The American Missionary — Volume 43, No. 04, April, 1889 by Various
page 32 of 109 (29%)
page 32 of 109 (29%)
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been wide open during these ten years, there are most marked and
gratifying signs of progress apparent in every way. Far and near the leaven has spread, the older denominations are improving, the principles of industrial and Christian education are accomplishing untold good. 2.--There is also manifest in these ten years a marked improvement in the feeling between the races. When a man has lived for ten years in the South, he will begin to see how deeply rooted and immovably imbedded in the Southern mind is the sentiment of inborn contempt for the Negro. This was greatly intensified and brought to the surface by the passions and prejudices of the war, with the volcanic upheavals and chaotic events of the "carpet-bag period" which followed. Considering all these things, there has been in my opinion a remarkable loosening of the grasp of prejudice, a gradual melting of the caste principle, especially in the minds of the better class among the whites. I say this deliberately, with personal knowledge of the agitation of the infamous "Glenn Bill" in Georgia, and notwithstanding the prejudice in Alabama which broke up the colored normal school formerly existing in Marion, and afterward successfully opposed its re-establishment in Montgomery, or rather refused the previous State aid. Having been for many years on the Board of Trustees of Atlanta University, and being personally acquainted with a number of the members of the Georgia Legislature, yet I am prepared to state this astonishing paradox--that even the legislators who voted for the Glenn Bill have a much higher regard for the colored race and for the A.M.A. schools than they formerly had. I cannot take time to explain this singular phenomenon, but it is true. One of the prominent members of the Georgia Legislature said to me on the streets of Macon, when he heard the news of President Ware's sudden death at Atlanta University: "Mr. Ware was a hero of the nineteenth century, and deserves a monument to his memory from the State of Georgia." So, notwithstanding Col. Glenn |
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