TWENTY YEARS OF NEGRO EDUCATION. 27 



tendance of 114,522 and an additional number of from 30,000 to 

 35,000 not regularly reported, together with 100,000 more attending 

 Sunday-schools, the gain on the whole body of colored illiteracy was 

 but a fraction of the annual gain of the negro population, not more 

 than 20,000 successfully accomplishing the task of learning to read. 

 But in eleven years all this had changed. The white people of the 

 Southern States had resumed the control of their governments, had 

 brought order out of chaos, diminished the burden of illegally made 

 debt, and reduced taxation, and had thus . given relief to all classes, 

 and had established a public-school system for black as well as white 

 children, which has ever since been steadily growing in public favor 

 and increasing in efficiency and power. The result of this may be 

 seen at a glance by the contrast of the statistics of 1869 with those of 

 1883. In the former year there was a total of 249,522 colored j^upils 

 enrolled at the South of all ages and grades, in day and night and Sun- 

 day schools ; in the latter year there were 16,086 colored schools, col- 

 leges, and universities, etc., with an enrollment of 821,380 pupils, the 

 average percentage of illiteracy being about seventy, except in Mis- 

 souri, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia, where it was about 

 fifty-six, a fact largely if not altogether due to the geographical situa- 

 tion of those States, and to their advantages as border States during 

 the war, and to their freedom from the turmoil, dissensions, and diffi- 

 culties of reconstruction. Nothing can be more instructive as to the 

 position the negro is taking as a citizen and to his appreciation of his 

 responsibilities. In twenty years of freedom he had blotted out thirty 

 per cent of the illiteracy that was the heirloom of the slave, and he 

 had done that under conditions for some years of a menacingly ad- 

 verse and repressive character. The white people opposed his educa- 

 tion because the expense of maintaining public schools would fall upon 

 them, and most of them had a conviction that ever so little education 

 would unsettle the brain of the freedman and elevate him " above his 

 business " as field-hand, house-servant, or mechanic. They were just- 

 ly incensed, too, at the hostile attitude of the negro and the readiness 

 and eagerness in some instances with which he allied himself with the 

 carpet-baggers and helped that class to postpone the restoration of 

 peace, order, and law. 



In 1870 Memphis, Nashville, and New Orleans furnished free 

 schools for the education of negroes, but elsewhere throughout the 

 South there was manifest indisposition and indifference to supporting 

 them. In that year, signalized above all others by the establishment 

 of the Bureau of Education at Washington, and the first of those in- 

 structive and exhaustive reports by Commissioner Eaton, which have 

 been continued every year since, and from which all the data of this 

 article are taken, the scholastic colored population between the ages of 

 five and eighteen was, in the whole country, 814,576 boys and 806,402 

 girls, and the attendance was 88,594 boys and 91,778 girls, but little 



