Negro Zeal to Learn

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 28, 1865

Negro Zeal to Learn.

The Charlottesville, Va., Chronicle, thus graphically depicts the eagerness with which the negroes of that place embrace the opportunity for learning to read:

“Charlottesville is fairly entitled to be called the literary center of the South. There is, first, the University of Virginia, with its learned professors on all sorts of subjects. Then we have two large female seminaries, where young ladies learn thirty or forty things ending in —ology. Then we have some half dozen first class academies for boys. Then several select schools. Then a number of schools for the English branches. And then the whole colored population of all sexes and ages is repeating from morning to night a-b—ab, e-b—eb, i-b—ib; c-a-t—cat; d-o-g—dog; c-u-p—cup; etc.,—through all the varieties of the first lessons of orthography. There are some four or five colored schools, and little negro chaps darken every door, with primers in their hands. If we pass a blacksmith's shop, we hear a-b—ab; if we peep into a shoe-maker's shop it is a-b—ab; if we pass by a negro cabin in the suburbs of the town, we hear the sound, a-b—ab; if the cook goes out to suckle her infant, it is a-b—ab; the dining-room servant washes up his dishes and plates, crying, a-b—ab; the hostler curries his horse, repeating a-b—ab; Jerry blacks your boots, saying, with rapid strokes, a-b—ab, a-b—ab; the whole air is resonant with a-b—ab. The little yellow boy who sleeps in our chamber awoke us the other night, muttering in his dreams a-b—ab. If you send a little negro boy on an errand, he is spelling everything he meets in one syllable. The little white boys look at them wonderingly, and try to 'cork' them. In one month or so we expect to issue an evening edition of the Chronicle in monosyllables, to increase our circulation—perhaps a pictorial, with tubs and spades, and ants and cows, and owls and bats, like the primers.”