[The following is in regards to Newton Knight, a Confederate deserter in the American Civil War who returned to Jones County in Mississippi and fought a guerrilla war against the Confederacy. Later in the war, he primarily spent his remaining days trying to protect his family, almost half of which were born of the love of his life, a former slave named Rachel.]
At first, Newton’s neighbors had sought his advice and cooperation in building a new school. Every two or three miles in Jones and Jasper counties there was a family with children, including those of some of the men he had ridden with in the war. He and his old friends decided to split the cost and the work of raising the schoolhouse. “He was a kind-hearted man, and he was a man of good judgement, and was looked upon as being the leader of his community in matters of schools and other local affairs,” Tom Knight [his eldest white son] remembered. Newton hewed beams and split logs for benches and contributed to the hiring of a teacher at a salary of ten dollars a month, the cost of which would be shared equally, along with his board.
On the first day of the term, Newton sent his children to school – and Rachel’s children went with them. Parents who accompanied their young to the schoolhouse door were startled to see Rachel’s son Jeff and daughters Georgeanne and Fannie file into the building. When some of the white parents angrily asked Rachel’s children what they thought they were doing, they replied that their mother had sent them.
The teacher flatly announced that he refused to instruct them. Rachel’s children were ordered out of the building. “Go home and tell your mother the school doesn’t accept Negroes,” they were told.
Newton was apparently outraged by the insult: he had put his sweat and labor into building the school for the common benefit of the neighbors’ children, yet they refused the same benefits to his and Rachel’s children. Rachel had protected the lives of some of those white men during the war. The edict against race mixing in the classroom seemed the height of moral hypocrisy: plenty of Piney Woods yeomen had sired children with Negro blood – racial intermingling was surely all right with them when it came to sex. The difference was that they refused to take responsibility for their progeny, while Newton took care of his.
By one account, a day later the school, which still smelled of fresh-cut pine, went up in a bonfire. The embers were still glowing as word spread that Newton Knight had set the fire “because he wished the Negroes to have equal opportunity,” according to one of his descendants.
Newton stopped talking to his neighbors over the school. It was the last straw for him – he had come to feel estranged from most local whites and more comfortable among blacks, with whom he shared an understanding of Unionism and democratic ideals. Martha Wheeler, the former Knight slave, said, “He had a complete break with the whites because he undertook to send several of his Negro children to a white school he had been instrumental in building.”
Source:
Jenkins, Sally, and John Stauffer. “Reconstruction and Redemption.” The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy. Anchor Books, 2010. 259-60. Print.
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