750
Second Ave., South, Minneapolis, Minn.

IOWA.--Woman's Home Miss. Union, Secretary, Miss Ella K. Marsh,
Grinnell, Iowa.

KANSAS.--Woman's Home Miss. Society, Secretary, Mrs. Addison
Blanchard, Topeka, Kan.

SOUTH DAKOTA.--Woman's Home Miss. Union, Secretary, Mrs. W.H. Thrall,
Amour, Dak.
{105}

* * * * *

THE BLACK WOMAN OF THE SOUTH.

The Rev. Alexander Crummell, D.D., formerly a missionary in Africa and
now Rector of St. Luke's Church in Washington, D.C., is a native of
Africa, a graduate of one of the leading Universities of England, who
adds to the strength and graces of a sound scholarship, the devotion
of a noble Christian character.

From an address made by him upon the "Needs and Neglects of the Black
Woman of the South," we quote his plea for "Woman's Work for Woman."
Referring to the Negro woman in slavery days, he says:

"She was a 'hewer of wood and a drawer of water.' She had to keep
her place in the gang from morn till eve, under the burden of a
heavy task, or under the stimulus or the fear of a cruel lash. She
was a picker of cotton. She labored at the sugar mill and in the
tobacco factory. When, through weariness or sickness, she had
fallen behind her allotted task, then came, as punishment, the
fearful stripes upon her shrinking, lacerated flesh.

"Her home life was of the most degrading nature. She lived in the
rudest huts, and partook of the coarsest food, and dressed in the
scantiest garb, and slept, in multitudinous cabins, upon the
hardest boards!

"There was no sanctity of family, no binding tie of marriage, none
of the fine felicities and the endearing affections of home. Few of
these things were the lot of the Southern black woman. Instead,
thereof, a gross barbarism, which tended to blunt the tender
sensibilities, to obliterate feminine delicacy and womanly shame,
came down as her heritage from generation to generation; and it
seems a miracle of providence and grace that, notwithstanding these
terrible circumstances, so much struggling virtue lingered amid the
rude cabins, that so much womanly worth and sweetness remained, as
slaveholders themselves have borne witness to.

"Freed, legally, she has been; but the act of emancipation had no
talismanic influence to reach to and alter and transform her
degrading social life. The truth is, 'Emancipation Day' found her a
prostrate and degraded being; and, alth