The Southern South Part 14

For the higher education of the dominant cla.s.s much more was done.

Beginning with William and Mary in 1692--the first colonial college except Harvard--many colleges were established. The first state university was North Carolina, founded in 1790; the first American university of the German type was the University of Virginia, which began operations in 1825; the first inst.i.tution to introduce coeducation was Blount College, which, about 1800, conferred the degree of A.B. upon a woman. But for various reasons there never were money enough, students enough, and trained educators enough to man the Southern colleges that were founded; and secondary schools to feed the colleges were lacking. The girls had a few boarding schools, some of which were called colleges by courtesy, but their education was superficial. Many students who could afford it found their way to Northern colleges, and that is why John C. Calhoun, the apostle of slavery, was a Yale graduate, and Barnwell Rhett, the protagonist of secession, was a graduate of Harvard.

After the Civil War came a dismal period, when some of the old universities were closed for want of means and of professors who could take the oath of allegiance. The training of the children of the best families at that period has been thus described by one who experienced it: "The schools that I attended--may G.o.d forgive the young women who one after another taught the children of the spa.r.s.ely settled neighborhood--were farces and frauds. There was no public school.... We lived in sort of a secluded training place for Southern gentlemen.... We never saw a newspaper.... The professor of mathematics--so a rumor ran--was a freethinker. He was said to have read Darwin and become an evolutionist. But the report was not generally believed; for, it was argued, even if he had read Darwin, a man of his great intellect would instantly see the fallacy of that doctrine and discard it."

One of the few benefits conferred by the Reconstruction governments was a system of general public schools nominally open to every child in city or country; but just as the education of Negroes and Poor Whites was beginning, the schools were separated for the two races, and the Negroes were cut off from Southern white teachers. To start the new system there was no tradition of public school training and management, little sense of public duty in laying sufficient taxes, and the South was very poor. Hence it was about 1885 before the South put into operation a general educational system, supported by public taxation. The most recent statistics available (for 1906) show over 6,000,000 common school pupils in the South, besides 380,000 pupils in private schools, 118,000 pupils in public high schools, and 34,000 more in private secondary schools; 38,000 students in public and private universities, colleges and schools of technology. Every Southern state has now worked out some system of both rural and urban public schools, and several of them have a sizable State school fund which is distributed among the districts. The ordinary type of rural school is practically the district school of the North over again.

City schools are graded in the usual fashion. Most states have a State Superintendent of Education, and the more progressive communities like Louisiana are introducing county superintendents with power to compel good schools. Surely with so many people and so much money, all must be happy in the South. It is an educational army, with common school infantry, secondary school cavalry, and in the inst.i.tutions of higher learning the heavy artillery and the big guns. Yet it is an army in which every division, brigade, and regiment is divided into two camps, in which spear clashes on shield, for hardly anything in the South so brings out into relief the race question as the problem of education, and especially of negro education.

The Reconstruction governments made no provision for public high schools, but the growth of towns and cities in the South and the need of preparatory schools for the colleges, and the public sense of the value of secondary education, have compelled the founding of a great number of such schools, both for girls and boys. Normal schools have also developed till there are 45 with over 10,000 students. The colleges are also flourishing; and of professional schools the South has more than 160, with above 12,000 students.

A rough measure of the need of education is the statistics of illiteracy, which in the reports of the United States Commissioner of Education is defined as the status of a person over ten years of age who is able neither to read nor to write. Such illiterates in Germany are about one per cent of the population; in England about six per cent; in the whole of the United States about ten per cent. The various states of the Union show great variations: in Nebraska in 1900 it was two per cent; and the lowest Southern state, Missouri, with six per cent, showed a greater proportion of illiterates than any of 27 Northern states; while the 12 highest communities on the list, from Arkansas with twenty per cent to Louisiana with thirty-eight per cent, are all Southern but two. Of 58,000,000 persons sufficiently old to be capable of both reading and writing in some language in the United States in 1900, 6,000,000 were illiterate, of whom about 4,000,000 lived in the South; of the 21 most illiterate states and territories, 15 are Southern, the worst being Alabama, South Carolina, and Louisiana, in all of which more than a third of the population was illiterate. This alarming state of things is not due wholly to the negro race; out of 5,700,000 blacks at least ten years of age, 2,700,000, or forty-eight per cent, were illiterate; out of 13,000,000 Whites, 1,400,000, or eleven per cent, were illiterates. The white illiterates, with all the advantages of their superior race, were half as numerous as the Negroes! Out of 1,900,000 white children of school age, 200,000, or ten and a half per cent, could not read or write; out of 1,000,000 colored children of the same age, 300,000 were illiterate, which is twenty-five per cent.

