[Footnote 1:  Wickersham, Education in Pennsylvania, p. 248.]

[Footnote 2:  Life of Martin R. Delaney, p. 33.]

[Footnote 3:  Special Report of the U.S.  Com. of Ed., 1871, p. 214.]

[Footnote 4:  Hickok, The Negro in Ohio, p. 88.]

The concentration of the freedmen and fugitives at Cincinnati was followed by efforts to train them for higher service.  The Negroes themselves endeavored to provide their own educational facilities in opening in 1820 the first colored school in that city.  This school did not continue long, but another was established the same year.  Thereafter one Mr. Wing, who kept a private institution, admitted persons of color to his evening classes.  On account of a lack of means, however, the Negroes of Cincinnati did not receive any systematic instruction before 1834.  After that year the tide turned in favor of the free blacks of that section, bringing to their assistance a number of daring abolitionists, who helped them to educate themselves.  Friends of the race, consisting largely of the students of Lane Seminary, had then organized colored Sunday and evening schools, and provided for them scientific and literary lectures twice a week.  There was a permanent colored school in Cincinnati in 1834.  In 1835 the Negroes of that city contributed $150 of the $1000 expended for their education.  Four years later, however, they raised $889.03 for this purpose, and thanks to their economic progress, this sacrifice was less taxing than that of 1835.[1] In 1844 Rev. Hiram Gilmore opened there a high school which among other students attracted P.B.S.  Pinchback, later Governor of Louisiana.  Mary E. Miles, a graduate of the Normal School at Albany, New York, served as an assistant of Gilmore after having worked among her people in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Ibid., p. 83.]

[Footnote 1:  Delany, The Condition of the Colored People, etc., 132.]

The educational advantages given these people were in no sense despised.  Although the Negroes of the Northwest did not always keep pace with their neighbors in things industrial they did not permit the white people to outstrip them much in education.  The freedmen so earnestly seized their opportunity to acquire knowledge and accomplished so much in a short period that their educational progress served to disabuse the minds of indifferent whites of the idea that the blacks were not capable of high mental development.[1] The educational work of these centers, too, tended not only to produce men capable of ministering to the needs of their environment, but to serve as a training center for those who would later be leaders of their people.  Lewis Woodson owed it to friends in Pittsburgh that he became an influential teacher.  Jeremiah H. Brown, T. Morris Chester, James T. Bradford, M.R.  Delany, and Bishop Benjamin T. Tanner obtained much of their elementary education in the early colored