The Prince of Jockeys
Page 15
Leaders of the disparate but solidifying African American communities recognized that all children needed access to proper schooling if the promise of enlightenment and full citizenship was to be achieved. In most cases, children “manifested the same dogged commitment to their education” as adults did to the recognition of their birthright and their humanity.45 Black children were the main reason African American leaders continued to fight for the franchise, no matter how dangerous the consequences or the means whites used to deter their progress.
By October 1865, less than two months after the State Convention of Colored Baptists first met in Louisville, Reverend Monroe, a charter member of the convention, had begun soliciting money from his 1,500 members to pay the salaries of teachers to staff community schools.46 Reverend Smith's fortuitous visit to Lexington (he had been delayed in the city while on his way to Nicholasville) led to AMA support not only for Monroe but also for other schools in the area.47 Smith's primary observation had been the lack of literate and capable teachers for the eager students. It was common knowledge that before the AMA and the Freedmen's Bureau became involved in the education of African Americans, local church schools such as those at Pleasant Green Baptist Church and Main Street Baptist Church were staffed by semi-illiterate teachers who did their best but inevitably failed to impart the fundamental elements of a proper education.48 Until more qualified teachers could be hired, the schools would not fully satisfy the children's educational needs.
Thanks to the proximity of Camp Nelson and the commitment of the Reverend John G. Fee to educating its inhabitants, children like Isaac Murphy had the opportunity to learn from some of the better teachers in the Bluegrass.49 Reverend Edward P. Smith knew of Miss E. Belle Mitchell, a mulatto woman who had briefly taught at Camp Nelson, and he sent word, through Miss Mary Colton at the camp, of a teaching position available in Lexington. A gifted teacher, Mitchell was asked to “take charge of a free school for the children of colored soldiers,” most of whom were poor.50 She relocated from her parents' home in Danville to Lexington, where Mr. and Mrs. Henry H. Britton willingly opened their home to her “for the good of the race.” Mitchell was thus introduced into the aspiring class of Lexington—the elite African American men and women who valued education, social mobility, and the power that comes from being well connected to those in power.51
The Brittons, whose home was located on the northwest corner of Mill and New Streets in the Second Ward, were considered “honest, industrious and frugal people, [who] were among the first and highly respected families and citizens of Lexington.”52 A freeborn mulatto and self-educated businessman, Henry Harrison Britton ran a barbershop serving white men only, located next to the Broadway Hotel. He employed several barbers, including Thomas Jackson and James H. Scott. Britton would become very wealthy from his business ventures and would use his capital to purchase luxury items such as a piano and a carriage for his family's transportation. He belonged to a variety of benevolent societies dedicated to the uplift of African Americans in Lexington and was a member of the inaugural board of directors for the Colored Fair Association in 1869.53 Like her husband, Laura Marshall Britton was mulatto, the daughter of a slave woman and her master, Colonel Thomas F. Marshall of Woodford County. The wealthy Colonel Marshall provided Laura with an above-standard education for any young girl—white or black—at his expense and most likely under his direct guidance and supervision.54 Like other women of her class and position, Laura Britton probably served as a community matriarch, ensuring the moral uprightness of the children, especially her own. Strict members of the Episcopalian Church, the Brittons undoubtedly exemplified proper middle-class sensibilities and served as a model for other black families.
The seven Britton children were well known throughout Kentucky for their intellectual capacity and musical ability. Julia Ann was recognized as a musical prodigy and a “remarkable performer on the piano,” holding parlor concerts before the Civil War in the homes of William Preston and John Hunt Morgan.55 Sometime between 1869 and 1870, the Brittons moved to Madison County, where the children were enrolled in Berea College to continue their educational and intellectual development. In particular, Julia and her sister Mary would blossom as intellectuals. After graduating from Berea in 1874, Julia moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she married and started a music school. In Memphis she also became heavily involved in civil rights, becoming a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Mary Britton became a teacher and was the first African American woman to practice medicine in Kentucky.
Clearly, Reverend Monroe's request for assistance from the AMA was answered and supplemented by members of the black community with considerable status and power, including the Brittons. The church school at First African Baptist Church, under the direction of the AMA, Miss Mitchell, and Reverend Monroe, satisfied the desires of both parents, who wanted their children to learn to read, write, and do arithmetic, and community leaders, who sought to transform the future of black Lexington through education, self-mastery, and successful assimilation into society. The school also provided the community's youngest members with the best examples of manhood and womanhood and demonstrated the benefits of upward mobility, political activeness, and an understanding of progressive ideas. More important, regardless of the freedmen's motivations for relocating to Lexington and despite the city's obvious limitations, African Americans created a proactive cultural, social, and political environment that attempted to redefine family, marriage, and community and advance communal cohesiveness. Among Lexington's progressive community, religion, temperance, education, and hard work were the foundations for the future. To succeed in Lexington, one needed to have a vested interest in the community, its children, and its overall welfare. Communities were composed of individuals, but individuals need communities for support, protection, and a grounded sense of identity.
