"I Still Live!~

On horseback, on foot, in ox-wagons, some 1,100 people trekked in 1909 to a place called Piney Woods, near Braxton, Miss. Some were "the best white people" from Braxton. Quality folk gave sizable sums; poor farmers a few pennies; one old woman brought two geese. Laurence Clifton Jones. Missouri-born Negro who had been teaching in a small Mississippi school, had come to Piney Woods to found a Negro school. He had already taught a few people under a tree in the open, had finally obtained an old log cabin. With the promise of enough lumber for the first building, Founder Jones called a public meeting. Result: a subscription list headed by $50 and 40 acres of land from an aged ex-slave named Taylor, first contribution to the Piney Woods Country Life School.

Undenominational, coeducational, Piney Woods has today 300 pupils drawn mainly from the deep Black Belt of Mississippi. They are taught to till the soil on its 1,500 acres of land, to teach in its Normal Department, to master trades, elementary subjects. Principal Jones, 47, a leader in Negro Y. M. C. A. work in Mississippi, member of the National Negro Press Association (executive committee) and the National Negro Business League, has worked hard with his school.

To Piney Woods lately came disaster. Its surplus funds, $2,000 for current expenses, were in the Braxton Bank. The bank closed; all the money was lost temporarily, some of it perhaps permanently. Wrote Principal Jones last week: "Our Southern white friends have no money but are helping us out with provisions and other necessities until we can hear from our friends up North.

"This morning we feel like Jack London's 'Sea Wolf' who when the shipwreck left him with only his tattered garments, looked out upon the world and toward the heavens and cried out in triumph--'I still live!'"

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