At this meeting in October, 1906, it was decided to investigate the conditions in colored neighborhoods, and learn more in detail of the environments of their homes and schools and churches, to study the sanitary conditions of colored neighborhoods and to collect all the reliable data possible to be used in the effort to improve conditions among the colored people. It was thought best to limit the size of this committee to the ten men who met at Dr. Hurst’s house. They divided themselves up into sub-committees to study and report on the sanitary conditions in colored neighborhoods, to investigate the school conditions with special reference to their surroundings, and to secure such printed matter and collect such reliable statistics as they might need in their future work. At the subsequent meetings reports from these committees brought out many interesting and startling facts. In Baltimore, as in most other cities, the colored people are grouped together in certain neighborhoods whose white population is very small and composed of the degraded rum-seller or the small shopkeeper, who has no social antipathy toward his black neighbors so long as business is good. [Illustration: MAP SHOWING LOCATION OF SALOONS A poor white neighborhood in Baltimore, in a section composed of four blocks, with 36 saloons. ] It was reported that there were at least three neighborhoods in the city in which the conditions with reference to schools for colored children and housing of colored families were deplorable in the extreme. There was the Caroline and Bank Streets district, in which a colored school was surrounded by a network of saloons and houses of prostitution. It was found that within a block of the school there were nine saloons and no less than forty-seven houses of ill-repute. It was learned that it was most difficult to keep girls in this school after they became thirteen or fourteen years of age. So powerful were the influences of this neighborhood upon them that at thirteen some of them passed from the school to the houses of prostitution and to lives of shame. In a tour of inspection of this neighborhood young girls were pointed out one after another, who, the previous year, had been pupils of the school. One mother, who had recently moved to Baltimore from the country, told how she had rescued her twelve-year-old daughter from one of those dens, and how a policeman, to whom in her agony and distress she had appealed, threatened to arrest her for disorderly conduct! [Illustration: Public School No. 116, surrounded by eleven saloons, 8 of which are within 300 feet of the school premises. ]