ee no philanthropy
in educating persons to prepare for doom in a deadly climate. The
convention of the free people of color assembled in Philadelphia in
1830, denounced the colonization movement as an evil, and urged their
fellows not to support it. Pointing out the impracticability of such
schemes, the convention encouraged the race to take steps toward its
elevation in this country.[1] Should the colored people be properly
educated, the prejudice against them would not continue such as to
necessitate their expatriation. The delegates hoped to establish a
Manual Labor College at New Haven that Negroes might there acquire
that "classical knowledge which promotes genius and causes man to soar
up to those high intellectual enjoyments and acquirements which place
him in a situation to shed upon a country and people that scientific
grandeur which is imperishable by time, and drowns in oblivion's cup
their moral degradation."[2]

[Footnote 1: Williams, _History of the Negro Race_, p. 67.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, p. 68; and _Minutes of the Proceedings of the
Third Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Color_, pp.
9, 10, and 11.]

Influential abolitionists were also attacking this policy of the
colonizationists. William Jay, however, delivered against them such
diatribes and so wisely exposed their follies that the advocates
of colonization learned to consider him as the arch enemy of their
cause.[1] Jay advocated the education of the Negroes for living
where they were. He could not see how a Christian could prohibit or
condition the education of any individual. To do such a thing was
tantamount to preventing him from having a direct revelation of God.
How these "educators" could argue that on account of the hopelessness
of the endeavors to civilize the blacks they should be removed to a
foreign country, and at the same time undertake to provide for them
there the same facilities for higher education that white men enjoyed,
seemed to Jay to be facetiously inconsistent.[2] If the Africans could
be elevated in their native land and not in America, it was due to the
Caucasians' sinful condition, for which the colored people should not
be required to suffer the penalty of expatriation.[3] The desirable
thing to do was to influence churches and schools to admit students of
color on terms of equality with all other races.

[Footnote 1: Reese, _Letters to Honorable William Jay._]

[Footnote 2: Jay, _Inquiry_, p. 2