them. If the supply of school accommodations to-day exactly equalled the
demand, so that every colored child of suitable age was provided for in
some school, there would be at the time of our next annual meeting
255,500 children asking to be taught their letters to whom we should
have to say, We cannot teach you. But the supply does not yet nearly
equal the demand.

In respect to education, the South is a dark sky rapidly growing darker,
but flecked with patches of lighter shade, which are gradually growing
brighter and larger. Such a bright space frames each of our chartered
and normal schools. Fisk University, Talladega College, Tougaloo
University, Straight University, in New Orleans, and Tillotson
Institute, at Austin, Texas, are doing work which vindicates each year
more distinctly the strategic sagacity which located them. In these
institutions alone nearly two thousand students of both sexes are being
trained to be light-bearers to their race. Besides these, each of which
is essentially a normal school, and includes a normal department,
eighteen distinctively normal schools are sustained at different points
of strategic importance. Two new schools have been established during
the year. Good work has also been done among the mountain whites. The
income from the gift of Mr. Daniel Hand has enabled the Association to
enlarge its school accommodations, and to assist more than three hundred
students, who, without it, would have been unable to attend schools of
any kind.

The committee would emphasize among special needs of the work, funds for
a girls' hall at Tillotson Institute, and for the endowment of a
theological school for training colored pastors. Two facts are
pre-eminently gratifying. The first is that in nearly all the schools of
the Association some kind of industrial training is provided, and that