For both races this proportion of illiterates is steadily diminishing; and that is the effect of the schools and of nothing else. Never again will the South see a generation like the present, in which many adults have had no opportunity, or have neglected the opportunity of going to school when children. These figures accord with the experience of other states; for instance, New Hampshire in 1890 was as illiterate as Missouri was in 1900; and in both states illiteracy is steadily decreasing. As for the Southern Poor Whites, it is true, as Murphy says, that they have a potentiality of education. "I find no hopelessness in it, because it is the illiteracy, not of the degenerate, but simply of the unstarted. Our unlettered white people are native American in stock, virile in faculty and capacity, free in spirit, unbroken, uncorrupted, fitted to learn."

The gross figures of illiteracy are misleading, because the old people who cannot now be taught to read and write reduce the general average against the children who are learning the arts of intelligence. The percentage of colored illiterates in the whole of the United States in 1900 was forty-four per cent as against seventy per cent in 1880; in Louisiana the percentage runs up to sixty-one per cent; but the Negroes between ten years old and twenty-five show only about thirty per cent of illiteracy, and that proportion is steadily decreasing. In 1900 the illiterate children from ten to fourteen years of age were in Mississippi only twenty-two per cent. With reasonably good schools and proper laws for compulsory attendance illiteracy may be expected to sink to about the figures of other civilized nations.

This raises at once the question of the actual efficiency of the schools in the South, their comparison with other parts of the country, their probable effect upon the future of the region. The ability to write one's name and to read a few words is only the beginning of education; the real educational question in the South is, What are the schools doing beyond the rudiments of the three R's? Some light is thrown on that question by comparing the school statistics of the Lower South with those of a block of similar Western and Northwestern agricultural communities from Indiana to Utah: 20,700,000 Southerners have 7,000,000 children of school age (five years to eighteen), of whom 4,400,000 are enrolled and the average daily attendance is 2,700,000; 20,700,000 Northerners with 6,000,000 children (a million less than the equivalent South) enroll 4,500,000 and have a daily attendance of 3,200,000. The Southern group has 92,000 teachers; the Northern, 158,000. The value of Southern school property is $42,000,000; of Northern, $217,000,000, or over four times as much. The Southern school revenue is $26,000,000; the Northern, $92,000,000. The average expenditure per pupil attending in the South is under $10.00; in the North nearly $30.00. The South spent about 16 cents on each hundred dollars of valuation; the North spent about 20 cents.

When the whole South together, including such rich states as Maryland and Missouri, is compared with an equivalent population group in the North, the figures are more favorable to that section: 28,000,000 Southerners furnished an average daily attendance of 3,700,000 children; the same number in the North furnished 4,200,000. The South has 127,000 teachers; the North, 200,000. The total value of Southern school property is $84,000,000; of Northern, $294,000,000. A comparison of per-capita expenditure in the year 1900 showed an average school tax in the United States of $2.84 per head; but not a single state south of Washington raised above $2.10. Alabama raised only 50 cents, and even the rich state of Texas only about $1.50, as against $4.80 in North Dakota. Tennessee spent $1,800,000 a year in public education; Wisconsin, with an equivalent population, spent $5,500,000; South Carolina, with a population nine tenths that of California, spent one eighth as much. The state of Mississippi spent $6.17 per pupil annually; the state of Vermont spent $22.85.

Inasmuch as the Negroes contribute several million school children and not very much in taxes, it will be instructive to compare the 12,000,000 Whites of the Lower South with 12,000,000 Northwestern Whites, in those forms of education which are referable chiefly to the Whites. The Lower South, on this basis, furnished in 1906 68,600 pupils in public secondary schools against 172,600 in the equivalent North; the secondary school plants in the South cost $23,000,000; in the North $52,000,000. The college students in the South were 27,800; in the North, 27,200. The Southern college income was $6,000,000; the Northern, $7,500,000. Here, again, the comparison of the whole South with 18 million Whites against 18 equivalent millions in the Northwest is somewhat more favorable. The secondary plant costs $40,000,000 against $77,000,000 in the North. The normal schools of the South have an income of $1,400,000, those of the North $2,400,000. The Southern college students are 38,000 against 42,000; and the college income, $9,000,000 against $12,600,000.

