Congress has been generous with grants of land and money in aid of education, but the negroes in the South have profited but little from its bounty. The southern public-land states were admitted into the union, and came into possession of their common-school and university lands, while the negroes were still in slavery, and before much thought had been given to their education; so that the Fourteenth Amendment or other subsequent enactments must be relied upon to secure as far as possible the equal treatment which might otherwise have been made a condition of the grants. The land grant for agricultural and mechanical colleges also antedated the emancipation proclamation, though by only a few weeks; if the bill had gone over till the following session of Congress, some provision would surely have been made for the industrial education of the negroes. In the absence of any specific provision of that kind, only four of the southern states use any part of the land-grant funds to endow institutions for the colored race,[1] although there are at least fifteen states in which the blacks are debarred from the colleges established for white students. In the case of the supplementary appropriations under the act of 1890, however, special provision is made for "a just and equitable division of the fund" wherever separate institutions are deemed necessary; so that these annual appropriations are for the most part equitably apportioned on the basis of numbers, though in one case Congress sanctioned an equal division where the colored population exceeded the white by nearly 50 per cent.[2] But the colleges for white students, besides retaining their original endowments, have the further advantage of connection with the southern experiment stations.
Thus it is evident that the cause of negro education, instead of receiving the special government aid which might reasonably have been expected under the circumstances, has never received even its proportional share of the congressional grants for education in general. To be sure, the Freedmen's Bureau assisted private philanthropy in what was done toward the education of
