The Montgomery advertiser., 1909-04-07
"A SOUTHERN PROTEST.
An Open Letter From MT. Edgar Gard.
 uer Murphy.

MCE 1A0kEMSs
 In The New York Evening Post of March 26. appears the following com munication from Mir Edgar Gardner Murphy of this city MT Murphy Is now in Montgomery. though he leaves in few days to attend the conference ences to local conditions will be of much interest here.
 Editor of The Evening Post.
 sir:-I trust you will permit me to Evening Posts recent editorial entitled ''The Heart of a Class Problem"
 It is true that at the South there Is large element of the population only good nigger.' But shall we call this element "the South?"
 It is also true that there is an element at the South which Is opposed can this element 'the South?" If so under what auspices. political ani legislative. are our Southern common schools administered, in which more enrolled?
 From what sources of taxation are they supported? From taxes paid by negroes? Yes. in part-for the rents to pay the rents But these taxes come from the common body of the property of all the people and that the children of all the people should share through
 
 all Is the fixed and authoritative policy of every Southern state.
 That the negro Is always treated fairly in the distribution of revenues ly absurd to claim that The Evening Post deals fairly with the attitude of the South in reference to negro pro- gress.
 You declare: "The South approves of Tuskegee because 1t turns out artisans; 1t likes Booker Washington because he seems to be teaching the South's own doctrine that the negro shall remain a newer of wood and drawer of water"
 Now this sort of misrepresentation in reference to ''the South" is as mus ty and as outworn as the ante being a creature without a soul Is 1t not high time. in the interest of com mon sense and of elementary ethics. for us to abandon some of these hoary Yes, there are some people at the South (and at the North. tool who think in that way about Tuskegee and about the negro, but they are not 'the south" The, The cities of the North, and their d, humanity, are frequently visited by the agents of negro institutions Let these agents talk to you. and almost invari- special pride. the letters which they bear from members of the white com munity about them. Tuskegee and Hampton seldom hold a meeting at the North that some Southern white man does not bear willing witness. at their request. to the value of the work they do. That the South is still undeE the delusion, after watching the work of these institutions for thirty years. that they exist for the purpose of restrict- ing the negro population to the activi- ties of the newer of wood and the drawer of water is preposterous.
 That both institutions. upon the other hand. may be able, with time. to relate their work more closely to the actual labor situation at the South, many of us have long desired: but the difficulty of putting education into closer touch with life Is not a problem for the negro institution alone, 1t Is the distinctive problem with which all educational in- stitutions, from Harvard and Yale at the one extreme to the common school at the other. are now engaged. In It's solution Hampton and Tuskegee are not behind other institutions. but are. in many respects. ahead of them. At any rate, the day when 'the South" ap- plauded them solely because they made ''hewers of wood and drawers of water" has long since passed. Such criticism of them as exists Is largely of the other type. as reflected in the conviction that to the hewing of wood and the drawing of water all our larger educational institutions in America, for white as we'll as black, may well make more definite ana more effectuaI contribution. And. upon the other hand. there are hundreds of thousands of men and women at tho South who are glad that these institu- tions for white and black, in an age when the fever of money" is so preva- lent, are steadily contributing to so much that Is high and pure and real in the intellectual development of every element of our population.
 And many of us at the South who so rejoice find no reward of faith in the assumption that in so rejoicing we form a small coterie of "the brave, a little ch-threatened company of the spiritually elite. think the writer to whom you especially refer would hard ly welcome such applause. The refer ence to brave Southerners" is too often an expression of contempt for "the South" rather than a tribute of esteem for those applauded. It may fit in with an older controversial tradi- tion to assume that the man at the South who says plain straight things about justice to the negro is poor outcast among his fellows, doomed 10 ostracis for opinions sake and daily fin terror of commercial ruin or phy. sicaI assault; but as a matter Of fact such an assumption fits into the req conditions of no actual Southern scene Such a man may find people about hin who think him wrong: they may even