The undersigned enter their solemn protest against this unjust
treatment of colored children. They believe with the experience of
Massachusetts, and especially the recent experience of Boston before
them, there is no sound reason why colored children shall be excluded
from any of the common schools supported by taxes levied alike on
whites and blacks, and governed by officers elected by the vote of
colored as well as white voters.
But if in the judgment of your honorable body common schools are not
thus common to all, then we earnestly pray you to recommend to the
Legislature such action as shall cause the Board of Education of this
city to erect at least two well-appointed modern grammar schools for
colored children on suitable sites, in respectable localities, so that
the attendance of colored children may be increased and their minds be
elevated in like manner as the happy experience of the honorable Board
of Education has been in the matter of white children.
In addition to the excellent impulse to colored youth which these new
grammar schools would give, they will have the additional argument of
actual economy; the children will be taught with far less expense in
two such schoolhouses than in the half dozen hovels into which they
are now driven. It is a costly piece of injustice which educates the
white scholar in a palace at $10 per year and the colored pupil in a
hovel at $17 or $18 per annum.
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