3 per cent
of the total number of negro males above the age of twenty-one. The per
cent of illiterate negro voters ranged all the way in former
slave-holding states from 61.3 per cent in Louisiana to 31.9 per cent in
Missouri, while in Massachusetts the percentage of negro illiteracy was
only 10 per cent.
In the school year 1907-08, in the sixteen Southern states there were
1,665,000 negro children enrolled in the public schools, this number
being 54.36 per cent of the negro population of the school age (five to
eighteen). The number of white children enrolled was 4,692,000, or 70.34
per cent of the white population of school age. But these statistics
fail to indicate the utter inadequacy of many provisions for the
education of the negro children. In many districts of the South the
negro schools are open only from three to five months in a year,--the
equipment of the school being very inadequate and the teacher poorly
trained. Nevertheless the sixteen Southern states have spent, since the
emancipation, over $175,000,000 to maintain separate schools for
negroes, a much larger sum than all that has been given by Northern
philanthropy.
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