by Paul R. Spitzzeri
The last part to cover in the special section on Black Los Angeles published in that city’s Times on 12 February 1909, the centennial of the birth of President Abraham Lincoln is a page with a banner headline of “Educational Progress of Negro in College and School of Land is Remarkable.” The feature article was titled “AS TO THE NEGRO FROM THE SCHOOLS” also had a brief subtitle of “NOT ILLITERATE” as Professor Ernest L. Chew began his essay by telling the paper’s readers:
Any consideration of the negro which leaves out his connection with the schools is necessarily incomplete. It is largely determinative of the character of a man to note his attitude toward education, toward the training given by educational institutions.
The writer went on to opine that, if a person did not pursue vigorous study, then “we are not unjust in ascribing to him a low mentality and classifying him very low in comparison with the rest of the humanity.” If, however, education was undertaken with “marked pleasure, ” then “we are compelled in justice to rate him high in mentality and a good specimen of the better type of the human family.”
It is also notable that the essayist offered that,
What is true of the individual is no less true of the race. The attitude of a race to education and the effect of proper education is the best touchstone of the innate value to a nation of that race.
Chew’s title of “professor” came from a common application of it to school principals, rather than college faculty holding PhD degrees. Born in Mississippi during the Civil War and when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and raised during the roiling era of Reconstruction, he graduated from Mississippi State College and the Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta.
At the end of 1881, he was appointed a teacher in a “colored” school in Memphis and remained in that Tennessee metropolis for most of the decade, including serving as chair of a teachers institute. In 1888, he relocated to Atlanta and was principal of the Roach Street School for a few years before taking on that position at the Gray Street School, serving in that role for 14 years. Meanwhile, he was ordained as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
In 1905, Chew migrated to Los Angeles and entered civil service, becoming a deputy assessor and tax collector for the city, while also working with the Black Y.M.C.A., frequently lecturing (one of his favorite subjects was the Renaissance-era religious firebrand priest Girolamo Savonarola, who was burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church for heresy in 1498), and acquiring a fair amount of real estate.
Under a subheading of “Effect of Education” and concerning the period since the Civil War and Emancipation, Chew remarked,
For a long time before the education of the negro it was asserted that he was deficient in mentality, that he possessed the power of imitation in common with our simian cousins [monkeys and apes], but lacked true intellectual initiative and the power of consecutive, logical thought . . .
The scholar noted the examples of mathematician Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass, theologian Alexander Crummell and linguist William Sanders Scarborough as prime examples to question “if the hypothesis of the negro’s natural inborn ineradicable mental incapacity holds.” Chew offered that “the negro has been demonstrating his manhood and kinship with his white brother for half a century and I think the time has come to write ‘Q.E.D.’ [meaning that it was proven] to the proposition.”
Moreover, the valiant work of such organizations as the American Missionary Association, Baptist Missionary Society and the Freedmen’s Aid Society showed that “hundreds of thousands observe and understand and are convinced, and give it silent acquiescence . . . [and as many more] who never doubted the negro’s manhood, his mental strength and wonderful future so full of promise to his race and country.” Such entities lifted Southern Blacks especially from the “swamps of ignorance and superstition to the tableland of intelligence, common sense and rational faith” so that,
It is they who have given consecrated millions to help the victims of mental slavery to escape to the high ground and in a pure atmosphere to breathe the strong, invigorating air of mental freedom.
Chew blasted the “blatant brazenness” of those who continued to insist on the innate inferiority of African-Americans and sought to prevent white people “from conceding to the negro the rights and privileges which are his heritage, which he claims on the strong ground of unimpeachable manhood.” What, however, was clear was that “the negro is a man, with the powers, the ambitions, the hopes, the aspirations, the loves, the fears, the genius to conceive and the skill to execute all of the good and all of the bad traits of our humanity.”
Turning to the Angel City and environs, the educator commented that there were some 20,000 Black people and that “nearly all have come in obedience to the age-long tendency to drift westward from the land of their nativity and seek better conditions in a new locality,” which Chew, of course, did less than four years prior. Most came for “a better market for their labor” and some “to profit by the wonderful climate or to seek a new environment in which to rear their children.” While some had some money when they migrated, most brought “their strong, capable, willing hands and a determination to succeed as their only capital.”
