Thereafter some progress in the development of separate schools in Cincinnati was noted. By 1855 the Board of Education of that city had established four public schools for the instruction of Negro youths. The colored pupils were showing their appreciation by regular attendance, manly deportment, and rapid progress in the acquisition of knowledge. Speaking of these Negroes in 1855, John P. Foote said that they shared with the white citizens that respect for education, and the diffusion of knowledge, which has ever been one of their "characteristics," and that they had, therefore, been more generally intelligent than free persons of color not only in other States but in all other parts of the world.[1] It was in appreciation of the worth of this class of progressive Negroes that in 1858 Nicholas Longworth built a comfortable school-house for them in Cincinnati, leasing it with the privilege of purchasing it in fourteen years.[2] They met these requirements within the stipulated time, and in 1859 secured through other agencies the construction of another building in the western portion of the city.[3] [Footnote 1: Foote, _The Schools of Cincinnati_, p. 92.] [Footnote 2: _Special Report of the U.S. Com. of Ed_., 1871, p. 372.] [Footnote 3: _Ibid_., p. 372.] The agitation for the admission of colored children to the public schools was not confined to Cincinnati alone, but came up throughout the section north of the Ohio River.[1] Where the black population was large enough to form a social center of its own, Negroes and their friends could more easily provide for the education of colored children. In settlements, however, in which just a few of them were found, some liberal-minded man usually asked the question why persons taxed to support a system of free schools should not share its benefits. To strengthen their position these benevolent men referred to the rapid progress of the belated people, many of whom within less than a generation from their emergence from slavery had become intelligent, virtuous, and respectable persons, and in not a few cases had accumulated considerable wealth.[2] Those who insisted that children of African blood should be debarred from the regular public schools had for their defense the so-called inequality of the races. Some went so far as to concede the claims made for the progressive blacks, and even to praise those of their respective communities.[3] But great as their progress had been, the advocates of the restriction of their educational privileges considered it wrong to claim for them equality with the Caucasian race. They believed that society would suffer from an intermingling of the children of the two races. [Footnote 1: Hickok, _The Negro in Ohio_, ch. iii.; and Boone, _History of Education in Indiana_, p. 237.] [Footnote 2: Foote, _The Schools of Cincinnati_, p. 93.] [Footnote 3: _Ibid_., p. 92.]