The committee was also asked why there was so much immorality among colored women and girls. The exhibition of the charts showing the conditions surrounding the colored public schools, particularly the Caroline and Bank Streets neighborhood and the Rogers Avenue neighborhood, are complete answers to this question. It was not difficult to see that girls who attended school among such surroundings as these could not in the very nature of the case have high ideas of virtue and morality. It was found that at least five of the colored city schools are surrounded by such conditions. Little girls and boys receive daily object lessons in prostitution, gambling, drunkenness, profanity and thieving.
Another distressing question which the committee was constantly called upon to meet was—Why is the colored jail population so large? The statistics show that about three-fourths of the population in the Baltimore jail and the Maryland Penitentiary are colored men and women—a most disgraceful showing on the part of the colored people. The committee could only admit that the undue proportion of colored criminals in the jail and the penitentiary is a reflection upon the citizenship of the colored people.
Educating a Negro is cheaper than hanging him. ]
The committee made the general plea, though, to the white men upon whom they called, that the colored children should have the opportunity as a result of their environments and the general advantages offered them, to grow up into decent citizenship. These gentlemen were shown the conditions which surrounded our schoolhouses, and readily admitted the handicap which such surroundings imposed upon little children. We were able to show them that the Colored High School, which the city has maintained for about twenty-five years, has in all of its history furnished but one inmate for the penitentiary or the jail. Those who are graduated from this school not only do not join this jail population, but they are engaged in such occupations in this community as prove their usefulness to the people with whom they are associated and of whom they are a part, and at the same time the wisdom of a liberal policy of education.
The committee was able to show another striking illustration of the value of education in presenting the history of the notorious Ike Winder, who murdered a tollgate keeper in Baltimore county. To arrest, try, imprison, recapture and execute Ike Winder cost the State two thousand dollars more than it cost to educate one of the graduates of the Colored High School. The State not only lost in this expenditure the money involved in the expense connected with the case, but lost the economic value of an educated citizen. The educated, trained graduates of the high school exert a most helpful influence in the community. Assuming that Winder, if he had graduated from the High School, would have been like the other graduates, the State lost also the moral influence of this kind of citizen.