The Negro and the nation
teachers is $28.67. The average length of the annual school term for white children is eight months and a quarter; for colored children, four months and a half.

[15]

$

In Wilcox County, Alabama, where there are 2,000 white children and 10,758 colored children, $32,660.48 is devoted to education. Of this amount the 10,758 colored children receive one-fourth—$6,532.09, or sixty cents each per annum—while the 2,000 white children receive the remaining four-fifths—$26,128.13, or about $13 each per annum. Mr. Booker Washington, who lives in this state sends his own children to the best colleges and to Europe while advising the rest of his people to “make your condition known to the white people of the state.” Now, if education—of any sort—is a training for life, is it not evident here that black children are being robbed of their chance in life? Why? Is it to be supposed that their fathers are so stupid as to allow this if they could vote their own needs? Yet Mr. Washington decries the agitation for the ballot as unwise and never loses an opportunity of sneering at these who see something of value in it. But to continue The number of white children of school age in Alabama is 364,266; the number of colored children of school age is 311,552. But the teachers of the white children receive in sala[16]ries $2,404,062.54, while the teachers of the colored children receive $202,251.13. The value of all schoolhouses, sites and furniture for white children is $6,503,019.57; for colored children, $273,147.50.

[16]

In South Carolina there are 316,007 Negro children of school age and 201,868 white children; but the state spends on its Negro children $368,802, and on its white children $1,684,976. Thus does America keep knowledge from Negroes. She is afraid of the educated black man. Of such are the people who taunt Negroes with ignorance.

children

 IV—Social. 

When a group has been reduced to serfdom, political and economic, its social status become fixed by that fact. And so we find that in “the home of the free and the land of the brave” Negroes must not ride in the same cars in a train as white people. On street-cars, certain sections are set apart for them. They may not eat in public places where white people eat nor drink at the same bar. They may not go to the same church (although they are foolish enough to worship the same god) as white people; they may not die in 
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