This the missionaries of '68 soon saw; and if effective
industrial and trade schools were impracticable before the
establishment of a common-school system, just as certainly
no adequate common schools could be founded until there
were teachers to teach them. Southern whites would not teach
them; Northern whites in sufficient numbers could not be
had. If the Negro was to learn, he must teach himself, and the
most effective help that could be given him was the establish-
ment of schools to train Negro teachers. This conclusion was
slowly but surely reached by every student of the situation
until simultaneously, in widely separated regions, without
consultation or systematic plan, there arose a series of institu-
tions designed to furnish teachers for the untaught. Above the
sneers of critics at the obvious defects of this procedure must
ever stand its one crushing rejoinder: in a single generation
they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they
wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of the black people of
the land, and they made Tuskegee possible.
Such higher training-schools tended naturally to deepen
broader development: at first they were common and gram-
mar schools, then some became high schools.
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