Lecture on Berea College.

Rev. Wm. Goodell Frost, D.D., Ph.D., president of Berea College, Kentucky, spoke last night in the Fogg Lecture Room under the auspices of the Social Service Committee on "A Mountain College on the Fighting Line."

Dean Ames of the Law School introduced the speaker, who began by showing that when free speech and free learning were prohibited in the South as a whole, they were preserved in the mountain districts of Eastern Kentucky by the abolitionist pioneers. Berea College was founded during the Civil War and thirty-nine years ago negroes were admitted. Its first work was to assist the process of reconstruction and to start the negro in his new life.

The region in which the work of Berea is going on consists of twenty counties in the mountain regions of eight states. It is populated by three millions of people, isolated from civilization of any kind and with little or no education. The only ways of transportation are through the river beds, and boys and girls who go to the college must leave their homes and take long pilgrimages in search of education. Help is needed more in this region than in any other of its size in this country.

A bill was passed a short time ago by the state of Kentucky prohibiting the education of negroes and white people in the same institutions, so that now there are no negroes at Berea. As soon as the law was passed, the negro students had to be placed in schools outside of the state, but the college is now fighting the law and hopes to be able to give aid again to the negroes.

The South did not believe that the negroes could be improved, but the experiments in the South at such places as Berea show that this theory is false and that the negroes may be made good citizens through education.