Through the fiery furnace -- resilience to succeed

Renowned for education in its academies, seminaries and subscription schools from early days, a free, public "common" school was a new concept in Cape Girardeau County in 1865. Yale-educated James H. Kerr, hired to reopen the Academy in Jackson, arrived in September when the community's post-Civil War scars were fresh. The young, novice, Yankee teacher was astute to the complex culture of the region, sympathetic to the returning, defeated Confederate soldiers, and sometimes caught in the contentious political reorganization in the days ahead. Kerr was elected county superintendent of public schools in 1868 and worked to raise standards of competency for area public school teachers. His 1869 report to the state superintendent of education recounted efforts to attract educated teachers and mimicked those he sought to replace that "kin larn scholurs readin and writin." It was also Kerr's responsibility to see that schools for black children were established, funded and able teachers were hired, as required by state laws.

The 1868 Cape County census provides early evidence of black family settlements in several county locales. Though most families did not yet own property as waged farm laborers, they gravitated to common country-side neighborhoods. These settlements were an organic, collective approach to maximize farm labor productivity, provide community fellowship, establish independent churches, and, most importantly, provide education for their children. When a school house was erected, teachers were hired and supervised by the county. Kerr's 1870 county schools report showed 495 "colored" students were taught in eight schools for an average of four and one half months instruction. The report failed to report, however, the setbacks experienced by these fledgling black communities to provide education for their youth.

In April 1870, Kerr wrote an open letter to The Cape Girardeau Weekly Argus newspaper, furious that the fifth county "colored school," in the last three years, had been burned to the ground. Kerr lamented that four of these school houses "were built entirely by the united savings and earnings" of Negro freedmen neighbors not waiting or asking for the white community to "contribute one cent to forward their noble work." Kerr railed against neighborhood attitudes and their failure to protect the rights of the freedmen against "the low, cowardly vagabonds who committed the deeds," and further speculated the "vagabonds" were their own sons, and they "secretly rejoiced over the results." Kerr challenged readers to face facts: "No class in any community has a right to expect that it can long trample upon the privileges of another without endangering the security of its own." He urged it was in the community's best interest "to protect them and the fruit of their toil, while they endeavor to make themselves an honest, intelligent, self-dependent and self-sustaining people."

Despite terroristic harassment, settlement schools persisted, rebuilt and contributed to generations of scholarship. Community memory includes schools for black children at Old Appleton, Concord (Liberty #1 district), Lovejoy (in the Shawnee township), Little Bethel (Coker district) and Shady Grove (Abernathy district).