Sandwich
This beautiful and quiet town, two miles from Windsor, has a population of about fifteen hundred, including twenty-one colored families, which number, perhaps, one hundred persons.
The colored population have the right to send their children when qualified, into the grammar school. None have hitherto availed themselves of this right. Here, as in many other parts of the province, the colored people by accepting of that provision of law, which allows them separate schools, fail of securing the best education for their children. The colored teachers who present themselves are examined with a great deal of “lenity,”—and some who cannot even spell, are placed in charge of the young.
The prejudice against the African race is here very strongly marked. It had not been customary to levy school taxes on the colored people. Some three or four years since, a trustee assessed a school tax on some of the wealthier citizens of that class. They sent their children at once into the public school. As these sat down, the white children near them deserted the benches: and in a day or two, the white children were wholly withdrawn, leaving the school-house to the teacher and his colored pupils. The matter was at last—”compromised:” a notice—”Select School”—was put up on the school-house: the white children were selected in, and the black were selected out.
Still, the prejudice here is not deeply seated: it is only skin-deep. Some slight affairs on the border prove that if a slaveholder were to set his foot in the township with any sinister intention, the true sentiments and feelings of the people would manifest themselves in the most decided and unmistakable manner. The people of Sandwich, as one of them jocosely remarked to me, are “awful independent:” and such is their strong old-fashioned English hatred of oppression, that the population would rally, almost to a man, to defend the rights of the humblest negro in their midst,—even of “crazy Jack,” the butt of the village boys.
It is to be observed, moreover, that the law allows separate schools not only to colored people, but to Catholic and Protestant sects, when these are in a minority.
The colored people have also their separate churches here. The Methodists contemplate erecting a building for public worship, and a member of that society remarked to me that he for one, would like to have aid for that purpose, as he did not see how it could be done without; but that the sentiment of his brethren generally was against begging. I asked him why they did not attend the churches of the whites of the same denomination. His reply indicated that they thought they would not be welcomed there with a single exception: “One church,” said he, “has thrown open its doors to us; and that is the English Church—Mr. Dewey’s—they have invited us all in, and they say if it is not big enough, they will make it bigger.” Whether I advised him to comply with an invitation so truly Christian in character, the reader, if he is a Yankee, and cares to take the trouble, can readily guess.
There is a school now open here registering thirty colored children, and having an average attendance of twenty-four. It is under the charge of an able and accomplished lady teacher—Miss Gifford—who informed me that the school was established by the Refugees’ Home Society.
