“Frederick, is God dead?”

Such strong, primitive types of Negro womanhood in America seem to some to exhaust its capabilities.  They know less of a not more worthy, but a finer type of black woman wherein trembles all of that delicate sense of beauty and striving for self-realization, which is as characteristic of the Negro soul as is its quaint strength and sweet laughter.  George Washington wrote in grave and gentle courtesy to a Negro woman, in 1776, that he would “be happy to see” at his headquarters at any time, a person “to whom nature has been so liberal and beneficial in her dispensations.”  This child, Phillis Wheatley, sang her trite and halting strain to a world that wondered and could not produce her like.  Measured today her muse was slight and yet, feeling her striving spirit, we call to her still in her own words: 

     “Through thickest glooms look back, immortal shade.”

Perhaps even higher than strength and art loom human sympathy and sacrifice as characteristic of Negro womanhood.  Long years ago, before the Declaration of Independence, Kate Ferguson was born in New York.  Freed, widowed, and bereaved of her children before she was twenty, she took the children of the streets of New York, white and black, to her empty arms, taught them, found them homes, and with Dr. Mason of Murray Street Church established the first modern Sunday School in Manhattan.

Sixty years later came Mary Shadd up out of Delaware.  She was tall and slim, of that ravishing dream-born beauty,—­that twilight of the races which we call mulatto.  Well-educated, vivacious, with determination shining from her sharp eyes, she threw herself singlehanded into the great Canadian pilgrimage when thousands of hunted black men hurried northward and crept beneath the protection of the lion’s paw.  She became teacher, editor, and lecturer; tramping afoot through winter snows, pushing without blot or blemish through crowd and turmoil to conventions and meetings, and finally becoming recruiting agent for the United States government in gathering Negro soldiers in the West.

After the war the sacrifice of Negro women for freedom and uplift is one of the finest chapters in their history.  Let one life typify all:  Louise De Mortie, a free-born Virginia girl, had lived most of her life in Boston.  Her high forehead, swelling lips, and dark eyes marked her for a woman of feeling and intellect.  She began a successful career as a public reader.  Then came the War and the Call.  She went to the orphaned colored children of New Orleans,—­out of freedom into insult and oppression and into the teeth of the yellow fever.  She toiled and dreamed.  In 1887 she had raised money and built an orphan home and that same year, in the thirty-fourth year of her young life, she died, saying simply:  “I belong to God.”