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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - X. The Negro Community - 43. Institutions - 4. The Negro School and Negro Education
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Chapter 43. Institutions 951
structure of the South: Negro children tend to drop out of elementary
school, partly because the family is poor and they are needed formwork,
partly because schools are so inaccessible, and partly because instruction is
so inferior. But the lack of high schools is also important: Wilkerson points
out that there was one white high school teacher for every 1 1 white seventh
grade (elementary school) pupils but only one Negro high school teacher
for every 20 Negro seventh grade (elementary) school pupils.*® Although
two-thirds of all Southern Negroes live in rural areas, only 508 of the
1,077 Negro high schools in 18 Southern states (1933-1934) were in rural
areas, and they enrolled only 21 per cent of the total number of Negro
pupils in public high schools in these states.*®
The Negro public junior college is practically nonexistent in the South,
since there were only 5 of them in 16 Southern states (1933-1934), enroll-
ing only 706 students.^® In addition, Negroes had 17 private junior
colleges, enrolling another 1,344 students. The colleges proper present a
comparable situation. Negroes constituted 25 per cent of the population 18
through 21 years of age in 17 Southern states (1930) but only 6 per cent
of the public college enrollment (i933-x934)-‘*^
Of the 1
17 Negro institutions of higher learning in the United States
(1932-1933), only 36 were public. More than half of these public colleges
were land-grant institutions—^largely stimulated and supported by the
federal government j
of the 81 private colleges, all but seven were church-
affiliated. Most of these colleges did not have the teachers and school
facilities to provide an adequate education." Before 1937, only 5 Negro
institutions offered instruction at the graduate level.’^^ After that year,
when the federal courts declared that a state must offer equal educational
opportunities to Negroes, several Southern states forced ill-equipped public
Negro colleges to assume graduate instruction. For all practical purposes,
however, it may still be claimed that only 3 or 4 Negro institutions have
real graduate instruction, and none of them offers the Ph.D. degree.
The whole Southern Negro educational structure is in a pathological
state. Lack of support, low standards, and extreme dependence on the
whites make Negro educatiop inadequate to meet the aims of citizenship,
character or vocational preparation. While illiteracy is being eliminated,
this is only in a formal sense—since children who are taught to read and
write and do arithmetic seldom make use of these abilities. Still there are
many educational opportunities for Negroes, and the situation is far better
than it was at the close of the Civil War. The concept of education for
*By 1939, the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools had awarded
Class rating to only i8 Negro colleges, and 4 Negro junior colleges. (Fred McCuistion,
Graduate Instruction for Negroes in the United States [1939], pp. 29-30.) In addition to
these, 3 public and 2 private institutions had been accredited in 1938 by the North Central
Association and the Middle States Association. In the ii states under the Southern Associa-
tion, 46 per cent of the white colleges are accredited but only 22 per cent of the Negro
colleges. (Wilkerson, 0^. p. 70.)
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