04/01/2013
From Pam Ferguson:
1864-1925
Southland College was one of the oldest private institutions in the South established for the education of blacks. Located at Helena (Phillips County), Arkansas, Southland was originally founded as an asylum for lost and abandoned children by the Friends' Freedmen Committee of the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers) and their local agent, Elkanah Beard1, at the request of the Union commandant at Helena, General Napolean B. Buford. With the appointment by the Friends' Freedmen Committee and the arrival of Calvin and Alida Clark of Wayne County, Indiana, Southland orphanage and school was established April 19, 1864.
Supported by the Friends' Freedmen Committee and the Freedmen's Bureau, the school remained at Helena almost two years until Colonel Charles Bentzoni, Buford's successor, was ordered to return the buildings which housed the orphanage to the original owners. Rather than evict the school, Bentzoni and his command, the 56th United States Colored Infantry Regiment, volunteered to save the orphanage by donating money with which to buy thirty acres, located nine miles northwest of Helena, and the labor to erect buildings. The new site and temporary buildings, deeded to the Indiana Yearly Meeting, were dedicated in March 1866. To the original thirty acres, the Indiana Yearly Meeting added fifty more during the same year; and by 1925, the Southland campus comprised 167 acres.
With the demise of the Freedmen's Bureau in 1869, the sole maintenance of the school devolved on the Missionary Board of the Indiana Yearly Meeting which had succeeded the Friend's Freedmen Committee. Calvin and Alida Clark remained at Southland as the superintendent and matron. During the Clarks' tenure, a normal course was added to the curriculum in 1869 and the primary goal of the school was to train black teachers for the uplift of the race. By 1874 sixty teachers had been trained. As a consequence, the Missionary Board of the Indiana Yearly Meeting renamed the school Southland College and diplomas were granted to the first graduating class of 1876. In 1880 the first black teachers, Southland graduates, were added to the faculty thereby constituting one of the few integrated faculties in the South. By the end of the Clarks' tenure in 1886, five permanent buildings had been constructed and enrollment approached 300 students.
Although Southland provided much needed educational opportunities and Christian ethics, the financial condition of the school was always tenuous. School revenues were entirely dependent on inadequate tuition payments of one dollar per month for day students and three dollars per week for boarding students; appropriations from the Indiana Yearly Meeting; and donations. George Sturge 2, an English Friend, contributed $25,000 in 1881 which eventually provided an endowment of $40,000. The Sturge Fund, renamed the Geoffrey Sawyer Fund in 1981, is still administered by Indiana Yearly Meeting for the education of black students. Despite the Sturge Fund, financial support remained meager.
The Clarks were succeeded by five superintendent and matron couples including Elkanah and Irena Beard for two brief periods, 1886-1888 and 1889-1891. The instability generated by the frequent changes in administration was exacerbated by other problems: the school building and chapel were destroyed by fire in 1900; the financial condition was worsened by the cancellation of insurance on the remaining buildings; and a drought ruined most of the farm crops. On Feb. 26, 1918 (photo at top) a fire destroyed the school barn and other out buildings with the loss of contents valued at a thousand dollars.
To increase Southland's appropriations, responsibility for the school was officially transferred, in August 1920, from the Indiana Yearly Meeting to the Board of Home Missions of the Five Years Meeting of Friends which could solicit support from all thirteen yearly meetings. In spite of this change the school continued to be financially insolvent, and the Board's primary goal was trying to keep the school open.
In April, 1924, the Rockefeller General Education Board appropriated $20,000 for Southland if matched by October 1, 1924. Unfortunately, the Rockefeller grant was applicable only if Southland retired its current indebtedness. To this end, Jenkins remained in Indiana during the 1924-1925 school year conducting fund- raising activities. Despite these efforts, the Board of Home Missions decided in March 1925 to close the school at the end of the spring term.
At the time Southland Institute closed, the original bequest by George Sturge was increased by additional bequests and the endowment amounted to around $41,000. The endowment was kept together in Indiana Yearly Meeting for the express purpose of the education of African American students according to the will of George Sturge, Southland Institute, and other donors who were interested in the education of “descendants of slaves.”
