University of Virginia Library

III. THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
VOLUME II

III. Part III
THE NEGRO AS A FREEMAN

I. The Story of the Negro

CHAPTER I
THE EARLY DAYS OF FREEDOM

THE Negro slaves always believed that some
day they would be free. From the Bible—
the only book the masses of the people
knew anything about—they learned the story of
the children of Israel, of the house of bondage,
and of forty years of wandering in the wilderness,
and they easily learned to apply this story
to their own case. There was always a feeling
among them that some day, from somewhere
or other, a prophet would arise who would lead
them out of slavery. This faith was the source
of the old "freedom songs," which always had for
the slaves a double meaning. Interwoven with the
religious sentiment and meanings there was always
the expression of a desire and a hope, not alone
for freedom in the world to come, but of freedom
in this world as well.

In their religious meetings, through the medium
not only of these songs, but of their prayers as well,

the coloured people expressed their longing for freedom
and even prayed for deliverance from slavery,
without apparently arousing the suspicion that they
were thinking of freedom in anything but a spiritual
sense. The following chorus of the plantation song
will illustrate what I mean:

One of the indications that the slaves on the
plantation believed, near the close of the war, that
freedom was at hand, was the way in which they
began singing, with new fervour and energy, those
freedom songs to which I have referred.

There was one of them which ran this way:

The Negroes, in certain parts of South Carolina,
sang this song with so much fervour at the
beginning of the Civil War that the authorities
put them in jail, in order to stop it, fearing it might
have the effect of arousing the slaves to insurrection.

Another indication that the masses of the slaves
felt during the war that freedom was at hand was
the interest in which they took, particularly after
the emancipation proclamation had been issued,
in "Massa Linkum," as they called the President of

the United States, and in the movements of the
Union armies. In one way and another many of
the slaves of the plantations managed to keep
pretty good track of the movements of the different
armies and, after a while, it began to be whispered
that soon all the slaves were going to be free. It was
at this time that the slaves out in the cabins on the
plantations began to pray for the success of "Massa
Linkum's soldiers." I remember well a time when
I was awakened one morning, before the break of
day, by my mother bending over me, where I lay
on a bundle of rags in the corner of my master's
kitchen, and hearing her pray that Abraham Lincoln
and his soldiers might be successful and that she and
I might some day be free.

The plantation upon which my mother lived was
in a remote corner of Virginia, where we saw almost
nothing of the war, except when some of those who
had gone away as soldiers were brought home dead,
and it was not until the very close of the war that a
party of Union soldiers came through our part of
the country and carried off with them a few of the
slaves from our community. In other parts of
the country, however, freedom came much earlier.
Wherever the Union armies succeeded in penetrating
the South, work on the plantation ceased, and large
numbers of the slaves wandered off on the trail of
the army to find their freedom. I have frequently
heard older people of my race tell the story of how

freedom came to them, and of the sufferings which
so many of them endured, during this time.

One of the curious things about the Emancipation
Proclamation of January 1, 1863, was that it probably
did not immediately confer freedom on a single slave.
This was because it was limited in its application to
those territories over which the Federal armies had
no control. In the Border states and wherever the
Union armies were established the institution of
slavery remained, nominally at least, as it had been.

On the other hand, wherever the Federal armies
entered upon slave territories, no matter what theory
the Government held to, it was found impossible in
practice to maintain the slave system. The first
proclamation of emancipation was, as a matter of
fact, General Butler's ingenious phrase which termed
the Negro fugitives who came into the Union lines
"contraband of war." Theoretically, these fugitives
were still merely property of the enemy which had
fallen into the hands of the Federal army, but
actually to be "contraband" meant to be free, and
from that time on Federal officers were everywhere at
liberty to receive and protect fugitive slaves who
came into their hands.

The result of this was that wherever the Federal
armies went slavery ceased. As a consequence
thousands of these homeless and helpless people
fell into the hands of the Federal commanders.
When General Grant entered Northern Mississippi

the refugees became so numerous that he detailed
Chaplain John Eaton, of the Twenty-seventh Ohio
Infantry, afterward colonel of a Negro regiment, to
organise them and set them to work picking the
cotton which was then ripe in the fields.

In a somewhat similar manner at Fortress Monroe,
Virginia, Washington, District of Columbia, Beaufort
and Port Royal, South Carolina, Columbus, Kentucky,
and Cairo, Illinois, large numbers of the Freedmen
had been collected into camps and the problem
of dealing with the Negro in freedom was brought, in
this way, for the first time definitely before the Northern
people for solution. Freedmen were to be governed,
to be educated and, in general, to be started
in the new life of freedom which was now open to
them. The difficulties that presented themselves
were appalling, and immediately aroused the deepest
sympathy and concern among the people in the
Northern states.

As an indication of some of the unusual problems
that presented themselves to the Union officers, who
were in command at the points I have named, I may
refer to an incident which occurred in New Orleans.
A free Negro, by the name of John Montamal, had
married a woman who was a slave. From the savings
of a small business he had purchased his wife
for six hundred dollars, so that he stood to her in the
relation of owner as well as husband. As a consequence
his children were his slaves. At the time

the Union soldiers arrived in the city his only surviving
child was a bright little girl of eleven years of
age, who had had the advantages of a school training
and had become a member of the Catholic Church.
Owing to the troublous character of the times the
father had fallen into debt and, in an evil hour, had
mortgaged his daughter to his creditors, believing
that he would be able to redeem her in time to prevent
her being sold. The war prevented his carrying
out this plan, and, as a result, the mortgage was
foreclosed and the child sold at auction by the sheriff.
Under these circumstances the man came before
the Provost Court, which had been established by
General Butler, and sought the restoration of his
daughter. Under the laws of Louisiana, which were
nominally, at least, in force at that time, the girl
would have been doomed to slavery, but the Provost
Judge, Colonel Kinsman, promptly decided that
the law was no longer in force and that when
Louisiana went out of the Union she took her "black
laws" with her.

Another anecdote, which illustrates the way in
which Union generals ruthlessly disposed of the old
slave laws, is related by James Parton in his history,
"General Butler in New Orleans." When
the Union soldiers arrived in New Orleans they
found, in the State Prison at Baton Rouge, children
who had been born in the prison of female coloured
convicts. By the laws of Louisiana these children.

were the property of the State, and if General Butler
had carried out the law he would have sold them as
slaves. When the superintendent applied for orders
with regard to these children, General Butler
promptly decided that they should be taken care of
in the same way as other destitute children, saying
that "possibly the master might have some claim
upon them, but he did not see how the State could
have any."

Thus it was that the work of what was afterward
called "reconstruction "began in the South wherever
the Union forces obtained possession of the country.
In the Department of General Banks, Louisiana, there
were 90,000 coloured people; 50,000 were employed
as labourers under the direction of the officers of the
army. Under Colonel Eaton seven thousand acres
of cotton land in Tennessee and Arkansas were
leased and cultivated in order to furnish food for
the 10,000 people who were not able to take care
of themselves. In South Carolina General Rufus
Saxton organised Negro regiments, sold confiscated
estates, leased abandoned plantations and assisted
in the building up of the Negro schools that had been
started under Edward L. Pierce.

March 3, 1865, what was known as the Freedmen's
Bureau was organised under General Oliver
O. Howard, to carry on the work that had been begun
under the Federal generals at the different refugee
camps. For the next four years this Freedmen's

Bureau, so far as concerned the Freedman and his
relation to his former master, was in itself a pretty
complete sort of government. In 1868 there were
900 bureau officials scattered throughout the South,
ruling directly and indirectly several millions of men
and women. During that time 30,000 black men
were sent back from the refugee and relief stations
to the farms and plantations. In a single state
50,000 contracts for labour were signed under
the direction of the agents of the Bureau. The
total revenue of $400,000 was derived from the
coloured tenants who had leased lands under the
control of the Bureau.

It was under this Bureau that the Negro schools
were started in every part of the South. Fisk,
Atlanta and Howard universities were established
during this time and nearly $6,000,000 was expended
for educational work, $750,000 of which came from
the Freedmen themselves. Before all its departments
were finally closed something like $20,000,000
was expended by the Bureau in the different branches
of its service.

One of the results of the organisation of the
Freedmen's Bureau was to give employment to a
large number of ambitious coloured men, and many
representatives of the Negro race, who afterward
became prominent in politics, gained their first
training in this direction as agents of the Freedmen's
Bureau. Among others who went into politics

through this door were Hiram R. Revels, the first
coloured man to enter the United States Senate, and
Robert C. DeLarge, who was a member of the
Forty-second Congress from South Carolina.

Hiram R. Revels was born at Fayetteville, North
Carolina, September 1, 1822. His parents seem
to have been free Negroes. At any rate they had
been permitted to give him some education while
he was a boy. After he became of age he went
North, entered the Quaker Seminary in Union
County, Indiana, and finally, about the year 1847,
graduated from Knox College, at Galesburg, Illinois.
He became a preacher and lecturer throughout
Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Missouri and, at the
breaking out of the war, he was serving as pastor
of the Methodist Church in Baltimore. He assisted in
raising the first coloured regiment that was organised
in the State of Maryland, and afterward organised
a second coloured regiment in Missouri. In
1864 he was at Vicksburg, where he assisted the
Provost Marshal in managing the Freedmen's
affairs. He spent the next two years in Kansas and
Missouri, preaching and lecturing, and finally settled
at Natchez, Mississippi, where General Adelbert
Ames, the Military Governor, appointed him an
alderman of the city. In January, 1870, he was
chosen United States Senator and on February 25th,
took his seat in Congress.

The announcement that a coloured man had been

elected to the Senate of the United States created a
great deal of surprise and comment, and the appearance
of the new Senator from Mississippi, who was
to take the place that had been occupied by Jefferson
Davis, President of the Southern Confederacy,
was waited with great interest. Strenuous efforts
were made to resist, on the ground that it was unconstitutional
and unprecedented, the determination
of the Senate to allow him to take his seat. Charles
Sumner made a speech in favour of the admission
of the coloured Senator in which he said: "The
vote on this question will be an historical event,
marking the triumph of the great cause." Senator
Henry Wilson, the second Senator from Massachusetts,
accompanied Mr. Revels to the Vice-president's
chair where he took the oath. The
chamber and galleries were crowded with spectators
eager to witness the event, which was to give formal
notice to the world that the revolution, which
changed the Negro from a slave into a free man, had
been completed. In the same year two other
Negroes, Joseph H. Rainey from South Carolina
and Jefferson Long from Georgia, were admitted to
Congress. During the next few years coloured men
were representing, either in the Senate or in the House
of Representatives, every one of the seceding states
with the exception of Texas and Tennessee.

The Freedmen's Bureau went out of existence in
1869 with the proposal by Congress of the Fifteenth

Amendment.[1] When the bill bringing the Bureau
into existence was under discussion, in 1865, Senator
Davis, of Kentucky had described it as a measure
"to promote strife and conflict between the white
and black races . . . by a grant of unconstitutional
power." This puts in a sentence the objections
that were made to the organisation of the
Bureau in the first instance and the criticisms that
have been passed upon it since. It was unfortunate
that the Freedmen's Bureau did not succeed in gaining
the sympathy and support of the Southern people.
This was the more unfortunate because, during the
four years of its existence, the Freedmen had learned
to look to this Bureau and its representatives for
leading, support and protection. The whole South
has suffered from the fact that the former slaves were
first introduced into political life as the opponents,
instead of the political supporters, of their former
masters. No part of the South has suffered more
on this account, however, than the Negroes themselves.
I do not mean to say that this rupture could
have been avoided. It was one of the unfortunate
consequences of the manner in which slavery was
brought to an end in the Southern states.

In the early days of their freedom, in spite of the
rather harsh legislation of certain of the Southern

legislatures, the temper of the Southern Freedmen
was conciliatory. The first move to obtain some
part in the government was made by the Free Negroes
of New Orleans, On November 5, 1863, the free
coloured people of New Orleans held a meeting
and drew up an address to Brigadier-general Shepley
in which they refer to the fact that there are among
them "many of the descendants of those men whom
the illustrious Jackson styled 'his fellow-citizens,'
when he called upon them to take up arms to repel
the enemies of the country," adding that they were
at that time paying taxes on property of which the
assessed value was more than nine million dollars.
In consideration of these fact and others they ventured
to ask that they be permitted to assist in establishing,
in the new convention, a civil government for
the state.

The next year in that corner of the State of South
Carolina occupied by the Federal troops, of which
Beaufort is the centre, a mass State Convention was
held to which the people of the state were invited,
"without distinction of colour," to elect delegates
to the Baltimore Presidential Convention. These
delegates were not, however, allowed to take part in
the proceedings of the Convention. From this time
on, numerous meetings of the coloured people were
held in different parts of the South and of the North.
In 1865, a state convention of coloured people was
held in South Carolina "to confer together and to

deliberate on our intellectual, moral, industrial,
and political condition, particularly as affected
by the great changes in the state and country."
This convention issued an address to the white
people of the state in which they declared, among
other things, that "notwithstanding we have been
born and reared in your midst and were faithful while
your greatest trials were upon you, and have done
nothing since which could justly merit your disapprobation,"
that they had been denied the rights
of citizenship which are freely accorded to strangers.
The address concludes with the moderate request
that the provisions of the "black code," which have
denied them the opportunities of education, equal
rights before the court, and imposed burdensome regulations
upon their personal liberty may be repealed.

There were some such slight evidences in other
parts of the country of a disposition on the part of
an element of the coloured people and of the Southern
white people, to come to terms with each other in
order to establish a form of government which would
be fairly satisfactory to both races. For instance,
the coloured citizens of Tennessee were invited, in
1867, to take part in the political meetings of both
parties, and a convention of Coloured Conservatives
which met at Nashville, April 5, 1867, adopted among
others the following resolutions:

The year before, October 1, 1866, Governor Worth,
of North Carolina, had spoken in a conciliatory
manner to a convention of coloured people assembled
at Raleigh. He declared that he was ready to
protect them in all their rights and urged them to be
industrious, to educate their children, and to keep
out of politics, seeing, as he said, "the strife and
struggle in which party politics have involved the
whites." He added that the general feeling of the
men who had been their masters was kindly toward
them, and added that "the whites feel that they owe
you a debt of gratitude for your quiet and orderly
conduct during the war, and you should endeavour
to so act as to keep up this kindly feeling between
the two races."

Bishop James W. Hood of the A. M. E. Zion
Church, who had recently come to the South, was
chairman of this convention. Bishop Hood was
born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, May 30, 1831.
He entered the ministry in 1860, and is said to have
been the first regularly appointed missionary of the

Negro race sent to the Freedmen in the South where,
it is stated, he founded in North and South Carolina
and Virginia more than six hundred church organisations.

Among the Negroes of the Northern states who
had gotten their political education under the influence
of the Northern abolitionists, the trend of sentiment
was naturally much more radical than in the
Southern states.

June 15, 1863, a convention of coloured people was
held at Poughkeepsie, New York, at which J. W. C.
Pennington, a Presbyterian minister, presided. At
this convention resolutions were passed, pledging
the support of coloured soldiers to the Union cause
and expressing the confidence that the Negro soldiers
would receive the "protection and treatment due to
civilised men."[2]

On October 3, 1864, a national convention of
coloured people was held at Syracuse, New York,
to take into consideration the future of the coloured
race in America. This convention was the successor
of other national conventions of the coloured people
which had been held in different parts of America
since the first National convention held in Philadelphia,
June, 1831. The radical temper of this convention
is, perhaps, best represented in a letter written
by Frederick Douglass in accepting an invitation to
be present. In this letter he demanded "perfect

equality for the black man in every state before the
law, in the jury-box, at the ballot-box, and on the
battlefield"; and that, in the distribution of officers
and honours under the Government, "no discrimination
shall be made in favour of or against any class
of citizens, whether black or white, of native or foreign
birth."

On February 7, 1866, a delegation of coloured
men, including George T. Downing, Lewis H. Douglass,
William E. Matthews, John Jones, John F.
Cook, Joseph E. Otis, A. W. Ross, William Whipper,
John M. Brown, and Alexander Dunlop, headed by
Frederick Douglass, called upon President Johnson to
urge upon him the propriety and necessity of granting
to coloured people the rights and privileges of citizenship
that had hitherto been and was still denied them.

In reply to the President's statement that the
policy they proposed would lead to a race war, and
that he did not propose to make himself responsible
for more bloodshed, the committee drew up an
address to the country in which they brought forward
the argument that if the hostility of the two races
was actually as great as President Johnson had
stated the Negro must be given the ballot "as a
means of defence." This address gave public
expression to the theory upon which Congress acted
when in the following year Negroes were permitted
to vote for delegates to the constitutional conventions
in all the seceding states.

At this time the Fifteenth Amendment had not
been proposed to Congress and there were only six
Northern states which permitted the Negro to vote.
In Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, many of the provisions
of the "black code," were still in force. Only
a few weeks before this time on February 25, 1866,
Negroes voted for the first time in the District of
Columbia.

Meanwhile the progress of events in the South
had been hastened by what the newspapers called
a "race war," at Memphis in May, and another
and still more bloody riot in New Orleans in which
thirty-seven Negroes had been killed and one hundred
and nineteen wounded. All this helped to
bring into power in Congress the radical party in the
North, and this party now proceeded to impose its
Government upon the South with the aid of Negro
votes.

Negroes sent two hundred and seven delegates out
of eight hundred and thirty-four to the constitutional
conventions which met, in 1867 and 1868, in Virginia,
North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida,
Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas.[3] Texas was represented
by the smallest number of Negroes. The
proportion was nine Negroes to eighty-one white
delegates. In South Carolina the Negroes were in
control, the proportion being seventy-six blacks to
forty-eight whites. Among the other members of

the South Carolina State Convention of 1867, was
Robert Smalls, who first became known during the
Civil War as the black pilot of the famous Confederate
ship, the Planter, which he boldly steered
out of the Charleston harbour and turned over to
the Federal fleet on the morning of May 13, 1862.
Robert Smalls was born a slave at Beaufort, South
Carolina, April 5, 1839. In 1851 he came to Charleston,
where he worked in the ship-yards as a "rigger,"
and thus became familiar with the life of a sailor.

In 1861, he was employed on the Confederate
transport, the Planter. I have more than once
heard Mr. Smalls tell the story of how he succeeded
in taking this ship out of the harbour under the
guns of the fort and at the same time managed to
carry his wife and family to freedom.

Up to this time the Planter was being used as the
special dispatch boat of General Ripley, the Confederate
Post Commander at Charleston. On the
night of May 12th, all the officers went ashore and
slept in the city, leaving on board a crew of eight men,
all coloured.

