The Role of Claflin College in Negro Life in South Carolina

It is notorious that the early Negro Colleges in America followed not only in the wake of a long period of the subjugation of Negroes in an atrocious slave system but it is as well known that the catastrophic break-up of this system removed the handles of life with 'which the slave had maneuvered his way through it. It is fair to say that systems which comprise the habits and folkways of the group serve to channelize the impulses and to set up images in the mind for the satisfaction of those impulses. It is generally this two-way process which forms the basis for the regulation of human behavior. A sudden, or cataclysmic disruption of the system tends therefore to disorganize the person. When the accustomed patterns for satisfying human needs are destroyed, group behavior becomes random, disorganized, confused, and chaotic. Moreover, under such circumstances the group becomes highly suggestible and malleable. Such a state of affairs calls for sane, prophetic leadership to chart the way out of such a morass of circumstances. This is one of the problems which faced the builders of the post-Civil War society. The Northern missionaries, the southern sympathizers, and

Geography · Political science · South carolina · Psychology · Public Administration · Race, History, and American Society

• The Status of the Free Negro in Charleston, South Carolina, and His Descendants in Modern Society

  E Horace Fitchett•The Journal of Negro History•1947

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