XI

In spite moreover of all the laws and disadvantages that they had to meet the Negroes also made general advance in education. In the South efforts were of course sporadic, but Negroes received some teaching through private or clandestine sources.191 More than one slave learned the alphabet while entertaining the son of his master. In Charleston for a long time before the Civil War free Negroes could attend schools especially designed for their benefit and kept by white people or other Negroes. The course of study not infrequently embraced such subjects as physiology, physics, and plane geometry. After John Brown's raid the order went forth that no longer should any colored person teach Negroes. This resulted in a white person's being brought to sit in the classroom, though at the outbreak of the war schools were closed altogether. In the North, in spite of all proscription, conditions were somewhat better. As early as 1850 there were in the public schools in New York 3,393 Negro children, these sustaining about the same proportion to the Negro population that white children sustained to the total white population. Two institutions for the higher education of the Negro were established before the Civil War, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania (1854) and Wilberforce University in Ohio (1856). Oberlin moreover was founded in 1833. In 1835 Professor Asa Mahan, of Lane Seminary, was offered the presidency. As he was an Abolitionist he said that he would accept only if Negroes were admitted on equal terms with other students. After a warm session of the trustees the vote was in his favor. Though, before this, individual Negroes had found their way into Northern institutions, it was here at Oberlin that they first received a real welcome. By the outbreak of the war nearly one-third of the students were of the Negro race, and one of the graduates, John M. Langston, was soon to be generally prominent in the affairs of the country.