“Can’t I do something to help?”
Miss Bartholomew was greatly pleased and cheered.
“Of course you can,” she said heartily. “We’re trying to keep some of the Negro children off the streets. There is plenty of opportunity for helping with our boys’ and girls’ clubs and classes.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” said the minister; “I thought, in cases of death in their families, we might offer to read the burial service.”
And he went away and did not see the humour of it!
Another minister made a similar proposition: he wanted to establish a Sunday School for coloured people. He asked Miss Bartholomew anxiously where he could hold it.
“Why not in your church in the afternoon?”
“Why, we couldn’t do that!” he exclaimed; “we should have to air all the cushions afterward!”
But to return to Boston. A proposition was recently made to organise for coloured people a separate Y. M. C. A., but the white members voted against any such discrimination. Yet a coloured man said to me hopelessly:
“It’s only delayed. Next time we shall be put off with a separate institution.”