This was the opportunity Smalls had been looking
for. He spoke to the members of the crew and
found them willing to help him. Wood was taken
aboard, steam was put on, and, with a valuable
cargo of guns and ammunition intended for Fort
Ripley, the Planter moved from her dock about two
o'clock in the morning, steamed to the North Atlantic

wharf, where Small's wife and two children, together
with four women and one other child and three men,
were waiting to go on board. By this time it was
nearly 3:30 o'clock in the morning. The ship was
started on its voyage, carrying nine men, five women
and three children. Two of the men, who had first
agreed to go with the ship, at the last moment concluded
to remain behind.

The transport blew the usual salute in passing
Fort Johnson, and proceeded down the bay. When
approaching Fort Sumter, Smalls stood in the pilot
house leaning out the window with his arms folded
across his breast, and his head covered with a big
straw hat which the commander of the ship usually
wore. Here again the usual signal was given, and
the ship headed toward Morris Island, and passed
beyond the range of the guns of Fort Sumter
before any one suspected anything was wrong. The
Planter steered directly toward the Federal fleet, and
was nearly fired upon by one of the Federal ships
before the flag of truce was noticed.

As soon as the vessels came within hailing distance
of each other, Mr. Smalls explained who they were
and what was their errand. Captain Nichols, of the
ship Onward, boarded the vessel, and took possession.
Smalls was transferred to another ship; and was
employed for some time as a pilot in and about the
neighbouring waters, with which he was familiar.
Later, in the war, for meritorious conduct, he was

promoted to the rank of captain and was given charge
of the Planter, which he had so successfully carried
out of Charleston harbour. In September, 1866, he
carried this boat to Baltimore where it was put out
of commission and sold.

After the war Mr. Smalls was elected in 1868 to
the House of Representatives of the State Legislature.
In 1870 he was elected to the Senate of South Carolina,
and afterward served three terms in Congress.
He was appointed Collector of the Port of Beaufort,
by President Harrison, a position which he was still
holding in 1908.

One of the surprising results of the Reconstruction
Period was that there should spring from among the
members of a race that had been held so long in
slavery, so large a number of shrewd, resolute,
resourceful, and even brilliant men, who became,
during this brief period of storm and stress, the political
leaders of the newly enfranchised race. Among
them were sons of white planters by coloured mothers,
like John M. Langston, P. B. S. Pinchback, and
Josiah T. Settle, who had given their children the
advantages of an education in the Northern states.
Mr. Pinchback's father was Major William Pinchback,
of Holmes County, Mississippi. His mother,
Eliza Stewart, claimed to have Indian blood in her
veins. When he was nine years old young Pinchback
and his brother Napoleon were sent to Cincinnati by
their father to attend Gilmore's High School. After

his father died, Mr. Pinchback's mother came to
Cincinnati, and it was there he grew to manhood.

Josiah T. Settle's father was one of those men, of
whom there were considerable number in the South,
who brought their children by slave mothers North
in order to free them. In fact, in Mr. Settle's case,
his father not only freed him but married his
mother. Mr. Settle got his early education in Ohio,
and in 1868 entered Oberlin College. The following
year he went to Howard University, where he graduated
in 1872. Mr. Settle was active in politics in
Mississippi during a portion of the Reconstruction
Period, being engaged in the practice of law at
Sardis, Panola County, Mississippi. In 1885, he went
to Memphis; was appointed assistant prosecuting
attorney of the criminal court of Shelby County,
and is still practising law in that city, where he is one
of the directors of the Negro bank at that place, the
Solvent Savings Bank.

Blanche K. Bruce, senator from Mississippi from
1875 to 1881, was born a slave in 1841 in Prince
Edward County, Virginia. He received his early
education along with his master's son. After freedom
came he taught school for a time in Missouri, and
studied for a short time at Oberlin College. In
1869, he became a planter in Bolivar County, Mississippi,
where he held a number of offices, including
that of sheriff and superintendent of public schools.
In 1881, President Garfield appointed him Registrar

of the United States Treasury. His son, Roscoe
Conklin Bruce, graduated with honours from
Harvard University; was for a time head of the
Academic Department of Tuskegee Institute; and
afterward had charge of the coloured schools in
Washington, District of Columbia.

Perhaps the most brilliant and, I might add, the
most unfortunate of these men of the Reconstruction
Period was Robert Brown Elliott, who was born
in Boston, Massachusetts, August II, 1842. His
parents were from the West Indies and, while he
was still a young boy, they returned to their home in
Jamaica. There young Elliott had the advantage
of a good schooling. He was sent to England, and
in 1853 entered High Holborn Academy, London.
Three years later he went to Eton, from which he
graduated in 1859. He adopted law as his profession
and after some years of travel in South America
and the West Indies, settled in Charleston, South
Carolina, where he became editor of the Charleston
Leader, afterward known as the Missionary Record,
owned by Bishop Richard H. Cain. He soon entered
politics and was elected to the Lower House of the
State Legislature in 1868.

In 1869, Mr. Elliott was appointed Assistant
Adjutant-general of the State, which position he
held until he was elected to the Forty-second Congress.
He was a member of the Forty-third Congress,
but resigned that position to accept the office of

sheriff. In 1881, he was appointed special agent of
the United States Treasury, with headquarters at
Charleston. He was transferred from there to New
Orleans, Louisiana. But the fall of the Reconstruction
governments in the South carried disaster to
him, and he died August 9, 1884, in comparative
obscurity and poverty.

Frederick Douglass says of Robert Brown Elliott:
"I have known but one other black man to be
compared with Elliott, and that was Samuel R.
Ward, who, like Elliott, died in the midst of his
years." Samuel R. Ward was, in 1848, editor of
the Impartial Citizen, published in Syracuse,
New York.

Altogether, the Negro race has been represented
in Congress by two Senators and twenty Representatives.
In addition to those already mentioned,
Richard H. Cain served as a Representative of South
Carolina in the Forty-third and Forty-fifth Congress;
H. P. Cheatham represented North Carolina in the
Fifty-second and Fifty-third Congresses. Jere Haralson
represented Alabama in the Forty-fourth Congress.
Jefferson Long was the Representative of
Georgia in the Forty-first Congress. John Hyman
was a member of the Forty-fourth Congress for
North Carolina, and James E. O'Hara represented
the same state in the Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth
Congresses. Thomas H. Miller was a member of
the Fifty-first Congress, and George W. Murray

of the Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth Congresses. Both
these men were elected from South Carolina. James
T. Rapier was elected to the Forty-third United
States Congress from Alabama. Benjamin S. Turner
represented the same state in the Forty-second
Congress. Josiah T. Walls was elected to represent
Florida in the Forty-second, Forty-third, and Forty-fourth
Congresses. The last man to represent the
Negro race in Congress was George H. White, of
North Carolina.

In a speech on the subject of the Spanish-American
War, January 26, 1899, Mr. White made a sort of
valedictory address, which is in many respects so
interesting, and created so much comment at the
time it was delivered, that I am disposed to quote a
portion of it here. Referring to Negro Congressmen,
Mr. White said:

Speaking a little later of the progress which the
Negro race has made, Mr. White said some things
which seem to me to express very accurately the
sober second thought of the Negro people upon their
condition in this country, and give a just and proper
expression to the legitimate aspiration of the American
Negro. He said:

This speech of Mr. White marks the end of an
episode in the history of the American Negro. In
considering the relation of the Negro people to this
period it should be remembered that, outside of a
few leaders, Negroes had very little influence upon
the course of events. It was, to a very large extent,
a white man's quarrel, and the Negro was the tennis
ball which was batted backward and forward by
the opposing parties.

Even as a boy I can remember that all through the
days of Reconstruction I had a feeling that there was
something in the situation, into which the course of
events had pushed the Negro people that was unstable
and could not last. It did not seem possible that a
people who yesterday were slaves could be transformed
within a few days into citizens capable of
making laws for the government of the State or
the government of the Nation.

There were a good many others who felt as I did.

One of the best illustrations that I happen to
remember of the sanity of not a few coloured people
on the subject of Reconstruction is Lewis Adams, the
man who was more largely responsible, perhaps,
than any one else for the location at Tuskegee of the
Negro school which now bears the name of the
Tuskegee Normal arid Industrial Institute.

Lewis Adams lived in Macon County, Alabama,
during the days of Reconstruction, and there was no
coloured man in the state, I dare say, who had more
influence over the masses of the coloured people than
did he. During this period Mr. Adams could have
been elected a member of the Legislature and, I have
no doubt, could have been sent to Congress had he
made the slightest effort in that direction. He refused,
however, to be a candidate for any office, because, as
he told me, he saw the futility and the shallowness of
it all. He saw there was no logical foundation upon
which the political activity of the Negro could rest
and, for that reason, he preferred to devote himself
to furthering the education of his people and to
building up his own interests. The results show
that he was right. When he died, on April 28, 1905,
he was among the most honoured, respected, and
successful coloured men in Macon County. On the
other hand, men who had chosen to travel the
political road had not only failed to succeed but some
of them died unknown, forgotten, after passing their
later years in obscurity and poverty.

CHAPTER II
THE RISE OF THE NEGRO LAND-OWNER

SOME years ago I was asked by the editor of a
well-known English magazine to write an
article on what he termed the "Racial Feuds"
in the southern part of the United States. I was compelled
to reply that I could not write such an article
as he desired because, so far as I had been able to
learn, no such thing as a feud existed between the
races in the Southern states. I said to him, as near
as I can remember, that I had frequently heard of
feuds among certain of the white people living somewhere
in the mountains of Tennessee, but so far
as I knew there never had been such a thing as a feud
between the black and the white people in the South,
and that, in fact, the trouble between the races in
the South was of quite a different character.

I mention these facts here to emphasise an observation
I have frequently made in regard to reports
that are printed and spread abroad in regard to the
relations between the white man and the black man
in the Southern states. As a rule, the world has
heard and still hears the worst that happens; it rarely
hears of the best. It hears of the riots and the

lynchings, but it knows very little of the friendly
and helpful relations which exist between individuals
of both races in every community in the Southern
states.

In the chapter preceding this I have written something
about the manner in which, directly after the
war, the two races became divided, politically, so
that up to the present time there is a white party and
a black party in the Southern states. I told something
of the manner in which this black party arose
and gained power in the South, and referred briefly
to some of the riots and disturbances which this
division between the races caused. The story of
the evils which came upon both races as a result of
what is sometimes referred to as "Negro domination"
has been frequently told. The animosities that were
kindled between the races at that time have not yet
died out, and there has been very little disposition
on the part of the politicians, black or white, to allow
them to die out. But the fact is that the good relations
between the Freedmen and their former masters,
which existed directly after the war, were never
wholly destroyed by the political contentions of
the Reconstruction Period, and in consequence of
the emphasis that has been placed upon the disasters
of that period by the historians and others
who have written about it, the existence of the
friendly relations to which I have referred has
been too frequently overlooked.

As an illustration of what these friendly relations
between the Freedmen and their former masters
sometimes were, I am reminded of an old coloured
man by the name of Matthews, whom I ran across
some years ago, when I was visiting a little town in
western Ohio. When I met this man he was about
sixty years of age, and in early life he had been a
slave in Virginia, where he had learned the trade
of carpentry. It frequently happened in Virginia,
as it did in other parts of the South, that after a
slave had learned a trade he would buy his own time,
so that he might go about the country working for
whom he chose, making his own contracts and keeping
for himself the money that he earned. In such
cases the slave would usually plan to save his money
until he could buy his freedom. This was the case
with Matthews.

About 1858, Matthews proposed to his master
that he would pay $1,500 for himself, a certain
amount to be paid in cash and the remainder to be
paid in instalments. Such a bargain as this was
not uncommon in Virginia at that time. Matthews's
master, having learned to have implicit confidence
in his slave, permitted him, after this contract was
made, to seek work wherever he could secure the
best pay. This went on for some time until Matthews
secured the contract for the erection of a
building in the State of Ohio. While he was at
work in that state the war broke out, but Matthews

remained, and continued to work at his trade. In
1863, he was declared a free man by Abraham
Lincoln's Proclamation of Emancipation. At that
time he still owed his former master, according to
his contract made before the war, $300. In telling
me the story, Matthews said that he was perfectly
well aware that, by the Proclamation of Emancipation,
he was released from all legal obligations
to pay this money to his master. He knew that, in
the eyes of nine-tenths of the world, he would be
released from all moral obligations to pay a single
cent of the unpaid balance. But he said he wanted
to begin his life of freedom with a clean conscience.
In order to do this, he walked from his home in Ohio,
a distance of three hundred miles, much of the way
over mountains, and placed in his former master's
hand every cent of the money that he had promised
years before to pay him for his freedom.

The story which I have just related is an instance
of a kind of thing that very frequently happened
directly after the War. I could relate hundreds of
instances which have come to my knowledge in
which former slaves have shown their fidelity to their
former masters and have assisted them in their
poverty, and sympathised with them in their troubles,
long after slavery had been abolished. In stating
these facts I am not seeking to apologise in any way
for the institution of slavery, neither do I mean to
suggest that the Negro slaves were ever satisfied with

their conditions in slavery. I think there is in the
mind and heart of every human being an ever-present
longing for freedom, no matter how comfortable,
in other respects, his condition in servitude
may be. I have often heard it said that some coloured
people were better off in slavery than in freedom,
but, in all the contact I have had with members
of my race in every part of the country, I
have never found an individual, no matter what his
condition, who did not prefer freedom to servitude.

I remember an acquaintance of mine telling
me of an old coloured man he had met somewhere in
North Carolina, who had spent the greater part of
his life in slavery. My friend, who had known the
institution of slavery only through the medium of
books, was anxious to find out just what the thing
seemed like to a man who had lived in slavery most
of his life. The old coloured man said that he had
had a good master, who was always kind and considerate;
that the food he had to eat was always of
the best quality and there was enough of it; he had
nothing to complain of in regard to the clothing that
was provided or the house that he lived in. He
said both he and his family always had the best
medical attention when they fell ill. To all appearances,
as near as any one could judge, the old man
must have been a great deal better off in slavery
than he was in freedom. Noticing these things, my
friend became more inquisitive and wanted to know

whether, after all, there was not a feeling deep down
in his heart, that he would rather be back in slavery,
with all the comforts that he had enjoyed there,
than be free. The old man shrugged his shoulders,
scratched his head, thought for a second, and then
said: "Boss, dere's a kind of looseness about
dis y'ere freedom which I kinder enjoys." It seems
to me that the old man has expressed the matter
about as tersely and as accurately as it is possible
to do.

I have referred to the manner in which the Freedmen
have stood by their former masters in the
troubles that came upon them during the war and
afterward. I want to emphasise, just as strongly,
that the Southern white men, who owned slaves,
have stood by them and helped and protected them
in freedom—in like manner and in the same degree.

In the spring of 1909, I made a trip, in company
with a number of well-known and successful coloured
men, through the State of South Carolina,
spending a week in visiting all the principal cities
where I was likely to meet the coloured people of
the state in the largest numbers. The purpose of
this visit was the same as that of similar journeys
of observation that I have made at different times in
other parts of the country. I wanted to see for
myself the conditions of the members of my race, and,
if possible, to say a word of counsel and encouragement,
which might help them in their struggle for

better things. I was surprised to learn that, in
spite of all that I had heard and in spite of all that
I had read about the bitter experiences South Carolina
went through during the Reconstruction Period,
the relations between individual coloured men and
individual white men throughout that state were
friendly and helpful to a degree that few people outside
of the State of South Carolina had comprehended.

On the car in which we travelled, for instance,
were a number of prominent and successful coloured
men of South Carolina and the neighbouring state
of North Carolina. During the week that we were
together I learned, directly and indirectly, a great
deal about the history of these men and the manner
in which they had achieved success in the different
lines in which they were working. I recall that, in
almost every case, each one of these men attributed
a large part of their success to the friendship or to the
assistance which they had received from some white
man. One of the leading men in this party, who
was as responsible as any one else for the success of
our campaign, was Richard Carroll, the founder of an
industrial home for Negro orphans, and one of
the organisers of an association that, in 1908, held
the first successful Negro state fair in South Carolina.
Mr. Carroll told me that one of the men who
had been his constant personal friend and assisted
him in all that he had attempted to do for the benefit
of the Negro race was United States Senator

Benjamin Tillman, who has the reputation of being
the most bitter opponent of the Negro, with perhaps
one exception, in the Southern states.

Another man who accompanied us upon this trip
was John Merrick, of Durham, North Carolina, the
founder of a Negro insurance company, The North
Carolina Mutual and Provident Association, which
has written insurance, since its organisation in 1898,
for over 160,000 members, paid $500,000 in benefits
and owns real estate in South Carolina and in
North Carolina to the value of something like $50,000.
This company owns a block of buildings in
Durham, where the home office of the company
is located, which, I am informed, is assessed at
$30,000, and in order to do business in South Carolina,
the officers have had to deposit $10,000 cash
with the insurance commissioner to protect the
company's contracts in that state.

John Merrick was born at Clinton, North Carolina,
in 1859. His mother was a house servant for Judge
Almon McCord. Merrick was brought up in
Raleigh, North Carolina, where he learned the trade
of bricklayer. Because this trade left him without
work during the winter, he gave it up and became a
barber. After that he went from Raleigh to Durham
and made his first start in business for himself
there with money he borrowed from a white man,
Mr. J. S. Carr. While he was in the barber business
at Durham, he made the acquaintance of Mr.

J. B. and Mr. Ball Duke, of the Duke Tobacco
Company. These men became interested in him
and assisted him not only in his personal affairs,
but in the work that he tried to do for the members
of his own race. They gave him money at different
times to help build a church. They gave
him money with which to endow twenty-one beds
in the Lincoln hospital for coloured people, which
is established at Durham, and they afterward
gave $5,000 as an endowment for this hospital. It
was not, perhaps, entirely a personal interest in Mr.
Merrick that led them to give this money through
him to these different institutions. The Duke
Tobacco Company employs two thousand or more
coloured people in its factories at Durham. They
wanted to help the coloured people whom they
employed, and because they trusted Mr. Merrick
and had confidence in him they gave this money
to the coloured people largely upon his suggestion
and advice.

Among the other people who accompanied us
upon this South Carolina trip was Bishop George
W. Clinton, of Charlotte, North Carolina, who was
one of a group of young coloured men that entered
the University of South Carolina, when it was open
to coloured students directly after the war. Bishop
Clinton, who, as a young man, lived through a
large part of the Reconstruction Period in South
Carolina, gave me a great deal of interesting information

in regard to the happenings of that time.
Among other things he told me a story which illustrates
the point that I am trying to emphasise,
namely, that in spite of the antagonisms of that
period, the individual friendly relations between
the races, particularly between the Freedman and his
former master, remained in many instances firm and
unshaken.

