In seeking to show how these good results were obtained by the Negroes’ cooeperative power and ability to supply their own needs, we are not unmindful of the assistance which they received.  To say that the colored people of Baltimore, themselves, provided all these facilities of education would do injustice to the benevolent element of that city.  Among its white people were found so much toleration of opinion on slavery and so much sympathy with the efforts for its removal, that they not only permitted the establishment of Negro churches, but opened successful colored schools in which white men and women assisted personally in teaching.  Great praise is due philanthropists of the type of John Breckenridge and Daniel Raymond, who contributed their time and means to the cause and enlisted the efforts of others.  Still greater credit should be given to William Crane, who for forty years was known as an “ardent, liberal, and wise friend of the black man.”  At the cost of $20,000 he erected in the central part of the city an edifice exclusively for the benefit of the colored people.  In this building was an auditorium, several large schoolrooms, and a hall for entertainments and lectures.  The institution employed a pastor and two teachers[1] and it was often mentioned as a high school.

[Footnote 1:  A contributor to the Christian Chronicle found in this institution a pastor, a principal of the school, and an assistant, all of superior qualifications.  The classes which this reporter heard recite grammar and geography convinced him of the thoroughness of the work and the unusual readiness of the colored people to learn.  See The African Repository, vol. xxxii., p. 91.]

In northern cities like Philadelphia and New York, where benevolent organizations provided an adequate number of colored schools, the free blacks did not develop so much of the power to educate themselves.  The Negroes of these cities, however, cannot be considered exceptions to the rule.  Many of those of Philadelphia were of the most ambitious kind, men who had purchased their freedom or had developed sufficient intelligence to delude their would-be captors and conquer the institution of slavery.  Settled in this community, the thrifty class accumulated wealth which they often used, not only to defray the expenses of educating their own children, but to provide educational facilities for the poor children of color.

Gradually developing the power to help themselves, the free people of color organized a society which in 1804 opened a school with John Trumbull as teacher.[1] About the same time the African Episcopalians founded a colored school at their church.[2] A colored man gave three hundred pounds of the required funds to build the first colored schoolhouse in Philadelphia.[3] In 1830 one fourth of the twelve hundred colored children in the schools of that city paid for their instruction, whereas only two hundred and fifty were attending the