TWENTY YEARS OF NEGRO EDUCATION. 35 



As fast as they have been able, the Southern States have increased 

 their taxes for school purposes and their facilities for the education 

 of teachers until they have reached a point as high as that of New 

 England — that is, they apjiropriate twenty per cent of the whole 

 amount of taxes levied and collected for school purposes, just as 

 Massachusetts does. Beyond this they can not go any faster than 

 their growth in taxable wealth will permit, and unless they have an 

 even greater amount of help than has been given by the American 

 Missionary Association, the Sears and the Peabody Funds, educational 

 progress must be very slow — too slow to meet the demands of the 

 people. It would take three times the amount now annually appro- 

 priated by the Southern States (815,000,000) to satisfy the demands 

 of the six million black and white children for education. With any- 

 thing like an adequate sum, and compulsory laws to overcome the leth- 

 argy and indiflFerence of the negroes, an inroad so broad might be 

 made in a few years in the illiteracy that is now a positive menace and 

 danger to these States as to encourage the friends of education in the 

 belief of a possible millennium, when every human being would be able 

 to stand an examination in at least the three R's. And this, however 

 chimerical it may seem, contrasted with existing facts, is what must 

 be kept steadily in view. The State owes it to every child to make it 

 intellectually strong enough to understand the necessity for law, to 

 submit to the restraints of law, and obey law. This can only be done 

 by education. 



Looking back through the years the educational work of which 

 has thus been traced in the foregoing pages, we find that several good 

 results have been accomplished : 1. The prejudices of the Southern 

 people against the education of the negro have been utterly and en- 

 tirely dispelled ; 2. The people of the South have become willing, 

 in most cases enthusiastic supporters and helpers in the education of 

 the negro ; 3. Thirty per cent of the illiteracy of the negro has been 

 wiped out ; and, 4. The negro has steadily, though gradually, been 

 brought to realize that in education he is to find perfect freedom, the 

 soul and heart freedom of which no man may rob him ; that by edu- 

 cation he is to be elevated, lifted up above the chaos and confusion of 

 ignorance, and prepared for whatever of destiny lies before him in the 

 United States. With these results before us, to raise any side or out- 

 side issues that would tend to re-excite the prejudices of the whites 

 against the blacks, to raise the social question, even in the least degree, 

 is to be at enmity with the peace and prosperity of the negro, to hurt 

 and injure the cause of his education, to retard his growth mentally 

 and morally, and postpone the time when he might claim equality 

 in both senses. 



In the face of such progress, to advocate the deportation of such 

 a race, or any scheme of separate colonization, is nothing less than a 

 crime. It has the effect to disturb and check the flow of this steady 



