Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/681

Rh her race. Exceptional abilities and opportunities enable her to do more than most of her sisters. But mothers' clubs, on a greater or less scale, are being started here and there all through the South. I know of one very able northern negro woman who devotes six months of the year to traveling through the black belt addressing the people, especially in their mothers' meetings. She perhaps stays in a place a week—speaks every day, and three or four times on Sunday. She never fails of an audience, and much good seed is sown.

There are cultured young negro women who go and live on the plantations in one-room cabins, teach the children, and by their example show the parents how decently it is possible to live on no more means than their own. This, of course, is the college-settlement idea. I was told of one young woman, a college graduate, who is living in this way, and who, during the two years that she has been working among her people, has not received more than twelve dollars in money. But these negroes are taught that they must never expect to get something for nothing. So, in return for her teaching, they supply her with provisions.

The southern negroes, we were told, are greatly in need of day nurseries and free kindergartens. One woman told of how a cabin, containing three small children, had burned down before her eyes. The mother had gone to her work, locking the little ones in the house. They had got to playing with matches, and, as a consequence, were burned to death. When children are not locked in the house, they run wild on the streets. As a result of the education that they get there, they become public nuisances. Then there is no place for them but the chain-gang.

In considering the needs of the southern black man, it will be borne in mind that there is no reformatory system in the South, and that all public institutions are closed to him, even the orphanages.

Colored women have had another reason, peculiar to themselves, for forming clubs. They realize that at this stage in their progress there is nothing that they need more than a proper race-pride—a becoming independence and self-respect. No