ivil 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.

[Footnote 1: For interesting examples see C.G. Woodson: _The Education
of the Negro prior to 1861_.]

It has been maintained that in their emphasis on education and on the
highest culture possible for the Negro the Abolitionists were mere
visionaries who had no practical knowledge whatever of the race's real
needs. This was neither true nor just. It was absolutely necessary first
of all to establish the Negro's right to enter any field occupied by any
other man, and time has vindicated this position. Even in 1850, however,
the needs of the majority of the Negro people for advance in their
economic life were not overlooked either by the Abolitionists or the
Negroes themselves. Said Martin V. Delany: "Our elevation must be the
result of _self-efforts_, and work of our _own hands_. No other human
power can accomplish it.... Let our young men and young women prepare
themse