Most of the nation’s Black children still lived in the South—a fact cited by Booker T. Washington, one of only two African Americans included at the conference. Black families, he told the white audience, had long practiced the ideals being touted at Roosevelt’s meeting. “The negro, in some way, has inherited and has had trained into him the idea that he must take care of his own dependents, and he does it to a greater degree than is true perhaps of any other race,” said Washington, who hoped that Black Americans would stay in the rural South, where strong family ties kept children safe and
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