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12.-What efforts are being made by the colored people to erect School Houses and organize schools? None except in building thier churches they expect to devote the basements to schools. There are 3 good school rooms of this kind in Mobile. No need of buildings here.
13.- Are colored people able to conduct and sustain the work of Education among themselves without further assistance? They are not. They can only attend free schools at present.
14.- By what means can new schools be organized and set in operation throughout your district. I do not know what will be done under the new constitution of Ala. But as matters now are, if we have the teachers sent here and paid we can soon locate the schools. Three hundred dollars will build a country school house. 
15.-What Benevolent Associations and Freedmen's Aid Societies are operating in your district and at what points? Only the American Missionary Association at Mobile.
16.- Answer as fully and promptly a possible, and add any suggestions that may occur to you as to how the work of Education may be most successfully carried on in your district during the coming year.
Yours Truly,
R.D, Harper,
Supt. of Education.

I have not personally visited Citronelle, Whistler &c, but at the various points named in Mobile and Baldwin Counties, there may be buildings that can be rented. If northern teachers are furnished I think they should be young men- at these interior places. The colored people are so poor and in their present agricultural and laboring interests so unsettled in this subdistrict that unless schools are free to all they will not attend in great numbers.

Yet so much depends on enabling them to read and write that the Government cannot make a better investment than to furnish Teachers and school houses for two years.

To secure the advantage of freedom to themselves and to become citizens of any advantage to the country they freed people must be lifted speedily from the slavery of ignorance. Had the work been more generally and thoroughly commenced when the war ended - on the principle that through education only can permanent improvement be gained, the race could now be left to itself with safety to all concerned.  
James Gillette
Brevet Major U.S.A.
Sub Dist Comr.