[Footnote 1:  Special Report of the U.S.  Com. of Ed., 1871, p. 379.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., p. 379.]

In 1834 the legislature of Pennsylvania established a system of public schools, but the claims of the Negroes to public education were neither guaranteed nor denied.[1] The school law of 1854, however, seems to imply that the benefits of the system had always been understood to extend to colored children.[2] This measure provided that the comptrollers and directors of the several school districts of the State could establish within their respective districts separate schools for Negro and mulatto children wherever they could be so located as to accommodate twenty or more pupils.  Another provision was that wherever such schools should “be established and kept open four months in the year” the directors and comptrollers should not be compelled to admit colored pupils to any other schools of that district.  The law was interpreted to mean that wherever such accommodations were not provided the children of Negroes could attend the other schools.  Such was the case in the rural districts where a few colored children often found it pleasant and profitable to attend school with their white friends.[3] The children of Robert B. Purvis, however, were turned away from the public schools of Philadelphia on the ground that special educational facilities for them had been provided.[4] It was not until 1881 that Pennsylvania finally swept away all the distinctions of caste from her public school system.

[Footnote 1:  Purdon’s Digest of the Laws of Pa., p. 291, sections 1-23.]

[Footnote 2:  Stroud and Brightly, Purdon’s Digest, p. 1064, section 23.]

[Footnote 3:  Wickersham, History of Education in Pa., p. 253.]

[Footnote 4:  Wigham, The Antislavery Cause in America, p. 103.]

As the colored population of New Jersey was never large, there was not sufficient concentration of such persons in that State to give rise to the problems which at times confronted the benevolent people of Pennsylvania.  Great as had been the reaction, the Negroes of New Jersey never entirely lost the privilege of attending school with white students.  The New Jersey Constitution of 1844 provided that the funds for the support of the public schools should be applied for the equal benefit of all the people of that State.[1] Considered then entitled to the benefits of this fund, colored pupils were early admitted into the public schools without any social distinction.[2] This does not mean that there were no colored schools in that commonwealth.  Negroes in a few settlements like that of Springtown had their own schools.[3] Separate schools were declared illegal by an act of the General Assembly in 1881.

[Footnote 1:  Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, vol. v., p. 2604.]

[Footnote 2:  Southern Workman, vol. xxxvii., p. 390.]