carefully inspected some three hundred individual schools, attended summer schools and other gatherings of teachers, arranged and attended special conferences of state, county, and city superintendents of schools in eight of the southern states, and in general have sought the acquaintance and counsel of leading educators thruout the country, especially in the South.

Questions covering educational facts have been prepared and sent to county school superintendents and to individual schools of all grades. Some thousands of these blanks have been filled out and are now on file, together with stenographic reports of the proceedings and discussions of the conferences above referred to. The board has also secured on its own blanks detailed information regarding the existing supply of teachers, covering such questions as their professional training, grade of license, time of service, etc. The information secured in these various ways is carefully verified by comparison with published reports and then edited, classified, and indexed, so as to be readily accessible at the offices of the board; and maps are being prepared which show at a glance the educational equipment of each state, including elementary, secondary, normal, professional, technical, and university instruction.

On the basis of such accurate knowledge the board hopes to develop a constructive program that will appeal strongly to people of wealth who share this sense of responsibility for the education of all the people of our country.

In a word, thru funds that may be placed at its disposal, and by furnishing the public with information, suggestion, and counsel, the General Education Board will seek "to promote education within the United States of America, without distinction of race, sex, or creed."

THE EDUCATIONAL NEEDS OF THE SOUTHERN NEGRO REV. CHARLES T. WALKER, PASTOR OF MOUNT OLIVET BAPTIST CHURCH, NEW YORK CITY

Mr. President, Members of the National Educational Association, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am gratefully sensible of the honor you have done me, in permitting me to represent the educational interests of my race before this intelligent audience.

I am to speak for and in behalf of a race peculiarly situated; a race born amidst persecution, disciplined in the school of slavery nearly two hundred and fifty years, emancipated forty years ago without education, experience, money, competent leaders, and in some instances without

names.

I represent a race that has been true and loyal to America

from the revolutionary struggle to this period of the twentieth century. My race has not only stood by the American flag, but has been true to America's interest. The American people, in order to do effective work in the elevation of my race, must believe in the manhood of the negro, and have faith in his moral, spiritual, and intellectual possibilities.

The negro has made wonderful progress since his emancipation in the development of knowledge, character, and the acquisition of property. The South has done well in her appropriations by the various legislatures for education, when are remembered the poverty, devastation, and bad feeling which came with that period of misconstruction called reconstruction.

The leaders of my race recognize the responsibility devolving upon them to lead into the possession of intelligent, honorable citizenship. They have commenced the serious and difficult task, and with divine guidance, and the assistance and encouragement of the friends of popular education, success is absolutely certain. Judging the future. by the past and present, negro illiteracy will be reduced to a greater extent in the next twenty years than it has been in the entire forty years of freedom. The past has been foundation work, and much foundation work remains to be done. We are indebted to northern philanthropists for the foundation of negro education; foundation work is not always conspicuous; to be permanent and durable much of it is out of sight; but that work is appreciated as the building in process of erection assumes proportions and gradually arises toward completion. The negro has reduced his illiteracy 50 per cent.; we have 2,500,000 negro children in the public schools, 35,000 negro teachers, 45,000 students in higher institutions, 30,000 students learning trades, and 3,000 students pursuing classical and scientific courses. Negroes have given out of their poverty for education $13,065,000. They have expended for school property $15,000,000. Negro students have taken high rank at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Oberlin, and other representative institutions. The negro's progress is remarkable when you remember the short time in which this progress has been made and the adverse circumstances under which the race has had to labor.

The negro is behind; not because he is incapable of intellectual growth and development; not because he differs essentially from other races. He is simply a man like other men. The negro race has the vices and virtues, abilities and disabilities, of other men. He loves freedom; he hates oppression. He is an ardent admirer of justice; he has no love for injustice, having known it intimately for two hundred and fifty years. The negro is patient under the most exasperating and trying. circumstances. He has been loyal to every trust committed to him both in war and in peace. He stood guard over southern homes during the Civil War, supporting and defending helpless children and defenseless.

women. He wept over the grave of his master as sincerely as Jacob mourned for Joseph. At the close of the war he returned to the white men their wives and children untouched, unharmed, and unblemished. There is no record of a single negro betraying the trust committed to him. during the four long years of bloody conflict.

There is no essential difference between the negro and any other race. While he is charged with being imitative, there are some things in which he does not care to imitate his white brother. He does not believe in committing suicide. He rarely ever makes assignments. He does not believe in bankruptcy, or in emigration. It is often claimed that the negro should return to Africa, just as the Jews returned to Canaan after their liberation. In the case of the Jews, God ordered the march, furnished leaders, gave supplies, and cut a path across the sea; but up to this time, so far as regards my race, no arrangement has been made for our transportation. The negro is behind other races because of lack of time and opportunity. Some few have done admirably; many have done well.

The educational needs of the negroes of the South can be summed up briefly as follows:

1. A better system of public schools-which means longer terms and better teachers. I mean thoroly educated, professionally trained teachers, who will follow teaching as a profession, and not as a steppingstone to something else. We need a well-regulated system of public schools for the rural districts. Professor Kelly Miller says in his report: "In the rural districts of the South the school fund is woefully inadequate to support a satisfactory system. The object of the public school is to benefit the masses; their plan and scope should be adapted. to the capacity and condition of those for whose welfare they are intended." Connected with our public-school system there should be the kindergarten institute.

