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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 947
single room. Where Negroes are a small element in the population, Negro
school houses may be far apart (cases have been reported where an elemen-
tary school child has had to travel up to eighteen miles every day). The
authorities are very discriminatory in providing bus services for Negro
pupils.® School buses are generally provided for rural whites, but are rarely
provided for Negroes. Some Negro families have to pay for private bus
service, and others board their children in town.®® The alternative Is not to
go to school at all, an alternative followed by some discouraged Negro
families. There is a special need for school bus service in rural areas, since
adequate schools cannot be paid for unless they serve many children resid-
ing over a wide area. But the ^^consolidation of schools” movement has
hardly begun for rural Negro schools in the South, although it is well-
developed for the white schools.
Another handicap of a financial nature is that Negro children must some-
times provide all their own books and other school supplies 5
white children
get these things free. The content of the elementary education in the rural
South is almost unbelievably poor in the eyes of the outsider; a poorly
trained^* and poorly paid‘s Negro woman^ must control and teach a group
of children from a poor and uncultured home background, in an over-
crowded,® dilapidated,^ one-room® school house, where she must perform
at least some of the janitorial and administrative duties. She is also subject
to unusual outside pressure.^
The Negro school in the rural South is kept open only about seven
‘While Negroes constituted 28 per cent of the pupils enrolled in the public schools of
10 Southern states (1935-1936) and were 34 per cent of the rural-farm population aged
5 to 17 (1930), they received only 3 per cent of the total expenditures for transportation
(1935-1936). (Compiled from a variety of government reports by Wilkerson, of, cit,, p. 19.)
^ See Chapter 14, Section 4.
* See Chapter 15, Section 3.
® Of all teachers in public elementary and secondary schools in the 1 8 Southern states in
1935-1936, 80.6 per cent were women. (Blose and Caliver, of, cit,, p. 12.)
•The average pupil load per teacher in 18 Southern states in 1933-1934 was 43 for
Negroes and 34 for whites. {Biennial Survey of Education: 1932-1 gs4i PP* 64-65, and
93-94 and 99 5
compiled by Wilkerson, of, cit.^ p. 21.)
*The average value of school property in 10 Southern states in 1935-1936 was $36 per
Negro pupil and $183 per white pupil. (Compiled from various government publications
by Wilkerson, of, cit,y p. 31.)
The literature is replete with descriptions of how dilapidated the rural Negro school
houses are: see, for example, ibid,y pp. 28-29$ Ambrose Caliver, Rural Elementary Educa-
tion among Negroes under Jeanes Sufervising Teachers^ U. S. Office of Education, Bulletin
No. 5, (1933)} John G. Van Deusen, The Black Man in White America (1938), pp.
164-166.
^
Sixty-five per cent of all the Negro public schools in Louisiana are one-teacher schools,
and another 27 per cent are two- or three-teacher schools (Charles S. Johnson^ “The Negro
Public Schools,” p. 43).
**
See Chapter 40, Section 1,
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