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Rh the one ray of positive light in all that darkness. Elsewhere and farther South there were only glimmers to encourage the mere "handful of men and women" who were laboring for the advancement of the negro. Governor "Joe" Brown, of Georgia, furnished one of these. As a result of the examination of the pupils of Atlanta University, he reported that "many of the pupils exhibited a degree of mental culture which, considering the length of time their minds have been in training, would do credit to members of any race." This was valuable and timely testimony from a high and reliable quarter. In the same year Dr. J. L. M. Curry, now of the Peabody Fund, in a speech in Brooklyn, admitting the defects in the public-school system at the South, declared that the people were awakening to the necessity of education, and "the colored people as citizens and wards of the nation need to be qualified for their exalted responsibilities. Especially do they need trained and educated teachers of their own race. If practicable, a degraded race should be elevated and delivered by their own class, as the patronage of the superior has a tendency to degrade character." This was as the voice of the awakened South, rising out of the ashes of despair and once more asserting her place in the Union and her responsibilities in helping to advance the work of American civilization. It found an echo here and there. A planter, witnessing the school examination at Athens, Alabama, in that year, said he had "no prejudices against the education of the colored race," and hoped "the children would improve their time." These were the breaks in the dense mass of opposition to the education of the negro. Few as they were, these echoes were encouraging to the noble and ever to-be-revered band of men and women engaged in the work, the servants of Northern institutions or churches whose voluntary contributions to sustain the work had by the beginning of 1871 reached, with the expenditures of the Freedman's Bureau, the grand total of $7,317,311. Of this sum, expended in from six to eight years, the American Missionary Association paid out $1,603,756; the Freedman's Bureau, $3,711,235; and in other things than cash, $1,551,270, making a total of $5,262,511; the Presbyterian Church (North), $220,704; the Freedman's Aid Society, $134,340; and the Baptists of the District of Columbia, $36,000. A noble return, surely, for the scorn, contumely, hate, and malevolent opposition with which the teachers of negro schools were mot by communities stung to the quick by the outrages put upon them by disfranchisement and political subordination to an ignorant race, the ready tools of designing knaves.

In 1871 but little improvement had been made. The general public was still indifferent, and there was much opposition to colored schools. A convention of Southern Baptists at Marion, Alabama, denounced the common-school system as fostering infidelity, and declared that the "only hope was in Christian education in our own schools." In Louisiana persons were deterred from accepting the position of school