The lower attendance of the Negro children may be accounted for as Asa Martin accounts for a similar condition in Kansas City.[52] In this city from 1885 to 1913 a larger per cent of the Negro than of the white children of school age attended the public schools, but the average attendance of the white children enrolled was above that of the Negro children. This he accounted for by the poverty of the Negro population. Since the Negroes were poorer as a whole than the whites, they were more poorly housed and clothed. Consequently the Negro children were more susceptible to sickness and to the disagreeable effects of inclement weather. On this account they were oftener absent from school than the white children.
The report of the State Superintendent of Schools for the year 1874 contains reports[53] from thirty-five of the urban communities which were organized under the act for cities, towns and villages. Five of these towns reported that they did not have any Negro children of school age. The thirty towns reported 4,701 Negro children, 2,379 of whom were enrolled in the public schools. Salisbury was the only town having more than sixteen Negro children for whom no school was maintained, while Bolivar and Augusta, which had in the first case eleven and in the second four Negro children of school age, reported respectively five and three Negro children in the public schools.
The largest cities in the State were St. Joseph, Kansas City and St. Louis. These cities provided public schools for the freedmen soon after the war. St. Joseph opened a school[54] with seventy seats for Negro children in 1866. In 1871 the city had for Negro children, two schools,[55] each of which was provided with one teacher. One of these schools had an enrollment of 96 pupils and the other 94. In 1874 this city enumerated[56] 651 Negro children of school age, 386 of whom were enrolled in the two public schools. The number of teachers had increased from two to four.
The first Negro public school[57] in Kansas City was reported in 1867. The enumeration[58] for 1873 was 408 Negro children of school age. The average attendance was 165. The length of the school term was forty weeks. The amount spent on each pupil was 7.5 cents a day in the Negro school and 8.6 in the white school. The average salary paid to male teachers was $68.33 in the Negro school and $112.50 in the white schools. The average salary paid to female teachers was $45 in the Negro school and $65 in the white schools. In 1874 the number of Negro children enumerated was 885.[59] There was one Negro school in the city for their use which had 356 pupils and five teachers.
In St. Louis, the largest city in the State, there was a steady growth of the Negro school system. The State Legislature granted this city the power to establish separate schools[60] for Negro children in 1865. The next year Ira Divoll, the City Superintendent, established three schools for Negro children.[61] One was in the northern, one in the central and another in the southern part of the city. In 1868 there were five Negro schools[62] in the city with a total enrollment of 924 pupils. Three of these schools held night sessions which ran from the first Monday in October of the year 1867 to the fifth of February, 1868. Twelve teachers were employed in these schools. In 1871 a sixth Negro school[63] was added and school No. 3 was improved to accommodate five hundred pupils. There were sixteen teachers and seventeen school rooms. The expenses for the year amounted to $11,787.80.[64]
The next year it was reported[65] that good buildings had been built for the Negro schools. A gain of eight pupils over the number enrolled the previous year was reported. This small gain was not charged to indifference, but to a decrease in the Negro population. In 1875 there were twelve Negro schools in the city. The legislature of that year passed a bill[66] which permitted the city to establish a Negro high school with a normal department in the old Washington School building and was known from this time on as the Sumner High School.
The first teachers of these schools were white, but they were gradually replaced by Negro teachers. The first teacher[67] of color was appointed largely through the influence of Samuel Crupples, who was a member of the Board of Education of St. Louis and also a regent of Lincoln Institute. He was so impressed with the work done by Lincoln Institute in preparing Negro children that he favored the giving of its graduates a trial in the public schools of that city. The chance to try teachers of color came when the friends of a white teacher, who had been assigned to a Negro school, protested against the assignment. From this time on the white teachers in the Negro schools were gradually replaced by those of color.
Very early in the history of the Negro schools the question of training teachers came up. The white teachers did not care to teach in the Negro schools and it was hard to find trained teachers of color at this date. Ten county superintendents in their annual[68] letters for 1872 mentioned the difficulties which they experienced in obtaining good teachers for their Negro schools. There was a prejudice on the part[69] of both the white and the black people of the State against white teachers for Negro schools; and it is reported[70] that in many cases the white teachers in these schools did not take the interest in the advancement of the people which was taken by the Negro teachers. The positions in the Negro school, moreover, were less desirable than those in the white schools because the financial returns were less in teaching in the Negro schools. In 1873 the cities, towns and villages which reported[71] Negro schools also reported an average salary of $46.70 per month for male teachers and $40.00 per month for female teachers. The white schools in the same towns paid an average monthly salary of $87.72 to male teachers and $46.64 to female teachers.
The first school[72] in the State which was devoted to the work of training Negro teachers was Lincoln Institute. This school[73] had its origin in a fund of $6,379 which was contributed by the soldiers of the sixty-second and sixty-fifth United States Negro infantry. These men upon being mustered out of service at the close of the war gave part of their pay to found in Missouri a school where their children might enjoy the blessings of a good education. The school was opened at Jefferson City,[74] the State Capital, September 17, 1866. Richard Baxter Foster, a New England white man who was educated at Dartmouth College and who had served as first lieutenant in the sixty-second United States Negro Infantry, became the first principal of this school.