SOME ATLANTA INSTITUTIONS
There has been great rejoicing in Atlanta over the raising of funds for
the establishment there of two new universities, Emory and Oglethorpe.
Emory was founded in 1914, as the result of a feud which developed in
Vanderbilt University, located at Nashville, Tennessee, over the
question as to whether the institution should be controlled by the Board
of Bishops of the southern Methodist Episcopal Church, or by the
University trustees, who were not so much interested in the development
of the sectarian side of the university. The fight was taken to the
courts where the trustees won. As a result, Methodist influence and
support were withdrawn from Vanderbilt, which thenceforward became a
non-sectarian college, and Emory was started--Atlanta having been
selected as its home because nearly a million and a half dollars was
raised in Atlanta to bring it there.
Oglethorpe is to be a Presbyterian institution, and starts off with a
million dollars.
This will give Atlanta three rather important colleges, since she
already has the technical branch of the University of Georgia, the main
establishment of which located at Athens, Georgia, is one of the oldest
state universities in the country, having been founded in 1801. (The
University of Tennessee is the oldest state university in the South. It
was founded in 1794. The University of Pennsylvania, dating from 1740,
is the oldest of all state universities. Harvard, founded in 1636, was
the first college established in the country; and the only other
American colleges which survive from the seventeenth century are William
and Mary, at Williamsburg, Virginia, established in 1693, and St. John's
College, at Annapolis, dating from 1696.)
There is a tendency in some parts of the South to use the terms
"college" and "university" loosely. Some schools for white persons,
doing little if anything more than grammar and high-school work, are
called "colleges," and negro institutions doing similar work are
sometimes grandiloquently termed "universities."
Atlanta has thirteen public schools for negroes, but no public high
school for them. There are, however, six large private educational
institutions for negroes in the city, doing high-school, college, or
graduate work, making Atlanta a great colored educational center. Of
these, Atlanta University, a non-sectarian co-educational college with a
white president (Mr. Edward T. Ware, whose father came from New England
and founded the institution in 1867), is, I believe, the oldest and
largest. It is very highly spoken of. Atlanta and Clark Universities are
the only two colored colleges in Atlanta listed in the "World Almanac's"
table of American universities and colleges. Clark also has a white man
as president.
Spelman Seminary, a Baptist institution for colored girls, has a white
woman president, and is partially supported by Rockefeller money.
Morehouse College, for boys, has a colored president, an able man, is of
similar denomination and is also partially supported by Rockefeller
funds. Spelman and Morehouse are run separately, excepting in college
work, on which they combine. Both are said to be excellent. Morris Brown
University is not a university at all, but does grammar and high-school
work. It is officered and supported by colored people, all churches of
the African Methodist Episcopal denomination subscribing funds for its
maintenance. Gammon Theological Seminary is, I am informed, the one
adequately endowed educational establishment for negroes in Atlanta. It
would, of course, be a splendid thing if the best of these schools and
colleges could be combined.
Citizens of Atlanta do not, generally, take the interest they ought to
take in these or other institutions for the benefit of negroes. To be
sure, most Southerners do not believe in higher education for negroes;
but, even allowing for that viewpoint, it is manifestly unfair that
white children should have public high schools and that negro children
should have none, but should be obliged to pay for their education above
the grammar grades. Perhaps there are people in Atlanta who believe that
even a high-school education is undesirable for the negro. That,
however, seems to me a pretty serious thing for one race to attempt to
decide for another--especially when the deciding race is not deeply and
sincerely interested in the uplift of the race over which it holds the
whip hand. Certainly intelligent people in the South believe in
industrial training for the negro, and equally certainly a negro high
school could give industrial training.
Negroes are not admitted to Atlanta parks, nor are there any parks
exclusively for them. Until recently there was no contagious-disease
hospital to which negroes could be taken, and there is not now a
reformatory for colored girls in the State of Georgia. Neither is there
any provision whatsoever in the State for the care of feeble-minded
colored children. And there is one thing even worse to be said. Shameful
as are Georgia's frequent lynchings, shameful as is the State's
indifference to negro welfare, blacker yet is the law upon her statute
books making the "age of consent" _ten years_! Various women's
organizations, and individual women, have, for decades, worked to change
this law, but without success. The term "southern chivalry" must ring
mocking and derisive in the ears of Georgia legislators until this
disgrace is wiped out. Standing as it does, it means but one thing: that
in order to protect some white males in their depravity, the voters of
Georgia are satisfied to leave little girls, ten, eleven, twelve years
of age, and upward, white as well as colored, utterly unprotected by the
law in this regard.
