p. 14 | Industrial Education in the South

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 29, 1909

Industrial Education in the South

By M. Bessie DeGraw

INDUSTRIAL education has had a lingering hold in the South since the days of the Wesleys, but the history of the movement we are now in dates back to the time of the war. Emancipation made necessary manual training for the negro. It also revealed the necessity of manual training for white youth. But some are only just beginning to see this. The Testimonies say that manual training will make masters of labor instead of slaves.

Prior to 1862, there were not more than six industrial schools in the United States, and they were inaccessible to the common people. But God put the ideas of true education into the hearts of men who were willing to devote their lives to the needs of the people, independent of public opinion.

I have said that emancipation of the negro called forth industrial schools for that race. Even before the race was freed, in 1853 Frederick Douglass wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe as follows:—

“The fact is that the colored man must learn trades; . . . or they must decay under the pressing wants to which their condition is rapidly bringing them.”

In 1868, when nearly four million colored people had been suddenly thrown upon their own resources, Gen. Samuel C. Armstrong, a noble hearted, philanthropic man opened an industrial school for negroes at Hampton, Va. That school still lives, and it is still true to the spirit of its founder.

Hampton Institute offers training in a variety of trades, and graduates from that school have done much to mold educational interests in the South.

Dr. Booker T. Washington, father of Tuskegee Institute, the most widely known exponent of industrial education for the negro, received his training in Hampton. Tuskegee, and the numerous schools started by its students, are increasing the sentiment in favor of industrial education.

If such a school can make independent workers of the children of slaves; if it can take children from the slavery of the rice-field, the cane-brakes, and the turpentine camp, and make them masters of labor, what will a similar training do for the boys and girls of the highland districts?

Workers in the mountain districts say that these people need a training that will elevate the home, and that will raise men and women above the conditions in which they now live, without removing them from locations whose natural advantages they are now incapable of utilizing. The farm school is their means of uplift. So teaches Miss Berry in her splendid effort for highland boys at Rome, Ga., and so say others.

But what is good for the highland boy or girl is proving equally advantageous to the factory boy and girl. The Secondary Industrial School of Columbus, Ga., is demonstrating this fact in that great cotton manufacturing center. I wish every REVIEW reader might have access to a description of this school, written by Prof. C. B. Gibson for the Industrial Education number of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

From a commercial standpoint, industrial education is advocated by the foremost periodicals of the day. As a means of reaching homes with the gospel, it is a most potent factor, and it is our privilege to take advantage of the popular wave in its favor.

One most encouraging feature to us is the broad invitation given by the spirit of prophecy to our people to have a part in this work. The well educated are needed, but the invitation is not alone to them. It includes fathers and mothers who may not have thought themselves capable of such a work—indeed, whole families. God bids them come also, for there is a work here for the home, and the home industrial school.

M. BESSIE DEGRAW.