proportion are day pupils from seven years old up who come in from the neighbourhood. This “college,” in reality a grammar school, is managed and largely supported by tuition and contributions from Negroes, though some subscriptions are obtained in the North. Besides this “college” there are many small private schools conducted by Negro women and supported wholly by the tuition paid—the Negroes thus voluntarily taxing themselves heavily for their educational opportunities. One afternoon in Atlanta I passed a small, rather dilapidated home. Just as I reached the gate I heard a great cackling of voices and much laughter. Coloured children began to pour out of the house. “What’s this?” I said, and I[Pg 54] turned in to see. I found a Negro woman, the teacher, standing in the doorway. She had just dismissed her pupils for recess. She was holding school in two little rooms where some fifty children must have been crowded to suffocation. Everything was very primitive and inconvenient—but it was a school! She collected, she told me, a dollar a month tuition for each child. Mollie McCue’s school, perhaps the best known private school for Negroes in the city, has 250 pupils.

[Pg 54]

Many children also find educational opportunities in the Negro colleges of the city—Clark University, Atlanta University and Spellman Seminary, which are supported partly by the Negroes themselves but mostly by Northern philanthropy.

Mr. Landrum gave me a copy of the last statistical report of the school board (1903), from which these facts appear:

8,118

5

49

2,445

Even with a double daily session for coloured pupils nearly half of the Negro children in Atlanta, even in 1903, were barred from the public schools from lack of facilities, and the number has increased largely in the last four years. Some of these are accommodated in the private schools and colleges which I have mentioned, but there still remain hundreds, even thousands, who are getting no schooling of any kind, but who are nevertheless being educated—on the streets, and for criminal lives.

White Instruction for Black Children

I made a good 

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