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[CHAPTER 38]
[Page 1]
Education, 1900-1940
When the great Negro educator, Booker T. Washington was at the heights of his popularity, he came to New Orleans at the turn of the present century, and delivered a public speech. At one point in his speech he turned to the Negroes who had crowded the building to hear him, and advised them to stick to the three P’s for their economic salvation--preach, plow, and plant cotton. Many of his hearers--whose free colored ancestors had been wealthy and highly educated a century before Washington was born—arose from their seats in anger, and walked out of the building. Nevertheless, the post-Reconstruction trend urging Negroes back to the land and adopting for them a type of “industrial” training as advocated by Washington were patterns which persisted in matters of education for many decades after.
But though trends towards “industrial” training of Negroes became more apparent, Negro education suffered neglect for a long period of time after the passing of Reconstruction. Curry’s warning in the Constitutional Convention of 1898 that Negro and white society were inextricably bound up together, received little notice at the hands of school officials who represented the views of an overwhelming Democratic majority. The convention before which Curry had voiced his warning had specified that all property owners should pay a poll-tax of one dollar each year on a prerequisite for voting, and the tax fell upon Negro and white property owners alike. But while it was to be used in the interest of public education, the State officials who had been entrusted
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