Page 1317 : NEEDLE-GUN — NEGRO EDUCATION
Individual articles:
needles, 3½ inches long, have been found in Egypt, and there are surgeon’s needles and thimbles which have been used in sewing, with ordinary needles recovered from Pompeii in the Naples Museum. Savage races use needles of various materials, as bone, ivory, wood and metal.
Steel needles were first made in Nuremberg in 1370, but the manufacture was not of much importance until about 1650. The early made needles were all square-eyed. Redditch, near Birmingham, is the seat of the needle manufacture in Great Britain, and great improvements have been made by the use of automatic machines and other new mechanical appliances. There are about 22 processes now used in the making of needles. First, fine steel wire is cut into double lengths; these are raised to a dull-red heat and placed in loose bundles inside iron rings, to be straightened by rolling each bundle backward and forward on a face plate with a slightly curved bar (Fig. 1), through which the rings project. Next the wires are pointed at both ends and then stamped in the middle, so as to produce the flat part of the eyes and the mark for the holes (Fig. 2); two oval holes are then punched by a vertical, belt-driven, punching-machine. After being eyed the double needles, joined at the heads by thin fins, are “spitted” through their eyes on two wires flattened at one end so as to retain them. The burr made by the punch and die is now filed away, and after being broken in two between the heads and filed smooth, a row of single needles is left on each spit, as shown in Fig. 3. Next they are tempered by heating and dipping in oil, then polished, cleaned and sorted. It is estimated that 50,000,000 needles are made weekly in the Redditch district.
Nee′dle-Gun. See Rifle.
Ne′gro, The Education of the. The first negroes were landed in the United States at Jamestown in 1619. Within less than a century from that date there were over 50,000 here and by 1819 there were more than 1,500,000. There now are about 10,000,000. The education of these people, according to the common meaning of the term, was begun only with their emancipation from slavery. The sudden emancipation of the negro was followed by a state bordering upon chaos, and it took a long time for things to adjust themselves to the new conditions. Both the whites and the negroes were all at sea.
The whites knew the negro only as a slave and themselves as their masters. The negro knew only to serve. Both were ill-prepared to adjust themselves to the new relation. It is not surprising that the negro went the full sweep of the pendulum. Emancipation from slavery meant to many emancipation from labor. Manual labor, the only kind for which the negro was prepared, was considered degrading; and it is not too much to say that influences were present that tended to confirm him in this idea. Following the emancipation, schools were established in great numbers. Missionary societies became active. Armies of teachers were rushed down from the north. The United States army exercised its usual zeal in furthering the work. The Rev. John Eaton, afterwards United States Commissioner of Education, was placed by General Grant in charge of the instruction for the emancipated race. Within five years after the close of the war more than $5,000,000 was expended by these organizations for educational purposes. On May 20, 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau was established by the national government, and Major-General O. O. Howard was made commissioner in charge. During the five years of its operation it made a total expenditure of more than $6,000,000, the larger portion for educational purposes. Over against all this enthusiasm on the part of the northern educator was the silent though persistent distrust on the part of the southern whites. They looked upon the negro as being fit only for manual labor and questioned the advisability of any attempt to train him along academic lines. The northern enthusiast was anxious to show them that the negro was as capable to learn as the whites. In the midst of it all it can not be considered strange that the tendency on the part of the negro was to discount the worth of industrial skill and to place an over-valuation on academic learning. Great harm as well as great good followed these methods. On the one hand, a great many negroes were led to consider themselves too good for manual labor as soon as they received a little learning, and on the other many were found who showed themselves capable of becoming good and efncient teachers and preachers, doctors and lawyers as well, and the wisdom and economy of providing schools with teachers of their own race was suggested. During the decade ending in 1878 more than 25 normal schools and collegiate institutes under control of different religious denominations were founded. These schools sent out many well-trained and efficient teachers. Unfortunately, however, these schools seemed to encourage rather than eradicate the negro’s well-developed notion that manual labor was degrading and that the way of escape was by study along academic lines. Latin and Greek occupied a prominent place in
Image: FIG. 2
Image: FIG. 3
