LUCY C. LANEY.
"Equipped for the work and fired with a dauntless zeal for the elevation of her race, of whom she always speaks as 'my people,' she entered Augusta, Ga., single-handed and alone and began teaching the few children she could at the beginning draw around her. As she taught, her school increased. No one stood with her at the first. The Freedmen's Board was back of her, but we scarcely knew her value at the time, commissioning her for the work, but giving her only what she could collect for her services on the field. On this point her success brought us the information we needed. We did not help her at the first as we would now. Her courage, patience, self-forgetfulness, and withal her good common sense, attracted attention. She began with a few and at the end of the first year reported seventy-five scholars under her care. At the end of the second year she reported 234. The progress of her work was so satisfactory that when the opportunity to place $10,000 in some particular educational work in the South came to the Board, the unanimous opinion of the members was that Miss Laney's school had merited the proposed help.
"When the Assembly met at Minneapolis in 1886, Miss Laney met the late Mrs. F. E. H. Haines, who was then President of the Women's Executive Committee of Home Missions, and was so impressed with her earnest Christian character and her deep interest in the colored people of the South, that she went home and named her school the Haines School."
The literary department of Haines School consists of College Preparatory course, Higher English, Grammar School, Primary and Kindergarten. The school contains the material for a strictly Normal course, and more than a dozen young women have graduated from the higher English or high-school course. Trained teachers are needed to put such a course into effect.
The Grammar School department, except the highest grade, furnishes practice work for these young women and it is preparatory to the higher English course.
The College Preparatory course aims to prepare students for college. With a very few exceptions all of the graduates from this course have entered Lincoln University, making at entrance Sophomore class. One entered Junior class two years ago.
The Higher English course aims to prepare the average young man and woman for active life as well as to stimulate them to further study in school.
The Kindergarten is complete in itself. Its furnishing, the training of the Kindergartner and her salary, are a gift to the school from its friends in Buffalo, N. Y. Though but lately added to the school, the Kindergarten is the result of the long-cherished plans and personal efforts of Miss Laney. Not only the Kindergarten, but the entire success of the school, is due to contributions from friends who have been reached and impressed with the actual needs of the Negro by Miss Laney in her numerous speeches to Northern audiences; "a mission," says Dr. Cowan in the same article quoted from, "for which she has a rare gift, apparently without knowing it." No less able is she to impress, by her own life of sacrifice, Christian character and native ability.
A lasting influence for good in this school, and especially in the home life, now lives, sacred to the memory of Miss Cora Freeman, who was associated with Miss Laney, when the foundation of the work was being laid, and who shared bravely the hard things which necessarily attend the beginning of a large, unselfish work of this kind. She died after a service of three years.