The Gazette

There are in the southern states 9,000,000 negroes, writes Booker T. Washington. There are 3,000,000 negro children of school age. Fifty-three per cent., or more than half, never go to school. Many of these negro children, particularly in the country district, are in school only from three to four months in the year. I am trying to get the white people to see that, both from an economic point of view and as a matter of justice and fair play these conditions must be changed. I am trying to get the white people to see that sending ignorant negroes to jails and penitentiaries, putting them in the chain gang, hanging and lynching them does not civilize, but on the contrary, though it brutalizes the negro, it at the same time blunts and dulls the conscience of the white man.

I want the white people to see that it is unfair to expect a black man who goes to school only three months in the year to produce as much on the farm as a white man who has been in school eight or nine months in the year; that it is unjust to let the negro remain ignorant, with nothing between him and the temptation to fill his body with whisky and cocaine, and then expect him, in his ignorance, to be able to know the law and be able to exercise that degree of self-control which shall enable him to keep it.

I am trying to get the white people to realize that since no color line is drawn in the punishment for crime, no color line should be drawn in the preparation of life, in the kind of education, in other words, that makes for useful, clean living.

The men who don't go to jail are either too good, or too rich.

So far as the youth is concerned the problem is in process of wholesome and certain solution. The future of the negro has never seemed so promising and bright. As a laborer, citizen and a man the negro, under this bright and beneficent policy, has advanced and is advancing day by day.

There are no greater people in the history of nations than the people of the south. And in view of the history of the Civil war and of the reconstruction period that followed, the southern people have never been greater and wiser than in their present splendid attitude toward their former slaves.—Chicago American.