It is now being recognized in every Southern State that free government is based upon a public common-school system.  It has taken two decades to incorporate this public school policy upon Southern institutions, but it has now the evidence of permanency and it is offering to Christian philanthropy an unparalleled opportunity, such as God seldom gives to any people, and one which should rally the churches as never before in support of the great enterprises of the American Missionary Association.

There has been forced upon the New South the conclusion that the best way to increase its wealth is to increase the number of educated, intelligent producers, and with this conclusion it realizes that it cannot afford to let two million colored children grow up in hopeless illiteracy.  It perceives that its very institutions will be imperiled by such a condition.  I have through personal interviews with leading educators in a recent trip through the South, by correspondence and by a careful examination of documents and reports from nearly all the Southern States, undertaken to find just what is being done at the present time in the public colored schools of the South.

The significance of this public school movement will be understood when it is remembered that the acceptance of the idea that the constitution of a free State rests on universal education, marks a great change in theory; that this has come against the opinions of the old Bourbon party, which never forgets, and, it is to be feared, never learns; whose political economy is represented by the expression, “keep the negro down”; which regards his enfranchisment as a political outrage and his education as a mistake and a failure; that it has risen in the face of the poverty of the South and in the midst of its most intense prejudices.  For when the new educational movement began, the property and a large part of the intelligence belonged to the opponents of the new educational policy, but now, in the words of a prominent Southern gentleman:  “The conviction has become very deep that in the altered condition of our people the only hope left us is to do all that can be done towards elevating the masses irrespective of race.”  This certainly represents a tremendous transformation.  Without stopping to trace the causes that produced it, or even the large place the American Missionary Association work has in it, let me simply quote from {98} a Southern Christian man, whose sympathies are full of prejudice against the North, but who has wakened with the awakening of the New South.

Writing of the educational movement, in a recent book, he says:  “Not a few of the best men and women of the North have come to teach in these institutions for colored youth:  their motives and their work have not always been understood, but the Great Day will make manifest how they have been constrained by the love of Christ, to spend years in work which has had many discouragements.” (’The New South’ by J.C.C.  Newton.) A few statistics may give some general idea of the extent of this movement.