Only a few, it was continued, were illiterate, though “nearly all have been partially illuminated by the diffused light in their home communities,” while many had grammar school educations and more attended ungraded country schools, equivalent, Chew remarked, to about a 5th-grade level. Other African-Americans had some experience with secondary schools, normal schools for teacher education or academies and institutes, while “a number have attended high schools, colleges and university.” He added that,
Therefore, the educational advancement of the negro of Los Angeles is not accurately gauged by the number of graduates among us, [but] rather by the amount of training which has been received and appropriated by the whole negro population of the county.
Chew also mentioned those adults in the working world who went to night schools, had private instruction or took correspondence courses “to struggle upward into light.” He then observed that “the professions, medicine, law and dentistry, have in them men who have not only sound academic foundations, but have added to this the technical knowledge of the subjects on which they have specialized.”
The subsection “The Negro Ministers” begins with Chew commenting that, “the colored ministers of town are a fine body of men who have worked hard to secure the training and information which would enable them to wisely lead their flock and assist in shaping sentiment among our people.”
The Rev. J.L. McCoy of the Second Baptist Church, a native of Virginia was said to have been “a representative of Harvard University, having completed the law and theological courses in that great institution.” The minister was praised for his community influence, leadership of the church (which he has been credited with pulling out from debt) and that “he can be depended upon to make a stand and fight valiantly for the right in church and state.”
The Rev. G.R. Bryant, who hailed from Texas and who composed an article for the special section, was a student at the University of Southern California and another college, doing so while serving as minister of the Wesley Chapel Methodist Church. Chew lionized Bryant as having “always stood for the higher life” and for being trusted to be “on the right side in all issues, public or private.”
Tabernacle Baptist Church’s founding pastor, the Rev. J.D. Gordon was born in Georgia and graduated from the Atlanta Baptist College and his success was such that the capacity of Tabernacle doubled during its short existence to date. Having introduced a Bible study course, Gordon was so well received that “his church is crowded by seekers after knowledge from every portion of the town, and from every church in the town.”
Like Chew, the Rev. W.D. Speights, of the Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church, earned a degree from the Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta, after completing his studies at that city’s Clark University. It was added that “his life is marked with a deep piety and his work is executed with a fervent enthusiasm which is contagious.” A migrant from South Carolina and the pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church, the Rev. Robert W. Holman was the pastor at Zion Presbyterian Church for fourteen years, while for two decades he was a Bible association and temperance committee. Holman, author of a book on sin in America, and “he is a good man, an earnest preacher and a successful pastor.”
The Rev. J.W. Pinkney, a Howard University graduate, was pastor of the Mason Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, and was given kudos for his efforts at the church while also deemed “worthy of a more extended field for the display of his activities.” A senior at U.S.C.’s College of Liberal Arts, the Rev. J.T. Hill was a relative newcomer to the Angel City, but “already the influence of his character and work is being felt.” The Rev. F. Jesse Peck, pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, was raised in Baltimore and another Howard alumnus, who was “a thorough Bible scholar, a preacher of power, and an earnest, sympathetic pastor.”
Colonel Allen Allensworth, one of the most prominent figures in Black America and a resident of Los Angeles for several years, has been the subject of a post here previously, and Chew observed that the long-time Army chaplain’s service “was characterized by earnestness, faithfulness and wonderful success.” The colonel’s signal project was the town of Allensworth, which was described as a place “of ideal homes, the inculcation of the principles of good government and the mastery of the theory and practice of scientific farming.”
It was hoped that the community would prove to be “an ideal negro settlement” where “much, perhaps most, of the good qualities of the negro can find expression.” Its founder was deemed to be “a deep thinker, a good platform or pulpit orator, a delightful conversationalist and a first-class business man” who also “possesses initiative and a vivid imagination,” with Chew concluding that Allensworth “has that breadth of sympathy which forces him, though a thorough race man,” meaning a strong advocate for the advancement of African-Americans, “to regard and love all mankind as brothers.”
