The undersigned enter their solemn protest against this unjust treatment of colored children.  They believe with the experience of Massachusetts, and especially the recent experience of Boston before them, there is no sound reason why colored children shall be excluded from any of the common schools supported by taxes levied alike on whites and blacks, and governed by officers elected by the vote of colored as well as white voters.

But if in the judgment of your honorable body common schools are not thus common to all, then we earnestly pray you to recommend to the Legislature such action as shall cause the Board of Education of this city to erect at least two well-appointed modern grammar schools for colored children on suitable sites, in respectable localities, so that the attendance of colored children may be increased and their minds be elevated in like manner as the happy experience of the honorable Board of Education has been in the matter of white children.

In addition to the excellent impulse to colored youth which these new grammar schools would give, they will have the additional argument of actual economy; the children will be taught with far less expense in two such schoolhouses than in the half dozen hovels into which they are now driven.  It is a costly piece of injustice which educates the white scholar in a palace at $10 per year and the colored pupil in a hovel at $17 or $18 per annum.

Taxes, etc., of colored population of the city.

No proposition can be more reasonable than that they who pay taxes for schools and schoolhouses should be provided with schools and schoolhouses.  The colored population of this city, in proportion to their numbers, pay their full share of the general and therefore of the school taxes.  There are about nine thousand adults of both sexes; of these over three thousand are householders, rent-payers, and therefore tax-payers, in that sense of the word in which owners make tax-payers of their poor tenants.  The colored laboring man, with an income of $200 a year, who pays $72 per year for a room and bedroom, is really in proportion to his means a larger tax-payer than the millionaire whose tax rate is thousands of dollars.  But directly, also, do the colored people pay taxes.  From examinations carefully made, the undersigned affirm that there are in the city at least 1,000 colored persons who own and pay taxes on real estate.

Taxed real estate in the city of New York owned
by colored persons $1,400,000
Untaxed by colored persons (churches) 250,000
Personal estate 710,000
Money in savings banks 1,121,000
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$3,481,000

These figures indicate that in proportion to their numbers, the colored population of this city pay a fair share of the school taxes, and that they have been most unjustly dealt with.  Their money has been used to purchase sites and erect and fit up schoolhouses for white children, whilst their own children are driven into miserable edifices in disgraceful localities.  Surely, the white population of the city are too able, too generous, too just, any longer to suffer this miserable robbing of their colored fellow-citizens for the benefit of white children.