known that we are helping the white children
of Louisiana as being the more destitute from the fact of their
unwillingness to attend mixed schools."

* To administer the fund bequeathed by George Peabody of
Massachusetts to promote education in the Southern States.
See "The New South", by Holland Thompson (in "The Chronicles
of America").

As was to be expected, the whites criticized the attitude of the school
officials, disapproved of the attempts made in the schools to teach
the children radical ideas, and objected to the contents of the history
texts and the "Freedmen's Readers." A white school board in Mississippi,
by advertising for a Democratic teacher for a Negro school, drew the
fire of a radical editor who inquired: "What is the motive by which this
call for a 'competent Democratic teacher' is prompted? The most damning
that has ever moved the heart of man. It is to use the vote and action
of a human being as a means by which to enslave him. The treachery and
villainy of these rebels stands without parallel in the history of men."

A Negro politician has left this account of a radical recitation in a
Florida Negro school:

After finishing the arithmetic lesson they must next go through the
catechism:

"Who is the 'Publican Government of the State of Florida?" Answer:
"Governor Starns."

"Who made him Governor?" Answer: "The colored people."

"Who is trying to get him out of his seat?" Answer: "The Democrats,
Conover, and some white and black Liberal Republicans."

"What should the colored people do with the men who is trying to get
Governor Starns out of his seat?" Answer: "They should kill them."....

This was done that the patrons, some of whom could not read, would be
impressed by the expressions of their children, and would be ready
to put any one to death who would come out into the country and say
anything against Governor Starns.

The native white teachers soon dropped out of Negro schools, and those
from the North met with the same social persecution as the white church
workers. The White League and Ku Klux Klan drove off obnoxious teachers,
whipped some, burned Negro schoolhouses, and in various other ways
manifested the reaction which was rousing the whites against Negro
schools.

The several agencies working for Negro education gave some training to
hundreds of thousands of blacks, but the whites asserted that, like the
church work, it was based on a wrong spirit