On every program of Amenia Field Day has been printed these principles:
“You have got to make the country as attractive socially as the city if you want to keep the young folks on the farms.
“There’s a good deal of work in the country, but most of our boys and girls have forgotten how to play.
“Baseball is a splendid game, but it isn’t the only one. Every healthy boy should be interested in at least half a dozen others. Don’t merely watch others play games; play them yourself.
“You can’t drink strong drink and be an athlete. Get your boys interested in honest and healthy sports, and save them from drink and dissipation.
“Contests and competitions are not the main thing. ‘The strong compete and grow stronger; the weak look on and grow weaker.’ The main thing is play. Learn the great lesson that play is just as necessary for your sons as work.
“The community should help to run its own recreations. Its festivals should be, not only for the people, but of and by the people.”
MODEL HOUSING AS A COLLEGE COURSE
Some of the concrete results of the Tuskegee experiment in reconstructing the interior of the Negro rural home, were told in The Survey of August 30. Paine College, Augusta, Ga., a school for Negroes, supported for thirty years by southern white people, who feel that the Negro question can only be solved when the white descendants of slave owners set their hearts and heads to the task, is endeavoring to experiment on the reconstruction of the Negro city home by change of material environment If a $50,000 endowment can be raised the college will put into effect a plan of housing designed to prove it profitable, not only morally but financially, to provide the Negro an exterior environment which shall make the task of educating him for life easier. The scheme and the demand for better housing on which it is based is described by Mrs. John D. Hammond, wife of and co-worker with the white president of Paine College.
The whole plan is based upon the belief that the Negro is himself eagerly striving for a decent living. The Negroes’ own fight, individually, for better homes is said to be little short of heroic. All through the South, in city and country, Negro-owned homes witness to the increasing prosperity of a large class, and to the effort and self-denial of thousands more, whose income would seem to many of us, to put house-owning utterly out of the question.