Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/41

This page has been validated.
TWENTY YEARS OF NEGRO EDUCATION.
33

institutions for secondary instruction, with 2,807 pupils; thirteen universities and colleges, with 1,270 pupils; seventeen schools of theology, with 462 pupils; two schools of law, with 14 pupils; three schools of medicine, with 74 pupils; and two schools for the deaf and dumb and the blind, with 99 pupils; making a grand total of 10,879 schools, colleges, etc., and 580,017 pupils enrolled.

The reports for 1878, notwithstanding the yellow-fever epidemic that prevailed throughout the whole of the lower valley of the Mississippi, were extremely encouraging. All the States did well.

The years 1879, 1880, and 1881 were years of general progress. The former year witnessed the fair inauguration of normal instruction in Texas for both white and colored. In Kentucky nine private normal schools and institutes held in fourteen counties, and a summer normal school, were doing good work for teachers. The report for 1880 was, taking in the whole field, more encouraging than any of the preceding ones. The Agricultural and Mechanical College of Mississippi was opened with two hundred students. In 1881, Delaware for the first time recognized its obligations to the colored children and appropriated $2,400 from the State Treasury for these schools. West Virginia made provision for the free education of eighteen colored pupils at Storer College. In 1882-'83 the white school population of the sixteen once slave States and the District of Columbia was 4,046,956, and the enrollment in public schools 2,249,263. The colored-school population was 1,944,572; enrollment, 802,982. Compared with the figures of 1877 there was clear evidence of the remarkable work that had been accomplished in the Southern States. The white-school population showed an increase of 13 per cent; enrollment, 23 per cent; the colored-school population showed an increase of 28 per cent; enrollment increase, 40 per cent. The expenditures during that time had steadily increased as follows: In 1878 they were $11,760,251; in 1879, $12,181,602; in 1880, $12,475,044; in 1881, $13,359,784; and in 1882, $14,820,972. And this, notwithstanding there had been a decrease in the value of the taxable wealth of ten of the Southern States amounting to $411,475,000. Notwithstanding which, these States now appropriated 20·1 per cent of their total levy of taxes for school purposes. New England at the same time paying 20·2; the Middle States, 19·5; the Western States, 26·2; and the Territories, 22·4; the average of the whole country being 22·6 per cent. This increase in funds corresponded with a radical change in public sentiment. Louisiana was the only State in which the prospect was in the main discouraging. Both races shared alike in the school fund in all the States except in Delaware, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, in which special provision was made for the colored race, and in South Carolina, where the basis of apportionment was the same for each race, but the amounts realized depended upon the extent to