One of his first teachers, he said, was Irving Clinton,
a white planter and lawyer, and a brother of his
father's master. Bishop I. C. Clinton, who, though
he has the same name and title, is no relative of
Bishop George W. Clinton, was a slave of this man,
he said, and before the war had been for many years
the foreman of his plantation. Bishop Clinton, he
said, had learned to read while he was a slave; he
had been taught by his master. After emancipation
the relations between the Freedman and his
former master remained intimate and friendly. In
fact, Bishop I. C. Clinton became, before his death,
the spiritual advisor of his former master; was
present at the bedside when his old master died;
and erected, at his own expense, in the Presbyterian
cemetery, at Lancaster, South Carolina, a monument
to his former master and lifelong friend. I
may add that Bishop I. C. Clinton was a man of
very little learning, so far as the books were concerned.
He had had one year's training, I believe,
at Hampton Institute, but he was a man of great

influence and apparently of great common sense.
He died in October, in 1904, at the age of seventy-eight.

I have referred to some individual cases of friendship
between white men and black men to show what
the character of some of these relations is. The
best indication that these friendly relations are more
frequent than ordinarily supposed, is the fact of the
success that the Negro has made in the South in
getting property, and in doing away with the burden
of illiteracy with which he entered freedom. It
would not be possible for Negroes to own as much
property as they do in the South at the present
time, unless the majority of the white people were
disposed to encourage them to get it. It would not
have been possible to reduce the illiteracy in the
race from 90 to 47 per cent, if the white people in
the South had not been willing to support, to some
extent, Negro schools.

It is not possible to determine with exactness just
how much property Negroes own, in the United
States, at the present time. In most parts of the
South, no effort is made to separate tax lists of
Negroes from those of white people. The State of
Georgia is, however, an exception in this respect,
and it is possible to study from records of the Comptroller
General's office the progress of the race in
that state. The figures obtained in Georgia, however,
may be used for estimating the progress in the

South, because it has been found that on the whole
the progress of the Negroes in Georgia runs parallel
to the progress of Negroes in the other Southern
states. I do not mean by this that Negroes in some
states are not gaining property more rapidly than
they are in others; I do mean that, on the whole,
they seem to be gaining in Georgia at about the
same rate they are throughout the South, taking all
the Southern states as a whole.

In 1866, a year after the close of the War, the
Negroes to Georgia owned about ten thousand acres
of land, to the value of $22,500. In the next ten
years, they increased the amount of land in their
possession more than forty-five times, having, in
1876, 457,635 acres of land, the tax value of which
was $1,234,104.

The rapid increase in land-getting during this
period is easily accounted for. A good many
Negroes had served in one way or another in the
Civil War, and the Freedmen's Bureau had paid
out something like $7,000,000 in bounties to Negro
soldiers. During the first ten years after the War
a large part of this money was invested in land in
the Southern states. During the next ten years,
from 1876 to 1886, Negroes increased their holdings
in farm land by nearly 100 per cent., having at the
close of that period 802,939 acres of land, the assessed
value of which was $2,508,198. During the next
ten years the holdings of Negro farmers increased

to 1,043,847 acres, with an assessed value of
$4,234,848.

During the next period often years, from 1896 to
1906, the increase in the holdings was slower. In
1906 the amount of property owned by coloured
people in Georgia was 1,420,888 acres, but the value
of that property had increased from -four to seven
millions. The last available statistics give, in 1907,
the land-holdings of Georgia Negroes as 1,449,624
acres, valued at $7,972,787. These figures do not
include the amount of property owned by Negroes
in the form of city lots; neither do they include the
various forms of personal property on which they
pay taxes.

The increase in the value of this class of property
has gone on at about the same rate as that of the
property in farm lands. For instance, the value
of city property owned by Negroes in 1866 is given
at $70,000, but in 1907, the value of city and town
property owned by Negroes in that state amounted
to $6,710,189, while the total assessed value of all
Negro property in Georgia had increased during
that period from $450,000 to $25,904,822. This does
not include the value of church and school property
which, according to a careful investigation of Professor
Monroe N. Work, made while he was connected
with the Georgia State Industrial College,
amounts to something like $7,000,000.

Some efforts have been made to study the progress

of the Negro land-owner in Virginia. Negroes
have made great progress all over that state in the
matter of land-getting but they have done better,
perhaps, in Gloucester County than in any other
part of the state. According to the census of 1900
the coloured population of Gloucester County was
a little less than the white. According to the public
records, when an investigation was made a few years
ago, the total value of the land owned by coloured
people amounted to $87,953.55. The total assessed
value of land at that time was $666,132.33. At the
same time the coloured people paid taxes upon
$79,387 worth of buildings and improvements, while
the total assessed valuation of buildings and improvements
in the county was $466,127.05. To state it
differently: the Negroes of Gloucester County,
beginning forty years before in poverty, had in 1905,
at the time of this investigation, reached the point
where they owned and paid taxes upon one-sixth of the
real estate in that county. This property is held very
largely in the shape of small farms, varying in size
from ten to one hundred and fifty acres. A very large
proportion of these farms contain about ten acres.

I have always believed that in proportion as the
industrial, not omitting the intellectual, condition
of my race was improved, in the same degree would
their moral and religious life improve.

Some years ago, before the home life and economic
condition of the people had improved, bastardy was

common in Gloucester County. In 1903, there
were only eight cases of bastardy reported in the
whole county, and two of those were among the
white population. During the year 1904, there was
only one case of bastardy within a radius of ten
miles of the courthouse.

Another gratifying evidence of progress appears
in the fact that there is very little evidence of immoral
relations existing between the races. In the whole
county, during the year 1903, about twenty-five
years after the work of education had gotten under
way, there were only thirty arrests for misdemeanors;
of these sixteen were white, fourteen coloured. In
1904, there were fifteen such arrests—fourteen
white and one coloured. In 1904, there were but
seven arrests for felonies; of these two were white
and five were coloured.

I ought, perhaps, to add that the majority of the
teachers in this county were trained at Hampton
Institute, and have been teaching there for a number
of years. For the most part the teachers of Gloucester
County are not mentally superior, but what
they lack in methods of teaching and intellectual
alertness is more than made up for by their moral
earnestness and by the example which they set
in their own lives for the people whom they teach.
Most of these teachers are natives of the county,
and what is more important, most of them own
property in the county.

Recently a careful study has been made of the
progress which Negro farmers have made in Macon
County, Alabama, where the Tuskegee Institute
is located. In 1880, a year before the school opened,
the census reported 593 farm-owners in the country
surrounding Tuskegee Institute. Of this number
not more than 10 per cent, were owned by Negroes,
Twenty years later the census showed 517 farm-owners
in the county, of whom 30 per cent, were
Negroes. From 1900 to 1908 the amount of property
owned by Negroes in Macon County increased
more rapidly than at any other period. The number
of Negro farm-owners increased from 167 in 1900
to 421 in 1908. Negroes paid taxes on 55,976 acres
of land assessed at $236,989. More than one-seventh
of the land and more than one-sixth of the
land value is held by Negro farmers. In addition
to this there are 288 Negro owners of town property,
which is about one-sixth of the value of the town
property in the county. To sum up, then, of the
$2,061,108 worth of real property in Macon County
$325,474 worth is owned by Negroes.

One explanation of the rapid progress which
Negro farmers have made in recent years in Macon
County may be found in the efforts that have been
made to build up the country schools. During the
years from 1904 to 1908, largely under the stimulus
and encouragement of Tuskegee Institute, the
Negro farmers in Macon County raised something

over $7,000 to build school houses and lengthen the
school terms. This was supplementary to the funds
that were given to support the schools by the state.
During that same period a special effort was made
to bring the influence of the Agricultural School at
Tuskegee to bear directly upon the work of the farms
in the surrounding territory. The result of all this
has been to draw into the county a class of farmers
who wanted the advantages of good schools for their
children, and to largely increase the productiveness
of their farms. I think I can safely say, that whatever
the opinion of people in other parts of the South
may be, the people of Macon County, both black
and white, have been convinced by the results
obtained that Negro education can be made to pay.

I have referred to the progress which Negroes
are making in Georgia and in certain other parts of
the South, where the statistics are available. From
my own observation I should say that the advance
in the places I have mentioned is not as exceptional
as it might appear. From all that I can learn
Negroes are making quite as much progress in
North Carolina and Mississippi, Texas and Oklahoma
as they are in Georgia and Alabama. As near
as I can estimate, Negro farmers are increasing their
acreage in land at the rate of 5 per cent. annually.

On the other hand, the taxable value of Negro
property seems to be increasing at the rate of about
11 per cent, per annum.

Using all the statistics at hand, it is safe to say that
Negro farmers in 1909 owned, in the Southern
states, not less than thirty thousand square miles
of land. This is an amount of territory nearly equal
to five New England states, Vermont, New Hampshire,
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode
Island. From the best estimate I have been able to
find I should say that Negroes in the United States
own at the present time not less than $550,000,000
worth of taxable property. If it is true, as I have
stated in another place, that the free coloured people
of this country owned before the War something
like $25,000,000 worth of property, it is safe to say
that $525,000,000 worth of property has been
acquired by the coloured people of the United
States since freedom.

It is difficult for one, who has not lived in the
South and has not closely studied the life of the
Negro on the Southern farms and plantations,
to clearly understand the actual progress that the
figures I have referred to stand for. As a matter
of fact, they represent the work that the masses
of the Negro people have done for their own emancipation.
It is a mistake to assume that the Negro,
who had been a slave for two hundred and fifty
years, gained his freedom by the signing, on a certain
date, of a certain paper by the President of the
United States. It is a mistake to assume that one
man can, in any true sense, give freedom to another.

Freedom, in the larger and higher sense, every man
must gain for himself. In this larger and higher
sense the Negro is, slowly but surely, gaining his
freedom in every state, in every city, and in every
village and on every plantation in the South. Here
and there this progress seems to halt. Sometimes
there seems to be a retrograde movement but, on
the whole, the work of emancipation goes steadily
forward.

One of the most interesting examples in my
experience of this kind of emancipation is that of
a coloured farmer of my acquaintance in Alabama.
When he was "turned loose' as he put it, at the
end of the Civil War, he was about sixty years of
age, and at that age, he began life, as a great majority
of my race began at that time, with nothing.
He did not own a house; he had but little clothing,
and no food but a bag of meal and a strip of bacon.
He had gotten out of slavery, however, a close
and intimate acquaintance with the soil, and the
habit of work.

After freedom came he left the plantation on
which he had been a slave and went to work on an
adjoining place as a "renter." He told me that
when he was first free he felt that he had to move
about a little, just to find out what freedom was like.
But he soon found that in most respects there was
very little difference between his condition in freedom
and his condition in slavery. The man of

whom he rented furnished him rations, directed
his planting, and kept after him to see that he
made his crop. At the end of the year the charges
for rent and interest had eaten up all that he had
earned, so that from one year to another he was not
any better off than he had been the year before.
When he did come out with a little money to his
credit the storekeeper soon got it all, and, if he fell
sick or anything happened to his family, he sometimes
found himself in debt at the end of the year,
and then he was worse off than if he had nothing.

One of the chief privileges of freedom he found
to be the opportunity for getting into debt, but after
he had succeeded in getting into debt he learned
that he had lost even the privilege which had remained
to him of moving from one plantation to another.
The reason for this is that, as a rule, the Negro
farmer who rents has no security to give for the
money he borrows except his own labour. In order
to secure this labour for the payment of debts the
custom, and frequently the law in the Southern
states, prevents a tenant from leaving the plantation
until he has "paid out of debt," as the saying
is, or until some other planter has bought him
out of debt. This condition, which has grown up
naturally and, I might almost say, necessarily, out
of the relations between the white land-owner and
his Negro tenants, represents a kind of serfdom,
and it is these same conditions that so frequently

bring about the cases of peonage, of which one
occasionally hears in the Southern states. This
serfdom, however, is merely one of the stages through
which a society, in which slavery has existed, has
usually worked its way to freedom.

Gradually something of all this that I have described
began to dawn upon the mind of the old
coloured farmer. He saw that he was making no
headway and that his condition might easily become
worse. It was about this time that he began coming
to our annual Negro Conference at Tuskegee
Institute. There he heard the stories of other
Negro farmers, some of whom had worked themselves
out of this condition of partial slavery that
I have described. As he listened to these stories,
he began to realise that what had been possible for
others was possible for him also. He began to
think for the first time in his life of getting a home
of his own. A place, as he told me, where if he
drove a nail or planted a tree it would stay there and
could be handed down to his children. He began
thinking about the land on which he was working,
and a passionate desire to own and improve it took
possession of him. He wanted to be in a position
where he could afford to improve his surroundings
and preserve for his children the improvements
that he made.

In order to get more out of the soil he arose early
in the morning before daybreak, and he and his

wife and his children were out in the field all day
and late at night. In the midst of this work the
rented mule, which he had been using to make his
cotton crop, died. This was a terrible blow to him,
but it proved his economic salvation, for it determined
him to have an ox or mule that he could
call his own next year.

The old farmer talked the matter over with his
wife and between them they agreed upon this plan:
they would do all the work they could during the
day with their hoes, and after dark, by the light of
the moon, the old man would put the harness that
the mule had worn on his own back and, while his
wife held the plow, he pulled it through the furrow
as well as he could. This method of cultivating the
soil was so unusual that he did not care to attract
the attention of his neighbours by working in this
way during the day.

At the end of the season he found that he had
cleared enough to buy an ox. I have heard the old
man tell more than once how proud he felt when
he owned an ox that he could call his own, something,
at any rate, that was absolutely free of debt
and no man had a claim upon it. With the aid
of this ox, he and his wife and his children made
the next year a larger crop and, when the cotton
had been picked, he had in his possession more
money than he ever had before in his life. With
this money he bought a mule. Working the mule

and the ox together, he made a still larger crop,
and the next year purchased another mule.

Without detailing step by step the method by
which the old man went forward, I might say that
before many years had gone by he had become
the owner in fee simple of over two hundred acres of
land. He was living in a good house and had
surrounded himself with most of the necessities and
some of the comforts of life. Not only was this
true, but I learned afterward that he had been
able to put considerable money in the local bank,
of which he eventually became a stockholder.
There were few men of either race who had the
confidence and respect of the community in a
larger degree than did this man, who emancipated
himself in the manner in which I have described.

The story which I have just related is typical of
hundreds of other coloured farmers, whom I have
known personally, and whose stories have been
related from year to year at the annual Tuskegee
Negro Conference. Some of these farmers, who
have told their stones at the Conference, are men
who have made an impression upon the communities
in which they live by the success which they have
achieved. One of these men, whose name, I remember,
is Alfred Smith, known as "the cotton king,"
of Oklahoma. He was born a slave on a Georgia
plantation, but went out to Kansas directly after
the War, and eventually moved into Oklahoma.

He is known all over that state for the success he
has made in cotton raising. He has a number of
times taken the first prize for cotton raised in
Oklahoma. He has taken the prize for his cotton
in Liverpool, and, in 1900, gained the first prize
at the World's Exhibition in Paris, France.

One of the best-known farmers in Georgia is
Deal Jackson, of Albany, who owns and works two
thousand acres of land upon which he employs
forty-six families. For a number of years past he
has gained a reputation throughout Georgia by bringing
the first bale of cotton to market. One of the
most successful farmers in the State of Alabama
is a coloured man by the name of John J. Benson,
who owns something like three thousand acres of
land in Elmore County. He is living on the plantation
upon which he was born a slave. He is
famous throughout the county not only for his success
in raising cotton but quite as much for his
success in breeding horses and raising cattle. His
son, William E. Benson, is the head of a corporation
which owns over nine thousand acres of land adjoining
John Benson's plantation.

Negro farmers have not only been successful in
getting hold of the land but they have been successful,
in one or two instances, at any rate, in greatly
improving their methods of farming. There is a
farmer by the name of Sam McCord, in Wilcox
County, Alabama, who has become famous throughout

Alabama from the fact that, while he farms
only two acres of land, he raises on that two acres
every year four bales of cotton, besides considerable
corn and fodder. This is the more remarkable
when it is remembered that the average yield per
acre in Alabama is a little more than one-third of
a bale.

Few people, who are not themselves members of
the Negro race, realise to what extent the masses
of the coloured people feel that they must be led
and guided; that they have no power within themselves
to accomplish anything, unless they are controlled
and directed by some one else. In the early
days of freedom the masses of the people felt that
it was hardly possible for coloured people to be
their own masters. They felt that it was somehow
unnatural to find themselves controlled and directed
by one of their own race. I never realised to what
extent this was true until I attempted to organise
the Normal and Industrial Institute at Tuskegee.

After I came to Alabama, in 1881, and before I
attempted to take any definite measures toward
founding the Tuskegee Institute, I spent several
weeks travelling about among the people in the
county, explaining to them my plans and seeking
to interest them in what I proposed to do. They
listened to me patiently and respectfully, but I
could see that, deep down in their hearts, they had
the feeling that white people might accomplish some

such thing as I proposed, or that coloured people,
under the direction and guidance of white people,
might do so, but that it was hardly possible for
Negroes to succeed in any such enterprise. For
that reason they halted and hesitated, and doubted
my ability and their own, to carry out the plans I
proposed to them.

After we had succeeded in erecting our first
building at Tuskegee, however, I could see that we
had made an impression upon the people. I can
remember how they would come in from the surrounding
districts, men, women, and children, to
look over the school and see what we had done.
It was touching to me to observe the manner in
which they would enter the different rooms, treading
lightly and cautiously, as if they were afraid
they would hurt the floors or, perhaps, that the floors
would somehow or other harm them. Then they
would stop and look about in a kind of bewildered
amazement, as if they were not quite sure whether
what they saw was real, and as if in order to test
it, they would take hold of the door knobs, put their
hands on the glass of the window panes, feel of the
blackboards, and then stop and gaze wonderingly
again at the plastered walls, the desks and the
furniture. It was difficult for them to believe that
the buildings and the school grounds really belonged,
as I tried to explain, to them. It seemed impossible
to them that all this could have been brought into

existence for the benefit of Negroes. I was compelled
to tell them, over and over again, that I wanted
them to feel that the school grounds and the school
buildings were theirs, and that I wanted them to
have a part in the direction and in the upbuilding
of everything connected with the school.

It took some years to really convince the masses
of the people in our neighbourhood that what I said
to them was literally true. But at last the idea that
Tuskegee is theirs has entered deep into the minds
and hearts of the members of my race, not only in
our immediate neighbourhood, but I believe, also,
to a large extent throughout the South. At the
present time I think that every coloured man and
woman in the South not only feels proud of what
Tuskegee has accomplished, but that he feels, also,
a little more alive, a little more able to go ahead and
do something in the world than he did before our
institution came into existence.

