propriation as I understand the bill, is to be an extra appropriation. The CHAIRMAN. It is to be extra?

General FRIES. It is to be a separate appropriation.

The CHAIRMAN. It would allow, then, $303,000,000, would it? General FRIES. Yes. Now, I was a school teacher for 4 years before I went to West Point. During those 4 years I taught a total of nearly 3 years' school, some 22 months. I have the utmost sympathy for the school teachers. I decided in those days I was not going to be a school teacher any longer, because all I got was $35 a month. However, that has been very thoroughly remedied in most cases. That is all I have to submit.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, General Fries.

Did Dr. Alexander come in?

(No response.)

The CHAIRMAN. Congressman Sparkman of Alabama? (No response.)

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Charles H. Houston, general counsel, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People?

(No response.)

The CHAIRMAN. Jere A. Wells, county superintendent of schools, Fulton County, Ga.?

(No response.)

The CHAIRMAN. W. P. King, executive secretary, Kentucky Education Association?

Mr. KING. Mr. Chairman, I have no prepared statement. Our State Department of education has prepared and will file with the committee a statement which covers the points which they desire to make in connection with this legislation.

The CHAIRMAN. We will be glad to have it, Mr. King, and it will be included in the record if it gets here in 2 or 3 days.

Mr. KING. All right.

(The statement referred to follows:)

KENTUCKY EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, INC.,

Louisville, Ky., May 2, 1941.

United States Senate, Washington, D. C.

Hon. ELBERT D. THOMAS,

DEAR SENATOR THOMAS: I am enclosing here for insertion in the records of the hearing of the subcommittee of the Senate Education and Labor Committee on S. 1313 a statement from our State Department of Education. I should like to add to that statement the following observation:

One of the greatest dangers of the inequality of educational opportunity in our State lies in the fact that certain localities have been highly underprivileged for several generations and there has grown up in those communities on the part of a great many of the citizens the idea that the more fortunate parts of the State are arrayed against them. Thus they interpret the failure of the State to provide adequate educational facilities as just another means of "keeping them down." They have come to look upon themselves as "underdogs" and to feel that the hand of authority in the State is set against them.

This state of public opinion in any large area affords fertile ground for the sowing of the seeds of dissension and for the encouragement of dissatisfaction with the Government. It is in just such areas as these that the Communists and other groups seek to establish their ideologies. Having for generations been deprived of adequate training these communities become twisted in their processes of thinking and become good material for those who would undermine our democracy.

While in Washington recently I heard it said time and time again that no appropriation should be made ahead of that which would lead to the production of materials for defense.

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America is going to need appropriations for defense for democracy within its own gates in the years which are not far ahead and a wise statesmanship, it seems to me, can easily see that the education of citizenry in all these spots where they unquestionably have been neglected is one of the most important factors in our whole defense program.

Federal aid to education is Federal aid to the strengthening of the bulwarks of democracy. This country is no stronger than these weak spots permit it to be. These unfortunate sectors of our Nation need a rallying point and that rallying point may well be the privilege of a culture which will lift them from a consciousness of inferiority to a realization of the importance and dignity of their own personalities.

Cordially,

STATEMENT FROM KENTUCKY DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

April 26, 1941.

There is urgently needed in the Commonwealth of Kentucky $6,971,930 annually to eliminate educational inequalities in the elementary and secondary schools of the State: $92,488 to increase the salaries for Negro teachers made necessary through recent Federal court decisions, and $529,400 annually to provide educational facilities and additional teachers in industrial and military defense areas.

Local tax sources have been exhausted in the majority of the school districts in this State and the only salvation is Federal aid.

The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Alexander, please.

STATEMENT OF DR. WILL W. ALEXANDER, ASSISTANT TO THE FEDERAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATOR, FEDERAL SECURITY AGENCY

The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Alexander, for the record, will you state your name?

Dr. ALEXANDER. I am Will W. Alexander.

The CHAIRMAN. Your address and title, please.

Dr. ALEXANDER. I am the vice president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, with offices at 4901 Ellis Avenue, Chicago.

