Without proper reformatories or asylums, with small advantage of the probation system, hundreds of Negro children are on the streets of Atlanta every day--shooting craps, stealing, learning to drink. A few, shut up in the stockade, or in chain-gangs, without any attempt to reform them or teach them, take lessons in crime from older offenders and come out worse than they went in. They spread abroad the lawlessness they learn and finally commit some frightful crime and get back into the chain-gang for life--where they make a profit for the state! Every child, white or coloured, is getting an education somewhere. If that education is not in schools, or at home, or, in cases of incorrigibility, in proper reformatories, then it is on the streets or in chain-gangs. _Why Negro Children Are Not in School_ My curiosity, aroused by the very large number of young prisoners, led me next to inquire why these children were not in school. I visited a number of schools and I talked with L. M. Landrum, the assistant superintendent. Compulsory education is not enforced anywhere in the South, so that children may run the streets unless their parents insist upon sending them to school. I found more than this, however, that Atlanta did not begin to have enough school facilities for the children who wanted to go. Like many rapidly growing cities, both South and North, it has been difficult to keep up with the demand. Just as in the North the tenement classes are often neglected, so in the South the lowest class--which is the Negro--is neglected. Several new schools have been built for white children, but there has been no new school for coloured children in fifteen or twenty years (though one Negro private school has been taken over within the last few years by the city). So crowded are the coloured schools that they have two sessions a day, one squad of children coming in the forenoon, another in the afternoon. The coloured teachers, therefore, do double work, for which they receive about two-thirds as much salary as the white teachers. Though many Southern cities have instituted industrial training in the public schools, Atlanta so far has done nothing. The president of the board of education in his last published report (1903) calls attention to this fact, and says also: While on the subject of Negro schools, permit me to call your attention to their overcrowded condition. In every Negro school many teachers teach two sets of pupils, each set for one-half of a school day. The last bond election was carried by a majority of only thirty-three votes. To my personal knowledge more than thirty-three Negroes voted for the bonds on the solemn assurance that by the passage of the bonds the Negro children would receive more school accommodations.