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Children of school age per 1,000 adults aged 20-64 years, 1930.

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Expenditure per pupil for education by States, in relation to net reproduction rates.

an education. We are building up a million or two nomads present a serious problem to us in the next generation.

That is on page 391 of our report.

that will

My next quotation is from page 577 of our report. This statement is from the report of the National Resources Committee, Problems of the Changing Population, of May 1938, page 120 of that report:

The evidence indicates clearly that some States provide relatively adequate support for education with relatively little financial effort involved; others support their schools equally well as the result of great financial effort; and in others education is supported only meagerly, in spite of the fact that a comparatively large percentage of total tax resources is expended for that purpose. States with great economic resources on the whole support their schools adequately and with relative ease; States with limited resources almost without exception rank low in adequacy of financial support even though, in general, they put forth greater effort than the richer States. In those States providing the least adequate support for education the fundamental difficulty lies in lack of financial assets. Even though a model tax plan were put into effect in the poorer States, they would not be able to support their schools adequately.

There is only one other thing that I care to call attention to, and I am not going into it in detail because I am sure that others have presented these facts to you. In 1938 the National Emergency Council prepared a report to the President entitled "Report on Economic Conditions of the South." In the chapter on Education they had this to say:

In the rural regions of the South, particularly, there is a marked disparity between the number of children to be educated and the means for educating them. For example, in 1930 the rural inhabitants of the Southeast had to care for 4,250,000 children of school age of the country's total, although they received an income of only 2 percent of the Nation's total. In the nonfarm population of the Northeast, on the other hand, there were 8,500,000 children in a group that received 42 percent of the total national income-21 times as much income available to educate only twice as many children.

The southern regions are affected by population shifts more than other sections because the greatest proportion of movers originate there. In the 1920's the States south of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers and east of the Mississippi lost about 1,700,000 persons through migration, about half of whom were between 15 and 35 years of age. These persons moved at the beginning of their productive life to regions which got this manpower almost free of cost, whereas the South, which had borne the expense of their care and education up to the time when they could start producing, suffered an almost complete loss of its investment. The newcomers to the South did not, by any means, balance this loss The cost of rearing and schooling the young people of the southern rural districts who moved to cities has been estimated to be approximately $250,000,000 annually. The South must educate one-third of the Nation's children with one-sixth of the Nation's school revenues. According to the most conservative estimates, the per capita ability of the richest State in the country to support education is six times as great as that of the poorest State.

But the poor educational status of the South is not a result of lack of effort to support schools. The South collects in total taxes about half as much per person as the Nation as a whole. All Southern States fall below the national average in tax resources per child, although they devote a larger share of their tax income to schools. For the Southern States to spend the national average per pupil would require an additional quarter of a billion dollars of revenue.

In 1936 the Southern States spent an average of $25.11 per child in schools, or about half the average for the country as a whole, or a quarter of what was spent per child in New York State. In 1935-36 the average school child enrolled in Mississippi had $27.47 spent on his education. At the same time the average school child enrolled in New York State had $141.43 spent on his education, or more than five times as much as was spent on a child in Mississippi. There were actually 1,500 school centers in Mississippi without school buildings, requiring children to attend school in large halls, abandoned tenant houses, country churches, and, in some instances, ever in cotton pens.

Mr. Chairman, I do not care to say anything more. I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you. To me it seems to resolve itself into a simple problem, that is that all sections of the country depend upon the productive capacity of the boys and girls from every other section of the country, and just as practically all of our States. have, within their own set-up, provided an equalization fund in order to equalize educational opportunities throughout that State, it seems to me that this great Federal Government should seek to equalize educational opportunities throughout the United States. It seems to me it would be desirable from the standpoint of those sections to which these people are going to migrate, because in that way they could expect a better and greater productive capacity. It certainly seems to me only fair to the boys and girls who have to go out there and compete with those other boys and girls that they might have these better opportunities in order to be the better able to compete. The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mr. Sparkman.

Mr. Charles H. Houston.

STATEMENT OF CHARLES H. HOUSTON, GENERAL COUNSEL, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE

The CHAIRMAN. Will you give your name, your address, and your position, please, and then proceed?

Mr. HOUSTON. Thank you, sir. My name is Charles H. Houston. I am on the national legal committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

I wish to apologize to the committee. I understand I was called this morning, but I had to be in court and could not get here.

I want to say that we support this bill as a minimum, in its present form, in what we believe is a sincere effort on the part of the Members of the Congress, particularly its sponsors, to try to equalize education throughout the Nation. However, for the purpose of the record and without any lack of support of this particular bill, we should like to place on record four matters which we think are important, so far as the future is concerned.

The first is that there is no equalization of costs because we recognize the paramount necessity of getting the program going. At this particular initiatory stage we are more interested in action and practical justice than we are in holding up the whole program to try to reach a perfect, absolute equality.

We do want to say for the record, however, that the fact the funds are to be divided according to population ratio does not actually produce equality, even as to Federal funds, for the reason that Negroes are so far behind in the matter of education that if equality were to be achieved, of course it would have to be achieved by an expenditure on Negro education of much greater than the population ratio. As a matter of fact, ultimately we hope that experience will show the way by which the funds for education may be expendable strictly according to public need, which we believe is the only just basis for the expenditure of public funds.

In the next place we hope that there will be a very close administrative watch over these funds, for the reason that we are much concerned that these funds be not wasted. We hear talk, for example, about the

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