fund created by John F. Slater, of Connecticut. Through the rest
of the century these boards, in close cooperation, studied and relieved
the educational necessities of the South. In 1901 the men who directed
them organized a Southern Educational Board for the propagation of
knowledge, while in 1903 Congress incorporated a General Education
Board, to which John D. Rockefeller gave many millions for the
subsidizing of educational attempts.

The negro advanced in literacy under the pressure of the new influences.
In 1880 seventy per cent of the American negroes over ten years old were
illiterate, but the proportion was reduced in the next ten years to
fifty-seven per cent; to forty-five per cent by 1900; and to thirty per
cent by 1910. As the negro advanced, his own leaders, as well as his
white friends, differed in the status to which they would raise him and
in the methods to be pursued. Some of his ablest representatives, W.E.B.
DuBois among them, resented the discrimination and disfranchisement from
which they suffered, and insisted upon equality as a preliminary.
Others, like Booker T. Washington, who founded a notable trade school in
Alabama in 1881, worried little over discrimination, and hoped to solve
their problem through common and technical education which might lead
the race to self-respect and independence.

Friction increased between the races at the South after emancipation.
Freedom and political pressure demoralized many of the negroes, whose
new feeling of independence exasperated many of the whites. Southern
society still possessed many border traits. Men went armed and fought on
slight provocation. The duel and the public assault aroused little
serious criticism even in the eighties, and the freedmen lived in a
society in which self-restraint had never been the dominant virtue. In
Alabama, in 1880, the assessed value of guns, dirks, and pistols was
nearly twice that of the libraries and five times that of the farm
implements of the State. The distribution of the races varied
exceedingly, from the Black Belt, where in the Yazoo bottom lands the
negroes outnumbered the whites fifteen or more to one, to the uplands
and mountains, where the proportions were reversed. But everywhere the
less reputable of both races retarded society by their excesses.

In spite of its unsolvable race problem the South was reviving in the
eighties and was changing under the influence of the industrial
revolution. Northern ca