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About Portland observer. (Portland, Or.) 1970-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 20, 1985)
Two centuries of Black education The early years of education deprivation Fighting illiteracy in the television generation Although the first public school o f record was established in 1647 in Massa chusetts, few attended, fo r most children were needed at home to help work the farm or small business. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Black family The hunger for literacy, while severely limited and restricted for slaves, was satisfied for some through clandestine means; others through the aegis o f church groups. In 1788, New Jersey was the first state to pass a law requiring compul sory education for slaves. Nevertheless, when the C ivil War ended, although four Black colleges were already in existence, over 4,000,000 Blacks were illiterate. A separate system o f education for them was begun by the Freedman’s Bureau, and Blacks went about the task o f closing the educational gap that years o f deprivation had opened. Limited funds from state governments were supplemented by private sources such as the Kosenwald. Peabody and Slater Funds. In addition, some schools that started as small classes were later endowed by churches and enlarged throughout the South as well as the North. Thus many o f the historically Black colleges were begun by White missionaries. As important as these schools were, and still are. there were those Blacks who felt that the responsibility for educating the masses o f their people lay within their own ranks, and they set about to do just that. Scrimping, begging, bartering, cajoling, and exhorting, they turned pennies into pencils. Even when the rudimentory tools were unavailable, they returned to the oral tradition and taught their eager students by recitation. So determined was the coalition o f Blacks and whites to educate the masses, that w ithin the first ten post-Bellum years, twenty-three colleges were added to Central State (Wilberforce) Ohio, Cheney State, Lincoln Universities in Pennsyl vania and the District o f Columbia College in Washington, D.C. Cheney State College, founded in 1837, has the distinction o f being the oldest Black college in existence. It was immediately evident that the colleges had to act as an umbrella They offered courses to satisfy any need, be it vocational, classical, trade, academic, or remedial. They became a beacon o f hope and it mattered not that the buildings were not ivy covered. In fact, most began quite humbly. For example, Tougaloo College in Mississippi used the site o f a former plantation; Atlanta University began in an abandoned railroad box car; Talladega College in Alabama used a former prison and Spelman College in Atlanta used the basement o f a church. Thus began the tradition o f building a foundation o f the Black professional world. From twenty-eight college educated Blacks in the 1850’ s, the number swelled one hundred times that in less than four decades. These numbers would continue to increase dramatically after the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision in 1896 made “ separate but equal” education the law o f the land. The Twentieth Century was a witness to the explosions in Black education and caused the historically Black colleges to constantly evaluate the roles that they played in the lives o f thousands o f Blacks. Consequently, there was a reshaping o f curricula and physical plants while the demand was made not to change too much by certain segments who felt tradition to be most important. Some stresses on weak academic institutions caused them to fail, but those that survived were proved to be sound as evidence by the achievements o f their graduates. __________________ r" ■» i „I., by Yvonne Wbalev Unemployment, high interest rates, an enormous budget deficit, crime, ter rorism; all capture today’s headlines. But a condition that threatens the very basis o f our economic well-being scarcely captures a paragraph in the daily newspaper: Illiteracy. O f the 158 member nations in the U N ., we rank 49th in the percentage o f our citizens who are illiterate, down from 3 1st during the 1950’ s. Studies in the late 1970's indicate that 23 m illion Americans cannot read or write at all, while another 23 m illio n are functional illiterates — unable to perform well in to day s marketplace or society. Even such relatively low-level jobs as cooking and delivery require that a person be able to read at about the seventh grade level. This means that for many, the skills needed to handle minimal demands o f daily living are absent. Education is a fam ily affair About 44 percent o f Black teenagers suffer from illiteracy, and the annual cost in social programs due to the problem, runs about $6 billion. In addition, this country spends about $6.6 billion to keep roughly 700,000 illiterates in ja il (the m ajority o f whom are Black). Juvenile court records indicate that 85 per cent suffer the inadequacy and the majority here, too, are minorities. The armed forces spend about $70 m illion annually to teach basic education to recruits, and two-thirds o f our colleges provide remedial, non-credit courses that must be taken before many students can matriculate. What does all o f this mean for our future? The requirement to be able to read is paramount in today's technological society. A t w ork, reading as a reference becomes increasingly important with the introduction o f new equipment. The struggle that good readers have to become "co m p u te r literate” assumes an impossible task fo r Blacks who are unable to fill out an application form , pass a w ritten driver's test o f read a simple menu. The result can also be expensive, for in addition to the previously mentioned cost o f social programs, industrial damage done by employees who misread instructions or can’ t read them at all is almost incalculable. Anyone can guess at the reasons for the high rate o f illiteracy in this country. Paramount in the minds o f many educators is television. Very early on it be comes a babysitter. W ith so many parents working at jobs that do not pay enough to warrant adequate childcare, children are often left alone with nothing but the T V to keep them indoors until a parent (or older sibling) comes home. Children sit passively before the box for hours on end, absorbing negative as well as positive images. Because viewing can be done in isolation, socializing skills, so sorely needed in the workplace, go unlearned. " G o watch T V " is the command often given to children, and they do so on an average o f six hours daily. This pastime does absolutely nothing to increase the viewer’s ability to read, write, calculate or speak with some acuity. W ithout the ability to com- municat effectively, chances fo r the child to become a good student are slim indeed And the gap w ill widen. It has been projected that by the 1990’s, less than a decade away, anyone who cannot communicate on at least the twelfth- grade level, w ill be lost. Inadequate education is reflected in the welfare rolls. While people require public assistance for a variety o f reasons, the proportion o f persons on welfare 1 Please rum In Page 12) .i Carter Goodwin Woodson (1875-1950) Bom in Canton, Virginia, educated at Berea College, Kentucky, he earned his B .A . in 1907 and his M .A ., from the University of Chicago, in 1908. After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1912, he became a college professor and Dean o f the College o f Liberal A rts at Howard University, in 1921. In 1910 he organized the Association fo r the Study o f Negro Life and History. He initiated the Annual February observance of Negro History Week in 1926, and wrote and published 16 out standing books on Black History. He received the Spingam Medal in 1926. FredMeysr ONE STOP SHOPPING JCENTERS Portland Observer, February 20, 1906, Section II, Page 3
