direct experience and observation have
had to do with the colored schools and teachers of a single city of
sixty to eighty thousand people, nearly one-half colored, and the
counties and towns adjacent. These I have followed very closely for
over twenty-five years. I can testify positively that there has been a
steady raising of the standards of qualifications and proficiency with
regard both to intellectual and moral attainments among the teachers
of colored schools, and in this I shall be borne out by the testimony
of superintendents and school officers, as well as by all observing
people of these communities. In many cases teachers and schools of
this class have attained an enviable reputation and are often
mentioned as models of excellence in many ways.

The process of growth here, as elsewhere, has been one of the
"survival of the fittest," the ill-trained, inefficient teachers
gradually giving place to the better qualified, more capable class.
The initial influence in this line of succession dates back but little
more than thirty years, to the founding of "mission" schools at
centres of influence throughout the South; "a handful of corn on the
top of the mountain" from which has come the wide-spreading harvests
of the present. It is a statement well within the facts that nine out
of ten of the colored schools of all grades in the South are taught by
those who had their training in these mission schools, or else by
teachers who owe their education to those of their own race who were
so trained. No more powerful or far-reaching influence was ever set in
operation than that which had its origin in the cabin where taught the
first humble missionary among the people freed by the war. The whole
power and potency of all that has followed was represented in that
first despised and humble effort.

From that day to this seems a long call. The passage has been made
almost unobserved, like the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. It now
not unfrequently happens that a colored public school stands
accredited in a community with excellencies to distinguish it as an
example worthy of imitation. Such is the colored high school in the
city of my direct observation, in the two respects of self-control and
government of its pupils, and in its movement toward a collection of
miscellaneous books for a school library--excellencies not ascribed,
so far as I know, in anything like the same measure to any other
public school. It is perhaps n