It is evident, therefore, that the leaders who had up to that time dictated the policy of the social betterment of the colored people had failed to find the key to the situation.  This task fell to the lot of Frederick Douglass, who, wiser in his generation than most of his contemporaries, advocated actual vocational training as the greatest leverage for the elevation of the colored people.  Douglass was given an opportunity to bring his ideas before the public on the occasion of a visit to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe.  She was then preparing to go to England in response to an invitation from her admirers, who were anxious to see this famous author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and to give her a testimonial.  Thinking that she would receive large sums of money in England she desired to get Mr. Douglass’s views as to how it could be most profitably spent for the advancement of the free people of color.  She was especially interested in those who had become free by their own exertions.  Mrs. Stowe informed her guest that several had suggested the establishment of an educational institution pure and simple, but that she had not been able to concur with them, thinking that it would be better to open an industrial school.  Douglass was opposed both to the establishment of such a college as was suggested, and to that of an ordinary industrial school where pupils should merely “earn the means of obtaining an education in books.”  He desired what we now call the vocational school, “a series of workshops where colored men could learn some of the handicrafts, learn to work in iron, wood, and leather, while incidentally acquiring a plain English education."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Douglass, The Life and Times of, p. 248.]

Under Douglass’s leadership the movement had a new goal.  The learning of trades was no longer to be subsidiary to conventional education.  Just the reverse was true.  Moreover, it was not to be entrusted to individuals operating on a small scale; it was to be a public effort of larger scope.  The aim was to make the education of Negroes so articulate with their needs as to improve their economic condition.  Seeing that despite the successful endeavors of many freedmen to acquire higher education that the race was still kept in penury, Douglass believed that by reconstructing their educational policy the friends of the race could teach the colored people to help themselves.  Pecuniary embarrassment, he thought, was the cause of all evil to the blacks, “for poverty kept them ignorant and their lack of enlightenment kept them degraded.”  The deliverance from these evils, he contended, could be effected not by such a fancied or artificial elevation as the mere diffusion of information by institutions beyond the immediate needs of the poor.  The awful plight of the Negroes, as he saw it, resulted directly from not having the opportunity to learn trades, and from “narrowing their limits to earn a livelihood.”  Douglass deplored the fact that even menial employments