Various

“ Nobody is trying to abolish it, because nobody believes it can be done. We believe the Negro breeds the slum—instead of the slum breeding many of the Negro’s defects. Everywhere else people are re-creating the slum-dweller by abolishing the slum. We make no effort, partly because, as yet, few of us know of the widespread struggle for better housing the Negro is himself making. ”

“ Any excuse that a manufacturer or other employer of labor might make that if he had to provide this protection to his employes he could not make his business pay seems to me similar to the excuse of one who contemplates putting up a building but says he cannot afford to make the necessary expenditures to provide for the safety of those who will occupy it because with such extra cost the income from the building would not be sufficient to pay a good interest. If he cannot make it pay he should of course not undertake it, but under all circumstances he must build safely. ”

“ We regard as merely a legal fiction the assumption that we are infants in all matters relating to the government of the community.
“We respectfully call attention to the fact that in time of war boys between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one are sent to the front to fight for their country and are frequently as officers placed in positions of peculiar responsibility and danger. Is it not self-evident that if youths can thus honorably acquit themselves in time of war, they could and should assume the less dangerous and onerous responsibilities of peace? ”

“ Negro farmers, bankers, merchants, contractors, cotton brokers, insurance men, real estate dealers, social service workers, town and community builders, caterers, engineers, undertakers, educators—these men, representing the entire country and especially the South, told at the recent session of the National Negro Business League held in Philadelphia, with eloquence torn of simplicity and hard experience in the school of life, thrilling stories of success won through struggle, persistence, and good-will toward their white neighbors. ”

“ Manufacturers and business men do not take kindly to the idea that they should be made responsible for the mental, moral and aesthetic development of their employes and under these circumstances industrial education would soon degenerate into a feudal appendage of our industrial system. ”

“ The committee imported a teacher from the Bureau of Recreation, Department of Parks, New York City, and entrusted to her not merely the task of teaching the graceful and quaint dances, that have been imported from over the seas, to the maidens of Dutchess County, but the far more difficult task of organizing the classes, of getting the girls to join, of persuading the mothers to allow their daughters to join. Nowhere are social strata so well-defined, nowhere religious and racial lines so closely drawn as in the country community; nowhere are barriers of caste so hard to break down. ”

“ The annual meetings of the Negro Business League give some striking stories of Negro success and progress to men and women who need courage and inspiration for their work. Other stories could be cited to show that the Negro who applies himself to business and refrains from whining wins the patronage and good will not only of his own people but also of the white people. Courage, initiative, and persistence are indeed required for the task of establishing any business. ”

“ Simple though this idea is, it has not been an easy one to inspire in the hearts of New York and Connecticut farmers (for Amenia is less than three miles from the state line) . The rural population is admittedly composed for the most part of conservatives, unimpressionable, and slow to arouse to anything which savors of innovation, and which does not bring in its train anything of palpable, material benefit. ”

“ There is something pathetic in the following glimpse of home life which Maurice affords us:
“The good food and bad are almost what I take, but I don’t drink coffee any more, and will not take it. My brother used to have coffee every meal, but since my mother was there he drinks no coffee but all milk and bread. Bread is about the only good food there is, and I have had lately a good appetite for it.”
One feels a throb of sympathy for the boy who says:
“We need something to make us stronger mentally, and something to abolish the truant officer.” ”

“ It is true that, if specific industrial education is yoked together with academic education in the high school, industrial education will be emasculated. But then it is due to a managerial blunder of trying to straddle two horses and there is no excuse to make such a managerial mistake the pretext for the creation of an expensive separate system of education. ”

“ Wherever there are not very positive reasons to the contrary, it is of great importance to tell a girl’s family of her approaching confinement in order to enlist their co-operation and to enable the girl to have the most natural and helpful relationships possible at a time when she needs every constructive influence to build up courage for her life ordeal and determination to keep her child and give it every opportunity within her power. ”

“ A committee has been appointed to make an investigation of the causes other than feeble-mindedness that are at the root of illegitimacy. This committee has already done valuable work as a by-product of its main purpose in suggesting important points which agencies are apt to omit in their histories, and in aiding in a greater standardization of work. A full report is expected of this committee next year.
Study groups are being organized to take up the questions of legislation, venereal disease, the efficiency and range of existing institutions, public opinion, feeble-mindedness and statistics. ”

“ It is a shrewd move to get entire control of the education of the masses of industrial workers, a mentally narrowing, mind killing education which, in its effects, would pull the intelligence of a community down to a lower level, being re-enforced by the ossifying influences of extreme specialization, which are noticeable in shop, store and office in all our industrial centers even now. ”

“ These vital questions of business and of life itself were put squarely to the thoughtful Negroes who had come great distances at their own expense and in many cases at considerable sacrifice of time and money. They also reached some of the city Negroes who had come out of mere curiosity to hear Mr. Washington urge a return to the Negro’s richest opportunity—the land. ”

“ A gross return of 10 per cent where the buildings suffered only the depreciation caused by rational use would be as attractive to the ordinary business man here as elsewhere.
Mrs. Hammond’s scheme would be considered part of the educational system of Paine College. Good housing and good living as taught in the settlement and practically applied in the model housing plan would become a part of the school curriculum. The raising of the endowment fund is the present problem of Paine College. The peculiarity of this, as of all other Negro schools, is that the more students it has the poorer it is. ”

“ Three rooms would be reserved for the Negro worker, who would not only keep them as a model home, but would use them to train the girls in housework. This would leave seventy-nine three-roomed homes for rent, at six dollars each monthly, a yearly total of $5,688.00. This sum would pay the salary of the social worker, who is a necessity to the success of the plan, and yet yield 10 per cent gross on the investment, though two acres of the land and the settlement house, representing one-fifth of the sum invested would he unproductive from a commercial point of view. ”

“ Difference in age seems to have little to do with the strength of the impression received. The fact that children acted in the entertainments and motion exhibits probably accounts in part for their interest in these two forms of exhibit material, but it cannot account for the high per cent of attention paid to the tidy and untidy home, the moving pictures, the library, the clean and dirty dairy, or the clean and dirty market. ”

“ The Amenia Field Day offers, as a substitute for the commercialized fair, a free day of wholesome enjoyment, supported by the united efforts of a whole community. One day a year the people of Amenia invite the whole countryside to such a day of clean and simple recreation, without gamblers, fakers, intoxicating liquors, or vulgar sideshows. ”

“ I have wondered in reading The Survey, that so very much attention was given to different phases of welfare by excellent writers, and the subject of liquor business was not emphasized. It is conceded to be the greatest economic problem of the age, and is the cause of the need of charity organizations, police courts, etc. It is estimated by scientific and prison boards that 75 per cent of the insane, and a greater per cent of criminals, and defectives are now at the mercy of the tax payers of the country as a result of liquor drinking, and liquor heredity. ”

“ After a few weeks of service he resigned to take the position of director of welfare with the American Smelting and Refining Company. He has taken charge of the welfare of approximately 20,000 laboring men in the employ of this corporation. The delay of the confirmation of Mr. Neill’s appointment brought forth from the labor press generally, from the railroad managers of the United States and from the American press generally, tributes to his character, to his power, and to his achievements which have been rarely equaled and more rarely exceeded in the industrial history of the nation. ”

“ Motion pictures are bringing the scenes and events of distant lands and even of other ages vividly to the eyes. The Durbar, the coronation, the Scott antarctic expedition, the story of “Quo Vadis,” as shown by the “movies,” not to mention a thousand and one travel subjects from a railway trip in the Andes to street scenes in China, are playing a growing part in popular education. Films are being used increasingly to spread information and enlist public co-operation in the struggle against tuberculosis, dirty milk, flies and other menaces to health. ”

“ The factory conference has recommended $8.60 a week pay as a minimum for factory workers, and a nine-hour work day. The present legal maximum is ten hours a day. Investigation has shown that one-half of the department store girls receive less than forty dollars a month at present and about the same proportion of factory girls get less than $8.60 a week. If the commission, after holding a public hearing as provided by law, decides to enforce these recommendations, its decision will directly affect the wages of fully one-half the women workers in department stores and factories in Portland. ”

“ In all factory buildings no articles or wares of a combustible nature shall be kept or stored inside the limits of any stairway enclosure, or unenclosed stairway, or on the landings, platforms, or passageways connected therewith, nor shall such articles or wares be kept or stored under any stairway unless such stairway and any partitions or doors thereunder are constructed of, or covered with, incombustible material.
Both rules become effective October 1, 1913. The labor law specifically provides for the enclosure of stairways in buildings over four stories. ”

“ The plan is to have the income from the model housing endowment used to pay poor students for work done and so provide with an education many whom the college is forced now to turn away.
The homes, playground and settlement would furnish a practical field where young Negro women could be trained as social workers in order to meet the growing demand from white people in several southern states for trained Negroes to work among the poor of their own race. ”