  This analysis also provides a different background against which we can read Cooper’s description of the “colored girls” of the South as: “that large, bright, fatally beautiful class that stand shivering like delicate plantlets before the fury of tempestuous elements, so full of promise, yet so sure of destruction; often without a father to whom they dare apply the loving term, often without a stronger brother to espouse their cause and defend their honor…” (VAJC 60). This passage not only underscores the danger that Black girls and women faced in terms of sexual exploitation it also challenges some claims made by Alexander Crummell in a speech given three years earlier titled “The Black Woman of the South: Her Neglects and Her Needs” (1883).  Crummell makes a clear distinction between the colored people (whom he describes as those who were more educated and had better material conditions) and the negro population (whom he describes as intellectual starvelings).  Crummell attributes the affluence of colored people to “the kindness and generosity of their white kindred—white fathers and relatives (1883, 212).  Cooper is making the case that “colored” people don’t always have a “father to whom they dare apply the loving term” or the kindness and generosity that having white kindred in selective instances might have entailed. She also makes many references to the ways in which white men protected “English womanhood” and the perceived lack of protection of Black women by Black men. When Cooper asserts that snares and traps are set for the “unprotected, untrained colored girl of the South,” this is a reference to the sexual exploitation of Black girls and women (VAJC, 64).