A trip to California

Work began at the Brick School in 1895 under the auspices of the American Missionary Association. The “Estes Farm,” named after the owner, General Estes of the Civil War, came into the possession of Mrs. Julia E. Brewster Brick, of Brooklyn, New York, who found it a burden on her hands. Mrs. Brick had visited the community, and her heart had been made sad by the sights which greeted her on every side. The sad faces and depressed spirits in a large environment of Negro congestion appealed to her heart. She was responsive to this appeal. It was the voice of God which she did not mistake.

Her life and thoughts and heart had been attuned to this appeal, and so she sought how best she might help the situation. The advice of General Oliver O. Howard was sought. He introduced Secretary A. F. Beard and Mr. H. W. Hubbard, at the time Treasurer of the American Missionary Association. The result of this counsel was that a large farm of 1,129½ acres of land in North Carolina three miles from the town of Enfield was given to the American Missionary Association for Negro education. With the gift came also from the same source $5,000 for the first building.

There followed other gifts from Mrs. Brick and from the American Missionary Association, so that the farm was soon stocked with hogs, horses, mules, cows and farm implements. Houses of various sorts, including school buildings, dormitories, teachers’ cottages, tenant houses and barns have been put up, valued at several hundred thousand dollars. This beautiful munificence has been our saving grace during the last twenty-seven years of stress and strain in the financial world.

We began work with the modest number of five teachers. We now have about twenty teachers and a few less than 400 students. The students come from a dozen states and from nearly all the counties in North Carolina. The larger number of them comes from a radius of fifty miles.

The purpose of the institution is to teach the students to do the things the best way in the community where they may live. Being rurally situated, the first and greatest appeal must be made along the line of an agricultural education. The knowledge of how to extract from the soil the largest and best products which the community may need for its consumption is an asset in which any group of people may well take pride. Most town and city boys coming to us have an aversion to this form of education, and especially to the strenuousness necessary to an efficient application of the most vital principles of agriculture.

Horses have to be shod, and farmers have to have houses in which to live and under which to shelter their stock. So we have to teach the boys to work in iron and wood. Along with this goes some drawing and planning. Tools and wagons must be kept in repair. Boys going back to their communities ought to be later the real leaders in the community. In many instances they are the leaders.

While the boys are investing their time in the farm crafts and the shop crafts the girls are learning to do needlework and house cleaning, washing and sewing. They learn the home life by getting some of the conventionalities of it here in the classroom under teachers who get from Pratt and Columbia and other good schools the best they have to offer. These teachers are themselves largely the products of our American Missionary Association Schools. They have not been satisfied to “graduate and quit,” but they have continued to study. In addition to giving the boys work on the farm and in the shop, and the girls work in the kitchen, laundry, dining-room and sewing-room, and general house cleaning, all are offered a first-class high school course covering six years, preceded by six years of elementary education.

The writer of these notes is himself a product of Oberlin and Fisk University. He knows how to do a great many things, including typesetting, printing, farming, plumbing, some work in wood, poultry-raising and agriculture, stock husbandry. He lectures, preaches sometimes, and writes for newspapers. He counts himself a fair judge of artistic values wherever they are on exhibition. He knows how utterly impossible it is to try to do any one of the above things with any degree of efficiency or even ordinary skill without mental training. The mind is the master, and unless that has training and poise the hand fails. The academic course is to meet this condition. Many of the boys and girls stay to finish it, but the bulk never finish. Many of them do not stay for the full course—not that they do not have the money in many cases—but because education among the masses it not popular. They have had a propaganda for many years that a little learning is a dangerous thing. They have been advised that they belong to a subject group, and that they need only the rudimentary necessaries of life. A fine horse and buggy or a car and nice clothes make an appeal above any sacrifice for study. It is the appeal for the glitter and the glare. This false notion comes to the half grown youth because they got a bad start. They were neglected in the public schools—parents ignorant of the necessity of education on the one hand, and poorly prepared teachers on the other hand, and poorly furnished and constructed schoolhouses. The whole school environment has not been psychological. It has rather been repulsive.

Some who return to their homes are making good farmers, as evidenced by their better crops, better fertility of their soil, better kept work animals, better kept machinery, better homes, yards, and community life.

Many of those who finish the high school course attend other schools and later enter the ministry, dentistry, or become physicians, teachers, Y. M. C. A. or Y. W. C. A. workers, or instructors in agriculture either in our schools or as county farm demonstration agents. The best examples are Isaac Bunn, farmer, and owns his own farm of 250 acres bought and paid for in Halifax County; Benjamin Bullock, under the Smith-Lever Fund, in charge of agriculture in the colored state college in Texas; Rev. A. S. Croom, Baptist minister, Salisbury, N. C.; Dr. Joseph Harrison, physician, Kinston, N. C.; Dr. Willie Sessoms, dentist, Rocky Mount, N. C.; Dr. R. R. Robinson, physician, Los Angeles, Cal.; Miss Hattie Green, Miss Lucy Richmond McCoy, Miss Susie Adams, Young Women’s Christian Association work, New York; Miss Annie Rhodes, teacher in the city schools of Chicago; Miss Lula Bullock, teacher in city schools, Louisville, Ky.; George Bullock, manual training in city schools of Louisville, Ky.; Joseph Bullock, a captain in the army, and now a student of dentistry. More than a hundred have gone out as graduates, and all are a leavening in the community in which they live. The influence of the Brick School has counted in the community life of the masses more than any other agency in operation. We mean by “Community” the area of a circle of which the school is the center and whose radius is twenty-five miles. We have three counties virtually inside of this circle whose Negro population is more than 60,000. The circle cuts into six other counties whose combined population is more than 148,000 Negroes. The nearest institution under private auspices doing anything like high school work is exactly sixty-three miles away. We have a field all our own. The area in this circle is “our community.”

We have sought all these years to better the community life by reaching the farmers directly. To this end we have annually and semi-annually farmers’ meetings. They come and spend one or two days at our expense for entertainment, where they have contact with our teachers and with men and women sent by the State Department of Agriculture at Raleigh, who lecture on the best methods of farm and home life.

We must do more than talk. We must help them. We have here a local Federal Farm Loan Organization, and this organization in the last three years has put into Negro farms more than $130,000. This money is let by the United States government and on conditions that can be met without hardship to the borrower. Titles are investigated, deeds are properly made, and a new spirit is put into the farmers of the community. We are encouraging our colored men to buy small farms of twenty-five and fifty acres and build for themselves modest homes near their public schools as far as they can, and not too far from their local churches. We advise them to patronize these institutions freely and to build up their community life.

The vision has been a long ways off, like the rainbow, but they have begun to catch it. In these three counties they are paying taxes on more than 100,000 acres of land. Their homes are very much improved. Their churches are excellent for rural communities. They are contributing largely for the Rosenwald schools. In Halifax County they have twelve, and more are now in construction, the colored people paying one-third of the cost.

They have helped us generously to erect several teachers’ cottages here at Bricks, and $5,000 is now pledged for further improvements, which will be paid as soon as farming conditions and prices enable them to do so.

Righteous public sentiment is of slow growth, and one cannot expect to change traditions quickly whose roots have penetrated every strata of society. It takes sympathy, patience, years, work, and some money.

T. S. Inborden.

May 17, 18, 1922.

MITCHELL PRINTING CO., RALEIGH