Suffer the Little Children: A Biographical History of Child Care for Colored Children in the American South

The literature on orphanages is heavily weighed with discussions of those caring for white whildren. Buckets of ink have been flung across volumes regarding the psychosocial issues of excessive work regimes, brutality, methods of treatment including group work, social work, healthcare etc. of white children. Little or nothing has been published describing the care for orphaned and neglected black children and how these children interacted and were affected by these same issues. Suffer The Little Children attempts to show the grandeur of the history of that work which has been leapfrogged over the care given to orphaned and neglected black children. To bring this issue to light, I used an orphanage in western North Carolina where I was a resident for 12 of the first 14 years of my birth to bring history to bear on this chasm of a diminishing segment of American history.