A Report Concerning the Colored Women of the South
C. E. Hopkins
9781465637321
108 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
We have the honor to submit the following report of a recent tour (made at the request of your Board) for the purpose of ascertaining the condition, mental and moral, of the colored women of the South. We started on October 20th, 1895. Our tour was confined to the five Central States,—Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. We visited twenty-four schools and institutions, examined the life of the people in the one-roomed cabin of the plantation and road-side, in the hovels of the manufacturing towns, as well as the neat and attractive homes which are the result of industry and thrift aided by education. We conversed with colored clergymen, lawyers, doctors, druggists, artisans, cotton-factors and laborers, with male and female teachers in educational and industrial schools, with trained nurses and servants, with wives and mothers, and with girls in and out of the schools. If the conclusions we draw should seem optimistic, it should be remembered that we received our impressions from negroes at their best, in the five states we visited, as most of them under thirty years of age have come under the influence of the great schools which have been established by northern philanthropy. We found the graduates of these schools intelligent, modest, self-respecting, clear sighted and frank in regard to the shortcomings and defects of their race, and while grateful for all that has been done for them, anxious to help themselves, and full of confidence and hope for the future. Among those not actually in the schools we found the desire for education and for the decencies of life to be intense, and parents appear to be willing to make the greatest sacrifices to secure for their children better advantages. But the negro women of the South are subject to temptations, of which their white sisters of the North have no appreciation, and which come to them from the days of their race enslavement. They are still the victims of the white man under a survival of a system tacitly recognized, which deprives them of the sympathy and help of the Southern white women, and to meet such temptations the negro woman can only offer the resistance of a low moral standard, an inheritance from the system of slavery, made still lower from a life-long residence in a one-roomed cabin. Remove a girl early from such degrading environment, send her home to her people with the changed idea of personal decency acquired by residence at one of the training schools, and she becomes at once a powerful agent for good in her family and neighborhood. Dr. Curry, the able Secretary of the Slater and Peabody Trusts, says: “Of the desire of the colored people for education the proof is conclusive, and of their capacity to receive mental culture there is not a shade of a reason to support an adverse hypothesis.”