It is this feeling on the part of the members of
my race that has given to me, and to others who are
working with me, the desire to go forward and make
our institution bigger and better and more useful,
in order that it may help complete the work of this
larger emancipation, which began before the Civil
War destroyed slavery as a political institution, and
has been going on steadily everywhere in the Southern
states since that time.

CHAPTER III
THE NEGRO LABOURER AND THE MECHANIC IN
SLAVERY AND FREEDOM

ONE of my most vivid boyish recollections
is of the period just previous to the end of
slavery, when my stepfather, who at that
time was, I take it, a man of about fifty years of
age, would return to his family at Christmas time
and tell us stories of his adventures during his long
absence from home. I recall that I would sit for
hours in rapture hearing him tell of the experiences
he had had in a distant part of Virginia, where he
and a large number of other coloured people were
employed in building a railway. Although he was
employed merely as a common labourer he had
learned something as to the plan and purposes for
which this railway was being built and he had some
idea of the great changes that it was intended to
bring about, and he told it all with a great deal of
interesting circumstance.

In my boyish ignorance at that time, I used to
wonder what interest he could have in a railway of
that kind; whether or not he owned any part in it;
and how it was he was so much interested in the

building of a railroad that he could remain away
from home for five or six months and sometimes
longer at one time. All through the country, in our
part of Virginia, Christmas was a season of great
rejoicing, on account of the home-coming of a large
number of coloured people who had been at work in
different industries in different parts of the state.
Some of them had been hired out to work on the
farms, some were employed on the railroads, and
others were mechanics, and when they came home
at Christmas time they brought with them stories,
anecdotes, and news of what was going on in different
parts of the state.

I am reminded of these facts at this time because
they gave me the first idea I had of the extent to
which the labour of the coloured man, both in the
shops and in the fields, has been employed in the
building up of the civilisation of the Southern states.
The Negro was first employed in the severe pioneer
work of clearing the forests, and planting and harvesting
the crops. After that he was employed in
building railways; in digging the coal and iron from
the mines; in laying out the streets, and erecting the
buildings in the cities. He is to-day very largely
depended upon for labour in the iron, mining and
manufacturing districts, like Birmingham, Alabama,
as well as on the great cotton plantations in
Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas.

Not only has the Negro performed this labour,

but he has performed it cheerfully, faithfully, and.
on the whole, as far as his education and training
would permit, he has performed it well. The white
people of the South, who have known the Negro best,
know and value the service that the Negro race has
performed in the South. Although they have not
always come forward publicly to defend the Negro
against the charges that are frequently made against
him, they know, deep down in their hearts, that they
owe the Negro a debt of gratitude for what he has
done, and they have expressed this feeling to individual
Negro men and Negro women, not only in words,
but in every-day acts of kindness and good will,
particularly toward those who at one time belonged
to their families or have in some way or other gained
their friendship.

It is largely owing to the manner in which the
Negro and the white man were brought together
in slavery that there is to-day no place in the world
where the Negro has made himself a more valuable
and efficient labourer than he has in the Southern
states. At the same time there is no place in the
world where, in spite of complaints that one sometimes
hears, there is a more general desire to retain
the Negro as a labourer, and no place where
there is more opportunity for Negroes to engage
in all kinds of labour, common and skilled, or to
enter into business pursuits.

Although the slaves that were first imported from

Africa were, as a rule, rude and unskilled in the
industrial arts of the white man, yet the native
African was not wholly without skill in the crafts,
and it was not very long before some of the dark-skinned
strangers had mastered the trades. Among
the slaves of Robert Beverly, who was clerk of the
House of Burgesses, in Virginia, in 1670, was a
carpenter valued at about thirty pounds. About
this same time Ralph Wormeley, a man of considerable
distinction in his time, who died in 1701,
owned a cooper and a carpenter, each valued at
thirty-five pounds. Negroes were employed as iron
miners and ship-carpenters, wheelwrights, coopers,
tanners, shoemakers, millers and bakers before the
Revolutionary War. As early as 1708 Negro
mechanics had become common enough in Pennsylvania
to arouse the opposition of the free white
workmen, who at that time petitioned the Legislature
against the practice of hiring out slaves to work
in certain of the trades.[1] In the early part of the
nineteenth century the number of Negro mechanics
in the District of Columbia was considerable, and one
of the men who assisted in laying out and surveying
the District of Columbia in 1791 was Benjamin Banneker,
the Negro astronomer, who is said to have
constructed the first clock that was made in America.

Benjamin Banneker was born November 9, 1731,
in Baltimore County, Maryland, near the village

of Ellicott's Mill. He is often referred to as a man
of pure Negro ancestry, but the facts seem to be
that his grandmother, on his mother's side, was a
white woman, by the name of Molly Welsh, who
was sent out from England in an early day as a
Redemptioner, and after she had served her master
for seven years, purchased a small farm and two
slaves. One of these slaves, whose name was
Banneker, she gave his freedom and married.

Benjamin Banneker seems to have been a great
favourite with his grandmother, who taught him to
read. At this time there was a "pay school" in the
neighbourhood, to which a few coloured children
were admitted, and Banneker got a part of his
education there. He early seems to have shown an
inclination for mechanics, and about the year 1754,
with the imperfect tools he was able to command,
he constructed a clock, which not only told the time
but struck the hours. Three years later the Ellicott
flour mills were erected on the banks of Patapsco
River, near his home. The construction of these mills
was a source of great interest and instruction to
Banneker and, in this way, he made the acquaintance
of Mr. George Ellicott, who opened to him his library
and furnished him with astronomical instruments in
order that he might pursue further the studies he had
already begun in the subject of astronomy.

From this time on Banneker, who still cultivated
a little farm inherited from his father, devoted himself

entirely to his scientific studies. He made the
acquaintance, through correspondence, with scientific
men in all parts of the world. It was after his
return home after helping to lay out the District
of Columbia, in 1791, that he got out his first almanac
for the year 1792. Before this almanac was printed
he sent a copy of the manuscript to Thomas Jefferson,
with a letter of explanation. In reply,
Thomas Jefferson said, among other things: "I have
taken the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur
de Condorcet, Secretary of the Academy of Sciences
of Paris, and member of the Philosophical Society,
because I consider it as a document to which your
whole colour had a right, for their justification against
the doubts which have been entertained of them."

Although after 1830 a number of restrictions were
put upon the Negro mechanics, limiting the extent
to which they might be educated, particularly in
knowledge of books, still, as a rule, these laws
were not strictly enforced and the number of coloured
mechanics continued to increase. In Virginia
Negroes worked in the tobacco factories, ran the
steamboats, and were employed in numerous kinds
of skilled labour. In Charleston and some other
places Negroes were employed in cotton factories.
Frederick Law Olmsted, who made a journey
through the Southern states in 1856, says that he
was told in Louisiana that master mechanics often
bought up slave mechanics and acted as contractors.

In Kentucky, slaves worked in the hemp-bagging
factories, in tobacco factories, and in the iron works
on the Cumberland River. Ex-Governor Lowry, of
Mississippi, says that before the War the Negro
mechanics became masters of their respective trades,
as a result of long service under the direction of
white mechanics. "During the existence of slavery,"
he adds, "the contract for qualifying a Negro
as a mechanic was made between his owner and the
master workman."[2] In Alabama, there was, some
time before the War, as I have heard, an enterprising
white man who converted his plantation
to an industrial school for slaves. In other
words, he would buy untrained slave boys and
give them instruction in the different trades that
were used upon the plantations, then sell them
again at a much larger price than he paid for
them. It was not unusual, in fact, for a well-trained
mechanic to sell for as high as two
thousand dollars while an able-bodied field-hand
would sell for eight hundred to one thousand dollars.
I mention these facts because they show that, even in
slavery, the value of education was clearly recognised.

One of the best mechanics I ever knew was
Lewis Adams, whose name I have mentioned in the
previous chapter. He was a first-class tinner, shoemaker,
and harnessmaker, and could do anything

from repairing a watch to mending an umbrella.
After the Tuskegee Institute was started, he became
the first teacher of the trades. During the early days
of the school he taught three distinct trades, and was
not only our tinner, shoemaker, and harnessmaker,
but for some time, also, our engineer. As illustrating
the extent to which the slave obtained education
in the trades, Mr. Adams once said that
there were in Macon County before the War twenty-five
Negro carpenters, eleven blacksmiths, three
painters, two wheelwrights, three tinsmiths, two
tanners, and fourteen shoemakers. Of these
mechanics, he said:

One of the men who learned his trade in slavery
was J. D. Smith, who, a few years ago, was a stationary
engineer in Chicago. In a study of the
"Negro Artisan," published by Atlanta University,
in 1902, he is quoted as saying:

At the close of the slavery period the Negro artisan,
to a very large extent, had a monopoly of the trades
in the Southern states. After slavery disappeared
the Negro boy and girl no longer had the same opportunity
to learn the trades they had had in slavery
time. At the same time, as the country developed,

and as new machinery and new methods of doing
things were introduced, there was a greater demand
for skilled labour than there had ever been before.
Wherever machinery was introduced to perform
work which had previously been performed by
hand labour, it generally happened that the white
man was employed to do that kind of work.

For instance, the building up of the cotton mills
in the South and the rapidly increasing demand for
labour that it caused, drained large portions of the
country districts of their white population to furnish
labour for these factories. All this produced
great changes in conditions in the Southern states.
It has seemed to many persons that the Negro, in
losing his monopoly in the trades, was losing also his
position in them. After a careful study of the facts,
I have come to the conclusion that this is not true.
What the facts do seem to show is that there is in
process a re-distribution of the coloured population
among the different trades and professions.
There were fewer negroes engaged in farm labour
in 1900 for instance, but there is a larger proportion
of the Negro population engaged in the
other four general classes of labour than there was
in 1890.

When the census was taken in 1900, 62.2 per cent.
of all the Negroes in the United States over ten
years of age were engaged in gainful occupations,
while, at the same time, only 48.6 per cent. of the

white population over ten years of age were so
engaged. This does not mean that the Negroes, as
a race, are more industrious than the white people;
it means that a larger number of those who should
be in school, preparing themselves to perform more
efficient labour, are at work performing unskilled
and inefficient labour. The actual number of
Negroes engaged in each of the main classes of the
occupations, in 1890 and in 1900, was as follows:
           

	1890	1900
Agricultural pursuits	1,984,310	2,143,176
Professional service	33,994	47,324
Domestic and personal service	956,754	1,324,160
Trade and transportation	145,717	209,154
Manufacturing and mechanical pursuits	208,374	275,149

While these figures show that a larger number
of Negroes is employed in all the main classes
of occupations, it does not mean that the percentage
of the Negro population engaged in these different
kinds of labour was larger in 1900, in all classes,
than it was in 1890. As a matter of fact, the percentage
of Negroes engaged in agricultural pursuits
was nearly 6 per cent, less in 1900 than it was
in 1890, as the following statement indicates:

           

	1890	1900
Agricultural pursuits	59.6	53.7
Professional service	1.0	1.2
Domestic and personal service	28.7	33.0
Trade and transportation	4.4	5.2
Manufacturing and mechanical pursuits	6.3	6.9

While it is true that these figures show a decreased
percentage of Negroes engaged in agriculture, still
a closer study of the figures indicates that the loss has
been in the class of agricultural labourers. There
are something over 18,000 less Negroes engaged as
agricultural labourers in 1900 than in 1890. On
the other hand there has been a gain in the number
of Negro farmers, both as to number and as to their
percentage of the total farmers. There were 590,666
Negro farmers in 1890, and 757,822 in 1900. Negro
farmers were 11.1 per cent. of the total number of
farmers in 1890, and 13.3 per cent. in 1900.

Of the 3,998,963 Negroes engaged in gainful
occupations, considerably more than one-half were
engaged in agricultural pursuits in 1900. The
next largest class, that of domestic and personal service,
employed 1,324,160 persons. Although there
were 64,562 more Negro servants and waiters in
1900 than in 1890, the per cent. which they formed
of the total number of Negroes engaged in this kind
of service decreased from 42 per cent. in 1890 to
35.1 per cent. in 1900. In other words, although
there was a considerable gain in the total number
and percentage of Negroes engaged in this kind of
service, the chief gains were in those of trades like
that of barbers and hair-dressers, boarding-house and
hotel keepers, janitors, and sextons, launderers
and laundresses, nurses and mid-wives, and in the
class of unspecified domestic and personal service.

These figures indicate the direction which this
re-distribution of Negro labourers among the different
trades has taken.

Manufacturing and mechanical pursuits gave
employment to 275,149 Negroes. This class included
carpenters and joiners, stone and brick
masons, painters, glaziers, and varnishers, paper
hangers and plasterers, plumbers, gas and steam
fitters, roofers and slaters, brick and tile makers,
glass workers, marble and stone cutters, potters,
fishermen and oystermen, miners and quarry men,
butchers, bakers, butter and cheese makers, confectioners,
millers, blacksmiths, iron and steel workers,
machinists, steam-boiler makers, stove, furnace, and
grate makers, tools and cutlery makers, wheelwrights,
wire workers, boot and shoemakers and repairers,
harness and saddle makers and repairers, leather
curriers and tanners, trunk and leather-case makers,
bottlers and soda-water makers, brewers and maltsters,
distillers, and rectifiers.

Other kinds of manufacturing and mechanical
pursuits, in all of which Negroes were found
engaged, are cabinet makers, coopers, saw-mill and
planing-mill employees, glass workers, clock and
watch makers and repairers, gold and silver workers,
tin plate and tinware makers, bookbinders and paperbox
makers, engravers, printers, lithographers and
pressmen, operatives in paper and pulp mills, bleaching
and dye works, carpet factories, carpet, cotton,

hosiery, and knitting, silk, and woollen mills, dressmakers,
hat and cap makers, milliners, seamstresses,
tailors, broom and brush makers, charcoal, coke and
lime burners. Negroes were also engaged as engineers
and firemen, glovemakers, model and pattern
makers, photographers, rubber factory operatives,
tobacco and cigar factory operatives and upholsterers.
In all these manifold occupations, except
fifteen, the number of Negroes employed increased
in the period from 1890 to 1900.

Negroes lost numbers in the trades of carpentry,
plastering, brick and tile making, marble and stone
cutting, blacksmithing, wheelwrighting, bootmaking
and shoemaking, harness and saddle making,
leather currying and tanning, trunk, valise and
leather-case making, engraving, hosiery and knitting
and woollen milling. But the same census shows
that in more than half of these trades, owing, perhaps,
to the larger use of machinery, there has been
a decrease in the total number of persons employed,
whether white or coloured. This indicates another
reason than that of racial competition for the redistribution
in the trades.

I have referred to the trades in which there
appears to be a falling off of Negro employees; let
me say a word concerning some of the trades in which
the Negro has made exceptional gains. The number
of Negro miners in 1890 was 15,809. By 1900
this number had been increased to 36,568, a gain

during ten years of 20,759, or 132 per cent. In
1890, the number of Negroes engaged as brick and
stone masons was 9,647. In 1900, this number had
been increased to 14,387, an increase of 4,740 or
49 per cent. In the meantime, the number of
white men reported as engaged in this occupation
had decreased 1.8 per cent.

The number of dressmakers in 1890 was 7,479.
The number in 1900 was 12,572, an increase during
the decade of 65.3 per cent; meanwhile the number
of white dressmakers in 1890 was increased to 17.4
per cent., which is between one-third and one-fourth
of the increase of the coloured dressmakers. In
1890, the number of Negro iron and steel workers
was 5,790. In 1900 the number was 12,327, an
increase of 6,537, or 112.7 per cent.; meanwhile
the number of white iron and steel workers had
increased 100 per cent. The number of Negro
stationary engineers and firemen in 1890 was 6,326.
In 1900, they had increased to 10,277, or 62.4 per
cent. During the same time the increase for the
white engineers and firemen was only 60 per cent.

The rapid increase of the Negro labourers in the
iron and steel industries was undoubtedly due to
the rapid development of that industry in the
Southern states. Perhaps this industry, together
with the coal and iron mining, has drawn more
heavily than other industries upon the labouring
population of the country districts. Some

figures and observations, indicating the progress
that the Negro has made in these industries, were
furnished to me by Mr. Belton Gilreath, of the
Gilreath Coal and Iron Company, and the Union
Coal and Coke Company, of Birmingham, Alabama,
who, after a very careful inquiry, has found that
Negroes in the Birmingham region mine about 90
per cent. of the iron ore and about 50 per cent, of
the coal.

"Twenty years ago," he says, "when the mines
were first being opened in this district, the oremining
was done by white miners with coloured
labourers, mostly foreigners, who in turn taught some
of the white men here. After a while, the Negro
labourers began to be the miners, and now Negroes
have almost completely monopolised the iron oremining.
Negroes perform both the work of labourers
and miners until about 90 per cent. of the oreminers
are coloured."

Mr. Gilreath added that in the coal mining industry
Negroes have likewise made progress, but are
not mining as large a proportion of the coal as they
are of the ore. "As near as I can estimate," he said,
" from the best information I am able to secure, one-half
the coal produced is gotten out by coloured
miners."

According to the census for 1900, 209,154 Negroes
were employed, in occupations which are classified
under "trade and transportation." This class

includes: agents, bankers, and brokers, bookkeepers
and accountants, clerks, and copyists, commercial
travellers, draymen, hackmen, teamsters, foremen
and overseers, hostlers, hucksters and peddlers,
livery-stable keepers, merchants and dealers, messengers,
errand and office boys, officials of banks
and corporations, packers, and shippers, porters
and helpers, salesmen and saleswomen, steam railway
employees, stenographers and typewriters,
street railway employees, telephone and telegraph
linemen, telegraph and telephone operators. In
nearly all these occupations Negroes have made
considerable gains. Among other facts I note that
the number of Negro draymen and hackmen,
teamsters, and so forth, increased from 43,963 in
1890 to 67,727 in 1900, an increase of 54 per cent.
The increase among the whites for the same period
was 45.9 per cent.

In 1900 there were over 200,000 Negroes engaged
in occupations requiring skill in some form or other.
These were: miners and quarry men, 36,568; sawmill
and planing-mill employees, 33,266; dressmakers
and seamstresses, 24,110; carpenters and
joiners, 21,114; barbers and hair-dressers, 19,948;
tobacco and cigar operatives, 15,349; brick and
stone masons, 14,387; iron and steel workers, 12,327;
engineers and firemen, 10,227; blacksmiths, 10,104;
brick and tile makers, 9,970. In addition to these
there were 2,585 Negro operatives in factories and

mills, 52 architects, designers and draughtsmen,
185 electricians, 120 civil engineers and surveyors,
1,262 machinists, 198 tool and cutlery makers, 342
cabinet makers, 109 clock and watch makers, 66 gold
and silver workers, 86 bookbinders, 22 engravers,
1,845 men and Women tailors, 15 glove makers, 24
model and pattern makers, 247 photographers, and
1,045 upholsterers.