In 1981 following the death of Geoffrey Sawyer, the son of George and Jackie Sawyer, the Black Scholarship Committee was renamed the Geoffrey Sawyer Scholarship Committee. At that time the Sawyer family was active members and participants in Indiana Yearly Meeting and George was active on the Black Scholarship Committee. George and Jackie both grew up in Richmond. George attended Earlham College and became a lawyer and professor of African American Studies and Political Science at the college. Jackie worked for years at Earlham’s pre-nursery where she helped care for the children of students and professors.
George Sawyer dedicated much of his life aiding African American Students in Richmond as well as other areas to rise to the height of their potential through higher education. He believed it was a way to contribute to a needy world that was waiting for the gifts they held to be revealed.
In 2007, Cynthia Sawyer, daughter of George and Jackie, and herself a scholarship recipient, wrote these reflections of her brother, Geoff:
“I realize that most of you have never met or known my brother Geoff. If you had, it may have been difficult for you to have seen the fullness of who he was. For many, he was a profoundly mentally re****ed, physically disabled person who could not see and appeared to not really be there.
Thoughts of what to do with such individuals have drastically changed since his birth in 1969, but for many the severity of his disability would continue to be off-putting. Many, even now, would look and see very little “there” there. Some would have seen him as a little more than a “vegetable”. But to me he was one of the best friends I ever had. To me he was a reconciler during a time of incredible strife and turmoil. To me his life on this earth was heroic and rich.
About five years after Geoff was born, my family moved to Indianapolis so my father, George, could take a position as the Director of Legal Services. Many things were changing in those days and for those of you who knew my father, he aspired to be one of the largest agents of change. Out of that came the move of our family into a non-integrated cul-de-sac, living next door to some of my father’s work associates.
When some in the neighborhood discovered our race, a petition instantly began to fly around the neighborhood in an effort to keep us out. My father, in Marshall-esque determination moved us in any way, venturing out to fight the fires of injustice in the fields of the court, leaving my mother to navigate the fiery waters of integration on the home front with young children at her heels.
And then there was Geoff, the child she refused to institutionalize. The child who she cried for, battled for, and would ensure to achieve his potential. She taught us through her words and actions that Geoff was equally merited and gifted as us or any other person we would meet, but merely in different and sometimes hidden ways. And this wisdom was the greatest of all of the things my mother gave to me. No matter what others saw, she saw the child who God had called into the world with a hope, a future and purpose. There was no room for her to believe that this child was a mistake, was of a lesser grade, nor was outside the sight or plans of God. She frequently stood alone in her tears and pain, but when others would have failed and fallen, she stood.
Many had told my mother that the best thing for Geoff and our family was to institutionalize him. They surmised that the burdens were too great and the cost too severe. What they did not see was the gift. What they could not fathom was the purpose, what they could not imagine was the redemption.
Those of you who know my mother, Jackie, can imagine that she would gently listen to these words of darkness and doom as Job listened to his hopeless friends. Their dire predictions merely cause her to be more determined that Geoff would be all that he could be and she began to search for ways for her son to gain more than others said he could. In that quest, my parents learned of a patterning regimen that was being taught in Philadelphia that had been helpful for some children like Geoff. They learned that the pattering would take a rotation of people of more than 30 slots of people per week to do the patterning in shifts of 3 people at a time. His patterning would have to happen at least three times a day.
My parents came back to Indianapolis with hope in their hearts and the reality of unwelcoming neighbors in their eyes. Then came the need. Before we were a Negro family who had moved into a neighborhood that had never experienced our kind in their midst. But due to Geoff, we became a family (of any race or creed) in need. In need of people to volunteer their time to help in the patterning, people were informed and began to freely donate their time by coming into our home. And our dining room table, where the patterning was done every day, became a place of gathering for the community.
People who had probably never stepped into an African American home came before breakfast to help with Geoff. They came during their lunch hours with brown bag lunches in hand. They came before their dinner, sometimes staying just to chat. They exchanged the news of the day, their victories, and their defeats. There were teens and old folks, Quakers and Catholics, wealthy and struggling, educated and not quite so much. Some days there were people who came just to talk, even though it was not their day or time to help. On the dining room table of our small home, people began to live Martin’s dream. They were sharing lives, experiences and realities, all because of a little boy named Geoff and due to him, my family was able to live in grace and freedom in what had previously been a somewhat hostile cul-de-sac. My goodness, how would we been able to have lived there without him?