The inevitable inference from these figures is that the South still needs to bring up its equipment and its expenditure if it is to educate as efficiently as its neighbors; and this presumption is strengthened by observation of schools of various grades. The Southern city schools are good, especially in the former border states; St. Louis, Baltimore, and Louisville come close up to Cleveland, Indianapolis, and St. Paul in the outward evidences of educational progress. Statistical comparison of a group of Southern cities with a group of Northern cities of the same aggregate population shows that in externals they are not far apart; the Northern schools have more schoolrooms, more teachers and more plant, but the annual expenditures are about as large in the Southern as in the Northern group.

The rural white schools are a different matter. It is, to be sure, nearly thirty years since old Bill Williams explained why there was no school in the Clover Bottom district in the Kentucky mountains: "They couldn't have no school because there wasn't nary door or winder in the schoolhouse.

I've got that door and winder, and I paid a dollar for 'em; but I've been keeping 'em, you see, because there was trouble about the t.i.tle. Jim Harris gin us that land, and we 'lowed 'twas all right, because it belonged to his gran'ther and he was the favorite grandson; but when the old man died it 'peared like he had willed it to somebody else; and I wouldn't put no door nor winder into no schoolhouse where there ain't no t.i.tle, and there hain't been no school there sence. You want to know when all that trouble happened 'bout the t.i.tle? I reckon it was fifteen or twenty year ago." There are still just such schools or rather such no schools in many parts of the South.

Even in prosperous regions, buildings, apparatus, and teacher may be alike, dirty and repellent. Take, for instance, Mt. Moriah school in Coosa County, Alabama. The building is twenty-five feet square, inclosing a single room with two windows and two doorways, one of them blocked up. In the middle is an iron stove, around which on a winter's day are parked four benches in a hollow square, upon which, or studying in the corner, huddle and wriggle twenty-three pupils, ranging from seven up to twenty-one years of age. They are reading physiology aloud, in the midst of the gaunt room, with very little in the way of blackboards or materials. An example of the better district schoolhouse is in a populous region near the mill town of Tala.s.see; a new building with eleven windows, well ceiled throughout, with a clean gravel s.p.a.ce in front, good desks and plenty of blackboard.

The curse of many of the rural schools is their easy money, for all the Southern states have a system of state school funds, the income of which is subdivided among the districts, and is in some of them about enough to keep up school three or four months on the usual scale of payment to teachers. When the school fund is exhausted, great numbers of districts close their schoolhouses, and the result is that the average number of school days in a year is far below that of Northern schools. In Ma.s.sachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island the public schools are in session about 190 days; in Georgia, 118; in Arkansas, 87. These are averages; and since the city schools commonly run seven or eight months, there must be many districts in which there are not over fifty or sixty days' school. One of the great educational reforms now going on in the South is to secure from the local governments appropriations to continue the schools after the state fund runs out. When the South is sufficiently aroused to the blessing of education, it will find that it has money enough for its needs.

Another defect is in the schoolhouses. The Southern towns and cities are coming to follow the example of the West and North in putting up imposing school buildings, though there is no such need for elaborate heating apparatus and ventilation as in the North, and they are in general simpler. The country schoolhouse is in many cases a big, dirty hut, often built of logs, wretchedly furnished, and devoid of the commonest appliances of civilization. There seems to be a feeling throughout the South that schoolhouses cannot be built wholly out of taxation, but the people on the ground must contribute at least a part of the cost. You may find neat and tidy rural schoolhouses, actually painted, but they are far from typical.

Another difficulty is the teachers. The monthly salaries for white teachers in several of the Southern states are high. A Coosa County farmer complains that a teacher in his district is getting $3.50 a day for twenty days in the month, which was more than any farmer in the district could earn. But of course her $70.00 a month would only run while school was in session, which might be five months. In Louisiana rural teachers receive higher salaries than in any other state in the Union, and no commonwealth is making such determined effort to improve its rural schools. In the remoteness of Catahoola Parish may be seen a system of wagonettes to bring children to central graded schools, a reform which goes very slowly in New England.