A thing that should be considered is that Negroes
are, more and more every year, becoming themselves
the employers of Negro labour. When Negroes
go into business they employ other Negroes as clerks,
bookkeepers, agents, and salesmen. All these
things tend to draw coloured people from the trades
and occupations in which they were formerly
employed. The Negro barber is a good illustration
of what I mean. The census of 1900 shows
that there were not only a larger number but a larger
percentage of barbers at that time than there were
ten years before. During this same period, however,
there has been a very large increase in the number
of white barbers not only in the North but in the
South. In many cases, particularly in the South,
white barbers have taken the places of the Negro
barbers, who formerly had a monopoly of that trade.
In spite of this fact, as I have said, the number of
Negro barbers has steadily increased. The explanation
is that a much larger number of barbers are now
employed by Negroes than there were a few years

ago. The whole number of barbers increased from
1890 to 1900 to 54 per cent., while the number of
Negro barbers increased during that period only
14 per cent.

A little earlier in this chapter I made the statement
that, with the growth of factories and the
introduction of machinery into the Southern states,
to perform work that had previously been performed
by hand, the white man rather than the Negro was
used to perform that kind of labour. In recent
years, however, there has been a growing disposition
to employ Negro labour in the factories. For
example, in 1900 a silk mill was established in
Fayetteville, North Carolina, by the firm of Ashley
and Bailey, who are the owners of a number of silk
mills in different parts of the North.

This firm decided, after carefully considering the
matter, to try the experiment of using Negro labour
in the spinning and weaving of silk. In order to do
this they purchased a considerable tract of land
just outside of Fayetteville, and started to build up
there a Negro colony. They rented to each family
they employed a tract of land and a house. They
erected a schoolhouse, in which there was a nine
months' school, and built a church for the use of
the colony. They obtained the services of an energetic
Negro minister to bring together a number of
Negro families and settle them on the land and in
the houses they had erected. After that they

invited the children to take employment in the mills.
These mills, which employ about five hundred
persons, are now conducted under the direction of
a white superintendent, who has under him a coloured
foreman, who is in charge of the mill which spins
the thread.

Under the direction of these two men some five
or six hundred children, from twelve to sixteen years
of age, have been trained until they have become
very satisfactory mill operatives. The superintendent,
Mr. G. W. Kort, says it will take a number
of years to bring these children up to the point
where they will equal the trained and disciplined
operatives in the Northern mills. He says, also,
that the company has found certain special
difficulties in controlling these children, most of
whom have come directly from the farm to
take up their work in the mills. Most of these
difficulties can be traced back to the irregularities
in the home life of the parents. Nevertheless,
the Fayetteville silk mill has been a success, and
is no longer, I understand, to be considered an
experiment.

Negro labour has also been tried successfully in a
number of hosiery mills. One of these is located in
Savannah, Georgia, and another in Durham, North
Carolina. In 1897, a group of coloured men in
Concord, North Carolina, organised the Coleman
Manufacturing Company, and erected a cotton mill,

which employed for a time some two hundred
coloured boys and girls. Just after the mill had been
fairly started, however, Mr. Coleman, the man who
organised the company, died, and the mill was sold
to a company of white men who decided to employ
white labour.

From the ranks of Negro mechanics, there have
come from time to time a number of Negro inventors.
The first of these inventors, to whom the Patent
Office records refer, is Henry Blair, of Maryland,
who was granted a patent for a corn harvester in
1834, and another patent for a similar invention in
1836. This man was probably "a free person of
colour," as slaves were not allowed to take out
patents for inventions in those days. The rule in
regard to the inventions of slaves was laid down, in
1858, by the Commissioner of Patents and confirmed
by the Attorney-general of the United States.
The circumstances were these: A Negro slave, living
with his master in the state of Mississippi, perfected
a valuable invention which his master sought
to have patented. His application was refused on
the grounds that he was not the inventor. He
then sought to have the invention patented as
assignee of his slave, but under the law a slave
could not hold property and therefore could not
assign this invention to his master. The case
was appealed to the Attorney-general, and, as
I have said, he confirmed the decision of the

Commissioner of Patents. The result of this law
was that neither the slave nor his master could
secure the protection of the Government for any
invention that a slave succeeded in making.

In 1862 a Negro slave belonging to Jefferson
Davis, President of the Southern Confederacy,
invented a propeller for vessels, which was finally
put into use, it is said, by the Confederate navy.
A Negro slave in Kentucky is said to have
invented the hemp-brake, a machine in which the
hemp fibre is separated from the hemp stalk.
Negro mechanics also have been the builders of
some of the most important buildings erected in
the South before the War. When I was in Vicksburg,
Mississippi, a few years ago, my attention
was called to the courthouse, that was erected
before the War, and is still the most imposing
building in the city. I was told that this building
was planned and built under the direction of a
Negro slave.

A few years ago, in 1899, an attempt was made
to find out from the Patent Office at Washington,
and through inquiries directed to prominent patent
attorneys in different parts of the United States,
the number of patents that had been taken out by
coloured inventors. Something over three hundred
and seventy patents, taken out by two hundred
and seven inventors, were found to have been taken
out by coloured men. Elijah McCoy, of Detroit,

Michigan, had taken out at that time twenty-eight
patents on appliances to be used for lubricating
engines and locomotives. This was the largest
number of patents taken out by any coloured man.
The next largest number of patents was taken out
by Granville T. Woods, an electrician. Mr. Woods
has patented many valuable improvements in telegraph
and telephone instruments. One of his
telephone inventions was sold to the American
Bell Telephone Company. Another important
series of inventions, covering machinery to be used
in soling shoes, was made by J. E. Matzeliger.
These included a lasting machine, a nailing machine,
a tack-separating mechanism, and a mechanism for
distributing tacks.[4]

One interesting fact in regard to the Negro
mechanic in slavery time is that the demand for
more efficient and more skilled labour made the
slave mechanic a freer and more independent
person than the other slaves. In a recent study of
the condition of slave labour in the Charleston District,
Professor Ulrich B. Phillips, of the University
of Wisconsin, has pointed out that, all through the
South and particularly in the cities where the demand
for skilled labour was greatest, there was a constant
disposition on the part of slave-owners to do
away, in one way or another, with the restrictions

that were imposed upon the intellectual progress
and personal freedom of their slave mechanics.
Upon this point, Professor Phillips says:

Under the influence of the conditions here described
a considerable portion of the slaves were
gradually making their way out of slavery. Many
of them purchased their freedom and moved North;
others, though nominally slaves, were practically
free. They were allowed to purchase their own
time, and in many cases engaged in business for
themselves. Such was the case, for instance, of

the father of Mr. R. R. Taylor, Director of Mechanical
Industries, at Tuskegee Institute. Mr. Taylor's
father was the son of a white man who was at the
same time his master. Although he was nominally
a slave, he was early given liberty to do about as he
pleased. While he was still a young man in Wilmington,
North Carolina, he made the acquaintance
of a white man who owned a sailing vessel,
and they entered into a sort of partnership together.
The young coloured man collected and bought up
naval stores and other merchandise which he
turned over to his partner, who carried them off in
his ship and sold them. In this way they made a
considerable amount of money together so that after
all the losses of the war, Mr. Taylor's father was able
to send him through one of the best technical training
schools in the United States, the Boston
Institute of Technology. I could mention a hundred
other cases which illustrate the way men and
women, though nominally slaves, succeeded in
reaching a condition that was very close to that of
freedom.

It was not an unusual thing in slavery days for a
coloured man and a white man to go into business
together. Negro and white artisans worked side by
side during slavery, and the freedom to labour
and to engage in business, without prejudice, has
always existed. In all the ordinary forms of
business and of labour there is no prejudice

against the Negro. I should rather say that, other
things being equal, a Southern white man who
has a job of work to do would prefer to have a
Negro perform it.

If slavery had continued as it began, merely an
industrial system, a method of obtaining and directing
labour, it is very likely that the slaves would have
succeeded finally in working out their own freedom;
but slavery had become, with the course of time, not
only an industrial but also a political system and,
by the beginning of the nineteenth century, many
people in the South had begun to feel that it was
absolutely necessary to preserve this system. In
order to do this they found it necessary to pass laws
which would limit and set bounds to the progress
which the slaves were making. It was in the
interest of this system that laws were passed to prevent
masters emancipating their slaves. It was
in the interest of the same system that laws were
passed limiting the direction in which slave labour
might be employed and the extent to which slaves
might be instructed in the trades and in books.
For instance, North Carolina allowed slaves to
learn mathematical calculation, but not reading and
writing. A law was passed in Georgia that no one
should permit a Negro "to transact business for him
in writing." In 1830, Mississippi passed a law which
forbade employment of slaves in printing-offices,
and, in 1845, the Legislature of Georgia declared

that slaves and free Negroes could not take contracts
for building and repairing houses.[6]

These restrictions bore most heavily upon the
class of industrious and ambitious slaves. It was
largely from this class that the fugitives, who,
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, began to
make their way northward, were recruited. It was
from the sufferings of these fugitives and the hardships
which they endured in order to preserve their
liberty, that the Northern people became acquainted
with the evils of slavery in the South. Many of the
fugitive slaves, like Frederick Douglass, Bishop
Loguen, and William Wells Brown, joined in the
anti-slavery agitation in the North, and by their
eloquence helped prepare the North for the struggle
with slavery that was soon to take place. Thus the
effect of the laws made in the South, to suppress the
efforts of the Negro slaves to be free, produced conditions
in the North which finally resulted in the
destruction of the slavery system.

Perhaps it is fair to say that the real cause of the
downfall of slavery was not so much the hardships
that it imposed upon the masses of both races, black
and white, but the fact that it attempted to build up
a dam that would hold back and restrain the forces
that were making for progress inside the system
itself. No page of history, I venture to say, better
illustrates the fact that it is not possible to pass a

law to permanently stop the progress of civilisation.
The hardest and most ungrateful task, that any
individual or any race can undertake, is that of holding
down and under another individual or another
race that is trying to rise.

CHAPTER IV
NEGRO CRIME AND RACIAL SELF-HELP

NEGRO crime in the United States reached
its highest point in the years of financial
strain, beginning in 1892 and ending in
1896. The United States Census Statistics of Crime
show that from 1870 to 1890 there was an enormous
increase of Negro criminality, particularly in
the Northern states. The total number of Negro
criminals enumerated in the Census of 1870 was
8,056; in 1880 this number had increased to 16,748;
in 1890 it was 24,277; and in 1904 it was 26,087.
This meant that for every one hundred thousand
Negroes in the United States there were, in 1870,162
criminals; in 1880, 248 criminals; in 1890, 325
criminals. Fourteen years later, however, in 1904,
the number of Negro criminals to every one hundred
thousand of the Negro population had fallen to 282.

Some time between 1890 and 1904 the wave of
Negro criminality which, up to that time, had seemed
to be steadily increasing, reached its highest point
and began to recede. Between these two periods
no census figures for the whole country are available,
but a special study of the criminal statistics of

cities, North and South, shows that about 1894 and
1895 there was a marked decrease in Negro crime.

Statistics for Washington, District of Columbia,
from 1881 to 1902, showed that the maximum rate of
184 police arrests per thousand of Negro population
was reached in 1893. In Charleston, South Carolina,
the rate of arrests reached its maximum of 92 per
thousand in 1902. Cincinnati, Ohio, reached its
maximum rate of 276 per thousand of the Negro
population in 1894. In Savannah, Georgia, the
highest rate of 165 was not reached until 1898. In
Chicago the rate of arrests of Negroes reached its
maximum of 586 per thousand in 1892, the year of the
World's Fair. At this time, there was a considerable
transient population in Chicago, and, as the rate of
Negro criminality per thousand is estimated on the
basis of the permanent population, these figures are
like to be misleading.

The rate of arrests in St. Louis, Missouri, reached
its maximum, when the number of arrests per thousand
of the Negro population was 269. Statistics
from the cities of New York and Philadelphia,
the only cities for which data covering the period
prior to 1866 are available, show that the rate of
Negro arrests per thousand of the Negro population
was about as great prior to 1866 as it was in 1902.
The maximum rate for New York was reached in
1899 when the number of arrests per thousand of
the Negro population was in. The rate of arrests

per thousand of the Negro population in Philadelphia
has, at no time previous to 1902, been greater than
it was in 1864, when there were 150 arrests per
thousand of the Negro population.

The thing that makes these figures the more significant
is the fact that it is, as a rule, in the large cities
that much the larger proportion of crimes is committed.
At any rate, it is in the cities that the larger
proportion of crimes committed gets into court and
is recorded. Furthermore, it is in the cities that the
larger proportion of the increase of recorded crime
has taken place during the period that I have mentioned.
This is, no doubt, the reason why statistics
show that there are more Negro criminals in the
North than in the South. Seven-tenths of the
Negroes in the Northern states live in the cities
having at least more than 2,500 inhabitants, and
more than one-third of the Negroes in the Northern
states live in cities having more than one hundred
thousand inhabitants.

A comparison of the criminal statistics of the
Northern and Southern states will illustrate what I
mean:

Negro Prisoners in Northern States:

   

1870	1880	1890	1904
2,025	3,774	5,635	7,527

Negro Prisoners per 100,000 of Negro Pop. in Northern States:

   

1870	1880	1890	1904
372	515	773	765

Negro Prisoners in Southern States:

   

1870	1880	1890	1904
6,031	12,973	19,244	18,550

Prisoners per 100,000 of Negro Pop. in Southern States:

   

1870	1880	1890	1904
136	221	284	220

The increase in the amount of Negro crime in the
United States during the period of 1870 to 1890 was
so rapid and so marked that it made a great impression
on the public, North and South. A thing that
helped to emphasise these facts and make them seem
more serious than they actually were, particularly
in the Southern states, was the outbreak, at this
time, of mob-violence so savage and so terrible in its
manifestations, as to attract, for a time, the attention
of the whole civilised world. From 1882 to 1892 the
number of persons lynched in the United States
increased from 114 to 235 per annum. From that time
on to 1903 the number decreased to 104 per annum.
The total number of Negroes lynched during this
period of twenty-two years was 2,060; the total
number of whites lynched during the same period
was 1,169. In the case of the Negroes there was
an average of 93 and 7–11 per year; in the case of
the whites the average was 53 and 3–22 per year.

Of the 2,060 put to death in this way during this
period, 1,985, or more than 96 per cent., were lynched
in the Southern states. The offences for which these
people suffered death from the wild vengeance of the

mob were not, as has been supposed, in the majority
of cases assaults upon women. A little more than one-third
of the lynchings were due to assaults, attempted
assaults, upon women or insults to them. The larger
number were occasioned by the crime of murder.

The minor offences for which Negroes were lynched
were such things as robbery, slander, wife-beating,
cutting levees, kidnapping, voodooism, poisoning
horses, writing insulting letters, incendiary language,
swindling, jilting a girl, colonising Negroes,
political troubles, gambling, quarrelling, poisoning
wells, throwing stones, unpopularity, making threats,
circulating scandal, being troublesome, bad reputation,
drunkenness, rioting, fraud, enticing a servant
away, writing letters to white women, asking a white
woman in marriage, conspiracy, introducing smallpox,
giving information, conjuring, concealing a
criminal, slapping a child, passing counterfeit
money, elopement with a white girl, disobeying
ferry regulations, running quarantine, violation of
contract, paying attention to a white girl, resisting
assault, inflammatory language, forcing white boys
to commit crime, lawlessness.[1]

These cases of mob-violence and the crime which
occasioned them, were, as I have said, widely advertised
by the press through the North and through
the South. And they helped to give the impression
that the Negroes in the South were much more

lawless than they were in other parts of the country,
much more lawless than other races in the same
stage of civilisation as the Negro. As a matter of
fact, as may be seen from the statistics I have given,
the Negro criminals in the North were always much
more numerous, in proportion to the Negro population,
than they were in the South. Furthermore,
as I hope to show later in this chapter, the amount
of crime committed by other peoples who have come
here from Europe, and particularly from the South
of Europe, where the social conditions are in some
sense comparable to the social conditions of the Negro
in the South, is considerably larger in proportion
to the number of population they represent, than is
true in the case of the Negro.

The single fact to which attention was directed,
as a consequence of this outbreak of mob-violence,
was that the number of Negro criminals, in proportion
to the Negro population, was three times as great
as that of the white criminals in proportion to the
white population, and that Negro crime was increasing
with much greater rapidity than was the crime
committed by whites.

One of the wholesome results of these outbreaks
of mob-violence and of the discussion that they
aroused, has been to direct the attention of earnest
men and women of the Negro race to a study of the
actual facts and their causes, in the hope of improving
conditions by getting at the sources of Negro

crime. The attention of Negro teachers and students
was first called to these facts by the Hampton Negro
Conferences, and studies were begun under the
direction of these Conferences as early as 1898.
Some years later, in 1903 and 1904, a study of Negro
crime was made under the direction of W. E.
Burghardt Du Bois, Professor of Sociology at Atlanta
University. This study of Negro crime, which was
published in 1904, is all the more interesting because
it was made under the direction of a Negro and
represents, in so very large a degree, the results of
the studies and observations of Negro students and
teachers upon the sources of crime among the people
of their own race.

Referring to the work that Negro schools are
doing in the way of studying the social conditions of
the Negro people, I am reminded of something said
to me a few years ago by a gentleman who had been
devoting some months to travel through the Southern
states, in order to gather material for a book upon
the subject of the Negro and his relations to the white
man in the South. He told me, among other things,
that he had been greatly surprised to observe to what
extent educated coloured men, in all parts of the
country, had taken up in a serious and systematic
way the study of the social conditions of their own
people. He said that he had been informed in the
North that educated Negroes had little or no interest
in studying the conditions of their own people, but

were interested rather in getting as far away as they
were able from the masses of the Negro race. On
the other hand, he had been told in the South that
Negroes were so wholly ignorant and unreliable that
if he wanted to really get at the truth about the Negro
he must get his information from a white man.

When he came to meet the educated Negroes in
the Southern states, however, he had learned that
they were not only well-informed in regard to the
conditions of their own people but that they frequently
seemed to have gained a deeper insight into
the actual conditions of the Negro people, and to
have a more accurate knowledge of the situation, as
it looked to a man from the outside, than many
white men he had met. He added that, considering
the persons he referred to were in many instances the
sons and daughters of slave parents, and that few
of them had had opportunities for study that men
and women of the white race have had, this seemed to
him an evidence of very genuine progress on the
part of the Negro race.

