--_African Repository_, vol. xxix., pp. 136, 137.
EDUCATION OF COLORED PEOPLE
(_Written by a highly respectable gentleman of the South in_ 1854)
Several years ago I saw in the _Repository_, copied from the
_Colonization Herald_, a proposal to establish a college for the
education of young colored men in this country. Since that time I have
neither seen nor heard anything more of it, and I should be glad to
hear whether the proposed plan was ever carried into execution.
Four years ago I conversed with one of the officers of the
Colonization Society on the subject of educating in this country
colored persons intending to emigrate to Liberia, and expressed my
firm conviction of the paramount importance of high moral and mental
training as a fit preparation for such emigrants.
To my great regret the gentleman stated that under existing
circumstances the project, all important as he confessed it to be, was
almost impracticable; so strong being the influence of the enemies of
colonization that they would dissuade any colored persons so educated
from leaving the United States.
I know that he was thoroughly acquainted with the subject in all its
bearings, and therefore felt that he must have good reasons for what
he said; still I hoped the case was not so bad as he thought, and,
at any rate, I looked forward with strong hope to the time when the
colored race would, as a body, open their eyes to the miserable,
unnatural position they occupy in America; when they would see who
were their true friends, those who offered them real and complete
freedom, social and political, in a land where there is no white race
to keep them in subjection, where they govern themselves by their own
laws; or those pretended friends who would keep the African where he
can never be aught but a serf and bondsman of a despised caste, and
who, by every act of their pretended philanthropy, make the colored
man's condition worse.
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