The Board of Trustees of the Elizabeth City Public Schools is due for a rude awakening in a few days when it finally sinks into their heads that they’ve got to provide high school education for 100 or more Negro students who have passed out of the seventh grades only that are provided for colored students in this city. There are actually 117 colored students ready for High School this year. Of this number 17 are going to be admitted to the State Normal School. The other 100 will have to be provided for by the city.
A lot of folks don’t know that Elizabeth City has never bothered itself much about Negro education. Part of the Negro school funds has been freely used for educating white children and where room wasn’t provided for Negroes in the public schools, the Negroes were shoved over into the State Normal “School over on Southern Ave. extended.
Prof S.L. Sheep, principal of the City schools, was also, for a long time chairman of the Board of Trustees of the State Normal and permitted the practice of letting the state take care of the education of a large proportion of the city’s Negro children. But the State Normal School was not put there for that purpose. It was established by the State to provide a teacher training school for the Negroes of Northeastern North Carolina, just as the East Carolina Teacher College at Greenville provides teacher training for the whites.
The question whether the State Normal would take care of colored high school students in the absence of a city high school for the colored was brought up several weeks ago and the trustees of the State Normal consented to relieve the city of the education of its colored high school students another year if they would pay the salaries of three teachers in the State Normal School. The city school board refused to take any action on the proposition and so the Board of Trustees of the State Normal have directed that a minimum of 17 high school students from the city shall be received in the State Normal next September.
The city is required by law to furnish high school education for colored as well as white students. Having to establish a colored high school will mean the rental or building of a High School and the employment of not less than five High School teachers. That’s hard on folks who have been grafting on the State so long that they think it is their precious privilege to keep right on grafting.
The city might have stolen a march on the State Normal another year, but the State is alert to protect itself in view of the fact that the attitude of Elizabeth City people generally is hostile to the State school for Negroes. The State had to build an institution of higher education for Negroes somewhere in Eastern North Carolina and Elizabeth City asked the State to put the school here. The attitude of Elizabeth City people has since been such that the State’s appeal for a decent half mile of road from the city limits to the State school property has been rudely rejected. About the only interest Elizabeth City takes in the school is in the thousands of dollars it released in local trade circles every week and in using it to relive the congestion in its inadequate city schools.
From the front page of The Independent, Elizabeth City, N.C., Friday, July 20, 1923
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