The CHAIRMAN. Please proceed, Doctor.

Dr. ALEXANDER. I am not quite clear as to what new light I can throw on this subject, Senator Thomas. I suspect you have the figures and statistics on these various groups that are involved. However, I will say a word about the general educational system in the South.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Doctor. For your benefit, we have heard such persons as Dr. Reeves, who has, of course, handled the problem in a big way, and I think that the committee has received the statistical information from the departments of Government which would be interested in this question.

Dr. ALEXANDER. The general situation in the South is that we are producing the surplus children for the Nation, and those children are being born and reared in those areas where available resources for their education, for the protection of their health and welfare, are the most meager. The resources are the most meager and the population is largest.

There has been, for a number of years, whenever opportunity presented, a large migration from that area. When the automobile industry developed in Detroit, thousands of these people migrated to Detroit. We will probably come to a time in the national-defense effort when

the last reservoir of labor will be in those rural areas. Therefore, from the standpoint of national emergency and long-time national welfare, that reservoir of surplus population bears a tremendously important relation to the future of the Nation.

One of the things that we are finding in thinking about labor for national defense is not only the lack of general education of the children in many of these rural areas, but particularly the lack of skills, the lack of agencies for the development of skills, from among these people. That aspect in the neglect of their education is more serious than the purely academic phases of education. They are the least skilled people in America, and I am inclined to think the whites are the least skilled white people in the world. This is due in part to the fact that there are in the States involved almost no facilities for training for skilled work. Forty percent of all of the Stateowned equipment for the training in trades and industries in the United States at high-school level is in the State of New York; California follows as a close second, I think, and Ohio, and a few of the others. The larger the surplus labor supply the smaller seems to be the opportunity for training.

We have recently been able to get, through the N. Y. A., the addition of 1,000 rural shops in connection with rural high schools where elementary training can be given. This is helpful and should be greatly expanded.

The CHAIRMAN. Doctor, May I interrupt you there? Where the N. Y. A. has gone in, has it not cost the Government very much more money for this technical training than it would have cost for our regular school organizations if they had been able to expand and carry on? Has it not been greater per pupil, for example?

Dr. ALEXANDER. The N. Y. A. has gone in, in two different ways. The. N. Y. A. has gone in with its own shops and put on its own work program, but it has also made a very large contribution in providing the shop buildings in connection with the schools. The schools have been very much helped by the N. Y. A. in getting this equipment. They could not have gotten it in any other way. The comparison between the cost of training in the schools and the cost to the N. Y. A. work expense is not quite fair. I do not know what the figures are. The N. Y. A. is trying to give employment to these unemployed youths, which is a different kind of thing from what is done by the schools. They are also now giving a very full health program. that the services are not altogether comparable.

There is no solution of this problem of adequate educational facilities for the South except some sort of an equalization fund. Somebody has already informed you, I suppose, that if the State of Mississippi spent its entire income from taxes on its educational system it would not be up to what the standards of education ought to be. It is a question of poverty.

I do not know that there is any more dramatic or fine chapter in American history than the story of the development of the public educational system in the South after the Civil War. Instinctively our people said, "If we begin a new civilization we have got to build it on an educational system that will reach out to all of the people." I think nobody could challenge the fact that our greatest leaders in the South since the Civil War bave been the educational leaders who sacrificed themselves in the attempt to give our people the fundamental

training they need in order to deal with their problems. Yet it is a vicious circle. The economic system has not been able to support it and our economic situation cannot be improved without better education.

The States have within their resources been generous in the support of education.

This was the move of the common people in the South, once they were out from under slavery, to solve their problem. They believed in education.

We have not made the wisest use of our resources. We have mined away our land, we have not done all we could have done for ourselves economically, and the lack of educational development of our people. is largely responsible for that.