From those days, many people’s lives and futures were changed. Some of those volunteering teens became occupational and physical therapists. All saw that in so many of the most fundamental ways, we were much more like them than not. People became attached to each other, and my family became attached to their hearts. For some, it may have been the only real-life contact that they had had (or have ever had) with people different than themselves. Geoff made none of our lives ever the same.
And me, well Geoff’s life continues to profoundly steer the life choices I have made. Professionally, I teach in a school for the deaf. My students are mentally ill deaf children of color who were born in the midst of the crack epidemic. Their behaviors were so aggressive, violent and out of control, that eventually they had to be removed from the regular school population. Their deafness prevented them from having access to behavioral health services within the community and so their inappropriate ways remained untreated and continued to increase in severity, frequency and danger as they grew older.
And so they became my class and they have become my people as well. For what many people may not understand is that I have been blessed with eyes of love that sees ability where others only see can’ts. That sees pain and fear when most others see anger and wildness. That sees the child underneath the mess and says “let’s see if we can help you out of there.” Many of them have found healing, hope, and ability that they never knew that they had. One, whose only aspiration was to get into the life of the hood, now aspires to go to college and is so bright, he most likely will. Together, we have formed community and they have learned how to live and love in peace, safety and comfort, just like big folks who were patterning Geoff on our dining room table every day.
This powerful love I inherited from my mother who loved her son so much that it spilled into the hearts of her other children and neighbors and a brother who taught me the greatest love of all. There has been no person on this planet who I have loved with greater depth or passion than my brother Geoff. During his stay on the earth, he was able to do what so many of us cannot – love without condition, reciprocation, or measure. 25 years after his death, there are still days when I miss him with a tear in my eye, but a smile in my heart.
I deeply appreciate the fund that has been established in Geoff’s name. I hope that other who have unrealized potential will be able to receive hope and achieve their purpose in life through such funds. And regarding Geoff, I wish you could have met him. I wish that you could have seen into who he really was. I wish that you could have been a part of a community that should have never been able to be. I wish you could have been loved by him, because his kind of love could do nothing short of changing your life.
Thank you so much for your consistent hard work and generosity on his behalf. I and my family express our deepest, heart-felt appreciation.
Sincerely,
Cynthia Sawyer, sister of Donnie, Geoff and Michael Sawyer, daughter of George and Jackie Sawyer
Sept. 27, 2007
George Sawyer, an African American Lawyer died in 2002 and his wife Jackie still lives a block from Earlham College in Richmond.
Today the Geoffrey Scholarship endowment is around $195,000 and each year the interest from these funds are able to give …
1 Elkanah (1833-1905) and Irena Johnson Beard (1835-1920) came to Wi******er in April of 1873 and started the Friends meeting in the city of Wi******er. They remained in Wi******er through its beginning years, through the building of the first Quarterly Meetinghouse in 1874 and through the building of this present Meetinghouse in 1898. During those years they maintained a home in Wi******er and traveled at various times throughout the US preaching and spent several years working with Indians in Oklahoma. In 1898, when Elkanah was 65 and Irena 63 they made available, with a donation of $1000 the brick residence and lot adjoining the Meetinghouse on the south to be used as the parsonage.
2 George Sturge created the trust which was “in perperuity to be laid out in educating such young men and women of the colored race…..as show an aptitude for teaching, and are willing to employ themselves in the common or district schools of the Southern States….after completing their education at Southland College, Arkansas.”
George Sturge was born Nov. 8, 1797 in Horsleydown, Newington, Surrey, England to Thomas Sturge (1749-1825) and Lydia Sturge (1765-Jan.18, 1837). At age 50 in 1848, he married Jane Sturge (1825-1883 – daughter of Jacob Player Sturge) when she was 23 years old at the Frenchay Friends Meetinghouse in Bristol. In 1861 when George was 63 and Jane 35, they lived in Northfleet, Kent, England and George was listed as a landed proprietor. George and Jane had no children, but they had a sister-in-law living with them, Catherine Sturge (age 33) and her son, Charles (age 6). In 1881, George (83) and Jane (55) lived in Woodthorpe, Lewisham, Sydenham, England where he was listed as a retired manufacturer. They also had a niece, Sarah Turner (27) living with them at that time.
In an article about George’s nephew, Alfred Sturge (1816-1901 – a Baptist missionary and minister who served in Devon, India, and Kent, it was reported that George gave £500,000 British Pounds to charity when he died. The $25,000 George gave to Southland College in 1881 is the equivalent of around $585,000 today.
