Part 22 (1/2)
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 freede and accoress 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 produceto the needs of their environ center for those ould 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, MR Delany, and Bishop Benjamin T Tanner obtained much of their elementary education in the early colored schools of that city[2] JC Corbin, a prominent educator before and after the Civil War, acquired sufficient knowledge at Chillicothe, Ohio, to qualify in 1848 as an assistant in Rev Henry Adaston was for a while one of Corbin's fellow-students at Chillicothe before the former entered Oberlin United States Senator Hiram Revels of Mississippi spent some time in a Quaker seminary in Union County, Indiana[4] Rev JT White, one of the leading spirits of Arkansas during the Reconstruction, was born and educated in Clark County in that State[5] Fannie Richards, still a teacher at Detroit, Michigan, is another exaro equipped for service in the Northwest before the Rebellion[6] From other communities of that section came such useful men as Rev JW Malone, an influential minister of Iowa; Rev DR Roberts, a very successful pastor of Chicago; Bishop CT Shaffer of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; Rev John G Mitchell, for ical Department of Wilberforce University; and President ST Mitchell, once the head of the same institution[7]
[Footnote 1: This statement is based on the accounts of various western freedmen]
[Footnote 2: Simmons, _Men of Mark_, p 113]
[Footnote 3: Simmons, _Men of Mark_, p 829]
[Footnote 4: _Ibid_, p 948]
[Footnote 5: _Ibid_, p 590]
[Footnote 6: _Ibid_, p 1023]
[Footnote 7: Wright, ”Negro Rural Communities in Indiana,” _Southern Workman_, vol xxxvii, p 169]
In the colored settlehter This better opportunity was due to the high character of the colonists, to thefrom the proximity of the communities, and to the cooperation of the Canadians
The previous experience of most of these adventurers as sojourners in the free States developed in them such noble traits that they did not have to be induced to ameliorate their condition They had already coer task in Canada Fifteen thousand of sixty thousand Negroes in Canada in 1860 were free born[1] Many of those, who had always been free, fled to Canada[2] when the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made it possible for even a dark-coe Fortunately, too, these people settled in the same section
The colored settlein, Dresden, Windsor, Sandwich, Queens, Bush, Wilberforce, Hamilton, St Catherines, Chatham, Riley, Anderton, Maiden, Gonfield, were all in Southern Ontario In the course of tiroups produced a population sufficiently dense to facilitate cooperation into social betterees waswhite persons ere their first teachers and missionaries While the hardshi+ps incident to this pioneer effort all but baffled the ardent apostle to the lowly, he found a the northerners that his as reeable and noring the request that the refugees be turned from Canada as undesirables, the white people of that country protected and assisted thee in their attitude toward their newcomers, but these British-Aroes as sometimes developed in the Northern States[4]
[Footnote 1: Siebert, _The Underground Railroad_, p 222]
[Footnote 2: _Ibid_, pp 247-250]
[Footnote 3: Siebert, _The Underground Railroad_, pp 201 and 233]
[Footnote 4: _Ibid_, 233]
The educational privileges which the refugees hoped to enjoy in Canada, however, were not easily exercised Under the Canadian law they could send their children to the common schools, or use their proportionate share of the school funds in providing other educational facilities[1] But conditions there did not at first redound to the education of the colored children[2] Some were too destitute to avail themselves of these opportunities; others, unaccusto their children le with those of the whites, and not a few clad their youths so poorly that they becaularly[3] Besides, race prejudice was not long infactor
In 1852 Benjamin Drew found the minds of the people of Sandwich roes into the public schools The sa in Chatha to this prejudice, and partly to their own preference, the colored people, acting under the provision of the law that allowed them to have separate schools, set up their own schools in Sandwich and in many other parts of Ontario”[5] There were separate schools at Colchester, A, Sandwich, Dawn, and Buxton[6] It was doubtless because of the rude behavior of white pupils toward the children of the blacks that their private schools flourished at London, Windsor, and other places[7] The Negroes, themselves, however, did not object to the coeducation of the races Where there were a fehite children in colored settlements they were admitted to schools maintained especially for pupils of African descent[8] In Toronto no distinction in educational privileges wasschool for adults of color[9]
[Footnote 1: Howe, _The Refugees from Slavery_, p 77]
[Footnote 2: Drew said: ”The prejudice against the African race is here [Canada] strongly marked It had not been customary to levy school taxes on the colored people Some three or four years since a trustee assessed a school tax on some of the wealthy citizens of that class They sent their children at once into the public school As these sat down the white children near them deserted the benches: and in a day or two the white children holly withdrawn, leaving the schoolhouse to the teacher and his colored pupils The matter was at last 'compromised': a notice 'Select School' was put on the schoolhouse: the white children were selected _in_ and the black were selected _out_” See Drew's _A North-side View of Slavery_, etc, p
341]
[Footnote 3: Mitchell, _The Underground Railroad_, pp 140, 164, and 165]
[Footnote 4: Drew, _A North-side View of Slavery_, pp 118, 147, 235, and 342]
[Footnote 5: _Ibid_, p 341]
[Footnote 6: Siebert, _The Underground Railroad_, p 229]
[Footnote 7: _Ibid_, p 229]