Mr. Gloer has endeavoured to secure a coloured assistant who would help look after the swarming Negro children who are becoming criminals. The city refused to appropriate money for that purpose, but some of the leading coloured citizens agreed to contribute one dollar a month each, and a Negro woman was employed to help with the coloured children brought into court. Excellent work was done, but owing to the feeling after the riot the Negro assistant discontinued her work.

Care of Negro Orphans

With many hundreds of Negro orphans, waifs, and foundlings, the state or city does very little to help them. If it were not for the fact that the Negroes, something like the Jews, are wonderfully helpful to one another, adopting orphan children with the greatest willingness, there would be much suffering. Several orphanages in the state are conducted by the coloured people themselves, either through their churches or by private subscription. In Atlanta the Carrie Steele orphanage, which is managed by Negroes, has received an appropriation yearly from the city, and has taken children sent by the city charities[Pg 52] department. After the riot the appropriation was suddenly cut off without explanation, but through the activities of the new Civic League, it was, I understand, restored.

[Pg 52]

Without proper reformatories or asylums, with small advantage of the probation system, hundreds of Negro children are on the streets of Atlanta every day—shooting craps, stealing, learning to drink. A few, shut up in the stockade, or in chain-gangs, without any attempt to reform them or teach them, take lessons in crime from older offenders and come out worse than they went in. They spread abroad the lawlessness they learn and finally commit some frightful crime and get back into the chain-gang for life—where they make a profit for the state!

Every child, white or coloured, is getting an education somewhere. If that education is not in schools, or at home, or, in cases of incorrigibility, in proper reformatories, then it is on the streets or in chain-gangs.

Why Negro Children Are Not in School

My curiosity, aroused by the very large number of young prisoners, led me next to inquire why these children were not in school. I visited a number of schools and I talked with L. M. Landrum, the assistant superintendent. Compulsory education is not enforced anywhere in the South, so that children may run the streets unless their parents insist upon sending them to school. I found more than 

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