The State of Alabama has 104,150 colored pupils enrolled in the public schools.  It pays an average of $25.97 per month to nearly 2,000 colored teachers, and expends altogether $198,221 upon these colored schools.  Georgia has 49 per cent. of its negro school population enrolled; that is, 119,248.  In 1871, this State had 6,664 only in all public and private colored schools.  Its teachers of this race now number 2,272. 40,909 colored children are enrolled in Louisiana, with 672 negro teachers, who receive an average of $23.73 per month.

Mississippi had last year 154,430 colored scholars.  It employed 3,124 colored teachers who receive an average of $28.73 per month.  North Carolina enrolled, in 1886, 117,562 colored pupils, employed 2,016 teachers of the same race, paying them about the same as its white teachers, $23.38 per month.  The colored school population of Tennessee numbers 158,450, of whom 84,624 are enrolled in her 1,563 common schools, which are taught by 1,621 teachers of the same nationality.  A county superintendent voluntarily adds:  “I should do our colored teachers an injustice not to speak of them.  Most of them are earnest, zealous workers, doing all in their power for their race.”

Turning now to Texas we find that this State has nearly doubled its enrollment of colored pupils in three years, which now number 62,040, with 1,696 licensed colored teachers who receive on an average, $41.73 per month.  Virginia has 111,114 out of a school population of 265,249 with 1,734 colored teachers who receive $28.65 per month.

That is, in eight representative States there are eight hundred thousand colored pupils who are now being trained by over fifteen thousand teachers of the same race.  Now the simple but grave question that every Christian patriot ought to ask himself is, “What kind of teachers are these, and where are they to come from in the future?” I asked that question of a gentleman who of all others ought to be able to answer it correctly and he replied, “Nine-tenths of these teachers come from the missionary schools, and of these nine-tenths, more than one-half come from the institutions of the American Missionary Association.”  Now we can understand the truthfulness of the testimony of the Rev. J.L.M.  Curry, D.D., the distinguished agent of the Peabody Fund, who says:  “The most that {99} has been done at the South for the education of the negroes has been done by the Congregationalists.  The American Missionary Association and those allied to it have been the chief agency, so far as benevolent effort is concerned, in diffusing right notions of religion, and in carrying education to the darkened mind of the negro.”