which, again, he makes opportunities for his

race.

R. H. Boyd, of Nashville, Tennessee, was another ex-slave to contribute $1,000 towards the Young Men's Christian Association in his city. Mr. Boyd owns one of the few big Negro publishing houses in the country. This man went to school-elementary school-after he was grown, married, and had a family of considerable size. To quote a part of his own story:

I went into Palestine, Texas, and formed a partnership with Dunlap and Smallwood and bought the first printing machinery furnishing Bible leaflets to the young people of the South. I went in partnership with Dunlap and Smallwood because they were white men and experienced printers. I had, at that time, $500, possibly $1,000. I invested it in machinery. I knew nothing of printing. I swindled both Dunlap and Smallwood. I swindled these men out of what they had. When we went into the business, they had the experience; I had the money. When we quit-we were finally burned out-they got all the money and I left Palestine with all the experience. I went to Nashville in 1896 for the purpose of devising some ways and means by which we could print all of the Bible leaflets, Sunday-school and Church literature used or required by our denomination. I secured a secretary, rented a room for $5 a month, furnished it nicely with one or two splitbottom chairs and a second-hand table, which

DAVID T HOWARD OF ATLANTA, GEORGIA Another colored man whose name is on the $1,000 roll of honor

served as my desk; then I bought a few pencils and some paper, opened my office, began business, and reported for work every morning promptly at or before nine o'clock. The first thing I did my secretary and I-was to bow down by the side of that table and ask Almighty God to help me to succeed in this work. And I want to tell you that from that day until the present time there has never been a day in the National Baptist Publishing Board but what every employee working there has been ordered to shut down the presses, stop whatever they are doing, and at 9:30 each morning enter the chapel and thank God for his goodness and ask for guidance during that day. When I first started into this printing enterprise at Nashville, I lived in that little room; I had left my family in San Antonio, Texas. There, beside the open fireplace, I slept, I prayed to God for success, and laid my plans for the future. I was my own cook and servant girl. The problem of the Negro servant girl had not entered my household. My breakfast consisted of a cup of coffee, some rye bread toasted on the coals, and a nickel's worth of bologna sausage.

This is the type of life story back of nearly every large as well as small sum paid from the Negro purse in all those campaigns. So it has been with Thomas E. Lassiter, of Atlantic City, New Jersey, again a man who started with nothing, but who now, through hard work and self-control, is worth some $50,000. His wife, a hairdresser, is, I am

told, worth in her own name almost as much as her husband.

Again, there is Mrs. C. J. Walker, of Indianapolis, who not many years ago left the farm in Louisiana for the wash-tub, left the wash-tub for the kitchen, and then left the kitchen for business. She, too, was in the $1,000 class of donors. In all these instances of $1,000 Negro donors-in that of Mr. Preston Taylor, a wealthy undertaker of the same city; of the Rev. William Beckam and Mr. Henry Allen Boyd, also of Nashville; of Mrs. Daisy Merchant, of Cincinnati, who gave $1,200; of Dr. E. P. Roberts, of New York; of Mr. Henry T. Troy, of Los Angeles, California-in all these cases the money has been literally wrung from the respective occupations by hard work, under trying circumstances and the greatest amount of personal restraint.

That most of the showing in building Young Men's Christian Associations should have been made among Negroes of the North is to me a matter of marked significance. In the first place, these buildings themselves provide places of welcome where

491

they are most needed. Year by year our boys get into Northern cities. Often they are in schools and work on trains or steamboats in summer to earn their tuition

He

for the next year. The Northern city gets attractive to them. They decide to stay there. But in too many cases this decision is the end of all that was hopeful in the young man's career. He misses the best people and gets among the easy-going. gets into a hotel, where money comes easily and regularly. Coming easily, it goes easily. The Young Men's Christian Association in these cities will lead him among different companions and keep in him the ambition he set out with.

It is sometimes said that the Young Men's Christian Association weakens the influence of the church. This was not so in the case of the Negro. In many instances the persons who contributed the most in effort and money to make the erection of these buildings possible were men who had not been counted as particularly religious men. In a great number of cases, after the building campaigns were over, they connected themselves with the

church again. Men and women who had previously taken little or no part in any organized effort to help themselves or the race were drawn into the movement. Men of all classes and all denominations united and pulled together for the common good as they had never done before. The result of this was that when the work was over and the finished building came to be dedicated, the people felt that it belonged to them to an extent that they could not have felt if it had cost them any less effort and sacrifice.

Another way in which this gift has helped the Negro people has been by enabling the Young Men's Christian Association to teach how it is possible to make religion touch practical life. That" old-time religion," from which the Negro got so much comfort in slavery, turned all attention to the next world. In the Young Men's Christian Association he learns to associate religion with cleanliness, with health, with pure living. He learns to associate religion with the reading of books, with opportunities for study and advancement in his trade or profession. In short, the young colored man learns in the Young Men's Christian Association how religion can and should be connected up with all the ordinary practical interests and wholesome natural pleasures of life.

Another direction in which, it seems to me, Mr. Rosenwald's gift and the Young Men's Christian Association have been a help to the members of my race is in what they are doing to convince the white people of this country that in the long run schools are cheaper than policemen; that there is more wisdom in keeping a man out of the ditch than in trying to save him after he has fallen in; that it is more Christian and more economical to prepare young men to live right than to punish them after they have committed crime.

