Evidences of Progress Among Colored People
for the training of colored girls in the United States.

The institution has a magnificent location, and all of the buildings are specially suited to its needs. Spelman has a large and able faculty of earnest, devoted teachers, an attendance of pupils numbered by the hundreds, a constituency of friends and patrons rapidly extending in numbers and interest, and has made for itself a large place in the educational forces of the South, and established a reputation of a very high order.

The question of the education of the colored people as a preparation for citizenship, just after the war, demanded careful thought and prompt treatment, and among the noble women who ventured into the South, fully equipped to do the service they felt was needed, were Miss S. B. Packard and Miss H. E. Giles. The Southern white people could not reasonably be expected to throw to the winds all their cherished traditions and preconceptions simply because they had acknowledged defeat at the hands of the Northern people. They could not even be ex[Pg 20]pected to at once admit their former slaves into political fellowship, recognizing them as equals in all the rights of citizenship; nor could they be expected to provide schools for the education of these people. Out of a consideration of these facts, Northern people, moved by noble and unselfish impulses, made their way to the South and established these great institutions for the education of colored people.

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Both Miss Packard and Miss Giles had made for themselves a reputation before moving from their homes in New England to Atlanta. They were identified with the Woman's Baptist Home Mission Society and had indicated their zeal for the promotion of the Society's interest in the most practical manner. The work done at Spelman is a practical Christian work, and the young ladies who graduate from that institution are the very best specimens of cultured and refined womanhood. This school is modeled after those of like grade established for white people. This should be the case with all Southern schools. There are required the same qualifications in the teachers, the same text-books, the same course of study, the same kinds of discipline that are found in similar institutions. There seems to be no point in the equipment or general management of these institutions where they can diverge safely from those which the history of education has shown to be most desirable and best adapted to their purpose. The grounds, buildings, furniture, libraries, text-books, apparatus, endowments of a Negro school in Georgia, should not differ in any 
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