Eighteen questions were posted at the geography examinations, and the pupils had the privilege of selecting ten to answer. The teacher who conducted the examination says that Estelle picked out the ten hardest. The girl is rather small for her age, but can stand a lot of work.
While she was standing the final examination Estelle was so absorbed that she did not go home to lunch, but spent all the time, from nine o’clock until three, working on the questions.
(2185)
NEGRO “MAMMY” REMEMBERED
The praises of the faithful black nurses of the South have long been sung, but it has remained for Texas to be the first State to formally recognize their worth. The citizens of Galveston have inaugurated a movement to erect and dedicate a monument to the old negro “mammy” of the South. It is planned to build a marble monument of appropriate design to cost $500,000, nearly half of which is already pledged. Resolutions concerning the plan pay this tribute: “Rapidly passing from the stage of events in the South are the few remaining representatives of one of the grandest characters which the history of the world records. Indeed, so high above all chronicles of pure, unselfish and unfaltering devotion, noble self-sacrificing and splendid heroism do they stand that they may be almost denominated a race in themselves.” This is all much to the credit of Galveston and Texas. But would it not be better to erect, not a monument of marble, but an equally enduring memorial in the form of some splendid philanthropic institution for the uplift of the black race? Or a great hospital to care for suffering blacks? The tribute would then be both beautiful and useful.—Christian Work.
(2186)
NEGRO PROGRESS
The Rev. Charles Edward Stowe, the son of Harriet Beecher Stowe, returning from a trip through the South, where he had been studying the industrial conditions, said:
“Do you realize that the cotton crop is 1,000,000 bales a year bigger than it was in the old slave days, and that as far back as 1884 the negroes owned 1,000,000 acres of land in Georgia? I saw a big negro shuffle into an Atlanta bank and say: ‘Boss, ah wondah of ah has dat fahm of mine paid foh yet?’ The banker looked up the darky’s account and found that he had not only paid for his land by his remittances, but that he had $700 to his credit.”
(2187)