d crime, to smite and to
blight this land where white people having eyes refuse to see whither all
their race injustice is leading, and ears but who are deaf to the prayer
of Christ's little ones crying for a man's chance to get with others into
the sun and to grow the free and beautiful life which God intended them to
grow when first they came into the world, and that whether they are black
or red or brown or yellow.

In the matter of education, to recur again to the South in particular, the
blacks are most outrageously discriminated against in favor of the whites,
who have more and better school buildings, more and better paid teachers
even where the blacks out-number them, longer school terms and a much
higher per capita rate of the public school funds than have the children
of the blacks. The problem of the South appears to be not how much
education but how little it can possibly give the blacks in comparison
with what it gives the whites. In all this educational business the South
reasons that the blacks must be kept well in the rear of the whites,
because they are to remain a permanently inferior class. That section is
not anxious to reduce the illiteracy of its colored population and to
raise the standard of their intelligence, for it thinks that an ignorant
labor class is less difficult to manage than an intelligent one. Ignorance
is indeed apt to be stolid and submissive under circumstances in which
intelligence becomes restless and discontented. Therefore the South has
little love or use for an intelligent labor class, but desires above all
things an ignorant one, and does what in it lies to hinder educational
progress among its colored population. But ignorance is a breeder of crime
just as poverty is. They are the parents of much of the crime committed by
the Negroes just as they are the parents of much of the crime committed by
the whites. Our criminal classes do many things which the law forbids to
be done not because they are of one race or color or of another race or
color, but mainly because they are poor and ignorant. Who then in these
circumstances are the ultimate criminal, those who are unwillingly poor
and ignorant, or those who make and keep them so by bad and unequal laws,
by bad and unequal treatment?

Such is the story of what the whites did to educate the blacks at the most
impressionable period of their freedom in democracy, in orderly government
and Christian civilization. And it is the stor