year 1828 a separate school for colored children was established at
Providence and placed in charge of a teacher receiving a salary of
$400 per annum.[1] A decade later another such school was opened on
Pond Street in the same city. About this time the school law of Rhode
Island was modified so as to make it a little more favorable to the
people of color. The State temporarily adopted a rule by which the
school fund was thereafter not distributed, as formerly, according
to the number of inhabitants below the age of sixteen. It was to be
apportioned, thereafter, according to the number of white persons
under the age of ten years, "together with five-fourteenths of the
said [colored] population between the ages of ten and twenty-four
years." This law remained in force between the years 1832 and 1845.
Under the new system these schools seemingly made progress. In 1841
they were no longer giving the mere essentials of reading and writing,
but combined the instruction of both the grammar and the primary
grades.[2]

[Footnote 1: Stockwell, _Hist. of Education in R.I_., p. 169.]

[Footnote 2: Stockwell, _Hist. of Education in R.I_., p. 51.]

Thereafter Rhode Island had to pass through the intense antislavery
struggle which had for its ultimate aim both the freedom of the Negro
and the democratization of the public schools. Petitions were sent to
the legislature, and appeals were made to representatives asking for
a repeal of those laws which permitted the segregation of the colored
children in the public schools. But intense as this agitation became,
and urgently as it was put before the public, it failed to gain
sufficient momentum to break down the barriers prior to 1866 when the
legislature of Rhode Island passed an act abolishing separate schools
for Negroes.[1]

[Footnote 1: _Public Laws of the State of Rhode Island_, 1865-66, p.
49.]

Prior to the reactionary movement the schools of Connecticut were,
like most others in New England at that time, open alike to black and
white. It seems, too, that colored children were well received and
instructed as thoroughly as their white friends. But in 1830, whether
on account of the increasing race prejudice or the desire to do for
themselves, the colored people of Hartford presented to the School
Society of that city a petition that a separate school for persons of
color be established with a part of the public school fund which might
be apportioned to them according to their