Citizens of Atlanta do not, generally, take the interest they ought to take in these or other institutions for the benefit of negroes.  To be sure, most Southerners do not believe in higher education for negroes; but, even allowing for that viewpoint, it is manifestly unfair that white children should have public high schools and that negro children should have none, but should be obliged to pay for their education above the grammar grades.  Perhaps there are people in Atlanta who believe that even a high-school education is undesirable for the negro.  That, however, seems to me a pretty serious thing for one race to attempt to decide for another—­especially when the deciding race is not deeply and sincerely interested in the uplift of the race over which it holds the whip hand.  Certainly intelligent people in the South believe in industrial training for the negro, and equally certainly a negro high school could give industrial training.

Negroes are not admitted to Atlanta parks, nor are there any parks exclusively for them.  Until recently there was no contagious-disease hospital to which negroes could be taken, and there is not now a reformatory for colored girls in the State of Georgia.  Neither is there any provision whatsoever in the State for the care of feeble-minded colored children.  And there is one thing even worse to be said.  Shameful as are Georgia’s frequent lynchings, shameful as is the State’s indifference to negro welfare, blacker yet is the law upon her statute books making the “age of consent” ten years!  Various women’s organizations, and individual women, have, for decades, worked to change this law, but without success.  The term “southern chivalry” must ring mocking and derisive in the ears of Georgia legislators until this disgrace is wiped out.  Standing as it does, it means but one thing:  that in order to protect some white males in their depravity, the voters of Georgia are satisfied to leave little girls, ten, eleven, twelve years of age, and upward, white as well as colored, utterly unprotected by the law in this regard.

I have heard more than one woman in Georgia intimate that she would be well pleased with a little less exterior “chivalry” and a little more plain justice.  Aside from their efforts to change the “age of consent” law, leading women in the State have been working for compulsory education, for the opening of the State University to women, for factory inspection and decent child-labor laws.  The question of child labor has now been taken in hand by the National Government—­as, of course, the “age of consent” should also be—­but in other respects but little progress has been made in Georgia.

From such cheerless items I turn gladly to a happier theme.