The New South removed the negro from politics, but he remained, in industry and society, a problem to whose solution an increasing attention was paid. At the time of emancipation he was almost universally illiterate and lived in a bankrupt community. Northern philanthropy saw an opportunity here. The teachers sent south by the Freedmen's Bureau stirred up interest by their letters home. In 1867 George Peabody, already noted for his benefactions in England and in Baltimore, created a large fund for the relief of illiteracy in the destitute region. His board of trustees became a clearing-house for educational efforts. Ex-President Hayes became, in 1882, the head of a similar fund created by John F. Slater, of Connecticut. Through the rest of the century these boards, in close cooperation, studied and relieved the educational necessities of the South. In 1901 the men who directed them organized a Southern Educational Board for the propagation of knowledge, while in 1903 Congress incorporated a General Education Board, to which John D. Rockefeller gave many millions for the subsidizing of educational attempts. The negro advanced in literacy under the pressure of the new influences. In 1880 seventy per cent of the American negroes over ten years old were illiterate, but the proportion was reduced in the next ten years to fifty-seven per cent; to forty-five per cent by 1900; and to thirty per cent by 1910. As the negro advanced, his own leaders, as well as his white friends, differed in the status to which they would raise him and in the methods to be pursued. Some of his ablest representatives, W.E.B. DuBois among them, resented the discrimination and disfranchisement from which they suffered, and insisted upon equality as a preliminary. Others, like Booker T. Washington, who founded a notable trade school in Alabama in 1881, worried little over discrimination, and hoped to solve their problem through common and technical education which might lead the race to self-respect and independence. Friction increased between the races at the South after emancipation. Freedom and political pressure demoralized many of the negroes, whose new feeling of independence exasperated many of the whites. Southern society still possessed many border traits. Men went armed and fought on slight provocation. The duel and the public assault aroused little serious criticism even in the eighties, and the freedmen lived in a society in which self-restraint had never been the dominant virtue. In Alabama, in 1880, the assessed value of guns, dirks, and pistols was nearly twice that of the libraries and five times that of the farm implements of the State. The distribution of the races varied exceedingly, from the Black Belt, where in the Yazoo bottom lands the negroes outnumbered the whites fifteen or more to one, to the uplands and mountains, where the proportions were reversed. But everywhere the less reputable of both races retarded society by their excesses.