A further reason for the backwardness of the Southern rural schools is that they are in the hands of county superintendents, whose place until recently has too often been political. Now there is a body of trained superintendents who are giving people object lessons in what can be done even with poor buildings by well-trained teachers. The South is also bending its energies on normal schools, and the result is a growing body of teachers with professional spirit, who expect to make the schools their life work. The state superintendents are also improving in their professional power. The worst Southern rural schools are not too much behind those that Horace Mann found in Ma.s.sachusetts when he began his work in 1837; the wages of the rural teachers are probably not so low as those in Maine; and the next decade will see a vast improvement in the rural schools throughout the South.

So with the secondary schools, where the number of pupils has astonishingly increased. In 1898 there were in the South 1,107 schools and 72,000 pupils; in 1906 there were 1,685 schools (Texas alone has 321), 5,100 teachers, and 118,000 pupils. A great change has come about in the education of girls. Nearly half the teachers and nearly two thirds of the pupils (70,000) in these schools are women, and that means that in connection with the normal schools, in which there are over 7,000 women students, the South is now training a body of teachers who are going, to make a great change in the education of the next generation. The growth of secondary schools means further that the South is putting an end to a reproach of many years' standing--namely, that it could not adequately prepare pupils for college.

It was a severe lesson when the trustees of the Carnegie retiring allowance fund in 1906 laid down its principle that no grant would be made to professors in any college which did not come up to the following standard: "An inst.i.tution to be ranked as a college must have at least six professors giving their entire time to college and university work, a course of four full years in liberal arts and sciences, and should require for admission not less than the usual four years of academic or high school preparation, or its equivalent, in addition to the preacademic or grammar school studies." To the surprise of the Lower South, it was discovered that only one inst.i.tution, Tulane University, had insisted on the condition of four years academic or high school preparation. Several other organizations are waking the South up to the need of improvements, such as the a.s.sociation of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Southern states, with nineteen colleges as members; a commission of the Southern Methodist Church; the General Education Board of New York, with its fund of $43,000,000; and the Southern Education Board.

In the South as in the North, there are two types of inst.i.tutions of higher learning, the endowed (in most cases denominational) and the public. The number of Southern colleges is considerable; 166 out of 493 in the United States--which is not far from the proportion of the population; but only 8 of these inst.i.tutions have upward of 500 undergraduate students, as against 42 in the rest of the Union; and the total number of undergraduate students in universities, colleges, and technological schools, 25,300, is about a fifth of the total of 122,000 in the United States, while the normal proportion would be a third. The property of the Southern colleges ($99,000,000) is about a fifth of the total college property; the income of $7,300,000 is about a sixth of the whole, the benefactions in 1906 ($2,400,000) about a seventh. That is, in number, wealth, and students, Southern inst.i.tutions of higher learning represent about the same reduced proportion to the North as in the case of public wealth and public expenditures; that means that an average million of people in the South enjoy less than half the educational advantages possessed by an average million in the Northwest.

This rather favorable proportion does not obtain in women's education; of the fifteen colleges for women, recognized by the Bureau of Education as of full collegiate rank, only 4 are in the South; they include less than an eighth of the women students, and their property is less than a tenth.

The 95 Southern inst.i.tutions cla.s.sified as "Colleges for women, Division B" are practically boarding schools of secondary grade, and are balanced by the greater number of Northern girls in high schools; 345,000 against 70,000 Southern high school girls; the 17,000 in private high schools and academies are overbalanced by 35,000 in the North. One of the great needs of the South at present is high-cla.s.s colleges for girls, which shall turn out a well-grounded and well-trained body of women, interested in public affairs, and shall be a nursery of high school and college teachers.

The Southern denominational colleges are open practically to men only. The normal schools receive both s.e.xes, and 4,000 women are registered in the Southern universities, colleges, and technological schools which are open to both s.e.xes, as against 10,000 men. As the Southern states grow richer, they are giving more attention and more money to their public inst.i.tutions, but so far few of their advanced inst.i.tutions take rank alongside the great Northwestern universities. The University of North Carolina has 682 students and an excellent tradition; the University of Texas counts 1,100 men and 400 women, and is in many ways the most flourishing of the Southern inst.i.tutions. The University of Virginia, though it has an annual grant from the legislature, is practically an endowed inst.i.tution with 700 students; the University of Georgia has 408 students, though it at one time put forth the whimsical claim that it had the largest attendance in the United States, surpa.s.sing Harvard and Columbia, a result made up by adding in day scholars in affiliated schools below the high school grade. The state university funds, including the federal grants, are usually dispersed among two, or even three or four small inst.i.tutions.

