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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 41. The Negro School - 1. Negro Education as Concerted Action
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Chapter 41. The Negro Schooi. 881
are better; teachers are better trained and better paid. In the Negro com-
munity teachers have a higher social status. As individuals they also achieve
a measure of independence because they are usually anonymous to the
white superintendent and school board. In the cities, the white community
as a whole does not follow so closely what happens among the Negroes.
The Negro principal in a city school, however, is directly responsible to
white officials and watches his teachers more closely than do superintendents
of rural schools.
In state colleges the situation is similar, except that the professors have
a still higher social status in the Negro community and except that the
college tends to become a little closed community of its own, with its own
norms, which tends to increase somewhat the independence of the teachers.
In the private colleges there is much more independence from local
white opinion within the limits of the campus. A friendly white churchman
belonging to the interracial movement recently told the students of Atlanta
University, in a commencement address, that the teachers there enjoyed
greater academic freedom than their white colleagues at the Georgia state
institutions, and this is probably true. The influence exerted by the North-
ern philanthropists and church bodies who have contributed to the colleges
—often exercised through Southern white liberals and interracialists and
through outstanding conservative Negro leaders—is, to a great extent,
effective as a means of upholding the independence of Negro college
presidents and professors.
As conditions are in the South, it is apparent that this influence is indis-
pensable for this purpose. Neither the Negro teachers themselves nor any
outside Negro institution could providcia power backing effective enough
to keep off local white pressure. This outside white control gives the
Negro teachers a considerably greater freedom even to inculcate a protest
attitude—if it is cautiously done—^than is allowed in publicly supported
educational institutions. But it is inherent in the Southern caste situation,
and in the traditions of the movement to build up Negro education in the
region, that even this control is conservatively directed when compared
with Northern standards.
In spite of these controls, strongest at the bottom of the educational
system but strong also in the higher institutions, there is no doubt, how-
ever, that the long-range effect of the rising level of education in the Negro
feofle goes in the direction of nourishing and strengthening the Negro
’protest. Negro-baiting Senator Vardaman knew this when he said:
What the North is sending South is not money but dynamite; this education is
ruining our Negroes. They’re demanding equality.^
This would probably hold true of any education, independent of the con-
trols held and the direction given. An increased ability on the part of the
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