As I have said elsewhere in this book, many colored people in Atlanta are doing well in various ways. At Atlanta University I saw several students whose fathers and mothers were graduates of the same institution. Higher education for the negro has, thus, come into its second generation. More prosperous negroes in Atlanta are doing social settlement work among less fortunate members of their race, and have started a free kindergarten for negro children. Many good people in Atlanta are unaware of these facts, and I believe their judgment on the entire negro question would be modified, at least in certain details, were they merely to inform themselves upon various creditable negro activities in the city. The northern stranger, attempting to ascertain the truth about the negro and the negro problem, has to this extent the advantage of the average Southerner: prejudice and indifference do not prevent his going among the negroes to find out what they are doing for themselves.
The negro roof-garden, Odd Fellows' Building, Atlanta
At various times in my life chance has thrown me into contact with charities in great variety, and philanthropic work of many kinds. I have seen theoretical charities, sentimental charities, silly charities, pauperizing charities, wild-eyed charities, charities which did good, and others which worked damage in the world; I have seen organized charities splendidly run under difficult circumstances (as in the Department of Charities under Commissioner Kingsbury, in New York City), and I have seen other organized charities badly run at great expense; I have seen charities conducted with the primary purpose of ministering to the vanity of self-important individuals who like to say: "See all the good that I am doing!" and I have seen other personal charities operated (as in the case of the Rockefeller Foundation) with a perfectly magnificent scope and effectiveness.
Nevertheless, of all the charities I have seen, of all the efforts I have witnessed to improve the condition of humanity, none has taken a firmer hold upon my heart than the Leonard Street Orphans' Home, for negro girls, in Atlanta.
The home is a humble frame building which was used as a barracks by northern troops stationed in Atlanta after the Civil War. In it reside Miss Chadwick, her helpers, and about seventy little negro girls; and it is an interesting fact that several of the helpers are young colored women who, themselves brought up in the home and taught to be self-supporting, have been drawn back to the place by homesickness. Was ever before an orphan homesick for an orphans' home?
Miss Chadwick is an Englishwoman. Coming out to America a good many years ago, she somehow found Atlanta, and in Atlanta somehow found this orphanage, which was then both figuratively and literally dropping to pieces. Some one had to take hold of it, so Miss Chadwick did. How successful she has been it is hard to convey in words. I do not mean that she has succeeded in building up a great flourishing plant with a big endowment and all sorts of improvements. Far from it. The home stands on a tiny lot, the building is ramshackle and not nearly large enough for its purpose, and sometimes it seems doubtful where the money to keep it going will come from. Nevertheless the home is a hundred times more successful than I could have believed a home for orphans, colored or white, could be made, had I not seen it with my own eyes. Its success lies not in material possessions or prosperity, not in the food and shelter it provides to those who so pitifully needed it, but in the fact that it is in the truest and finest sense a home, a place endowed with the greatest blessings any home can have: contentment and affection. What Miss Chadwick has provided is, in short, an institution with a heart.
How did she do it? That, like the other mystery of how she manages to house those seventy small lively people in that little building, is something which only Heaven and Miss Chadwick understand.