emocratic, framed the present
state constitution of Texas, and in it absolutely equal provision is
made for both the elementary and the higher education of the Negro
youth of Texas. And it is to the credit of Texas as an enlightened
state as well as fortunate for her Negro population, that in the
distribution of the magnificent school fund of the state, no
discrimination is made between the races.

The Negro public schools are doing a great work for the elevation of
the colored people. In a silent, unobtrusive way, these schools are
leavening the thought and life of the race. The status and progress of
the Negro are too commonly gauged by the deeds of the loafing and
criminal element. The honest, law-abiding Negro who has a home, is
getting a little property, has a small bank account, and is educating
his children to useful citizenship, attracts little or no attention.
But a race that has in a generation since chattel slavery gotten
property worth by reliable estimate upward of $400,000,000 has been
doing something. All of such a race are not either lazy, vicious, or
immoral. The public school is doing effective work for the Negroes of
the South in awakening in them a desire for better ways of living and
higher ideals of conduct. Much remains to be done but that already
accomplished is an earnest of better work yet to be done.

The Negro public school teacher has been more than a mere
schoolkeeper. No class of educators in any race has done more, all
things considered. The colored teacher has been a herald of
civilization to the youth of his people. His superior culture and
character have acted as a powerful stimulus to the easily roused
imagination of the colored youth, and the black boy feels, in the
presence of the black "professah," to him the embodiment of learning,
that he too can become "something." At first he does not know what
that something is, but he determines to be "somebody" and to make a
place and a standing for himself in the world. In this way the colored
school teacher is leading his race "up from slavery;" that is from the
slavery of ignorance and superstition, of intellectual and moral
inertia, of aimlessness and shiftlessness, into the freedom of
intelligence, of energy, ambition and industry. Lincoln removed the
formal yoke of a legal bondage, but the colored teacher is helping his
race to get free a second time from a bondage just as galling--the
bondage of intellectual and moral blindness and