There is a vigorous intellectual movement in the South. The recent graduates, who at one time had a preference for college appointments in their own colleges, are now giving way to a throng of eager young scholars who have enjoyed graduate study in American or foreign universities and hold higher degrees. Wherever you fall in with a body of those men, you are impressed with their good training and their broad outlook. Politics are yearly less forceful in such inst.i.tutions; and probably never again will there be such an episode as happened in a border state university about ten years ago. A new president discovered after a time that the janitor of the college buildings was not disposed to take instructions from him, whereupon he appealed to the board of trustees to put the man definitely under his control. The trustees held their meeting, at the end of which the janitor appeared with a bundle of blue envelopes, the first of which he offered to the president with the confidential remark, "You're fired!" The others were addressed to the professors, every one of whom was summarily removed. Having thus gone back to first principles, the trustees elected a new president and a new faculty, including some of the old teachers; strange to say, that university has since become one of the most promising in its section. In all inst.i.tutions of this kind and in the literary faculties of many colleges is a sprinkling of Northern professors, for the Southern colleges, like the Northern, are more tolerant than they were half a century ago. Most of the young men now receiving appointments in colleges and scientific inst.i.tutions have studied in other Southern colleges, in the North or in Europe; and in all the learned a.s.sociations they take their places as well-equipped and productive men.

Professional education has also made great strides in the South. Many of the most promising young men are sent to Northern law and medical schools, not only because of their supposed educational advantages, but because it is thought well for a young man to have a double horizon; but the greater number find instruction in nearby professional schools either established by pract.i.tioners or attached to some university. For the medical students the hospitals which are springing up everywhere furnish clinical material.

Theological education is less systematized; the older and more settled denominations have good schools, but too many preachers in the back country have no other training than a natural "gift of the gab." In the agricultural and mechanical colleges, and the engineering departments of the endowed public universities, the South is educating her future engineers and scientific men.

The educative effects of travel and intercourse with other people are making themselves felt. In ante-bellum times few Southerners traveled widely, except the comparatively small number of the richer young men who found their way to Northern colleges, or abroad. Until ten years ago it was difficult to hold Southern conventions and gatherings of intellectual men of kindred aims because people could not afford to travel. Now there is more circulation, more knowledge of the world, more willingness to see in what respects the South lags behind, a greater spirit of cooperation between Southern states, and with some people of other sections. The norms of common schools, secondary schools, and higher inst.i.tutions are now laid down on about the same principles as in the North, and it remains to develop them, to make paper systems actual, to get more of the school children registered, more of the registered children in attendance, more months of school for those who attend, better teachers for the longer sessions, new buildings to accommodate the larger numbers, more students to fill the little colleges and to enlarge the universities. White education in the South is in a progressive and hopeful condition.

In the means of education outside of schools and colleges the South is still much behind the richer North, and still more behind foreign countries. Museums and picture galleries are few, aside from private collections in Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, and New Orleans. The fine old paintings that one sees in clubs and public buildings come from an earlier age, for there are few Southern artists. Nevertheless, the architectural standard is quite as high as in the North, and the tradition of wide s.p.a.ces and colonnades persists. In its public buildings the South is in general superior to the North; even in remote county seats one may find buildings old and new of cla.s.sic proportions, dignified and stately.

The South has been poor in collections of books, but all the larger Universities have fair libraries, and the cities have public libraries, and the numerous gifts of Carnegie have stimulated this form of public education. Several Southern cities, as, for example, Galveston, have endowed inst.i.tutions for lecture courses on the general plan of the Lowell courses in Boston.

The South has never been highly productive in literature, and too much of the Southern writing bears evidence of a purpose of speaking for the South or in a Southern fashion. A considerable part of the books written by Southerners are about the South in one way or another; there is a sense of sectional obligation. This is the less necessary for a region from which have sprung Poe, one of the world's acknowledged literary delights, and Lanier. There is a school of Southern writers, of whom the late Joel Chandler Harris is a type, who have found broader themes of life about them and have given to the world the delightful flavor of a pa.s.sing and romantic epoch. The princ.i.p.al literary work of the South is now in its newspapers.

Another intellectual force is found in the Southern historical societies, of which there is one in almost every state. They have shown a lively interest in saving the records of the early history of the South and in preserving its memorials from destruction. There are also two or three literary periodicals of distinct literary merit, in which one finds an expression of the newest and most modern South.

