]
CHAPTER XII
VOCATIONAL TRAINING
Having before them striking examples of highly educated colored men
who could find no employment in the United States, the free Negroes
began to realize that their preparation was not going hand in hand
with their opportunities. Industrial education was then emphasized as
the proper method of equipping the race for usefulness. The advocacy
of such training, however, was in no sense new. The early anti-slavery
men regarded it as the prerequisite to emancipation, and the
abolitionists urged it as the only safe means of elevating the
freedmen. But when the blacks, converted to this doctrine, began to
enter the higher pursuits of labor during the forties and fifties,
there started a struggle which has been prolonged even into our day.
Most northern white men had ceased to oppose the enlightenment of the
free people of color but still objected to granting them economic
equality. The same investigators that discovered increased facilities
of conventional education for Negroes in 1834 reported also that there
existed among the white mechanics a formidable prejudice against
colored artisans.[1]
[Footnote 1: _Minutes of the Fourth Annual Convention for the
Improvement of the Free People of Color_, p.
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