M.Curry, a lifelong advocate of Negro education: "It is not just to condemn the Negro for the education which he received in the early years after the war.

That was the period of reconstruction, the saturnalia of misgovernment, the greatest possible hindrance to the progress of the freedmen....

The education was unsettling, demoralizing, [and it] pandered to a wild frenzy for schooling as a quick method of reversing social and political conditions.

Nothing could have been better devised for deluding the poor Negro and making him the tool, the slave of corrupt taskmasters.

Education is a natural consequence of citizenship and enfranchisement...