"Dog House" Education

Abstract

We had been driving for an hour over the red clay roads of Crawford County, Georgia, taking pictures of school The Georgia law says that there shall be but equal educational facilities provided from the public funds for the children of the two races. As to the separate we were discovering sharp and definite evidence; as for the equal. . . . We had just taken photograph of fine, brick school on hill with tall columns and shrubbery and little white children swinging and see-sawing in play-yard. We dropped down tortuous road from the brow of the hill and skidded around few curves as we approached the bare and raineroded gully. A dingy cracker-box of building stood in the clearing. We could see through the irregular openings that served for door and windows rows of colored children of all sizes jammed together on long backless benches without desks of any kind. The only teacher was literally barking at the children and every now and then they seemed to yelp in return. My friend turned to me and smiled cynically a veritable house!. . . Doghouse education! . . . I looked and listened at this ramshackled kennel of children and in my mind's eye I saw the hillsides and gullies of Tennessee and the Carolinas, of Alabama and Mississippi, of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas dotted with these tumble-down educational dog houses. Through my brain there burned the facts that 80 per cent of the 11,891,143 Negroes in the United States live in 15 of these Southern states where school systems are maintained and that of the 24,079 Negro schools in the entire country 64 per cent are one-teacher schools, 18.8 per cent are two-teacher schools, making 82.6 per cent of all Negro schools either of -the oneor two-teacher type. If you throw in the three-teacher schools, you have 93 per cent of all Negro educational institutions. I knew, too, that nearly three-fourths of all Negro children never advance beyond the fourth grade. Veritably, the education of Little Black Sambo was taking place in the dog house down in the gully while up on the hill the brick building with the tall fine columns and the playground was shaping the minds and souls of white children. At home that night I read in the Pittsburgh Courier Dr. Dubois' statement of our plight: In industry we are labor reservoir, fitfully employed and paid wage below subsistence; in agriculture we are largely disenfranchised peons; in public education we tend to be disinherited illiterates; in higher education we are the parasites of reluctant and hesitant philanthropy. It is all very nice and full of sweetness and light to prate about reorganization and redirection, to play fondly with the wishful thinking of the