In the larger centers of the State where there was a large Negro population the necessity of establishing schools[50] for the Negroes seems to have been better realized. Thirty-nine out of seventy-three towns and villages incorporated under the special Act for Towns and Villages, reported[51] a sufficient population for a Negro school. There were 19,879 white and 3,609 Negro pupils enrolled in the public schools of these thirty-nine towns and villages. The length of the school term was the same in the white and the Negro schools in a number of cases; but the average length was lower in the Negro schools than in the white schools. The average length of the white school was thirty-four weeks and the average length of the Negro school term was twenty-eight weeks. The average expense a pupil in these schools was 8.1 cents a day for each white pupil and 7.8 cents a day for each Negro pupil. The average attendance in the Negro schools was below that in the white schools. The average attendance of the white schools was 61.89 per cent and that of the Negro schools was 51.86 per cent of the enrollment.
The lower attendance of the Negro children may be accounted for as Asa Martin accounts for a similar condition in Kansas City.[52] In this city from 1885 to 1913 a larger per cent of the Negro than of the white children of school age attended the public schools, but the average attendance of the white children enrolled was above that of the Negro children. This he accounted for by the poverty of the Negro population. Since the Negroes were poorer as a whole than the whites, they were more poorly housed and clothed. Consequently the Negro children were more susceptible to sickness and to the disagreeable effects of inclement weather. On this account they were oftener absent from school than the white children.
The report of the State Superintendent of Schools for the year 1874 contains reports[53] from thirty-five of the urban communities which were organized under the act for cities, towns and villages. Five of these towns reported that they did not have any Negro children of school age. The thirty towns reported 4,701 Negro children, 2,379 of whom were enrolled in the public schools. Salisbury was the only town having more than sixteen Negro children for whom no school was maintained, while Bolivar and Augusta, which had in the first case eleven and in the second four Negro children of school age, reported respectively five and three Negro children in the public schools.