Unfortunately this reaction extended also to education.  Appropriations to public schools for Negroes diminished from year to year and when there appeared practical leaders with, their sane plan for industrial education the South ignorantly accepted this scheme as a desirable subterfuge for seeming to support Negro education and at the same time directing the development of the blacks in such a way that they would never become the competitors of the white people.  This was not these educators’ idea but the South so understood it and in effecting the readjustment, practically left the Negroes out of the pale of the public school systems.  Consequently, there has been added to the Negroes’ misfortunes, in the South, that of being unable to obtain liberal education at public expense, although they themselves, as the largest consumers in some parts, pay most of the taxes appropriated to the support of schools for the youth of the other race.[15]

The South, moreover, has adopted the policy of a more general intimidation of the Negroes to keep them down.  The lynching of the blacks, at first for assaults on white women and later for almost any offense, has rapidly developed as an institution.  Within the past fifty years [16] there have been lynched in the South about 4,000 Negroes, many of whom have been publicly burned in the daytime to attract crowds that usually enjoy such feats as the tourney of the Middle Ages.  Negroes who have the courage to protest against this barbarism have too often been subjected to indignities and in some cases forced to leave their communities or suffer the fate of those in behalf of whom they speak.  These crimes of white men were at first kept secret but during the last two generations the culprits have become known as heroes, so popular has it been to murder Negroes.  It has often been discovered also that the officers of these communities take part in these crimes and the worst of all is that politicians like Tillman, Blease and Vardaman glory in recounting the noble deeds of those who deserve so well of their countrymen for making the soil red with the Negroes’ blood rather than permit the much feared Africanization of southern institutions.[17]

In this harassing situation the Negro has hoped that the North would interfere in his behalf, but, with the reactionary Supreme Court of the United States interpreting this hostile legislation as constitutional in conformity with the demands of prejudiced public opinion, and with the leaders of the North inclined to take the view that after all the factions in the South must be left alone to fight it out, there has been nothing to be expected from without.  Matters too have been rendered much worse because the leaders of the very party recently abandoning the freedmen to their fate, aggravated the critical situation by first setting the Negroes against their former masters, whom they were taught to regard as their worst enemies whether they were or not.