In a statement made to the Negro press last week, Governor George C. Peery of Virginia, made it plain that he considered it no duty of the State to furnish professional or technological training to her citizens and a state had fulfilled its obligation when education amounting to the accredited high school training had been made available. This statement came as a reply to a request in which the Governor was asked to consider the fact that the State of Virginia supported only one Negro instituion offering college work and that instituion could not provide training in medicine, law, dentistry and engineering.

Honorable George Peery may have meant that Negroes do not need doctors. If that is true he should review the death rates of Virginia for 1930, which show that three Negroes died for every one white person. More Negro physicians would have lowered this percentage. He may have meant that Negroes do not need trained lawyers among their group, or trianed pharmacists or engineers.

The Governor could not have been serious about what he considered the duty of the State towards her citizens with regard to education not extending beyond high schol training, because eight white instituions are maintained by the State of Virginia that offer technological and professional training and they receive ninety-one percent of Virginia's appropriations for higher education.

Eight schools in Virginia are supported by the Commonwealth, created to train the youth of the white race in branches of higher education. In these schools he studies medicine and is prepared to aid in the lowerng of the death rate among his people. He studies law and later is prepared to organize and direct the business and political activites of the people. Still others engage temselves in the study of pharmacy, dentistry and engineering, and are fully equipped to render to his race a service and make a definite contribution to civilization.

Defintions of a State's duty to its citizens come at a late date and it seems a little inconsistent with Virginia's present higher education program or perhap the "busy" Governor confused the term citizen with that of Negro citizens, but even if that is the cause one wonders because there are only six class A High Schools for Negroes in Virginia.