1 Men and women and children fled and fell before them as they swept into Dougherty.
2 The young men marry between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five; the young women between twenty and thirty.
3 Yet the rate of illegitimacy is undoubtedly lower than in Austria or Italy, and the women as a class are modest.
4 Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls.
5 I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest.
6 The world loved him; the women kissed his curls, the men looked gravely into his wonderful eyes, and the children hovered and fluttered about him.
7 They are usually young unmarried persons, some being women; and when they marry they sink to the class of metayers, or, more seldom, become renters.
8 In the house there was little to interest him; the books were old and stale, the local newspaper flat, and the women had retired with headaches and sewing.
9 Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the calico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet.
10 It would of course be unfair to compare this number with divorce statistics, for many of these separated women are in reality widowed, were the truth known, and in other cases the separation is not permanent.
11 This narrowness of life reaches its maximum among the women: thirteen hundred and fifty of these are farm laborers, one hundred are servants and washerwomen, leaving sixty-five housewives, eight teachers, and six seamstresses.
12 It was not enough that the teachers of teachers should be trained in technical normal methods; they must also, so far as possible, be broad-minded, cultured men and women, to scatter civilization among a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters, but of life itself.
13 I have seen twelve-year-old boys working in chains on the public streets of Atlanta, directly in front of the schools, in company with old and hardened criminals; and this indiscriminate mingling of men and women and children makes the chain-gangs perfect schools of crime and debauchery.
14 And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood.
15 The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.
16 Comparing them as a class with my fellow students in New England and in Europe, I cannot hesitate in saying that nowhere have I met men and women with a broader spirit of helpfulness, with deeper devotion to their life-work, or with more consecrated determination to succeed in the face of bitter difficulties than among Negro college-bred men.