Night schools are also held in the public school buildings from November to April—two schools for Negroes especially, where coloured people of all ages are at liberty to attend. It is a remarkable sight: Negroes fifty and sixty years old mingle there with mere children. The girls are taught sewing and cooking, the men carpentry—besides the ordinary branches. One old man from the South was found crying with joy over his ability to write his name. For the very young children, Negro equally with white, there is Mrs. Eliza Blaker’s Kindergarten. For the aged coloured women a home is now supported principally by the coloured people themselves.
The Morals of Negro Women
I saw a good deal of these various lines of activity and talked with the people who come close in touch with the struggling masses of the Negro poor. I wish I had room to tell some of the stories I heard: the black masses of poverty, disease, hopeless ignorance, and yet everywhere shot through with hopeful tendencies and individual uplift and success. In Indianapolis, as in other Northern cities, I heard much to the credit of the Negro women.
“If the Negro is saved here in the North,” Miss Smith told me, “it will be due to the women.”
They gave me many illustrations showing how hard the Negro women worked—taking in washing or going out every day to work, raising their families, keeping the home, sometimes supporting worthless husbands.
“A Negro woman of the lower class,” one visitor said to me, “rarely expects her husband to support her. She takes the whole burden herself.”
And the women, so the loan association visitors told me, are the chief savers: they are the ones who get and keep the bank accounts. I have heard a great deal South and North about the immorality of Negro women. Much immorality no doubt exists, but no honest observer can go into any of the crowded coloured communities of Northern cities and study the life without coming away with a new respect for the Negro women.
Another hopeful work in Indianapolis is the juvenile court. A boy who commits a crime is not immediately cast off to become a more desperate criminal and ultimately to take his revenge upon the society which neglected him. He comes into a specially organised court, where he meets not violence, but friendliness and encouragement. Mrs. Helen W. Rogers is at the head of the probation work in Indianapolis, and she has under her supervision a large corps of voluntary probation officers, thirty of whom are coloured men and women—the best in town. These coloured probation officers have an organisation of which George W. Cable, who is the foreman of the distributing department of the Indianapolis post-office, is the chairman. A Negro boy charged with an offence is turned over to one of these leading Negro men or women, required to report regularly, and helped until he gets on his feet again. Thus far the system has worked with great success. Boys whose offences are too serious for probation are sent, not to a jail or chain-gang, where they become habitual criminals, but to a reform school, where they are taught regular habits of work.
Why the Negro Often Fails
As I continued my inquiries I found that the leading coloured men in most cities, though they might be ever so discouraged over the condition of the ignorant, reckless masses of their people, were awakening to the fact that the Negro’s difficulty in the North was not all racial, not all due to mere colour prejudice, but also in large measure to lack of training, lack of aggressiveness and efficiency, lack of organisation. In New York a “Committee for Improving the Industrial Condition of Negroes” has been formed. It is composed of both white and coloured men, and the secretary is S. R. Scottron, an able coloured man. The object of the committee is to study the condition of the Negroes in New York City, find out the causes of idleness, and try to help the Negro to better employment.