cluded
from any of the common schools supported by taxes levied alike on
whites and blacks, and governed by officers elected by the vote of
colored as well as white voters.

But if in the judgment of your honorable body common schools are not
thus common to all, then we earnestly pray you to recommend to the
Legislature such action as shall cause the Board of Education of this
city to erect at least two well-appointed modern grammar schools for
colored children on suitable sites, in respectable localities, so that
the attendance of colored children may be increased and their minds be
elevated in like manner as the happy experience of the honorable Board
of Education has been in the matter of white children.

In addition to the excellent impulse to colored youth which these new
grammar schools would give, they will have the additional argument of
actual economy; the children will be taught with far less expense in
two such schoolhouses than in the half dozen hovels into which they
are now driven. It is a costly piece of injustice which educates the
white scholar in a palace at $10 per year and the colored pupil in a
hovel at $17 or $18 per annum.

Taxes, etc., of colored population of the city.

No proposition can be more reasonable than that they who pay taxes for
schools and schoolhouses should be provided with schools and
schoolhouses. The colored population of this city, in proportion to
their numbers, pay their full share of the general and therefore of
the school taxes. There are about nine thousand adults of both sexes;
of these over three thousand are householders, rent-payers, and
therefore tax-payers, in that sense of the word in which owners make
tax-payers of their poor tenants. The colored laboring man, with an
income of $200 a year, who pays $72 per year for a room and bedroom,
is really in proportion to his means a larger tax-payer than the
millionaire whose tax rate is thousands of dollars. But directly,
also, do the colored people pay taxes. From examinations carefully
made, the undersigned affirm that there are in the city at least
1,000 colored persons who own and pay taxes on real estate.

Taxed real estate in the city of New York owned
by colored persons $1,400,000
Untaxed by colored persons (churches) 250,000
Personal estate 710,000
Money in savings banks 1,121,000