The senior member of the Angel City’s pastorate was the Rev. C.H. Anderson and whose education, though not specified, allowed him to accumulate “much useful knowledge,” though it was added that “he is more prominently characterized by executive ability,” suggesting that he did not have the advanced formal education of other Black ministers in Los Angeles. Anderson was the founding pastor of the Second Baptist Church, but then left to start another church.
Lastly, among the roster of religious leaders in the city was the Rev. E.T. Hubbard, who “received his intellectual equipment” from Wilberforce University, one of the first three Historically Black Colleges and Universities established before the Civil War and founded in 1856. Hubbard also had some education in California and he was employing his learning “daily in newspaper work and the pastorate” with “a thriving mission” so that he was “doing much in his dual relation to elevate his people.”
While there is more to Chew’s essay, with a majority of it devoted to “EDUCATED NEGRO LAYMEN,” to which we’ll turn in the concluding next part of this post, let’s conclude this one by summarizing a sidebar piece “specially contributed to The Times” and dated 1 February by Booker T. Washington, the famed founder of the Tuskegee Institute and promoter of practical education for trades. Notably, Washington was increasingly being challenged by a younger generation of African-Americans, most prominently W.E.B. Du Bois, who emphasized the importance of academic achievement and more direct activism in promoting Black rights, under what has often been called the “New Negro” concept.
In his remarks, Washington told readers that his efforts to his people involved the recognition of “the advantages of their disadvantages,” while he asserted “I am glad that I was at one time a slave” because “it has enabled me to perform a kind of service that I would not otherwise have been able to perform.” He added that “what has been true in my own case has been equally true of my race as a whole” and then remarked that “the progress which the negro has made in this country” since Emancipation was because of opportunity as well as “the courage, which other successful races have had, to convert obstacles into opportunities.”
While it was a disadvantage for Black schools to be chronically underfunded and lacking in properly trained teachers, it was an advantage that those instructing in those institutions were largely of the race and were able to “perform for their race . . . a much higher form of service than they would otherwise have had an opportunity to perform.” To educate some 10 million African-Americans was vital for the South, where most then lived, and the country broadly and for Black teachers to provide this instruction was crucial.
Washington held that the same general condition was true for professionals “because of the separation of the races” and the inability or lack of interest in whites to provide services meant that “the negro physician and banker have been able and willing to render” these. This involved an opportunity for these figures to serve clientele, Black and white, that otherwise would not have been possible. With respect to health, it was remarked that conditions for the entirety of the South were such that “it is absolutely indispensable that the masses of the negro people should learn the ordinary measures of hygiene, and they should be encouraged to properly care for their own health.”
African-American bankers, too, were essential because not only was accumulating capital good for the development of the community, but this was “inspiring the negro with motives and habits which will make him industrious, keep him from falling into the ranks of the idle, vicious and criminal classes, and make him in every way a better citizen.” As with doctors, bankers could serve in ways whites could not and Washington averred that “the needs of the negro race are the opportunities of individual negroes” with opportunity to “work out his own salvation.” This was to be also for “a service for his race and his country which will bring him not merely profit, but honor and respect as well.”
Washington quoted extensive from a Durham, North Carolina newspaper, in which it was propounded that “even the southern people do not care so much what race of men turns the crude product [of their labor] into account, as it does for the fellow who can perform some service better than the other fellow.” The idea of “work is worship” was said to mean that
It shows the colored people striving and the white man willing. The African asking only for hope, aspiration and room for effort; the Caucasian bidding him to his work and assuring him that if he falls it must be by the weight of his own demerits and not by the tyranny of the great white race.
Washington ended by informing readers that he found this editorial “the best evidence I can give that the patient and persistent effort of individual negroes to improve their own condition and that of the members of their race in their own community are bound to win for them the recognition from their white neighbors which they deserve.”
It is worth observing that this was just before the Great Black Migration of millions of African-Americans from the South to other parts of the country took place because of conditions like Jim Crow laws, rampant lynching and other forms of discrimination and oppression drove them to see better opportunities elsewhere, including in Los Angeles. The growing divide between Washington and younger Black leaders like DuBois was palpable and manifest by the time this special section was published by the Times.