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1422 An American Dilemma
feel that they are compelled to go to one school rather than the other. It seems as if it
was taking away part of their freedom. This feeling is likely to be all the stronger where
the matter is made a subject of public agitation. On the other hand, my experience is
that if this matter is left to the discretion of the school officials it usually settles itself.
As the colored people usually live pretty closely together, there will naturally be
schools in which colored students are in the majority. In that case, the process of
separation takes place naturally and without the necessity of changing the constitution.
If you make it a constitutional question, the colored people are going to be opposed
to it. If you leave it simply an administrative question, whicih it really is, the matter
will very likely settle itself.” (Quoted in Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe,
Booker T. Washington [1916], pp. 42-43.) For another similar situation, see Moton,
Of. cit., pp. 1 1 2 S.
®®Schrieke, of. cit., pp. 166-167.
^®The latter type may be exemplified by the following quotation from Schrieke:
. . the same curriculum is taught in the Negro schools as in the white, and the
same books are supposed to be used. The children are grouped in grades, but, as a matter
of fact, these grades have only a theoretical value which does not correspond with that
which the white schools attach to it. 1 found pupils in an eighth grade studying com-
mercial geography without maps, and in another place I found them studying the state
history. In both cases they understood almost nothing of the subjects, with the result
that the geography and history classes simply developed into very poor reading classes
poor because the worst kind of training in reading is the reciting of words and sentences
which have no meaning for the reader. I have seen textbooks on literature used when
the pupils did not understand one word of what they read. The English was far too
difficult. I found seventh- and eighth-grade pupils unable to spell ‘ApriF or ‘cotton.’
”
(Of. cit.y pp. i6o-l6l.)
The theory behind it may be exemplified by the following quotation from Willis
D. Weatherford;
“Perhaps the weakest point in the Negro school is its maladjusted course of study.
Most of the Negro children are located in the rural districts. These children, like the
white rural children, are being taught from books made almost entirely by city teachers
and adapted to city children. They talk about problems and situations arising in urban
communities. The city is glorified and the country neglected. This has a tendency to
make the rural child dissatisfied with the rural surrounding, and desirous of getting
away to the city . . . but if nine-tenths of the material in their readers and histories
relates to things that do not concern their daily life, how can we expect their school
work to give them any appreciation of their surroundings? , . . There is a great need
that we have two sets of text books, one for the rural children and one for the urban . .
the body of the text for the rural child will deal with the materials at hand. It will
teach him the beauty of nature, and it will help him observe the birds and bees, the
Bowers and plants and trees; it will help him see new beauty in the growing crops and
the fallow fields. Who would dare say there was not as much real culture in studying
the life about him as in studying the life offered by the city 200? . . . What the rural
child needs—^and especially is this true of the Negro child—is a new ability to interpret
the life that surrounds him.” (Weatherford and Johnson, of. cU.y pp. 360-361.)
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