Closely connected with these plans, moreover, are certain other projects to preserve Negro folklore. In this effort the Association has the co-operation of Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, the moving spirit of the American Folklore Society. She is now desirous of making a more systematic effort to embody this part of the Negro civilization and she believes that the work can be more successfully done by co-operation with the Association. As soon as the Director can obtain a special fund for this particular work, an investigator will be employed to undertake it. For the present the Association is endeavoring to stimulate interest in this field by offering a prize of $200 for the best collection of tales, riddles, proverbs, sayings, and songs, which have been heard at home by Negro students of accredited schools.
The interest in the result of these researches has become all but nation-wide. Most advanced institutions of learning now make some use of historical works on the Negro. The Negro in Our History has met with the general welcome as a much desired volume giving the essential facts of Negro achievement. It has been extensively used as collateral reading and has been adopted as a text in more than a score of schools and colleges. The demand for this book is so rapidly increasing that the second edition has been almost exhausted. The third edition, which is now in preparation, will be revised and enlarged so as to give more attention to the Negro in freedom, a period of more concern to most students than that of the Negro before the Civil War.
In almost every center of considerable Negro population and in most of the large schools of the race there are clubs or classes engaged in the study of Negro life and history. Some of these were organized under the supervision of the Association and others sprang up of themselves in response to the increasing desire among Negroes to know about themselves and to publish such information to a world uninformed as to what the race has thought and felt and attempted and done. These groups thus interested in the scientific study of the Negro, moreover, are not restricted to the schools and communities controlled by this race. The Association has found little difficulty in interesting advanced students in large northern universities, and this work has extended to some of the best white schools of the South.
The Staff
The staff has suffered one irreparable loss in that Miss A. H. Smith, who during the last seven years has served the Association as Office Manager and Assistant to the Secretary-treasurer, has recently retired from the service. The Association is immeasurably indebted to Miss Smith for the faithful service which she has rendered the cause, and it will be difficult to fill her position. Although offered opportunities for earning a larger stipend elsewhere, she remained with the Association because of her interest in the work which it has been prosecuting. The Association wishes her well and earnestly hopes that she may be welcomed in some other field of usefulness.
Respectfully submitted,
Carter G. Woodson,
Director
1538 Ninth St., N. W.,
Washington, D. C.
Sept. 18, 1923
FOOTNOTES:
[A] The books of the Association have been audited by a certified public accountant who reports that the receipts have been duly deposited, that all disbursements have been made through numbered voucher checks properly approved, and that the balances given in the records of the Association agree with the balances reported by the banks.