Some years ago at Buxton, Iowa, where there is a community of about fifteen hundred Negro miners, the Consolidated Coal Company was persuaded to erect a colored Young Men's Christian Association building at a cost of $20,000. For several years this Christian Association was about the only government that community had. So satisfactory did this investment prove that, after a short time, another building was erected for a boys' branch of the Association. When

the manager of this company was asked his opinion as to the value of this work, he said: "The Association has made a policeman and a prison unnecessary in this community."

This work, begun at Buxton in 1903, has now become a regular feature of the Young Men's Christian Association's work. There are similar Associations among the lumber men at Vaughn, North Carolina, and Bogalusa, Louisiana. Recently an Association was started among the five thousand Negroes employed by the Newport Shipbuilding Company, at Newport News, Virginia. At this place night classes were established to give the boys and young men of the community a general education. In addition, there is a social room where members may play billiards, pool, and other games, and an athletic field where they have outdoor games and sports. Thousands of colored men are employed in mines, in lumber camps, iron mills, and construction camps, in which there are neither schools nor churches, nor any other influence that makes for better living. Under such conditions employers see that it is not only human and right, but sound economy, to provide some sort of welfare work for their employees, both white and black. The result is that these Associations are springing up more rapidly than the Association can find competent men to direct them. At Benham, Kentucky, an Association has recently been started for colored miners. At Birmingham, Alabama, the American Coal and Iron Company has recently fitted up a splendid plant for its employees, white and colored. This branch of the work illustrates how the Association has been able to adapt its work to all kinds and classes of men.

The organizing of the colored people for the gathering and collection of subscriptions, the inspiration that comes from labor in common for the common good-all this is in itself a character-building process, and has had a far-reaching influence upon the churches and other religious organizations throughout the country. These efforts have helped not merely the black man, but the white man as well, in bringing the best element of both races together in labor and counsel for the common good. To the South especially, where the best black and the best white people almost never meet and know each other, the struggles, the sacrifices, and the generous enthusiasm which the building campaign has brought out in the black man and white have served to reveal each race to the other and to bring about an understanding and community interest between them that could probably have come about in no other way. Tuskegee Institute, Alabama.

T

HE quilt shown in the accompanying photograph is the work of an aged Negro woman, who put into it the reverence, the fantastic conception of sacred events, and the passion of imagination of her people. Her idea was, as she voices it, "to preach a sermon in patchwork." In other words, to express through this humble and homely medium the qualities of mind and soul that are the inborn possession of the Negro-the leveling of all events to his personal conception of them, and the free, colorful imagination of a primitive mind. The Negro's religion is instinctive, interwoven into the whole warp and woof of his being, and it finds its way out, into the realms of expression, in everything that he does. This unconscious, superstitious, symbolic relation with the Great Force behind and in all life might easily be the chief characteristic of the Negro. In order fully to comprehend the wonderful imagination wrought in mystic symbols into this old quilt one must really know something about the Negro himself, more especially about the "old timey "Negro, who is so fast and so tragically disappearing.

The religion of the Negro of the older. type is a curious blend of blind superstition wrought out in imagination, generally unreserved and not self-conscious, hysterical and ecstatic in its manifestation. It not only is not a mental state, but has very little of the mental attitude in it. It is pure emotion, in greater or less degree-absolutely sincere. while it lasts, but not necessarily connected with the common activities of life. The older type of Negro reduced everythingGod and the angelic hosts-to the level of his own understanding, the personal equation entering largely into his conception of such high matters. His God was the anthropomorphic God of all savage people and of all childhood-individual childhood and race childhood. A God to be feared, yet one who could be deceived, hoodwinked. A God to be reverenced, yet about whom the most absurd, incongruous, almost sacrilegious superstitions gathered.

The following lines from an old Negro "spiritual," as these songs are called, may be quoted as an example of the Negro's intimate expression of religious belief:

"Fer itself, fer itself,

Fer itself, fer itself,
Every soul got ter confess
Fer itself!

De Lawd reach down
An' he says ter me

(Every soul got ter confess fer itself!)
Dat he can't have no heaven
'Less he got me

(Every soul got ter confess fer itself!).

De devil reach up

An' he says ter me

(Every soul got ter confess fer itself!)
Dat he can't have no hell
'Less he got me

(Every soul got ter confess fer itself!)."

And now for the explanation of the old quilt pictured herewith. It is the reverent, worshipful embodiment of an old colored woman's soul. I shall use her own words, in as far as I can quote them. So many tributes were paid to flowers and leaves by using them as decorations that she determined, she said, to "preach de Gospel in patchwork, ter show my Lawd my humbility." And again, "Dis heah quilt gwine show where sin originated, outen de beginnin' uv things." The whole quilt is made of gaycolored calico, most beautifully quilted with the finest stitches. The border is rose-colored, the spotted animals yellow and purple.

In No. 1 Adam and Eve are shown in the Garden of Eden. In the upper right-hand corner is the serpent, represented with feet. When asked to explain this anatomical curiosity, she replied, elusively, "He 'blige ter have foots and han's an' all his features in dem days, ter git aroun' man, chile!" The coloring of the serpent is a brilliant yellow and black in eleven bold stripes. Immediately under the serpent's head is what she called "forbidden fruit, or original sin." It is in the shape of a dressmaker's form! The trimming around the neck even is most carefully worked out in its significance. "To ketch de eye, honey !" she said. To ketch de eye er mortal man. Yas, suh!" To the immediate right of this strange symbol, and scarcely perceptible, is a white dove.

In No. 2 are shown Adam and Eve and Cain in the Garden, before the expulsion. The peacock, in the extreme lower right cor