ess of the first labors of this devoted band led
to the foundation of permanent institutions for the elementary and
later for the normal and collegiate instruction of the Negro youth. At
Nashville, at Atlanta, at Raleigh, at Memphis, and at New Orleans
institutions were founded which have become great schools and have
contributed beyond measure to the process of civilizing the Negro as a
mass--a process confessedly still far from completion. Complicated and
annoying as the race problem assuredly is and will be for years to
come at the South, it would be far worse--much farther away from even
a hopeful degree of solution--but for the work done by the missionary
colleges.

The missionary schools, of which Fisk, Atlanta, Straight, Roger
Williams and Central Tennessee may be taken as types, furnished the
first Negro school teachers and the Negro owes to these schools,
founded and maintained in the spirit of the purest Christian
philanthropy, a debt he can never repay in either kind or equivalence.
The nearest like payment he can make is to imitate the beautiful,
pure, devoted, lives of the missionary teachers. Too much cannot be
said in praise of their labors. Perhaps if only the missionary
Christian teachers had come and the political missionaries had
remained at home, all might have been better.

But the missionary schools could reach but few. How was the great mass
of the colored population to be educated? This was the question, and
it was a most serious one. But the answer came not from the federal
government, as some expected--that source from which so many had
looked to get the mythical "mule" and the legendary "forty acres"--it
came from the South, from the wasted resources of the former master.
History furnishes no precedent as it affords no parallel to the action
of the ex-slaveholders--a dominant race--in entering at once--before
any opportunity had been afforded for recuperation from the losses of
the Civil War--on the expensive work of giving a public school system
to their former slaves--now technically, at least, their political
equals. And nothing can be gained by the Negro in refusing gratitude
to the South for this most magnanimous act and policy. An instance of
this unselfish policy of the South in its attitude toward Negro
education is seen in the history of Texas, the most liberal as well as
the most progressive of the Southern commonwealths. The Constitutional
Convention of 1876, which of course was D