In every direction, then, the white people of the South are alert. The schools are fair and improving, the community is awake to the need of educating all the children, even in the remote country; and though the taxes for education are still very light, there is a disposition to increase them. In Texas, for example, where there is a state tax, the people have by const.i.tutional amendment authorized all school districts to double that amount by local taxation. If the Whites were the only people to be educated, and if education were the panacea, if it brought a.s.surance of good government, the Southern question would in due time take care of itself.

The most hopeful sign of intellectual progress is the a.s.sociation of those most interested for the promotion of their common ends; such is the Cooperative Education a.s.sociation of Virginia which holds annual meetings and general conferences for education. These meetings are means of attracting public attention to the problems and of suggesting the solution.

For many years education of the Whites in the South has been aided from the North, first, through considerable gifts for the education of the Mountain Whites, and second through more sparing aid to colleges for Whites in the lowlands. Recently, however, the attention of wealthy Northern givers has been turned to the importance of uplifting the whole white Southern community, and after several annual visits to the South under the patronage of Mr. Robert C. Ogden, of New York, a Southern Education Board was formed, the purpose of which is to rouse people to the need of improving their education; following it is the General Education Board, which makes small gifts to educational inst.i.tutions usually on the stipulation that they shall raise a conditional amount varying from an equal sum to a sum three times as great. This is the more necessary as there are only two or three inst.i.tutions in the South that have anything like an adequate endowment. Tulane University in New Orleans has a property of several millions, and the University of Virginia has recently raised a new million outright, but the South has no large body of people with superfluous funds and its giving turns habitually rather in the direction of church construction and foreign mission work than to educational inst.i.tutions. Of $1,400,000 given to the University of Virginia during thirty years, $900,000 came from Northerners and $270,000 more from foreigners living in the South.

Of late, voices have been raised for some kind of Federal aid to Southern education on the plea that where there is the greatest intellectual dest.i.tution there is the most need for money. The appeal is contrary to the usual instincts of the South in matters of federal and state relations, and is strongly opposed by part of the Southern press, particularly the _Manufacturers' Record_, which has waged a campaign against even the private gifts made through the General Education Board.

CHAPTER XXII

NEGRO EDUCATION

However cheering the interest in general public and higher education throughout the South, the Whites get most of the benefit; the lower third of the people, the most ignorant, the poorest, the least ambitious, those whose debas.e.m.e.nt is the greatest menace to the community, are less in the public eye; and the efforts to educate them arouse antagonism of various kinds. All calculations as to numbers of pupils, school expenditures, and public opinion as to education are subject to restatement when the Negroes are taken into account. Even in states like Maryland and Kentucky, where they are not a fourth of the population, they disturb the whole educational system, and in the Lower South, where they are in many places overwhelming in numbers, the problem of their education becomes alarming.

Most people suppose that negro education began during the Civil War, but it is as old as colonization; free Negroes were always allowed some privileges in this respect, and thousands of slaves were taught to read by kind-hearted mistresses and children of the family; the opinion of one who has carefully explored this field of inquiry is that of the adult slaves, about one in ten could read and write. Nevertheless, this practice was contrary to the principles and the laws of the South, as is proved by the dramatic prosecution of Mrs. Margaret Dougla.s.s, of Norfolk, in 1853, for the crime of holding a school for free negro children, in ignorance of the fact that it was forbidden as "against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth of Virginia." In due time this person, who had admitted unhallowed light into little dark souls, was duly sentenced to thirty days' imprisonment, a penalty (as the judge explained) intended to be "as a terror to those who acknowledge no rule of action but their own evil will and pleasure."

Both the teachings and the prosecutions establish a general belief that Negroes could easily learn to read and write; and when during the Civil War refugees flocked into the Union camps at Beaufort and Hilton Head, charitably disposed people in the North sent down teachers; and, the federal government cooperating, schools were started among those Sea Island people, then rough, uncouth, and not far beyond the savage state, though now a quiet, well-ordered, and industrious folk. From that time till the giving up of the Freedman's Bureau in 1869, the federal government expended some money and took some responsibility for negro education. It was a pathetic sight to see old gray-headed people crowding into the schools alongside the children, with the inarticulate feeling that reading and writing would carry them upward. The Northern missionary societies kept up these elementary schools, and then began to found schools and colleges for the training of the most gifted members of the race. Out of their funds, and with the aid of the freedmen, they put up schoolhouses, they collected money to establish inst.i.tutions like Fisk University in Nashville, Leland and Straight Universities in New Orleans, and Atlanta University. Such colleges were on the same pattern as other colleges for Whites both North and South, adopting the then almost universal curriculum of Greek, Latin, and mathematics, along with smatterings of other subjects; they included preparatory schools, which, as in some white colleges both North and South, included the larger number of the recorded students.

