The age-herald., 1901-12-01

fining influences. Perhaps their parents are living in sin. And the climatic con- ditions in the South, added to the tenn peramental laxity in manners that Is un- doubtedly characteristic of the sub merged negro woman, all tend to make the labors of Mrs. Bruce exceedingly valuable.
 Very often when the girls come to Tuskegee they lie atrociously. But Mrs. Bruce Is especially stern about false hoods. and the girl who does not very soon evince desire to be truthful is sent back to her home. As for the statement recently mad1 by 6 Northern writer to the effect the negro girls In the South are all shockingly immoral-that's a gross exaggeration. But heredity is powerful factor for evil as we'll as tor good and we have had too short a time at the work to have been able to educate the colored girl in every case out of proneness to moral laxity.
 ''The educated negro woman who is good. however, has a conception of purity which seems to me to compare very fa- vorably with that of the white girl of the same class. I have had ample opportun- ity to make observations from the in- side of both a Northern and a Southern school for girls and I firmly believe that a colored girl of the South who has once realized with her heart and mind the biUAulHebb LII blft hftu tnc pehdtJ Oh Wohh- anly delicacy and restraint is often more pure in mind and deed than the Northern girl. I was at the practice school con nected with the Birmingham Normal School for three years and l saw there, of course, a great deal of boarding school life. It was at Birmingham. too, that l received the only notion Have ever had in the North as to what color line might be. And then the implied snub came from a Southern girl.
 '"rhe girls home was in South Carolina and though she was civil to me she was never cordial as the other girls. And once when her brother came to visit her, he declared up and down, as l after- ward learned, that he would not go to the table while I was there. He had never eaten at the same table as a col ored person, he said, and he never would. But there was nothing for him to eat and his sister finally persuaded him. l was told, to come in and not make a scene. I didn't mind this at all, you know, for the Southern womans feeling about social intercourse with colored people is a thing beyond her control Education has not been so effectively di- rected to this weakness of hers that she is able to overcome 1t. For her to grow broad, as for the colored girl to grow delicate. will take time.
 .'Ita seemed to me last year when went back home after long absence and myself taught some of the classes at Tuskegee that there is not so very much, after all, to be said to the superior credit of the Northern white girl as compared with the poor colored girl of the South. when the difference in early environment and in heredity is taken into considera- tion." ..
 Miss Washington wore a simple close fitting walking skirt and a becoming shirt waist of green and pink organdie, trimmed with narrow white satin rib- bon, on the day of this talk and was herself so refined in appearance as to suggest quite naturally 8 question as to Tuskegee's influence upon the taste of the girls there graduated.
 ''The students soon become very care full about their clothes and most partio- ular in the small matters of the toilet D blue percale. trimmed with red braid and 1t is made to fit very nicely with a shirt waist and full skirt The girls are early taught dressmaking, and they al- most all, after they leave the school, make their own clothes and those of the family. I myself cut and make all my dresses. But the best work which springs from the school Is undoubtedly that which comes as a result of the object lessons in. neatness and social purity fur nished by the consecrated lives of the graduates"
 Miss Washington has good many old friends among the girls at Wellesley. and she has received several invitations not ordinarily extended to special stu- dents But she seems to feel. in spite of the cordiality which has everywhere been shown her. that college girls of the North