A Report Concerning the Colored Women of the South

To the Board of Trustees

of the John F. Slater Fund.

Gentlemen:—We have the honor to submit the following report of a recent tour (made at the request of your Board) for the purpose of ascertaining the condition, mental and moral, of the colored women of the South.

We started on October 20th, 1895. Our tour was confined to the five Central States,—Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. We visited twenty-four schools and institutions, examined the life of the people in the one-roomed cabin of the plantation and road-side, in the hovels of the manufacturing towns, as well as the neat and attractive homes which are the result of industry and thrift aided by education. We conversed with colored clergymen, lawyers, doctors, druggists, artisans, cotton-factors and laborers, with male and female teachers in educational and industrial schools, with trained nurses and servants, with wives and mothers, and with girls in and out of the schools.

If the conclusions we draw should seem optimistic, it should be remembered that we received our impressions from negroes at their best, in the five states we visited, as most of them under thirty years of age have come under the influence of


 the great schools which have been established by northern philanthropy.