I have some quarrel with education as it has been done. I remember going down with the trustees of the Rosenwald Foundation to take a look at some of the 6,000 schools that Mr. Rosenwald helped build in rural areas. We started north from New Orleans and came to a school that the Rosenwald Foundation had helped to build. Without any announcement we went in to see what was going on. A retarded Negro boy was trying to read. He was reading in a third reader. He was 16 years old. The textbook had been written in Boston, and it was about the robins coming in the spring. He would read it to the point as to when the robins come, and the teacher and he would say "in the fall," she would try to make him say "in the spring." Well, the robins do come to Louisiana in the fall.

The CHAIRMAN. You say the Negro boy was retarded, or the teacher was retarded?

Dr. ALEXANDER. They were both retarded.

I think what was worse, the educational system was not dealing with the life of the people. We need more money for education, but our people need education of a more vital type. In Farm Security Administration we helped to reorganize the agriculture in Coffee County, Ala. It was the county that had built a monument to the boll weevil for forcing them to give up cotton, and then went back to cotton when it got to 20 cents a pound.

We attempted to reorganize the agriculture of the whole county on the basis of the sound use of the land. The county superintendent got an idea that what went on in the school ought to be directly related to what was going on in the reorganization of the land—agriculture. He rewrote his arithmetic, and the arithmetic that was taught in that school had to do with farm accounts.

"If your father borrows $200 to finance his crop and pays back $230 in the fall, how much interest does he pay?"

The whole curriculum was reorganized in this way.

We need a more realistic type of education in those rural areas that would teach these children the things that they have to deal with. Then, of course, you have in the South two systems of educationa system for whites and a system for colored. There are some very interesting things about that. One of them is that in many of the states the public school system, as it now exists, was set up under the reconstruction legislatures. These legislatures that were pretty heavily loaded with Negro representation, and it was those legislatures that established the dual school system. This is very expensive.

If the white schools are backward, the Negro schools are vastly more backward. In many areas in the black sections, where the colored population is the largest, there are few schoolhouses. The schools are conducted in churches or in abandoned buildings of other types. The resources for the development of adequately trained Negro teachers are meager. Yet, in spite of what seems to be backwardness and slowness, the Southern States are now putting into higher education for Negroes more money from taxes than the total amount put into the private schools, which, in the early days, were the only schools for Negroes in the South.

So that the facilities for the training of these Negro teachers are very slowly developing, but the situation regarding the buildings is still very backward. High-school buildings have been very slow and difficult to get, although they are coming slowly.

There is a very marked difference between the amounts paid to Negro teachers and white teachers. In Alabama the amount paid to white teachers, the average amount is $827 a year, and Negro teachers $393. In Arkansas it is $620 as against $367. In Florida it is $1,146 as against $542. In Georgia it is $876 against $352. In Mississippi it is $630 as against $215 salary for the Negro teachers. In South Carolina it is $943 as against $373.

Senator, I left out Louisiana, but not purposely. It is $1,165 in Louisiana for white teachers as against $499.

Well, that is a bad situation, it is not democratic, and yet these white people in control had not ever had very much education for themselves. You can understand the psychology that brought these inequalities about, but in any dealing with this situation by way of a national equalization fund, very careful attention needs to be given to that phase of the situation.

I think it is fair to say that there is a very great concern on the part of the educational authorities in the Southern States over these discrepancies. The State teachers association in Mississippi, in its recent meetings, passed a resolution to the effect that there must be in Mississippi an equalization, equal pay for equal training and equal work between Negro and white teachers. It was a mark of very great advance.

The State of Georgia is trying to equalize under a new law, and over the long years it will work out so that a Negro teacher that has equal training with the white teacher will get the same pay in that State.

So that some of these discrepancies are not altogether due to ill will. To bring up these Negro teachers' salaries would require a great many millions of dollars. I do not know where the millions of dollars are coming from, with the best of good will, because the resources are just not available in the States.

The interest of the State legislatures in providing funds for the training of Negro teachers is encouraging. Legislatures are doing the best they can and doing a little better all the time. If they had the resources, I think they would correct these discrepancies.

Senator ELLENDER. Dr. Alexander, I think you are the second person connected with the Federal Government that has talked of that discrepancy, and yet since 1933 there has been that discrepancy in connection with all agencies with respect to payments to labor