2. We need trade and technical schools for the masses. The question, "What sort of education does the negro need?" finds its answer in the economic law of supply and demand, and not in his ethnological characteristics, inherent ability, and political status. Broadly speaking, the negro needs every sort of education necessary to the conduct of every phase of civilized life; but the ratio of lawyers, doctors, skilled artisans, etc., needed for the entire race is, owing to conditions peculiar to the present time, not proportional to that of the white people either north or south. The reason for this disparity is that the negroes' greatest and most imperative need is the ownership of good homes and the accumulation of wealth, moral and intellectual training, and skilled ability in the production of staple raw material for the world's commerce. Reckoning on the basis of a negro population of nine millions in this country (adult 3,500,000 or 4,000,000), an approximate estimate shows that there

are needed 10,000 or 12,000 educated negro preachers, about 10,000 physicians, 5,000 lawyers, 135,000 teachers, and 1,000,000 skilled artisans, merchants, etc. Eliminating about 5,000,000 children, and subtracting the 1,160,000 accounted for in the estimate just given, there remain 2,840,000. These should engage in agriculture and other productive work. They represent the greatest educational demand of the race, and therefore this demand should be more largely supplied than that of any other class. That is, industrial training, preferentially agricultural, should be given to three out of every four persons in the race. It goes without saying that the industrially trained should also have a good commonschool education as a prerequisite to their special training in the industries and to intelligent citizenship. And when I refer to industrial and agricultural schools, I mean real schools; not shams and fakes. The skilled mechanic and the scientific farmer can find remunerative employment in the South as he cannot find it anywhere else. The South has as yet set up no barrier to prevent a man from making an honest living on account of the color of his skin. We need several more institutions in the South like Hampton and Tuskegee. The governor of Georgia believes that $3,000 should be appropriated by the legislature of that state for an agricultural and mechanical college for young white men in each of its eleven congressional districts. The distribution of these schools would give a greater impetus to agriculture in the state, and would reach a larger class of young white men.

Every southern state needs a number of industrial and agricultural schools for the colored young men and women. I do not think there need be any fear for an overproduction of industrially or mechanically trained colored people. I am quite sure there is an imperative need for scientific farmers thruout the South. Professor Miller has wisely said: "The greatest need of the negro is to bring the wild energy of his muscle under the guiding intelligence of his mind."

3. In the third place we need high-grade normal schools and colleges for the training of teachers, leaders, and professional men. We need industrial training for the masses-practical education. But in order to have competent leaders, cultured and intelligent educators, professional men of skill and ability, I plead not only for the higher education of the negro, but for the highest. I believe it to be the order of divine Providence that the negro shall maintain and preserve his racial identity. The race must produce intelligent leaders; no race can succeed by allowing another race to do its thinking. We are going to advocate industrial education for the masses; and the best people of my race believe in the great work that Booker T. Washington is doing at Tuskegee. He is the great apostle of industrial education; and I for one wish we had one thousand Tuskegees, and ten thousand Booker Washingtons. But, while we love Hampton and Tuskegee, we also honor those institutions that

stand for the higher education of the race. We shall still send the ambitious, aspiring students to the best northern universities, where they have proven themselves susceptible of the highest intellectual development. Negro students from the South, sons of slaves, have entered Harvard, Yale, and Brown, and crossed intellectual swords with the sons of America's most cultured citizens; and those negro boys, with no centuries of civilization and culture behind them, no two hundred and fifty years of the white man's opportunity, have plucked laurels and won well-merited honors in the greatest schools of America.

The negro race needs the most highly educated men and women to train and prepare the future leaders of the race; to give encouragement and inspiration to the aspiring young men and women who will make these instructors their ideals; because these teachers, members of the same race, have come in possession of the moral and intellectual qualities which fit men and women for usefulness, and entitle them to the respect and confidence of mankind.

The black man in the South, with well-regulated public schools in the rural districts, with protection to life and property, will purchase and cultivate lands, and will, by the aid of industrial education, become an important factor in the development of the almost boundless resources of the South. It is said that the colored laborer does four-fifths of the agricultural labor of the southern states, and all of the unskilled labor. It is estimated that his share in the cotton, corn, wheat, rice, oats, etc., amounts to $610,786,182 —a sum equal to $8.14 for every inhabitant of this country, or $61 per capita for every individual of the race. If we divide the total amount of these products made in the entire country by the population, it will be found that the per capita production is only. $27.80, whereas the colored man's part is $61 per capita; thus showing his great activity as an agricultural laborer, and the splendid part he is playing in the industrial development of the nation. This vast contribution to the wealth of the nation is made without disturbing the industrial and commercial tranquillity of the country by strikes or labor riots of any class whatever. The colored man never strikes unless he is forced to do so.

As the colored man is trained industrially, and learns the science of agriculture, his contribution to the national wealth will be much larger. The leaders of my race recognize the present as the most critical period of our history as a race. It is the period of adjustment, and we know that our success will not depend upon conflict, but upon concord and co-operation with the best thought and sentiment of this American nation. The southern negro is becoming serious; he is beginning to think; het is striving earnestly to better his condition. These lines of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, in "The Black Man's Claim," express very pathetically the condition of my race: