THE

HE first Negro home that I remember was a log-cabin about fourteen by sixteen feet square. It had a small, narrow door, which hung on rusty, wornout hinges. The windows were mere openings in the wall, protected by a rickety shutter, which sometimes was closed in winter, but which usually hung dejectedly on uncertain hinges against the walls of the house.

Such a thing as a glass window was unknown to this house. There was no floor, or, rather, there was a floor, but it was nothing more than the naked earth. There was only one room, which served as kitchen, parlor, and bedroom for a family of five, which consisted of my mother, my elder brother, my sister, myself, and the cat. In this cabin we all ate and slept, my mother being the cook on the place. My own bed was a heap of rags on the floor in the corner of the room next to the fireplace. It was not until after the emancipation that I enjoyed for the first time in my life the luxury of sleeping in a bed. It was at times, I suppose, somewhat crowded in those narrow quarters, though I do not now remember having suffered on that account, especially as the cabin was always pretty thoroughly ventilated, particularly in winter, through the wide openings between the logs in the walls.

I mention these facts here because the little slaves' cabin in which I lived as a child, and which is associated with all my earliest memories, is typical of the places in which the great mass of the Negro peo

ple lived a little more than forty years ago; and there are thousands of Negro men and women living to-day in comfortable and well-kept homes who will recognize what I have written as a good description of the homes in which they were born and reared.

Probably there is no single object that so accurately represents and typifies the mental and moral condition of the larger proportion of the members of my race fifty years ago as this same little slave cabin. For the same reason it may be said that the best evidence of the progress which the race has made since emancipation is the character and quality of the homes which they are building for themselves to-day.

In spite of difficulties and discouragements, this progress has been considerable. Starting at the close of the war with almost nothing in the way of property, and with no traditions and with little training to fit them for freedom, Negro farmers alone had acquired by 1890 nearly as much land as is contained in the European states of Holland and Belgium combined. Meanwhile there has been a marked improvement in the character of the Negro farmer's home. The old, one-roomed log-cabins are slowly but steadily disappearing. Year by year the number of neat and comfortable farmers' cottages has increased. From my home in Tuskegee I can drive in some directions for a distance of five or six miles and not see a single one-roomed cabin, though I can see thousands of acres of

land that are owned by our people. A few miles northwest of Tuskegee Institute, in a district that used to be known as the "Big Hungry," the Southern Improvement Association has settled something like over fifty Negro families, for whom they have built neat and attractive little cottages. During the first six years nearly all of these settlers have paid for their houses and land from the earnings of their farms.

The success of this experiment has helped to improve conditions throughout the county. Similar results have obtained at Calhoun, Alabama, where a somewhat like experiment has been tried.

What I have said in regard to the condition of the people in the neighborhood of Tuskegee is equally true of Gloucester County, Virginia, where the influence of Hampton has been much felt. My friend Major R. R. Moton of the Hampton Institute writes:

In traveling over some fifty miles of Gloucester County last May, visiting schools and farms of the colored people, I did not see a single one-room house occupied by colored people. Not only that, but the houses of the colored people, I might add, were for the most part either painted or whitewashed, as were the fences and outbuildings. While, on the other hand, in a travel of about eight miles in York County, which is separated from Gloucester County by the York River only, I counted as many as a dozen dilapidated one-room dwellings of colored people. The reason of this is due largely to the influence of the fifty or more graduates and former students who have settled in Gloucester County, while York County has not been touched by the former students and graduates of Hampton Institute.

At Mound Bayou, Mississippi, in the center of the Mississippi-Yazoo delta, where the Negroes outnumber the whites sometimes as high as ten to one, a Negro colony, founded by Negroes, has come into possession of thirty thousand acres. of land, and has built a Negro town in which, during the twenty years of its existence, no white man has ever lived. Another and large Negro town has grown up at Boley, Indian Territory, within the last five years, where all business, schools, and town-government are in the hands of Negroes, most of them from the farms and country towns of northern Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi.

With regard to the progress made by Negroes in the cities we have less complete and definite information. But the number of those who possess homes, particularly in the Southern cities, is, I am convinced, much larger than most people, even those who are best informed, are aware. And this progress has been made for the most part in recent years, for after emancipation the freedmen did not at once understand the importance of acquiring property and building homes. They have had to learn that, as they have had to learn, in the first forty years of freedom, so many other simple and elementary principles of civilization.

I remember that the Reverend W. R. Pettiford, President of the Alabama Penny Savings Penny Savings Bank at Birmingham, Alabama, told us in one of his reports at the National Negro Business League that when he began his campaign among the miners and laborers of that region, before he could induce them to save money he had first to convince some of them of the necessity of giving up the loose connections in which they had been accustomed to live in slavery, and to establish permanent family relations for the benefit of their children. Many of these people who had been living together for years were ashamed to go through the legal form of marriage: it was a sort of acknowledgment that they had been in the wrong. It was only after their responsibility to their children was explained to them that they could be induced to do so. Others were led to take the step through the influence of the church, or were drawn to it by the growing strictness in such matters of the community in which they lived.

So an increasing number of Negro homes has gone along with an increasing sense of the importance of the safeguards which the home throws about the family, and of the household virtues which it encourages and makes possible.

In every Southern city there is a Negro quarter. It is often merely a clutter of wrecked hovels, situated in the most dismal and unhealthy part of the city. A few years ago there might be two or three of these quarters, but there was very little choice between them. They all had the same dingy, dirty, and God-forsaken appearance. These are the places that

are still usually pointed out as the Negro homes. But in recent years there have grown up, usually in the neighborhood of a school, small Negro settlements of an entirely different character. Most of the houses in these settlements are still modest cottages, but they are clean and neat. There are curtains in the windows, flowers in the gardens, the doorways are swept, there is a little vine growing over the porch, and altogether they have a wholesome air of comfort and thrift.

If you should enter these homes, you would find pictures on the walls, a few books on the table, and an atmosphere of self-respect and decency which is conspicuously absent in the other quarters to which I have referred. These are the homes of a thrifty laboring class, usually of the second generation of freedmen. You would find, if you should inquire, that the owners had all had some education. Many of them have gone through colleges or an industrial school, or at least are sending their children there; and if you should inquire at the places where they are employed, you would learn that they were steady, thrifty workmen, who had won the entire respect of their employers. Many of them were perhaps born and reared in the dingy hovels to which I have referred. Many of them had come originally from farms, and, after leaving school, have settled permanently in the city.

In these same communities, however, you will frequently find other homes, larger and more comfortable, many of them handsome modern buildings, with all the evidences of taste and culture that you might expect to find in any other home of the same size and appearance. If you should inquire here, you would learn that the people living in these homes were successful merchants, lawyers, doctors, and teachers. There is nothing picturesque about these dwellings, and nothing to distinguish them from any other houses of the same class near-by; they are not usually recognized as Negro homes.

Now, the fact is, that white men know almost nothing about the better class of Negro homes. They know the criminals and the loafers, because they have dealt with them in the courts, or because they have to collect the rents from the places in which they congregate and live. They

know to a certain extent the laboring classes whom they employ, and they know something, too, of the Negro business men with whom they have dealings; but they know almost nothing about the doctors, lawyers, teachers, and preachers, who are usually the leaders of the Negro people, the men whose opinions, teaching, and influence are, to a very large extent, directing and shaping the healthful, hopeful constructive forces in these communities.

In the course of my travels about the country I have had the opportunity to visit the homes of many of the people of this influential class. I have talked with them, by their firesides, of their own personal struggles. I have had opportunity to learn of their difficulties, temptations, aspirations, and mistakes, as well as to counsel and advise with them in some of the common undertakings in which we were engaged.

If it were possible, I should like to describe in detail some of the homes that I have visited, and to tell some of the histories that I have heard, because most that has been written about the Negro race in recent years has been written by those who have looked upon them from the outside, so to speak, and have seen them merely through the dull, gray light of social statistics. It is my experience that a house is like a face: it is not difficult to perceive and feel the subtle influences that find expression there, but it is hard to describe them. But I can make here only a few random notes upon my own impressions; I must leave to a poet like the late Paul Laurence Dunbar, and to a novelist like Charles W. Chestnutt, the task of telling the new thoughts that are now stirring in plantation cabins, or the ambitions and struggles of the men and women who have gone out from them to win success in the bigger world outside.

One of the most beautiful and interesting homes with which I am acquainted is that of W. H. Lewis, Special Assistant to the United States District Attorney at Boston. Mr. Lewis lives in Cambridge. His home is on Upton Road, one of the many pleasant avenues of that beautiful university city. The house itself was designed especially for Mr. Lewis, who has chosen to put the entrance rather near the street, in order to give more room and privacy for the fine lawn at the back. On

the rear porch, looking out across the lawn, the family sometimes have their meals in summer. The interior is designed with all the ingenuity and taste that have made modern houses models of comfort and convenience, and is at once large enough to be airy, and snug enough to be warm. Mr. Lewis is extremely fond of old furniture, and he has many trophies to show for his prowls among the antiquaries. I might mention also that in the library and study, which is the place which he regards as particularly his own, Mr. Lewis has a good collection of the books which concern the history of his race, and other races, and the walls are hung with the portraits of the men, both black and white, who have distinguished themselves by service to the Negro race. Mr. Lewis was born in Virginia thirty-nine years ago. Both his father and mother had been slaves, and he got his early education in the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, a school for colored youth. As a boy he peddled matches along the wharves at Portsmouth, Virginia, and in one way or another he made his way until he was able to enter Amherst College. While he was in Amherst he was captain of the foot-ball team. He won the Hardy Prize Debate and the Hardy Prize Oration, and at his graduation, in 1892, was chosen class orator. He was graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1895. During all this time he made his own way, working at various occupations which chance offered. He worked for a time, during this period, as a waiter in Young's Hotel, Boston. After his graduation he began the practice of law. He was three times chosen representative from Cambridge to the legislature, and was finally appointed, in 1903, to the position of United States District Attorney. Such, in brief, is the history of one of the more successful of those who are sometimes referred to in the South as the "new issue."

The limits of this article will not permit me to describe at the same length the homes of Dr. Samuel G. Elbert of Wilmington, Delaware; of Professor William S. Scarborough of Wilberforce, Ohio; nor that of A. D. Langston of St. Louis, Missouri, all of whom are, like Mr. Lewis, men of scholarly attainments,

whose homes reflect the best influence of modern American life.

Dr. Elbert, who was graduated from the Harvard Medical School in 1891, and after several years' experience, first as interne, and then as assistant resident physician, at the Freedman's Hospital in Washington, completed his medical education by a three years' graduate course at the Medical School at the University of Pennsylvania, is still a zealous student, and has collected a private library of some 5000 volumes. Professor W. S. Scarborough, who is the head of the department of Greek at the Wilberforce University, is author of a Greek textbook and a member of a number of learned societies to whose proceedings he is a valuable contributor. Mr. A. D. Langston, who is the son of the Hon. John Mercer Langston, the only colored man ever chosen from the State of Virginia as United States representative, is, as his father was before him, a graduate of Oberlin College. He has been for the larger part of his life a teacher, and is at present the head of the Dumas School at St. Louis, Missouri, where he is doing valuable work for the education of his

race.

A Negro home very different from any of these is that of Paul Chretien, who owns a large plantation of 360 acres two miles from St. Martinsville, in St. Martin's Parish, Louisiana. Mr. Chretien's father was a Creole Negro who made a fortune before the war raising cattle on the low and swampy prairies of southwestern Louisiana. When he died, he left each of his children, three boys and two girls, 360 acres of land, and to Paul he gave the quaint and beautiful country place in which he lived. It was a vast; roomy structure of brick and wood, with a wide gallery across the front, and a porch set into the building at the back. The house stands in the midst of a large garden in which flowers and fruits blossom and bear in tropical profusion. Side by side with such fruits as Northern people are familiar with, grow oranges and figs, which lend an air of luxuriance to eyes accustomed to soberer Northern landscapes.

Among the other Negro homes that I have visited, which have preserved either in their exterior or interior something of