Influential abolitionists were also attacking this policy of the colonizationists.  William Jay, however, delivered against them such diatribes and so wisely exposed their follies that the advocates of colonization learned to consider him as the arch enemy of their cause.[1] Jay advocated the education of the Negroes for living where they were.  He could not see how a Christian could prohibit or condition the education of any individual.  To do such a thing was tantamount to preventing him from having a direct revelation of God.  How these “educators” could argue that on account of the hopelessness of the endeavors to civilize the blacks they should be removed to a foreign country, and at the same time undertake to provide for them there the same facilities for higher education that white men enjoyed, seemed to Jay to be facetiously inconsistent.[2] If the Africans could be elevated in their native land and not in America, it was due to the Caucasians’ sinful condition, for which the colored people should not be required to suffer the penalty of expatriation.[3] The desirable thing to do was to influence churches and schools to admit students of color on terms of equality with all other races.

[Footnote 1:  Reese, Letters to Honorable William Jay.]

[Footnote 2:  Jay, Inquiry, p. 26; and Letters, p. 21.]

[Footnote 3:  Ibid., p. 22.]

Encountering this opposition, the institutions projected by the colonization society existed in name only.  Exactly how and why the organization failed to make good with its educational policy is well brought out by the wailing cry of one of its promoters.  He asserted that “every endeavor to divert the attention of the community or even a portion of the means which the present so imperatively calls for, from the colonization society to measures calculated to bind the colored population to this country and seeking to raise them to a level with the whites, whether by founding colleges or in any other way, tends directly in the proportion that it succeeds, to counteract and thwart the whole plan of colonization."[1] The colonizationists, therefore, desisted from their attempt to provide higher education for any considerable number of the belated race.  Seeing that they could not count on the support of the free persons of color, they feared that those thus educated would be induced by the abolitionists to remain in the United States.  This would put the colonizationists in the position of increasing the intelligent element of the colored population, which was then regarded as a menace to slavery.  Consequently these timorous “educators” did practically nothing during the reactionary period to carry out their plan of establishing colleges.

[Footnote 1:  Hodgkin, Inquiry into the Merits of the Am.  Col.  Soc., p. 31.]