Note 7 — Chapter VIII · The Negro and the Municipality

The following story of Athens, Georgia, told by a Northerner teaching in the South, illustrates this point. "The city of Athens was planning to inaugurate a public school system, and also wished to 'go dry.' It made a proposal to the colored voters promising that if their combined vote would carry the city, two schools should be built, of equal size and similar structure for each race. I visited Athens shortly after the two buildings were built, and I found two beautiful brick buildings very similar in all their appointments. At an interval of several years I again visited the little city and again spent an hour in the same brick school-house of the colored folk.

"At my third visit, I found my colored friends occupying a wooden structure on the edge of the city, and not only inconveniently located, but much less of a building than the one hitherto occupied. Upon inquiry I found that in the growth of the school population of the whites, it was cheaper to seize the building formerly occupied by the colored children, and to build for them a cheap wooden structure on the outskirts of the town.

"The colored school was still occupying this inadequate building at my visit this last September, 1909. A second wooden structure has been added to the colored equipment on the east side of the town."

This story of the Athenians well illustrates what will be done when the Negro counts for something politically, and also what may be undone if his value as a political asset is reduced.