has decreased. Out of every 100 criminals only 39 could read and 61
could not, whereas in the general population 43 could read and 57
could not.[73] In the Mississippi penitentiary where they had 450
convicts of Negro blood one half of them could neither read nor write,
and less than 10 per cent had anything like a fair education.[74]
Atlanta University has graduated 800 Negro men and women, not one of
whom has ever been convicted of crime. Fisk University has only one
graduate who has ever been convicted. Greensboro Agricultural and
Technical College has had 2,000 students since its establishment, and
only five have ever been convicted of crime. Two of these had been
expelled students, and none were among the three hundred graduates of
the college. Negro students who have gone to high school show a
remarkably low percentage of crime. Of the 200 graduates from the
Winston-Salem High School (North Carolina) only one has a criminal
record. Waters Normal Institute at Winton, North Carolina, has
graduated more than 130 students and not one of these has ever been
arrested or convicted of any crime.[75] The records of the southern
prisons show that at least 90 per cent of those in prison are without
trades of any sort.[76] According to Booker T. Washington, "Manual
training is as good a prevention of criminality as vaccination is of
smallpox."[77] In 1903, in Gloucester County, Virginia, twenty-five
years after education had been introduced, there were 30 arrests for
misdemeanors, 16 white and 14 black; and in the next year there were
15 arrests for misdemeanors, 14 white and one black.[78] The general
opinion of the southerner may be judged by the answers to a
questionnaire sent out to prominent southern men in each of the
Southern States. To the question "Does crime grow less as education
increases?" there were 102, answered "yes" and 19 answered "no."[79]

One of the charges against the Negro has been his shiftlessness, both
as far as his personal industriousness is concerned, and as far as the
care of his home and things about him. Now, however, education has
increased his standards and his wants, so that since he desires to
have land, homes, churches, books, papers, and education for his
children, he will labor regularly and efficiently to supply these. The
graduates of Tuskegee Institute are kept in touch with by one of the
school officials, who reported that not 10 per cent could be found in
idleness and that only on