Now came the founding of rural schools, for both Negroes and Whites; all the Reconstruction const.i.tutions provided for free public schools; and since that time there has been public organized education for the colored people, such as it is, in every state, in every city, and in most of the rural counties having a considerable black population. The reaction against Reconstruction for some time bore against these schools and they have come along slowly. When, about 1885, the South entered upon a new career of education, the negro schools came more into people's minds; but they have not advanced in proportion to the white schools, and they have encountered a lively hostility directed particularly against the higher forms of education.

The present status of the negro common schools may be summarized from the report of the Commissioner of Education for 1906. Taking the whole South together, there were, in that year, over 2,900,000 colored children five to eighteen years old, of whom 1,600,000, or little more than half, were enrolled in school, while of the white children of school age nearly three fourths were enrolled. Out of 1,600,000 enrolled, the average attendance was 990,000, or about a third of the children of school age, while of the whites it was 3,000,000, or nearly half the children of school age. For the 1,600,000 enrolled negro children, there were 28,000 teachers, or 1 to 57; for the 4,500,000 white children over 100,000 teachers, 1 to 45. The annual expenditures for the 6,200,000 children enrolled (white and black) were $46,000,000, but to the negro children (about a third of the whole, and least likely to be educated otherwise) was a.s.signed about a seventh of this sum. To state the same thing in another form, in nearly all the Southern states at least twice as much was spent per pupil on Whites as on Negroes.

A part of this disparity is due simply to the fact that the superior race produces the larger number of children capable of secondary and higher training and has more money to carry its children along, to pay their expenses and tuition where necessary, in order to give them a start in life. That consideration does not account either for the very low enrollment or low attendance of negro children. The truth is that the majority of white people, who have the sole power of laying taxes and of appropriating money for education, think that the Negroes ought not to have school advantages equal to those of white children, or advancing beyond a common school education.

The mere statistics of negro schools and attendance after all carry with them little information. What kind of pupils are they? What kind of school buildings are provided for them? What is the character of their teachers?

Naturally, among both races, many are at work after twelve or fourteen years, but the percentages of enrollment and attendance are so much less than those of the white people that apparently colored children are less likely than white to be sent to school and to be kept there when started.

Though every Northern state without exception has some kind of compulsory education, not a single Southern state, except Kentucky and Missouri, has enacted it.

Some personal knowledge of Southern schools, both in cities and the country, suggests several reasons why the attendance is small. Visit this negro wayside school in the heart of the piney woods near Albany, Ga. The building is a wretched structure with six gla.s.s windows, some of them broken; the sky visible between the weatherboards. There is one desk in the room, the teacher's, made of rough planks; the floor is rough and uneven. Of the forty-four children enrolled, none of whom come more than about three miles, thirty-two are present on a pleasant day; six of them appear to be mulattoes. They wear shoes and stockings and are quiet and well-behaved but sit in the midst of dirt on dirty benches. The teacher is a pleasant woman, wife of a well-to-do colored man in the neighboring town, but apparently untrained. She teaches five months at $35 a month.

Last year there was no school at all in this district.

Enter another school at Oak Grove, Ala. The house is a single room, twenty-five feet square; larger than is needed, like many of the schoolhouses, because it may serve also for church services. There is not a sash in any one of the seven windows, each having a hinged shutter. The teacher has a table, and for the pupils are provided several rude benches with or without backs; the room is furnished with a blackboard and is reasonably clean; the teacher, a young man eager and civil, a graduate of a neighboring school carried on by the Negroes for themselves, holds five months' school. Take another school near Albany, Ga., in a tolerably good schoolhouse built by the Negroes themselves with some white a.s.sistance, for the county commissioners will do no more than offer $100 to a district that will spend about $300 more on a building. The room overcrowded, four or five at a desk; twice as many girls as boys; a good teacher who has had some normal training; a book for each group of three in the reading cla.s.s; the lesson about a brutal Yankee officer who compels a little Southern girl to tell where the Confederate officer is hiding. The children read well and with expression.