Page:The Black woman of the South.djvu/5

Rh "I would have the trades of dress-making, millinery, straw-plating, tailoring for men, and such like, taught them.

"The art of cooking should be made a specialty, and every girl should be instructed in it.

"In connection with these schools, garden plats should be cultivated, and every girl should be required daily, to spend at least an hour in learning the cultivation of small fruits, vegetables and flowers.

"It is hardly possible to exaggerate either the personal, family or society influence which would flow from these schools. Every class, yea, every girl in an out-going class, would be a missionary of thrift, industry, common-sense, and practicality. They would go forth, year by year, a leavening power into the houses, towns and villages of the Southern black population; girls fit to be the wives of the honest peasantry of the South, the worthy matrons of their numerous households.

"I am looking after the domestic training of the masses; for the raising up of women meet to be the helpers of poor men, the rank and file of black society, all through the rural districts of the South.

"A true civilization can only be attained when the life of woman is reached, her whole being permeated by noble ideas, her fine taste enriched by culture, her tendencies to the beautiful gratified and developed, her singular and delicate nature lifted up to its full capacity, and then, when all these qualities are fully matured, cultivated and sanctified, all their sacred influences shall circle around ten thousand firesides, and the cabins of the humblest freedmen shall become the homes of Christian refinement through the influence of the uplifted and cultivated black woman of the South."

The above appeal is in the line of our American Missionary Association work. While we have higher schools and institutions for more thorough education, which these Negro women need as much as any women in the world, we are increasingly developing this idea which Dr. Crummell eloquently pleads,

We remind our friends and those Christian women who are interested in the uplifting of Negro womanhood, that the American Missionary Association, the ordained agency of the Congregational Churches for this work, could do much more of it if the means were forthcoming. The marked success of the domestic training in our schools at Tougaloo, Miss., Talladega, Ala., Thomasville, Ga., Memphis, Tenn., and other points, shows the advantage gained in the twenty-five years' experience which the A M. A. has had in its work for the Negroes.

We need the co-operation of all Christian women in carrying on these Industrial Schools already established, and to enable us to establish and carry forward many more.