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(1944) [MARC] Author: Gunnar Myrdal
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Note: Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.

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Chapter 41. The Neoro School 903
But in appraising the situation, it is equally important to recognize that
there are dissimilarities in the level of educational facilities offered Negroes,
and that there is a definite tendency upward.
This trend is gaining momentum and is pushed not only by Northern
philanthropy and the intervention of federal agencies, but also by the
growing force of Southern liberalism.* The rising educational level of the
whites in the region gives an increasing basis for understanding the necessity
of doing something for Negro education. The skillful strategy of the
N.A.A.C.P. is probably going to enforce a raise in the wages of Southern
Negro teachers over the next decade and will, if it does not open the door
of the graduate schools to Negroes, at least compel the Southern states to
than many other school buildings in the region. The students were in all age groups from 6
to 7 years upward to i6 to 17. There was also an imbecile man of about 20 staying on as
a steady student veteran. (The lack of institutions for old Negro mental defectives makes
the great majority of them stay in their homes, and the homes find it often convenient to
send them to school. There they are, of course, a great danger from several viewpoints.)
The teacher, a sickly girl about 20 years old, looked shy and full of fear} she said she had
had high school training.
The students seemed to enjoy the visit and it was easy to establish a human contact with
them. No one could tell who was President of the United States or even what the President
was. Only one of the older students knew, or thought he knew, of Booker T. Washington.
He said that Washington was “a big white man,” and intimated that he might be the
President of the United States. This student, obviously a naturally very bright boy, was the
only one who knew anything about Europe and England} they were “beyond the Atlantic,”
he informed me, but he thought that Europe was in England. No one had ever heard about
Walter White, John Hope, Du Bois, or Moton. No one had heard of the N.A.A.C.P. One
boy identified Carver as a “colored man who makes medicine.” Several could identify Joe
Louis, Ella Fitzgerald, and Henry Armstrong. Asked if they knew what the Constitution
of the United States was and what it meant to them, all remained in solemn silence, until
the bright boy helped us out, informing us that it was a “newspaper in Atlanta.”
When telling such a horror story it must, at once, be added that it is not typical, though
a large portion of rural Negro schools are at, or near, this cultural level. But it is remark-
able, and a significant characteristic of the whole system, that it can exist even as an
isolated case. It should also be said that there are a few white schools in some regions of the
South which do not reach much higher. I recollect that some white school children in
Louisiana believed that Huey Long was still living (autumn, 1938) and was the President
of the United States.
A further reflection is that the usual measures of school efliciency (see Chapter 43,
Section 4) are inadequate when the problem is to sound the bottom of ignorance in many
Negro schools.
*As an example of what can now be publicly stated in the South concerning the low
existing level of Negro educational facilities and the need for improved ones, we may note
the excellent Louisiana Educational Survey. Charles S. Johnson and Associates prepared the
monograph on the Negro public schools, and his report is summarized in popular form in
the “summary report” prepared by Carleton Washburne {Louisiana Looks at Its Schools
[1942]). Seldom has such an excellent survey appeared regarding the schools of any state,
and the fact that this survey emanates from one of the Deep Southern .states is a most
hopeful sign.

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