Surely the poor little black children are not likely under any circumstances to suppose that they are the equals of the members of the proud families that held their fathers in slavery! The white people sorely need the employment; the Negroes still more need the example and admonition of trained and high-minded people. The relation is not unknown. In the public schools of Charleston, for forty years, the negro children have been taught by white ladies, and as well taught as the white children. In Alabama, and even in Virginia, public schools were for a time taught by Whites, and you hear of sporadic cases elsewhere, as in a district of Louisiana, where the mother of the chairman of the school board was a teacher, and she was so incapable that no white school would have her on any terms, so they compromised by giving her a negro school. With these small exceptions, a relation between the races, through which none of the dreaded evils of race equality could come about, was rejected; and that is the main reason why the negro schools have been poor and continue inferior. The Southern woman is not below the Northern in a sense of duty; the Southern schoolmarm is the equal of her Yankee sister in refinement and in pluck; and the Southern woman was the only class of people in the South who could at the same time have taught the pickaninnies to read, and the older people to recognize that the Whites were their best friends. Of all the remedies suggested, education is the most direct and the most practical because it has so far been neglected; education is needed for the safety of the race. As Leroy Percy, the successful planter, puts it: "You cannot send these men out to fight the battle of life helplessly ignorant. In slavery, he was the slave of one, and around him was thrown the protecting care of the master. In freedom you cannot, through the helplessness of ignorance, make him the slave of every white man with no master's protection to shield him"; and he adds, "The education of the Negro, to the extent indicated, is necessary for the preservation of the character and moral integrity of the white men of the South." Professor Garner roundly declares that "Governor Vardaman's contention that education increases the criminality of the negro is nothing but bold assertion and has never been supported by adequate proof."