In keeping with the mission of the black Baptists' convention—which was to preach the Gospel and train the black community through Christian education—in addition to their rudimentary education, children were instructed in proper etiquette and hygiene to prepare them to serve their community, participate as upright citizens, and lead the race to new horizons.56 This approach to education would allow future generations of African Americans to function in society as disciplined, self-directed, and purpose-driven individuals. The future of both Lexington and Kentucky was dependent on this particular generation's access to education and acceptance of religious values, which would prepare them for all the rights and privileges of citizenship.
Although there were a number of problems with school supplies, and a majority of the students lacked proper nutrition, Belle Mitchell's average class size grew to sixty-nine by November 1865.57 The number of children attending school in Lexington increased primarily due to the in-migration of refugees from Federal encampments and rural black families fleeing the violence of the countryside. White resistance to educating former slaves varied, based on their class and their understanding of race as a concept. In the rural towns and hamlets surrounding Lexington, the economic difficulties of white farmers, many of them former slaveholders, “caused…them to oppose any prospect of extending education or welfare agencies which would involve an increase in taxes” to pay for Negro education and thus ruin the South's traditional labor pool.58 Others considered schools for former slaves a waste of time and resources and refused to have anything to do with uplifting a so-called inferior race of people. The most extreme cases involved the burning of school buildings and the violent intimidation of black preachers and white teachers who sought to enlighten former slaves through religious and moral education. Many were run out of town, afraid they would be shot for teaching Negroes.59 To a majority of working-class and poor whites, elevating the Negro to the level of a socially conscious citizen threatened all that was common and familiar.60 The idea of being equal to or less than the Negro drove whites to unimaginable acts of violence, including l
ynching, to reclaim what they had lost in the Civil War and Reconstruction: ignorance of their common humanity with other human beings.61 Whites had been exposed as the victims of a cruel joke: they were no better than the next man, unless, of course, they imagined themselves to be so. Some would rather drape an American flag around a dog and call it a citizen than concede that the Negro was a human being deserving of citizenship.
By the time of Reconstruction, the image of the black man as inherently inferior, ignorant, and hopelessly corrupt was no longer universally applicable. Education was quickly becoming the most accessible way to shed the weight of history and the myth of white supremacy; it empowered former slaves to imagine a future of freedom and prosperity. This proposition was difficult for white men—both the wealthy elite and the illiterate poor—to accept. The race-based social, economic, and political hierarchy at the foundation of American society in general and Southern society in particular was changing before their eyes and shifting under their feet. If blacks could read, write, and discuss the finer elements of government and politics, how could they be ignorant and backward and at the bottom of society? Black education was a direct threat to white identity, citizenship, and power, and those whites who were unable to accept this break from tradition threatened to plunge Kentucky into a race war.
On December 18, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, and Secretary of State William Henry Seward made it official: slaves in the state of Kentucky were free. Immediately, Kentucky lawmakers began devising ways to derail federally funded and supported reforms advanced by the Freedmen's Bureau. By February 1866, the Kentucky General Assembly adopted the following measure, creating a special fund to pay for the education of black children:
All taxes hereafter collected from negroes and mulattoes in this Commonwealth shall be set apart as a separate fund for their use, one-half, if necessary, to go to the support of their paupers, and the remainder to the education of their children.
In addition to the tax already levied a tax of two dollars shall be levied on every male negro and mulatto over the age of eighteen years, and, when paid into the treasury, shall go into the fund aforesaid.
The trustees of each school district may cause a separate school to be taught in their district for the education of the Negro and mulatto children, to be conducted and reported as other schools are; and when this is done, they shall receive their proportion of the fund set apart in this act for that purpose.
No part of said fund shall ever be appropriated otherwise than pursuant to this act, in aid of common schools for negroes and mulattoes.62
In theory, this measure would have established a formal education system for black children in Kentucky, as well as a fund to care for “paupers”—aged and debilitated former slaves who were unable to find work and support themselves. In practice, however, the monies collected were not used for black education; they were spent on white schools and disbursed to former slave owners to compensate them for their losses and help them support older blacks still living on their property. Monies left over were absorbed into the general state fund, never to be recovered.63
As a direct consequence of the abuse of the so-called Negro Fund, the black community rallied to address this miscarriage of justice. For some, the Civil War was still alive and kicking, and black folks were prepared to defend their position alone, if need be; however, they understood that without the help of the Federal government, their chances for success were limited. Those opposed to the Thirteenth Amendment sought to unravel blacks' transition from slaves o free citizens by any means possible. Allies of the freedmen understood the power behind the ability to read a book, understand the law, and exercise the right to vote. Those invested in the process of black citizenship and suffrage recognized a moral obligation to see justice served.