The study of Negro crime to which I have referred
is interesting, however, not merely as an indication
of the serious interest that educated Negroes have
begun to take in the condition of the Negro race, but
it is interesting also for the new facts which were
first brought to light in this study, and have since
been confirmed by a census of crime published by
the United States Census Bureau in 1907.

One of the facts brought out by this census concerns
the method of enumeration used by the Census
Office. For instance, up to 1904 it had been the
practice, in taking the census of crime, to count all
persons who were in jails or prisons on a certain day.
The result was supposed to give the relative number
of criminals in different parts of the country and so
indicate the comparative amount of crime committed
in these different places.

A closer study of the statistics shows, however,
that it has been customary to sentence prisoners for
longer terms in some parts of the country than in
others, even though the crime committed was of the
same character or class. This is true, for instance,
of the Southern states as compared with the Northern
states. The result has been that an undue amount
of crime has been credited, by this method of enumeration,
to the Southern states.

I can, perhaps, make this point clear by an illustration.
Consider the case of a man who is engaged
in raising chickens, and who, for some reason or
other, desires to confine a certain number of his
chickens, while the others are allowed to run loose.
He has, let us suppose, two breeds, and he puts
five chickens of each breed into the hen-yard every
day, with, however, this difference, that the chickens
of one breed are confined in the hen-yard one week,
while the chickens of the other breed are confined
two weeks. Now it is evident that if you put five

chickens of each breed in the hen-yard every day,
you will have, at the end of the first week, an equal
number of each breed, namely, thirty-five. From
that time on, however, the number of chickens in
the hen-yard which are confined two weeks will be
larger than that of the breed confined one week.

So that at the end of the second week there will be
still only thirty-five chickens of the first breed, while
there will be seventy of the second. In other words,
there will be twice as many of the second in confinement
as of the first breed.

The result is the same whether we are counting
chickens in a hen-yard or prisoners in a penitentiary.
This illustrates, in a simple way, how it is
that in the Southern states, where the sentences
imposed upon criminals are heavier than they are
in the Northern states, the number of criminals
enumerated at any one time will be disproportionately
large.

In order to correct this error it was determined, in
the Census of 1904, not merely to enumerate the persons
found in confinement at any particular date, but
to obtain figures as to the number of commitments,
that is to say, to find out the number of persons who
had been sent to jail during the period of a year.

By this means, the Census of 1904 took account not
merely of those who happened to be in the jails or the
prisons at a given period, but also of those who had
come in during the year, and, either because they

had been able to pay their fines or because they
served their sentences, had been released.

The results showed at once some striking changes
in the statistics of crime, and materially corrected
some wrong impressions as to the relative amount
of crime committed in the different sections. For
example, the number of prisoners enumerated according
to the earlier method gave the North Atlantic
states in 1904, 27,389 prisoners. The number of
commitments for that same year was 76,235. In
other words, according to the second method of
enumeration, there was 48,846 more crimes committed
in the Northern states than there appeared
to be by the first method of counting. This was an
increase of nearly 200 per cent.

On the other hand, in the South Atlantic states
there were 11,150 prisoners enumerated, but only
10,643 had been committed to prison during the
year. By this method of reckoning it appeared that
there were 507 criminals less than were shown by
the earlier method of enumeration. The same differences
appear when the South Central states are
compared with the North Central states and the
Western states. By the census enumeration, it
appeared that there were 14,614 prisoners in the
penitentiaries and jails in the South Central states
while only 10,206 had been committed to prison
during the year. This was a decrease of 4,408.

In the North Central states, reckoning by the methods

of enumeration, there were 21,000 prisoners, but by
the method of commitment there were 38,603.
In other words, there appeared to be 17,603 more
criminals by this latter method of enumeration than
by the former. In the Western states there were
7,619 prisoners enumerated, but there were 14,004
commitments during the year.

One explanation of these differences is, as I have
said, that in the Southern states the sentences are
longer than they are in the Northern states. I do
not know exactly why the Southern courts impose
heavier sentences upon prisoners than the Northern
courts. Perhaps it is because the crimes committed
in the South are more serious than those committed
in the North and deserve heavier punishment.

But that, of course, is no reason why we should count
those crimes twice in making up our estimates of the
criminal population, as I fear has, in effect, sometimes
been done in comparing the amount of crime
committed in the South with the amount of crime committed
in the North.

The method of computing crime which has made
so large a difference in the apparent amount of
crime committed in the South, as compared with
the North, has been responsible for crediting a disproportionate
amount of crime to the Negro. For
instance, in the South Atlantic states, 8,281 criminals
were enumerated as in jails and prisons in 1904.
In the same year, however, only 6,847 prisoners had

been committed to prison. In the South Central
states, 10,269 prisoners were enumerated in the
prisons and jails during the year 1904. At the same
time it was found that only 6,066 prisoners had been
committed during that year. In other words, if we
were to estimate the amount of Negro crime in the
South by the number of persons found in the prisons
and jails, there would be 5,643 more criminals found
for the year 1904 than if we had counted the actual
number of Negroes arrested, convicted and committed
to prison. The reason here again is that
Negroes in the South are given longer sentences than
white men. For example, 50 per cent, of the
Negroes convicted of crime in the South Atlantic
states were sentenced to terms of one year or more,
while only 38 per cent, of the white men so convicted
were sentenced to terms of a year or more.

No doubt, also, there is a difference in the crimes
committed by the white and black population. It is
said that, in the South, stealing and ail crimes against
property are punished relatively with more severe
sentences than crimes of violence, or crimes against
the person, as they are termed. An illustration of
this is given in an article upon the "Negro in Crime,"
in the Independent for May 18, 1899, where the
following items clipped from the Atlanta Constitution,
of January 27, are quoted. The items are:

The two cases I have just cited are, perhaps,
exceptional, but they illustrate the kind of crime
upon which the Southern courts are disposed to put
the emphasis. At the time the crimes referred to
in these clippings were committed, there were, so
far as I know, no juvenile courts in any of the
Southern states, and with the exception of the
Virginia Manual Labour School, started in 1897, no
reformatories to which Negro children could be
sent. Where the principle of the juvenile court has
been established, an offence committed by a child,
such as the one referred to in the foregoing quotation,
is not considered a crime in the same sense in which
an offence committed by an adult person is so considered.
The imposition of heavier sentences for
minor offences and especially the disposition of Southern
courts to impose relatively heavier penalties
on children, has had the effect of largely increasing
the number of Negroes in the jail and prison
population.

It should be remembered, in this respect, also, that
among the members of the Negro race, owing, no
doubt, to the condition of the home surroundings,
to poverty, and, perhaps, also, to the fact that

mothers are so frequently employed away from home,
a much larger proportion of Negro criminals are
children than is true with the white race. This
makes the system which prevailed a few years ago,
and still continues in a less degree, of sending children,
particularly Negro children, to the penitentiaries
and the chain-gang, bear so heavily upon the members
of my race. When children are sent to prison,
they are not only subjected, during the period when
they are most impressionable, to the influences of
evil companions, but they sometimes get to thinking
of the prison as a place to which they naturally
belong, and where they expect to spend the larger
part of their lives. It is a very serious matter when a
race or a class of people reaches the point where it
begins to feel that it is looked upon by those to whom
it has been taught to look for guidance and control,
as a criminal people.

A few years ago, when I was in Kentucky, I remember
hearing a story which struck me as peculiarly
pathetic. One morning the officers of the State
Prison found, in counting over their prisoners, that
they had one too many. Upon investigation, they
discovered a young coloured boy, who had been discharged
from prison a few days before, had actually
broken into the prison during the night, apparently
in order to find a place to sleep. As I remember the
story, the boy said, when questioned, that after
leaving the prison he had wandered about till he was

very hungry, and as he had no place to stay he finally
decided to come back and crawl into the stockade,
where there were at least people who knew him, and
where he could find a place to sleep. From all that
I could learn, this boy had lived so long in prison that
he had come to feel more at home there than he did
outside.

Another reason why prison sentences are longer in
the South than they are in the North is because, under
the convict-lease system, crime has been or has
seemed to be immensely profitable, not only to the
states but to individuals. For instance, in 1900, the
state of Georgia received $61,826.32 from the earnings
of prisoners. From 1901 to 1903, the net income
was $81,000 a year. In 1904, new contracts were
made for a period of five years beginning April 1,
1904, which netted the state on an average of
$225,000 per annum.

It is only slowly that the public has begun to
realise that the new form of slavery, represented by
the convict-lease system, has made the condition of
the convict-slave infinitely worse than was possible
under a system of slavery in which the slave belonged
to his master for life. Gradually, however, the evils
of a system which made crime profitable have
been coming to light. In 1908, Georgia, seeing the
horrible conditions that existed in the convict camps,
abandoned its old methods of disposing of convict
labor and has since that time employed convicts

in building the public roads. The conditions that
formerly existed in Georgia still exist, however, in
several of the other Southern states.

In most cases where an effort has been made to
determine the relative criminality of the Negro it
has been customary to compare the Negro with the
white man. Because the white man stood higher in
the scale of civilisation, was better educated, had a
better home and was more respected, this comparison
has been to the disadvantage of the Negro.

The criminal statistics of 1890 showed, for example,
that there were 104 white and 325 Negro criminals in
the United States for every one hundred thousand
of the respective races. In other words, the crimes
of Negroes were more than three times those of the
whites. In the Northern states, the ratio was even
greater, the crimes of Negroes being more than five
times those of the whites.

In 1904, however, when the races were compared
upon the basis of the actual number of persons committed
to prison during the year, it was found that
the commitments per hundred thousand were 187
for the whites and 268 for the Negroes. That is to
say, the two races stood to each other, in respect to
the amount of crime committed by each, in about the
ratio of one to one and one-half. In the Northern
states, Negro crime, instead of being five times, was
a little more than four times that of the whites.

By the census of 1890 it appeared that the Negro

offenders in Southern states compared with the white
offender in those states, were in the ratio of 2 to 9.
That is to say, in those states, comparing the races
by the methods I have described, there were four
and one-half times as much crime committed by
Negroes as by whites. In 1904, however, considering
the actual number of both races committed to
prison, it appears that the Negro crime, compared
with the white, was in the ratio of less than three
and one-half to one—a decrease of 21 per cent.

In looking further into the statistics of crime
with special reference to the nationality of the criminals,
I have found that among the foreign-born
people in the United States, the different nationalities
range themselves, at very diverse distances, on two
sides of the general average of crime committed by
the foreign population as a whole. On the one side,
there are nationalities which fall far below the
average. On the other hand, there are others which
rise far above that average.

In comparing the Negro with the immigrants now
coming into the United States in such large numbers
from the South of Europe, we are comparing him
with races which in Europe have been, and still in
America are, living in the conditions that are in many
respects comparable to those in which the masses of
the Negro people now live. The people to whom
I refer are, in many instances, less advanced in education
in books than the majority of the coloured

people in the Southern states, though they are, no
doubt, far ahead of them in some of the more fundamental
things.

For instance, among the Italian people, as a
whole, more than 38 per cent, of the population
can neither read nor write. Of the people who come
into the United States, particularly from Sicily and
Southern Italy, no doubt a much larger per cent.
are illiterate. In Russia, more than 70 per cent. of
the population are without education. In other
parts of Southern Europe, like Roumania, 89 per
cent, of the people are wholly illiterate.

A good many of these people are now coming into
certain parts of the South. The following comparison,
therefore, of the relative criminality of these
different races as compared to the Negro is peculiarly
interesting:

                 

Nationality	Number in U. S. according to census 1900	Prison commitments in 1904	Commitments per 1,000 of each nationality
Mexicans	103,410	484	4.7
Italians	484,207	2,143	4.4
Austrians	276,249	1, 006	3.6
French	104,341	358	3.4
Canadians	1,181,255	3,557	3.0
Russians	424,096	1,222	2.8
Poles	383.510	1,038	2.7
Negroes	8,840,789	23,698	2.7

There is another class of crimes with which the
Negro has been more associated in the public mind
than any other. I refer to the assaults upon women,

to which attention has so often been directed because
they have so frequently been made the occasion of,
or excuse for, outbreaks of mob-violence, not only in
the Southern states but in the Northern states as
well. The total commitments for rape, in 1904, were
620; of this number 450 were by white persons, 170 by
coloured, and in by persons of foreign birth.

The number of cases of rape committed by coloured
people, including all the races in the United States
classed under that title, was 1.8 per hundred thousand
of the total coloured population. The total
number of commitments for the white population
was 0.6 per hundred thousand of the white population.
The number of commitments for this crime
per hundred thousand of the foreign population
was I. In other words, the number of commitments
for rape was proportionately three times as great
for the coloured population as it was for the whites.
It was nearly twice as great, proportionately, as that
for the foreign population.[2]

A comparison of the coloured committed for this
crime with that portion of the foreign-born population
which is nearest to the coloured in respect to
education and social condition shows, however, that
the Negro is by no means the worst offender in
respect to this crime. The following table shows the
number of commitments per hundred thousand for

this crime of the foreign-born people to whom I
have referred:
     

Italians	5.3	Hungarians	2.0
Mexicans	4.8	French	1.9
Austrians	3.2	Russians	1.9

For other portions of the foreign-born population
the percentage is less. For example, among the
Canadian-born population statistics indicate for
every one hundred thousand of the population that
1.2 are guilty of assaults on women. For other
foreign-born portions of the population the figures
are Polanders 1.0, Germans 0.4, Irish 0.3.

While it is true that the Negro furnishes a proportionately
large number of the crimes of assault
upon women, I do not think it is true, if we are to go
by the statistics, that there is any more disposition on
the part of men of the Negro race to commit this
crime than on the part of men of other races.
While no statistics can possibly determine this fact,
I have taken the trouble to find out what per cent. of
the major offenders, that is to say, of the men who
committed the worst crimes, were sent to prison for
the crime of rape during the year 1904. From these
figures it appears that only 1.9 per cent, of the coloured
offenders committed for major offences were committed
for the crime of rape. On the other hand,
2.3 per cent, of the white and 2.6 per cent, of the
foreign major offenders were committed in 1904
for that crime. The following table will show the

per cent, of major offenders of the races to whom
I have already made reference, who were committed
for this offence:
           

Hungarians	4.7	Canadians	3.0
Italians	4.4	Mexicans	2.7
Austrians	4.2	Poles	2.1
French	3.1	Germans	1.8
Russians	3.0	Irish	1.3
	Coloured	1.9

As a further confirmation of the facts which these
statistics show, I might mention that in the South
Atlantic states, where 35.7 per cent, of the total population
are Negroes, the rate of commitments per
100,000 of the population for assault on women is
0.5. On the other hand, in the Western Division,
where only 0.7 per cent, of the total population are
Negroes, the commitments for rape amount to 1.4
for each 100,000 of the population. In the North
Atlantic states, where Negroes represent 1.8 per cent.
of the population, the number of commitments for
this crime per hundred thousand is 0.9. In the South
Central states, where 29.8 per cent, of the population
are Negroes, the number of commitments for rape
per hundred thousand is 0.7.

It may be said that the reason the commitments
for assaults upon women are lower in those regions
where the Negro population is proportionately larger,
is due to the fact that the men who commit these
crimes are summarily executed by lynch law. The

fact is, however, that were the total number of
Negroes lynched for rape in the United States in 1904
added to those arrested and committed to prison, it
would not change these percentages more than a
quarter of one per cent.

Before concluding what I have to say on the subject
of Negro crime I want to add a word in regard
to the work that Negroes, sometimes in association
with their white neighbours and sometimes independently,
have done and are doing to get at and destroy
the sources of crime among members of their race.

Immediately after the Atlanta Riot, September 22,
1906, during which ten white people and sixty
coloured people were wounded, and two white and
ten coloured people were killed, there came forward
two men, among others, with definite measures of
"re-construction." These men were ex-Governor
W. J. Northen and Charles T. Hopkins.

Ex-Governor Northen set on foot what was at
first known as the "Christian League" an organisation
composed of leading coloured men and leading
white men, formed for the purpose of putting down
mob-violence. Charles T. Hopkins, a prominent
young lawyer of Atlanta, organised, in association
with Reverend H. H. Proctor, pastor of the First
Coloured Congregational Church, and some others,
what was known as the Civic League, the purpose
of which was to bring leading coloured men and
leading white men of the city together in order to

coöoperate in doing away with the conditions which
had brought about the Atlanta Riot.

One of the first things that this dual organisation
did was to defend in the courts a Negro named
Joe Glenn, who had been charged with an assault
upon a woman. In fact, he had been identified by
the woman upon whom the assault was committed,
and the members of this organisation, both white
and coloured, believed that Joe Glenn was guilty.
Their purpose was merely to secure for him a fair
and speedy trial. Upon examination into the evidence,
however, they came to the conclusion that the
man was not guilty, and succeeded not only in proving
his innocence before the trial was ended, but in
finding the man who was guilty, and thus, undoubtedly,
saved the life of an innocent man.

The Civic League confined its operations to the
city of Atlanta, but ex-Governor Northen sought to
extend the influence of his organisation throughout
the state of Georgia and into adjoining states. Up
to 1909, he had organised eighty-three of what came
to be known as the Christian Civic leagues. These
organisations were located mainly in counties containing
the larger Negro populations, and were composed
of the very best people in the state, white and
black.

One of the indirect results of this "re-construction"
movement was the erection, under the direction of
Reverend H. H. Proctor, and at a cost of $50,000, of

a handsome institutional Negro church. This
church was dedicated in February, 1909. It was
intended to do a work among the coloured people that
would attack the causes of racial friction and make
mobs like that of 1906 impossible.

Before this time, however, Negro people themselves,
with very little assistance from their white neighbours,
had undertaken a kind of work intended to
remedy the evils in their present condition. All
over the South, and in many parts of the North,
wherever the Negroes live in large numbers, coloured
orphan asylums have been established to care for the
neglected children from among whom Negro criminals
are so frequently recruited. As near as I have
been able to learn, there are not less than fifty or
sixty of such asylums already in existence in different
parts of the United States. A number of these, like
the Carrie Steele Orphanage, of Atlanta, have been
started upon the small savings and pious faith of
some good coloured woman.

Carrie Steele, the founder of the orphanage at
Atlanta, which bears her name, was born a slave in
Georgia. For many years she was employed at
the Atlanta Union Depot. Here she had an opportunity
to see something of the dangers to which
homeless and neglected coloured children were subjected.
In order to raise money to carry out the
plan she then formed of establishing an orphans'
home, she wrote a little book, which was the story

of her life. This book found a ready sale among the
charitably disposed people, and with the proceeds
a home was organised in 1890. This institution
began with five orphans. In 1906, it was caring for
ninety-seven children, and had an income of $2,000
a year, a portion of which is paid by the coloured
people and the remainder by the city.

