FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT AND RACE QUESTION 2$l
abundantly confirmed by official statistics, both state and national. For example, in Alabama the colored schools have three-fifths as many pupils as the white schools, but less than one-half as many teachers ; yet the colored teachers, though deemed capable of managing even larger schools than the whites, receive much smaller salaries averaging in 1894-5 only $18.71 a month, while the average monthly pay of white teachers was $24.03.* If the smaller compensation stands for a lower grade of ability, the colored children are discriminated against in the quality as well as in the amount of their schooling. Of eight southern states reporting the length of the school year for both races, ix have longer terms in the colored than in the white schools. 3
Nothing could express more clearly than these educational discriminations the desire of those southern whites who would prevent the negroes from rising; nothing could more effectively nullify the spirit, if not the letter, of the Fourteenth Amend- ment. Nothing, because if the negroes had been denied educa- tion altogether by the southern states, instead of being permitted as much as they could pay for, other provision would have been made for them : Senator Blair's bill for national aid to education would have passed, and more aid would have been given by northern philanthropists. Perhaps the nation should have made some special provision for the education of the negroes when they were first elevated from slavery to citizenship, as it does for that of the Indians before they are recognized as citizens ; we can see now only too clearly that it was a mistake to make citizens and voters of the slaves without at the same time doing something to guarantee them the education which alone could make their enfranchisement a safe experiment. But to educate the children of nearly five million negroes would have been even a greater task than to civilize the children of the aborigines ; it was, perhaps, a task too great for either the nation or the states alone.
Evidently something must be done either to prevent or to neutralize the discriminations of the state educational systems.
1 Alabama's Resourc es and Future Prospects (1897), P- 2 7-
- Report of 'the Commissioner of Education, 1891-2, p. 863.