General Oliver O. Howard, commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau, promoted Negro suffrage and education to ensure that former slaves became functional citizens of the United States.64 Howard was certainly aware of the conspiracy against him in the White House. Early on, President Andrew Johnson used the Freedmen's Bureau as a political whipping boy to denounce the radical Republicans as a “new set of slave-masters…[who,] under this new system” of Reconstruction, would work blacks as if they were slaves, at the expense of the Federal government, and keep any financial benefit to themselves, at the cost of the taxpayers.65 Johnson attempted to appeal to white Southerners by undermining and threatening to scuttle the push for black enfranchisement, arguing that “already the colored man had gained his freedom during the war, and if he and the poor white came into competition at the ballot-box, a ‘war of races’ would result.”66 In reality, that war had already begun. The battlefronts were set: the schoolroom and the ballot box.
Johnson vetoed the freedman's bill, which would have extended Federal protections to African Americans in the South, in an effort to ensure the enforcement of blacks’ rights. This led to a debate in Washington that was settled by Congress on April 9, 1866, with passage of the Civil Rights Act.67 Lincoln Republicans recognized President Johnson's ploy to undermine one of the main goals of Reconstruction: citizenship and suffrage for former slaves. Johnson's sympathetic policy toward the South and negrophobes, as well as his own racism, presented a challenge to General Howard and his Freedmen's Bureau. Still, the “Christian general's” strong conviction about doing what was right and moral guided his steps. Howard's purpose was to create a vehicle by which citizenship rights could be obtained by black men who had remained steadfast in their pursuit of education and temperance and understood the true meaning of citizenship. Only this, Howard believed, would right the injustices of slavery and the exclusion of blacks as an inferior class of people. As Reconstruction moved into high gear, members of the African American community looked to the Freedmen's Bureau as the gateway to first-class citizenship.
General Howard's persistence, along with that of his assistant commissioner of Tennessee and Kentucky, General Clinton Fisk, assured blacks that slavery was, in fact, “a dead letter.”68 Yet, even with the support of the Freedmen's Bureau and the American Missionary Association, black education in the South proceeded slowly and sporadically. However, in cities such as Louisville and Lexington, where the black church was strong and the black community resilient, education was directly connected to the destiny of African Americans—especially the aspiring class of professionals who assumed leadership.
One of the most impressive schools in Kentucky was the Howard School, which opened in Lexington in the fall of 1866. Through the fund-raising efforts of black women such as Laura Britton, Arrena Turner, and Theodorcia Scroggins, the tuition-free school was opened in the Ladies Hall on Church Street, the building having been purchased by some of the city's prominent black leaders.69 Supplied with teachers, materials, and funding from the Freedmen's Bureau and the AMA and money from the Negro Fund, the Howard School was the premier institution of black learning in Lexington.70 In its first year of operation, the 500 students enrolled were instructed by three teachers: Sarah B. Todd, Dora Brooks, and J. H. Phillips. The AMA later hired Belle Mitchell to teach and to be an example of an intellectually challenging, morally sound, and community-oriented “colored” citizen.71
Samuel C. Hale, an instructor from South Carolina, was hired to enhance the teaching corps at the Howard School. Appointed assistant superintendent of education for Kentucky by General Howard, Hale would be responsible for implementing a number of advances in the education of Lexington's black children. Certainly, Hale's appeal was closely connected to the documented success of the all-black Saxton School under the supervision of Francis L. Cardozo, a mulatto educator who constructed a curriculum to support the ongoing development of black children in the South with well-qualified black teachers.72 In the September issue of the American Missionary, Hale writes of his arrival in Lexington, his interaction with the teaching staff, and the community's reaction to the education of black children. Most important, he accounts for the changing politica
l environment of Lexington, which had swung in favor of funding for the freedmen's schools:
Our colored school board applied to the trustees and county school commissioner, and they agreed to so far recognize us as teaching one of the public schools in the city, as to draw for us the share of public funds coming from taxes upon colored people, and over five hundred dollars came into the hands of the treasurer of our school board, who, after paying bills for coal and repairs, turned over near $300 to the A.M.A. Though this is but a small part of the cost of supporting so large a school, yet, it is a step in the right direction—the beginning of a support of common schools by tax, and as such we rejoice in it.
Our school building, located on what is known in Lexington as Church St., is a brick structure, and answers our purpose well, so far as it goes. The chief alterations needed are to make the larger rooms smaller by folding doors and to have them better supplied with more convenient seats. Our seats are without desks, and writing has been taught by classes—a few desks being provided for the purpose at one end of the large upper room.