While a great many of these schools are kept going through the donations of money by Northern white individuals and organizations as well as by the aid of several state appropriations, the majority of them are supported and run by Colored people themselves. “The African Methodist Episcopal Church is raising each year about $500,000 for the support of its twenty colleges and normal schools. The Negro Baptists are giving support to about 110 colleges and academies.” All together there are about 175 such schools supported by different Colored church denominations that raise each year for this purpose about two million dollars. The properties of these schools thus supported are worth about two million five hundred thousand dollars. (Ref: Works Negro Year Book 1918-1919 edition page 286.)
Among the foremost Colored leaders in industrial education are J. B. Dudley, Winston-Salem, N. C., W. J. Edwards, Snow Hill, Ala., J. M. Gandy, Petersburg, Va., W. H. Goler, Salisbury, N. C., W. J. Hale, Nashville, Tenn., J. R. E. Lee, Kansas City, Mo., E. A. Long, Cambria, Va., R. R. Moton, Tuskegee, Ala., J. S. Russell, Lawrenceville, Va., Emmett J. Scott, Washington, D.C., R. R. Wright, Sr., Savannah, Ga.
When it is taken into consideration that in 1910, just 47 years after their freedom was received, there were less than three million illiterate Negroes in America out of their population of ten million, it will be seen that the Colored people under most unfavorable circumstances that have always existed have made very good strides along educational lines. Rural education among them began as early as 1861 when the first real day school was started near Fortress Monroe, Va., by the American Missionary Association. That school, which was taught by Miss Mary S. Peake, a Colored teacher, was the forrunner of Negro rural school education in the South as well as the pioneer site of the present Hampton Institute. The movement continued to grow and spread so rapidly that in 1870 through the assistance of the Freedman’s Bureau, there had been established in different parts of the South over four thousand common schools.
While it is true that the majority of the Southern white people apposed the education of the Negro, there were many of the best thinking among them who did everything possible to elevate their Colored population. Together with the hundreds of Northern white people (mostly of the Quaker and Puritan stocks) who willingly gave their times, fortunes and in many cases their lives for this cause, different white church denominations and other organizations spent large sums of money for the establishment of schools and the support of teachers for the work. As the outgrowth of that early start there are today in just the Southern States alone over two million Colored children attending public schools that are being taught by nearly thirty-seven thousand Colored teachers. (Ref: Work Negro Year Book, 1918-1919 edition, page 269.)