In 1897, a Negro reformatory association was
organised in Virginia by John H. Smythe, former
minister to Liberia. It had a Negro board of
directors, and an advisory board of seven white
people, and its purpose, as stated, was to "rescue
juvenile offenders." The association purchased
a large tract of land, amounting to four hundred and
twenty-three acres, which had been part of the
"Broadneck" estate in Hanover County, Virginia.

For a number of years this reformatory was supported
by private philanthropy, but eventually it became
a state institution.

In conclusion, I want to say a word here about a
work that the Negroes of Birmingham, Alabama, have
undertaken, at the suggestion and under the direction
of Judge N. B. Feagin, of the Municipal Court.

Judge Feagin is not only a lawyer, but a student of
sociology. Some years ago, when he first became
judge of the Municipal Court, there was no way of
disposing of children convicted in the City Courts
except to send them to the chain-gang. In 1898,
however, there was established at East Lake, about

twenty miles from Birmingham, a reformatory for
white boys.

The large number of juvenile offenders who found
their way into courts were, however, Negro children.

Nothing had been done, up to this time, to keep
them out of prisons and chain-gangs. Every year
large numbers graduated from the prisons into the
ranks of professional criminals. In 1903, an attempt
was made to remedy this by passing a juvenile court
law, but it failed. March 12, 1907, however, a law
was passed making it a misdeameanor to send any
child under fourteen years of age to jail or prison.
If there had been practical means for executing this
law, it would have effected a revolution in the treatment
of criminal children in Alabama. But, as in
the case of the Negro children, no such means existed;
the law was repealed the following August.

Meanwhile, Judge Feagin determined to establish,
upon his own responsibility, a modern system
of dealing with criminal children in Birmingham.
He found that there are thirty Negro churches in
Birmingham. He determined to call the preachers
of these churches together and explain his purpose to
them. He then asked them if they could not induce
the women of their congregation to raise two dollars
per month to support a coloured probation officer.
He said if they would do that, instead of sending the
coloured children, who were brought into his court,
to the chain-gang, he would send them back to their

homes or to the homes of relatives and friends, on
probation.

A coloured probation officer was appointed and
the city divided into thirty districts, in which three
women from each of the thirty Negro congregations
in the city were appointed to cooperate with the probation
officer in looking after the children on probation.
In order to arouse interest in this plan, an
association was formed of the coloured women of the
thirty different churches, and Judge Feagin went
around to the different Negro churches to speak to
the people in order to assist the association, in this
way, in raising money to support the voluntary
probation officer he had appointed.

So far as the plan outlined was carried out, it
concerned only those children who were brought
into the court for the first time. It was necessary
to devise some means for taking care of those who
were guilty of a second offence. Judge Feagin
decided that the way to dispose of them was to send
them to the country districts. He then announced
this plan in the papers and declared that wherever
he could find a coloured farmer of good character,
who would take these children and put them to work,
he would turn them over to him, under certain conditions,
which were named.

About twelve miles from Tuscaloosa, the former
capital of Alabama, there is a Negro farmer by the
name of Sam Dailey, who owns five hundred and

thirty-five acres of land. This man, reading of
Judge Feagin's proposal, came to see him and made
a proposition to set aside one hundred and twenty-five
acres of his farm, on which he would employ the
children whom Judge Feagin sent him. Sam Dailey
has been receiving these boys since 1903. With the
aid of funds which he has been able to collect and
from the profits of the farm he has established a school,
which is conducted by a coloured preacher employed
for that purpose. During this time, and up to
1909, he had had on his farm over one hundred
Negro boys. Some few of them have run away.
Several have been sent back to their relatives in the
city. Others have become permanently settled in
the farming districts and are making good citizens.

As a result of the interest aroused in this work,
two other reformatories for juvenile offenders of the
Negro race have been started. One of these is on the
outskirts of Birmingham, and the other is at Mount
Meigs, a few miles from Montgomery. At the time
this is written, the probation officer, Reverend J. D.
James, is supported not merely by the contributions
he receives from the coloured churches, but also
from two of the coloured secret orders in Birmingham.
It is the hope of Judge Feagin and those who are
associated with him that the work which is being
done will eventually receive the sanction and support
of the state, and that the juvenile court law, which
was passed and repealed, will then be reënacted.

CHAPTER V
THE NEGRO TEACHER AND THE NEGRO SCHOOL

IN THE spring of 1907, Colonel Henry Watterson,
of Louisville, Kentucky, the noted Democratic
editor and statesman, made an address
at a great meeting in Carnegie Hall, New York City,
in the interest of Negro education in the South.
Speaking of the work that has been accomplished in
this direction since the War, he said: "The world
has never yet witnessed such progress from darkness
into light as the American Negro has made in the
period of forty years."

When the Negro was made free and became an
American citizen, it is safe to say that not more than
5 or, at most, 10 per cent. of the race could read
and write. In 1900, at the end of less than forty
years of freedom, 55 1/2 per cent. could both read
and write. If Negro education has made as much
progress in the last ten years, as it did from 1890
to 1900, it is safe to say, at the present time, that
not more than 32 per cent. of the Negro population
is without some education in books. As Mr.
Watterson said, no race in history can show a
similar record.

What was it that so aroused a whole race, a
nation within a nation, numbering at the present
time ten millions of people, to make such strides
in education? How has this work been done?

Perhaps the best answer I can make to this
question is to relate my own experience. When
I was a boy in Virginia, I used sometimes to accompany
the white children of the plantation to the
schoolhouse, in our neighbourhood. I went with
them to carry their books, to carry their wraps,
or their lunches, but I was never permitted to go
farther than the schoolroom door. In my childish
ignorance, I did not understand this. During the
hours when the white children were not in school,
we played and chatted together about the house or
in the fields. We rode together our wooden horses;
we fished together in the nearby streams; we
played marbles, town-ball, "tag," and wrestled
together on the parlour floor. And yet, for some
reason I did not understand, I was debarred from
entering the little schoolhouse with the children
of my master.

The thing made such an impression upon my
mind, that I finally asked my mother about it.
She explained the matter to me as best she could,
and from her I heard for the first time that learning
from books in a schoolroom was something that,
as a rule, was forbidden to a Negro child in the
South. The idea that books contained something

which was forbidden aroused my curiosity and
excited in me a desire to find out for myself what
it was in these books that made them forbidden
fruit to me and my race.

From the moment that it was made clear to me
that I was not to go to school, that it was dangerous
for me to learn to read, from that moment I resolved
that I should never be satisfied until I learned
what this dangerous practice was like. What was
true in my case has been true in the case of thousands
of others. If no restriction had been put upon
Negro education, I doubt whether such tremendous
progress in education would have been made.

When I became free all the legal restrictions
against my getting education were removed. Nevertheless
I heard it stated in public speeches that
the Negro was so constituted that he could not
learn from books, and that time, effort and money
would be thrown away in trying to teach him to
master the studies of the ordinary school curriculum.
When I heard this, I resolved again that, at the
price of any sacrifice, I would do my part in order to
prove to the world that the Negro possessed the ability
to get an education, and to use it. If I had heard
no such prediction regarding the ability of the
Negro to get education, I question whether I would
have been any more interested in mastering my
school studies and text-books than the ordinary
white boy.

Directly after the War the whole race was conscious
that a large part of the American people doubted
the ability of the Negro to compete with other
races in the field of learning. But when the
Negro heard people freely discussing his abilities
and making predictions about his future he
determined to see to it that these predictions should
not be fulfilled.

My experience is that it is very unsafe to make
predictions either in regard to races or in regard
to individuals. Sometimes the mere statement
of a prophecy tends to bring about its own fulfillment.
In this case, if the predictions made are
evil, the prophets become, to a certain extent,
responsible for their consequences. At other times
predictions stimulate the people, in regard to whom
they are made, to do something entirely different
than the thing predicted. But in that case, of
course, the predictions do not become true. In
either case prophecy is likely to be unprofitable.

In order to gain a just idea of the distance the
Negro has travelled during the years since freedom
came we should compare his progress with that
of the people of some of the countries of Europe
that have been free for centuries. For example,
in Italy, 38.30 per cent. of the population can neither
read nor write. In Spain the percentage of illiteracy
is 68.1 per cent.; in Russia, 77 per cent.; in Portugal,
79 per cent.; in Brazil, 80 per cent.; in Venezuela,

75 per cent.; and in Cuba 56.6 per cent. By comparison,
the progress of the American Negro
represents a remarkable achievement.

In the early days, when slavery was still merely
an economic and not yet a political institution,
there seems to have been no special restrictions
put either upon the education of slaves or of free
Negroes. If Negroes did not obtain an education
it was because there were few opportunities in
the Southern colonies for any one to receive an
education. In fact, before the Revolution, there
was no such thing as a public school system in
any colony south of Connecticut. The colonies
were opposed in principle to public schools. It
was considered an interference on the part of the
state to undertake the education of the younger
children, who were supposed to be taught at home.

People in England who sent out the first colonies
were interested, however, in the religious education
of the Indians and as the number of slaves increased
they became interested in the education of the
Negroes, who, at that time, were also a "heathen"
people. In fact, the first public school in Virginia,
which was started about 1620, was erected for the
benefit of these native Americans. The Indian
War of 1622 destroyed this school, however, and
thus little or nothing was done to educate either
the Indian or the Negro in the English colonies
until the year 1701, when a society was organised

in England to carry the gospel and its teachings
to the Indians and Negroes in America. In June,
1702, Reverend Samuel Thomas, the first missionary
of this society, in reporting upon his work in South
Carolina, said that he "had taken much pains, also,
in instructing the Negroes, and learned twenty
of them to read."

In 1704, Elias Neau, a French Protestant, established
a catechising school for the Indian and
Negro slaves in New York. His work continued
successfully until 1712, when a conspiracy of the
Negro slaves was discovered in New York, which
was said to have had its origin in Mr. Neau's school.
Upon the trial, however, it appeared that the guilty
Negroes were "such as never came to Mr. Neau's
school. And what is very observable," the chronicle
adds, "the persons whose Negroes were found
most guilty were such as were declared opposers
to making them Christians." In 1738, the Moravian
or United Brethren first attempted to establish
missions exclusively for Negroes. In the Moravian
settlement at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a painting
is preserved of eighteen of the first converts made
by these missionaries in America prior to 1747.
Among the number are Johannes, a Negro of South
Carolina, and Jupiter, a Negro from New York.

The religious instruction of Negroes was begun
by the Presbyterians in Virginia in 1747. In a
letter written in that year, Reverend Samuel Davis

refers to "the poor, neglected Negroes who are so
far from having money to purchase books that
they themselves are the property of others." A
little further on in this same letter, speaking of the
eagerness of the Negro slave to hear the gospel
and to learn to read, he says:

Two years earlier than the date of this letter, in
1745, the Society for Propagating the Gospel in
Foreign Parts established a school in Charleston,
South Carolina. It had at one time as many as
sixty scholars and sent out annually about twenty
Negroes, "well instructed in the English language
and the Christian faith." This school was
established in St. Philip's Church and some of its
scholars were living as late as 1822, when the Denmark
Vesey Conspiracy resulted in the closing of
the schools for free Negroes as well as for slaves.

It seems probable that prior to the Revolution
some attempt was made to teach the Negroes,
wherever they were brought into touch with the
Church. In this way, the Negro Sunday-schools

gave the Negroes the first opportunity for education
and his first school book was the Bible. In 1747,
when slavery was introduced into the colony of
Georgia, respresentatives from twenty-three districts
met in Savannah and drew up resolutions in regard
to the conduct of masters toward their slaves.
Among other things they declared in substance
"that the owners of slaves should educate the
the young and use every possible means of making
religious impressions upon the minds of the aged."

In 1750, the Reverend Thomas Bacon, who was
himself a slave-holder, established in Talbot County,
Maryland, a mission for the poor white and Negro
children. The majority of the colonied children
who attended this school were slaves.[2]

In the Methodist Conference of 1790 the question
was raised: "What can be done in order to instruct
poor children, white and black, to read?" to which
the following reply was made:

The opposition to the teaching of the slaves seems
to have begun in South Carolina. In 1740 that

state passed a law imposing a fine of one hundred
pounds upon any one who should teach any "slave
or slaves in writing in any manner whatsoever."
In 1770 Georgia passed a similar law punishing
with a fine of twenty pounds any person teaching
a slave to read and write.

Immediately after the Revolution there was a
feeling all over the United States that slavery was
soon to pass away. About 1792, however, a Yankee
schoolmaster, Eli Whitney, invented the cotton-gin.
This invention suddenly made Negro slave labour
valuable, particularly in the new states of the
Southwest. From this time on, the feeling that
slave labour was necessary to the economic life
of the Southern states grew to a conviction that
slavery was to be a permanent institution in the
Southern states.

The change in public opinion is reflected in the
laws. In 1819, Virginia passed an act prohibiting
all meetings of slaves, free persons, and mulattoes,
in the night, or any school or schools for teaching
them reading and writing in either day or night.
Ten years later, Georgia passed a law forbidding
any person of colour from receiving instruction
from any source. In 1830, Louisiana forbade free
Negroes entering the state and passed a law against
the printing and distribution of seditious matter
among people of colour and against their being
taught. A year later Mississippi passed a law against

any coloured person, free or slave, from preaching
the gospel. The next year Alabama passed a law
against teaching any free person of colour or slave
and, in 1835, North Carolina abolished the schools
for free persons of colour, which up to that time
had been taught for the most part by white teachers.
The law passed in North Carolina at this time provided
that no descendants of Negro parents, to the
fourth generation, should enjoy the benefit of the
public school system. Similar laws were passed
in Mississippi and Missouri.

In spite of this fact Negroes continued, in one
way or another, to keep alive the little tradition
of learning they had already possessed. In New
Orleans, and in Charleston, South Carolina, there
were clandestine schools in which the children
of free Negroes had an opportunity to get some
sort of an education. In New Orleans it had
long been the custom for planters, who had children
by slave mothers, to send them abroad to France
or to some of the Northern states for their education.
One of the most interesting, as well as one of the
most pathetic, chapters in American history is that
which has to do with this class of white men who
felt in honour bound to support, educate and protect
their illegitimate offspring. To do this meant
in many cases ostracism, loss of property, and
reputation.

In 1833, the city of Mobile was authorised by

an act of legislation to grant licence to suitable
persons to give instruction to the children of the
Creole Negroes in that city. This act applied only
to the county of Baldwin and to the city of
Mobile. The basis for it was the treaty between
France and the United States by which all the
rights and privileges of citizens were guaranteed
to them. It should be remembered, also, that
schools for free coloured people were never
abolished in Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee,
Florida and Texas.

The census of 1860 shows that there were 1,355
free coloured children attending school in Maryland.
The schools were such as the coloured
people could support, from the African Institute
on Saratoga Street, Baltimore, with its hundred
or more scholars, "to the half-dozen urchins learning
their words under the counter of a little tobacco
shop in Annapolis." One of these, known as the
Wells school, was established in 1835 by Nelson
Wells, a coloured man, who applied the income
of $7,000 to its support.

The coloured people who got sufficient education
during the days of slavery to read their Bible may
be divided into four classes: those who were taught
by their owners in spite of law; those who had
white fathers; those who, in some way or other,
obtained their freedom; those who literally stole
their education. There were always a few cases

in all the states where the master or mistress, or
some other member of the family, took sufficient
interest in some individual slave to teach him to
read. Sometimes this was done out of mere curiosity,
just to see if the Negro could learn. I
have met dozens of former slaves who told me
their owners taught them to read, and described
the great precautions sometimes taken to keep
the fact that such teaching was going on from
other members of the same family and from the
neighbours.

The desire to read the Bible was a plea that
usually touched the heart of the more kindly disposed
master. To this day there is an intense
longing among a number of the older people to
learn to read the Bible before they die. No
matter how the slaves obtained their knowledge
of reading and writing, in every case it was like
bringing the germs of an infectious disease into
the household; it spread. Among the free Negroes
of Charleston, the learning that the older people
had obtained previous to 1822 was handed down
from generation to generation until the War
brought freedom to the slave and the free Negro
alike.

During his journey through Northern Mississippi,
Frederick Law Olmsted one day stopped to talk
with a small planter who seemed to have an exceptionally
good class of slaves. Mr. Olmsted referred

to the fine appearance of his Negro labourers,
whereupon the following conversation as reported
by Mr. Olmsted ensued:

When slaves living on the distant plantations
in the back country of Mississippi succeeded in
learning to read it is not difficult to understand
that in the cities, where exceptional opportunities
were given to the slaves employed in the household
services of their masters, a considerable number
should in one way or another learn to read and
write. Frederick Douglass, in the story of his
life, has given a description of the manner in which
he learned to read, which is probably typical of
other slaves in the same class as himself. He says:

In another portion of his narrative, Mr. Douglass
describes how he used to pick pieces of waste
paper from the gutters of Baltimore, and try to
read them. Sometimes he made use of other
devices for getting the knowledge he wanted. For
example, he would bet the white boys, with whom
he frequently played, a marble or a piece of candy
that they could not read an advertisement he found

on the fences or on the side of a house. This
wager would tempt the white boys, of course, to
spell out and read these advertisements, and as
they did this young Douglass was able to learn
from them what the words of the advertisement
meant. This same method of learning to read was
adopted by more than one ambitious slave boy.

It sounds strange to-day, but it was nevertheless
true that up to a few years before the Civil War
there was almost as much opposition to Negro
education in the North as there was in the South.
In 1882, John F. Slater, of Norwich, Connecticut,
gave a million dollars to be used in the education
of the Negro race. Up to that time this was the
largest sum that had ever been given at one time
for a like purpose. Yet, fifty years before, in
the neighbouring town of Canterbury, Prudence
Crandall, a young Quaker schoolmistress, who
ventured to open a school for coloured children,
was mobbed by some of the inhabitants of that
town, and so great was the opposition to the school
that a special law was passed, making it a crime
to open a school for Negroes in that state.

In 1831, when the first national coloured convention
assembled at Philadelphia, it was determined
to establish a college for coloured people, and the
Reverend Samuel E. Cornish, a coloured Presbyterian
clergyman, was appointed agent to secure
funds. In the course of the next year, he succeeded

in raising $3,000 for establishing "a school on the
manual labour plan." Arthur Tappan, the philanthropist,
succeeded in buying several acres of land
in the southern part of New Haven, Connecticut,
and had completed arrangements for erecting a
building. As soon as it was discovered, however,
that it was proposed to erect a Negro school in New
Haven, there was a great outcry and protest from
the citizens. At a public meeting, at which the
mayor presided, it was resolved by a vote of seven
hundred to four, that "the founding of colleges
for educating coloured people is an unwarrantable
and dangerous undertaking to the internal concerns
of other states and ought to be discouraged," and
that "the mayor, aldermen, common-council, and
freemen will resist the establishment of the proposed
college in this state by every lawful means."

