as they are old enough, where their morals will be an object of attention as well as their improvement in school learning.”  Then followed some advice which would now seem strange.  They said, “Encourage, also, those among you who are qualified as teachers of schools, and when you are able to pay, never send your children to free schools; for this may be considered as robbing the poor of their opportunities which are intended for them alone."[2]

[Footnote 1:  Proceedings of the American Convention, etc., 1819, p. 21.]

[Footnote 2:  Proceedings of the American Convention, etc., 1819, p. 22.]

The concentration of the colored population in cities and towns where they had better educational advantages tended to make colored city schools self-supporting.  There developed a class of self-educating Negroes who were able to provide for their own enlightenment.  This condition, however, did not obtain throughout the South.  Being a proslavery farming section of few large towns and cities, that part of the country did not see much development of the self-sufficient class.  What enlightenment most urban blacks of the South experienced resulted mainly from private teaching and religious instruction.  There were some notable exceptions, however.  A colored “Santo Dominican” named Julian Troumontaine taught openly in Savannah up to 1829 when such an act was prohibited by law.  He taught clandestinely thereafter, however, until 1844.[1] In New Orleans, where the Creoles and freedmen counted early in the nineteenth century as a substantial element in society, persons of color had secured to themselves better facilities of education.  The people of this city did not then regard it as a crime for Negroes to acquire an education, their white instructors felt that they were not condescending in teaching them, and children of Caucasian blood raised no objection to attending special and parochial schools accessible to both races.  The educational privileges which the colored people there enjoyed, however, were largely paid for by the progressive freedmen themselves.[2] Some of them educated their children in France.

[Footnote 1:  Wright, Negro Education in Georgia, p. 20.]

[Footnote 2:  Many of the mixed breeds of New Orleans were leading business men.]

Charleston, South Carolina, furnished a good example of a center of unusual activity and rapid strides of self-educating urban Negroes.  Driven to the point of doing for themselves, the free people of color of this city organized in 1810 the “Minor Society” to secure to their orphan children the benefits of education.[1] Bishop Payne, who studied later under Thomas Bonneau, attended the school founded by this organization.  Other colored schools were doing successful work.  Enjoying these unusual advantages the Negroes of Charleston were early in the nineteenth century ranked by some as economically and intellectually