I have heard more than one woman in Georgia intimate that she would be
well pleased with a little less exterior "chivalry" and a little more
plain justice. Aside from their efforts to change the "age of consent"
law, leading women in the State have been working for compulsory
education, for the opening of the State University to women, for factory
inspection and decent child-labor laws. The question of child labor has
now been taken in hand by the National Government--as, of course, the
"age of consent" should also be--but in other respects but little
progress has been made in Georgia.
From such cheerless items I turn gladly to a happier theme.
As I have said elsewhere in this book, many colored people in Atlanta
are doing well in various ways. At Atlanta University I saw several
students whose fathers and mothers were graduates of the same
institution. Higher education for the negro has, thus, come into its
second generation. More prosperous negroes in Atlanta are doing social
settlement work among less fortunate members of their race, and have
started a free kindergarten for negro children. Many good people in
Atlanta are unaware of these facts, and I believe their judgment on the
entire negro question would be modified, at least in certain details,
were they merely to inform themselves upon various creditable negro
activities in the city. The northern stranger, attempting to ascertain
the truth about the negro and the negro problem, has to this extent the
advantage of the average Southerner: prejudice and indifference do not
prevent his going among the negroes to find out what they are doing for
themselves.
* * * * *
At various times in my life chance has thrown me into contact with
charities in great variety, and philanthropic work of many kinds. I have
seen theoretical charities, sentimental charities, silly charities,
pauperizing charities, wild-eyed charities, charities which did good,
and others which worked damage in the world; I have seen organized
charities splendidly run under difficult circumstances (as in the
Department of Charities under Commissioner Kingsbury, in New York City),
and I have seen other organized charities badly run at great expense; I
have seen charities conducted with the primary purpose of ministering to
the vanity of self-important individuals who like to say: "See all the
good that I am doing!" and I have seen other personal charities operated
(as in the case of the Rockefeller Foundation) with a perfectly
magnificent scope and effectiveness.
Nevertheless, of all the charities I have seen, of all the efforts I
have witnessed to improve the condition of humanity, none has taken a
firmer hold upon my heart than the Leonard Street Orphans' Home, for
negro girls, in Atlanta.
The home is a humble frame building which was used as a barracks by
northern troops stationed in Atlanta after the Civil War. In it reside
Miss Chadwick, her helpers, and about seventy little negro girls; and it
is an interesting fact that several of the helpers are young colored
women who, themselves brought up in the home and taught to be
self-supporting, have been drawn back to the place by homesickness. Was
ever before an orphan homesick for an orphans' home?
Miss Chadwick is an Englishwoman. Coming out to America a good many
years ago, she somehow found Atlanta, and in Atlanta somehow found this
orphanage, which was then both figuratively and literally dropping to
pieces. Some one had to take hold of it, so Miss Chadwick did. How
successful she has been it is hard to convey in words. I do not mean
that she has succeeded in building up a great flourishing plant with a
big endowment and all sorts of improvements. Far from it. The home
stands on a tiny lot, the building is ramshackle and not nearly large
enough for its purpose, and sometimes it seems doubtful where the money
to keep it going will come from. Nevertheless the home is a hundred
times more successful than I could have believed a home for orphans,
colored or white, could be made, had I not seen it with my own eyes. Its
success lies not in material possessions or prosperity, not in the food
and shelter it provides to those who so pitifully needed it, but in the
fact that it is in the truest and finest sense a _home_, a place endowed
with the greatest blessings any home can have: contentment and
affection. What Miss Chadwick has provided is, in short, an institution
with a heart.
How did she do it? That, like the other mystery of how she manages to
house those seventy small lively people in that little building, is
something which only Heaven and Miss Chadwick understand.
But then, if you have ever visited the home and met Miss Chadwick, and
seen her with her children, you know that Heaven and Miss Chadwick
understand a lot of things the rest of us don't know about at all!