About this time, the Noyes Academy, of Canaan,
New Hampshire, opened its doors to coloured
students. Several young men entered the academy,
and for a time the coloured people believed that
they had found a school where they might obtain
advanced education in the United States. On the
3rd of July, 1835, however, a town meeting was
called and a committee was chosen to "remove
the academy." A little more than a month later,
this committee, aided by some three hundred persons
and a hundred yoke of oxen, proceeded to literally
carry out the instruction of the town meeting. In

many other of the Northern states, particularly
in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, even where there
was no law prohibiting the education of Negroes,
no provision was made for educating them in the
public schools.

In spite of the opposition which manifested
itself from time to time against Negro education,
there was a steady increase in the number of
Negro schools in most of the large Northern cities.
I have already referred to the school established by
Anthony Benezet, in 1750. This first noted teacher
of Negroes, who died May 3, 1784, left in his will
property to put this school on a permanent foundation.
The school was continued in the charge
of a committee of Friends, and received donations
from time to time, one donation of three hundred
pounds coming from a coloured man by the name
of Thomas Shirley. In 1849, it appeared from a
statistical study of the condition of coloured people
at Philadelphia, made at that time, that there were
among others the following schools for coloured persons:
A grammar school with 463 pupils; five other
schools with 911; an infant school in charge of the
abolition society with 70 pupils; a "moral reform"
school with 81 pupils. In addition to the public
schools there were also about 20 private schools
with 296 pupils, making an aggregate of more than
1,800 pupils receiving an education of one kind or
another.

In 1832, ten thousand dollars was left by the
will of Richard Humphreys, an ex-slave-holder,
to establish "An Institute for Coloured Youth."
The school was accordingly started in 1837. A
farm was purchased in Bristol Township, Philadelphia
County, in 1839, but later sold, and a
school building erected on Lombard Street, Philadelphia.
In 1852, the school was opened and
conducted for a time by Charles L. Reason,
of New York. Ebenezer D. Bassett, afterward
for nearly eight years Minister and United States
Consul-general at Porte au Prince, Haiti, was
for many years the principal of this school. A few
years ago, sufficient funds were raised to enable
the school to carry out the original purpose of its
founder and it was removed to Cheyney, Pennsylvania,
and transformed into an industrial school
for the special purpose of training teachers.

The circumstance that a number of free persons
of colour were frequently kidnapped in New York
City resulted in the formation in an early day of.
"The New York Society for Promoting the Manumission
of Slaves and for Protecting Such of Them
as Have Been or May Be Liberated." The same
gentlemen who organised this society became the
Board of Trustees of what was known as the New
York African Free School, which was, or afterward
became, the first public school in New York City.
This school was located on Cliff Street, between

Beekman and Ferry streets, and was opened in
1786 with forty pupils. In 1824, when General
Lafayette was in this country, he visited this school,
and a little coloured boy, who afterward became
Dr. James McCune Smith, was delegated to make
an address to him in behalf of the students.

This school and others established by the society
continued to flourish until 1832, when they, with
their 1,400 students, were formally turned over to
the public school society and became part of the
public school system of the city. The first normal
school for coloured teachers was established in
1853, with John Peterson, a coloured man who
had long been a teacher in the coloured schools of
New York, principal.

The first coloured school for Negro children in Ohio
was established in 1820. Owen T. B. Nickens, a
public-spirited and intelligent Negro, was largely
responsible for bringing these schools into existence.
In 1844, the Reverend Hiram S. Gilmore founded
the "Cincinnati High School" for coloured youth,
and in 1849, the Legislature passed an act establishing
public schools for coloured children. The law
provided that the school funds should be divided
among the white and coloured children, but for
a long time this law was not enforced, until, under
the leadership of John I. Gaines, the coloured
people took the matter to the court. In 1856, a
law was passed giving the coloured people the

right by ballot to elect their own trustees, and in
1858, Nicholas Longworth built the first school
house for coloured people, giving them a lease
for fourteen years, during which time they were
to pay the $14,000, which the building cost.

The first separate school for coloured children
in Massachusetts was established at the home of
Primus Hall, in Boston, in 1798. This school
continued to be held in the house of Primus Hall
until 1806, when the coloured Baptists erected a
church on Belknap Street, and fitted up the lower
rooms as a school for coloured children. This
school continued until 1835, when a coloured schoolhouse
was erected from a fund left for that purpose
by Abiel Smith. This became the famous "Smith
schoolhouse." This Smith schoolhouse continued
in existence until 1855, when a law was passed
abolishing separate schools for coloured children.

Although slavery was not abolished in the District
of Columbia until April 16, 1862, the free coloured
people, who were very numerous in the District,
early succeeded in establishing and maintaining
schools for their children. The first schoolhouse
built for coloured pupils was erected by three
coloured men named George Bell, Nicholas Franklin
and Moses Liverpool. All these men had been
slaves in Virginia, and not one of them knew a
single letter of the alphabet. From this time on,
the number of schools increased rapidly with the

increase of the free coloured population. One
of the most noted of the early coloured teachers
was John F. Cook. He had been born a slave,
but had been purchased by his aunt, Alethia Tanner,
who at the same time purchased his mother, Laurena
Cook, and four other children. John F. Cook
learned the shoemaker's trade in his boyhood and
worked very hard after the purchase of his freedom
to make some return to his aunt for the money she
had spent in setting him free. He picked up the
rudiments of an education in the Treasury Department,
and thereupon began teaching school. During
the Snow Riot of September, 1835, his schoolhouse
was destroyed, and, to escape the mob, he fled to
Pennsylvania. In the next year he returned,
re-opened his school on a more generous plan than
before, and kept it up until his death, March 21,
1855, when the work was taken up by his sons,
John F. and George F. T. Cook.

Among the other noted teachers in Washington
before the War were Louisa Park Costin, the daughter
of William Costin, who was for twenty-four years
the messenger for the bank of Washington, and
who was well known and respected by all the old
residents of Washington, District of Columbia.
Another was Maria Becraft, who was the head of
the first seminary for coloured girls in the District
of Columbia. This seminary was established, in
1827, in Georgetown, under the auspices of Father

Vanlomen, who was the pastor of the Holy Trinity
Catholic Church. In 1831, Maria Becraft gave
up her school to the care of one of the girls she had
trained. In October of that year she joined the
convent of the coloured Catholic Sisters at Baltimore,
where she was known as Sister Aloyons.

Little struggling schools, that sprang up here
and there in the cities North and South before the
Civil War, served to give the rudiments of an
education to a few coloured people, but it was not
until after 1865, when four millions of Negro slaves
were made free, that the education of the race
really began. I shall never forget the strange,
pathetic scenes and incidents of that time. Nothing
like it, I dare say, had ever before been seen. It
seemed that all at once, as soon as they realised
that they were free, the whole race started to go to
school, but not in the usual orderly fashion. It
was as if four million people had been shut up
where they could not get food until they had reached
the starving point, and then were suddenly released
to find food for themselves.

The primer, the first reader, and most frequently
of all, the Webster's blue-back speller, suddenly,
as if by a miracle, made their appearance everywhere.
Even before the thousands of Negro
soldiers had been disbanded, they inveigled their
officers into becoming their schoolmasters, and
scores of Negro soldiers in every regiment were

learning to read and to write and to cipher. On
every plantation, and in nearly every home, whether
in the town or city, the hidden book that had been
tucked away under the floor or in an old trunk or
had been concealed in a stump, or between mat-,
tresses suddenly came out of its hiding-place and
was put into use.

I can recall vividly the picture not only of children,
but of men and women, some of whom had reached
the age of sixty or seventy, tramping along the
country roads with a spelling-book or a Bible in
their hands. It did not seem to occur to any one
that age was any obstacle to learning in books.
With weak and unaccustomed eyes, old men and
old women would struggle along month after month
in their effort to master the primer in order to get,
if possible, a little knowledge of the Bible. Some
of them succeeded; many of them failed. To
these latter the thought of passing from earth
without being able to read the Bible was a source
of deep sorrow.

The places for holding school were anywhere
and everywhere; the Freedmen could not wait for
schoolhouses to be built or for teachers to be provided.
They got up before day and studied in
their cabins by the light of pine knots. They sat up
until late at night, drooping over their books, trying to
master the secrets they contained. More than once, I
have seen a fire in the woods at night with a dozen

or more people of both sexes and of all ages sitting
about with book in hands studying their lessons.
Sometimes they would fasten their primers between
the ploughshares, so that they could read as they
ploughed. I have seen Negro coal miners trying
to spell out the words of a little reading-book by
the dim light of a miner's lamp, hundreds of feet
below the earth. In the early days of freedom,
public schools were not infrequently organised and
taught under a large tree. Some of the early schoolhouses
consisted of four pieces of timber driven
into the ground and brush spread overhead as
a covering to keep out the sun and rain. It was a
simple and inexpensive schoolhouse, but I am sure
that the students were more earnest than many
who have since had much greater advantages.

The night school became popular immediately
after freedom. After a hard day's work in the
field, in the shop, or in the kitchen, men and women
would spend two or three hours at night in school.
A great many of the Freedmen got their first lessons
in reading and writing in the Sunday-school. In
fact, there were frequently more spelling-books in
the Sunday-school than Bibles. I, myself, got my
first knowledge of the alphabet by perusing a
spelling-book in the Sunday-school.

A teacher in the first few years of freedom
was likely to be any one who knew something
some one else did not know. Sometimes it happened

that some would be able to read better than they
could write; others would be able to write better
than they could read. In that case the former
became teachers of reading and the latter became
teachers of writing. As may well be understood,
there was very little organisation in these
first schools; they were just groups of people
moved by a common impulse in coming together
for study. But almost before the proclamation
of freedom had been issued, white teachers
of all classes and both sexes began to pour into
the South from the Northern states. Along with
them came numbers of Negro men and women
who had escaped from slavery and, having gained
some education in the North, now returned to the
South to become the teachers of their race. It
should be added, also, that many of these teachers
were Southern white people, who, when they found
no other occupation directly after the war, were
glad to turn to teaching the Freedmen in order to
eke out a livelihood.

It was during this same period that the people of
the Northern states, through their religious and
missionary organisations, began sending not merely
teachers, but money, books, and clothing to provide
for the schools and for the pupils in the Negro
schools that were springing up everywhere. It
was during this period that many of the most noted
schools in the Southern states were founded. Berea

College had been established since 1856, by the Reverend
John G. Fee, a Kentucky minister who had
been converted to anti-slavery views by taking a
course at Lane Seminary, Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1865,
Lincoln Institute, at Jefferson City, Missouri, was
founded with the assistance of contributions of the
Sixty-second and Sixty-fifth United States coloured
regiments, who generously contributed something
over $6,000 of the wages they received from the
Government to help establish the school. The
same year Shaw University was started at Raleigh,
North Carolina. In 1866, Hampton Institute was
founded by General S. C. Armstrong, and in the same
year Fisk University was established at Nashville,
Tennessee. The next year Atlanta University was
established at Atlanta, Georgia; Biddle University,
at Charlotte, North Carolina; and Howard University,
named after General O. O. Howard, at
Washington, District of Columbia; two years
later, in 1869, Straight University, at New Orleans,
Louisiana; Tougaloo University, at Tougaloo,
Mississippi; Talladega College, at Talladega,
Alabama; and Clafin University, at Orangeburg,
South Carolina.

In speaking of the contribution which the people
of the United States made at this time to the education
of the Negro in America, it should not be forgotten
that Negro education has contributed something in
return to the people of the United States. It was

through the Negro that industrial education in this
country had its start. Neither in the North nor
in the South, before the starting of Hampton
Institute in Virginia, was any systematic instruction
in the industries given in any kind of educational
institution. The success of the Hampton and
Tuskegee institutes in giving industrial education
to the Negroes led the way to the introduction of
industrial education into the Northern schools
and white schools in the South, as well as in many
other parts of the world.

The desire for education among the Freedmen
was a veritable fever for the first ten or twelve
years after emancipation. Since that time I do
not think the desire for education has diminished
among the coloured people, but the methods for
obtaining it have become more profitable and less
picturesque. This is shown particularly in the
effort which the coloured people are making everywhere
to add to the meagre funds which are given
them by the states in order to prolong their school
terms, to secure better teachers, and build comfortable
schoolhouses. Negro parents will still make
all kinds of sacrifices, frequently depriving themsevles
not merely of the comforts, but many times of
the necessities of life, in order that they may have
the satisfaction of seeing their children able to read
and write.

All sorts of devices are now employed in the

coloured communities to eke out the salary of the
coloured school-teacher. In some communities
teachers will impose an extra tax of ten cents per
month for every student who comes to school. In
other cases each family will take turns in boarding
the teacher for a day or for a week. Sometimes
they will donate a pig, a chicken, a dozen eggs, a
fish, or a rabbit to help the school-teacher out. A
method that is now growing in popularity, for
the purpose of meeting the expenses of a first-class
school, is what is known as the "school farm."
This means that three or four acres of land will be
secured near the schoolhouse and on a given day,
usually Saturday, parents and children come
together to plant, plough, or harvest the cotton
which is to be sold to increase the length of the
school term.

Some idea of the difficulty under which the
coloured schools labour in the South may be gathered
from the fact that, while in the Northern and
Western states something like five dollars per pupil
is spent every year for the education of the children
of school age, in several of the Southern states
only fifty cents per pupil is expended for coloured
children. While a number of office-seekers in
the South, complaining about the burden of education
under which the South laboured, have
been advocating that no money be spent for the
education of the Negro, and that everything

possible be done to check his advancement in this
direction, a few courageous State Superintendents
of Public Instruction in the South have begun to
point out that, not only is the Negro not a burden
upon the South so far as his education is concerned,
but in some instances Negro taxpayers are supporting
white schools. In a careful study made of the
statistics of education some years ago in Florida,
the superintendent in that state came to the conclusion
that "the schools for Negroes not only
were not a burden upon the white people, but four
thousand five hundred and twenty-seven dollars
contributed for Negro schools from other sources
was in some way diverted into the white schools."
Speaking of the conditions in middle Florida, where
the Negro population is most dense and the
educational conditions are at their worst, he said:

At a meeting of the Conference for Southern
Education, in Atlanta, Georgia, in the spring of
1909, Charles L. Coon, Superintendent of Schools
at Wilson, North Carolina, read a paper on "Public

Taxation and Negro Schools," in which he attempted
to show, for the whole South, what he had previously
shown for North Carolina, that the Negroes were
not only not getting their share of the public education
fund, which they were entitled to under the
law, but their education was not, as has so often
been asserted, a piece of philanthropy on the part
of whites to the coloured race. He found, by the
study of actual statistics, that while Negroes represented
40.1 per cent. of the total population of
the eleven Southern states they received only 14.8
per cent. of the money spent for education. In
Mississippi, where Negroes represent 58.7 per
cent. of the population they received 21.9 per
cent. of the school funds. In Louisiana, where
they represent 47.2 per cent. of the population, they
received 8.6 per cent. of the school funds.

After a careful study of all the available statistics,
Mr. Coon reaches the conclusion, to put it in his
own words, "that the Negro school of the South
is not a serious burden on the white taxpayer. On
the contrary, if all the Negro children of the Southern
states were white, it would cost to educate them
just about five times as much as it does now to
give the same number of Negroes such education
as they are getting."

Mr. Coon points out, and quotes articles from
several Southern papers to support him, that the
Negro is not only almost the only dependable

labourer in the Southern states, but even those
people who are most ready to abuse him "as a
burden and a curse" are loud in their complaint
"whenever any one attempts to lure him away".

In 1891, the Negroes of North Carolina listed
$8,018,446 worth of property. In 1898, they listed
$21,716,922, an increase of 171 per cent. in seventeen
years. The property listed by the whites during
that time increased only 89 per cent. In other
words, the taxable value of property of Negroes
increased in seventeen years nearly twice in proportion
to that of the white people. In Georgia,
in 1891, Negroes listed $14,196,735 worth of property.
In 1907, they listed property to the value
of $25,904,822, an increase of 82 per cent.
The taxable property of white people increased
during this same period only 39 per cent. This
again indicates that the ratio of increase of
Negro property in Georgia during the last sixteen
years has been twice that of the property of the
white people.

"Such facts as these" says Mr. Coon, in concluding
his report, "give us glimpses of the economic
importance of Negroes, and abundantly justify
us in hoping that the senseless race prejudice which
has for its object the intellectual enslavement of
Negro children will soon pass away. I do not
believe that any superior race can hope for the
blessings of heaven upon its own children while

it begrudges more light and efficiency for those of
an inferior race."

In all that has been said, bearing upon what the
Negro has done to help himself in education through
the public schools in the South, the fact should not
be overlooked that he owes much to the Southern
white people. Especially is this true in the large
cities and towns of the South, where generous
provision has been made for the education of the
Negro child in the public schools. While in the
country districts, as a rule, the schools are poor,
almost beyond description, still in not a few country
districts broad-minded and courageous Southern
white men have seen to it, and are seeing to it, that
the Negro gets a reasonable chance for education
in the public schools. It should also be stated
that while the Negro at present is paying in a large
part for his own education in the public schools,
in the years immediately following emancipation
he paid very little and during this time the burden
of his education fell heavily upon the Southern
white people.

It should be remembered also that it is only
within the past fifty or sixty years that many of
the Northern states have begun to have a system
of education which sought to educate all the people
irrespective of race or colour. The world is slow
to learn that when we attempt to stop the growth
of our fellow-man, we are doing the thing that will

most surely stop our own growth. How much
faster the world would go forward if every one
should learn, once for all, that nothing is ever
permanently gained by any attempt to retard or
stop the progress of any human being!

CHAPTER VI
THE NEGRO SECRET SOCIETIES

THERE are about twenty national Negro
secret societies in America. The older and
better known of these are the Masons, the
Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias, United Brothers
of Friendship, Improved Benevolent and Protective
Order of Elks, Knights of Tabor, Benevolent
Order of Buffaloes, Ancient Order of Foresters,
The Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen,
Good Samaritans, Nazarites, Sons and Daughters of
Jacob, The Seven Wise Men, Knights of Honour,
Mosaic Templars of America, and the True
Reformers.

In addition to these there are a number of smaller
organisations, most of them local in character, but
quite as interesting in their workings and history as
the larger organisations.

The Masonic order, which is the oldest, and so far
as its history is concerned, the most interesting of
these orders, had its origin in the following manner:
During Revolutionary days there lived in Boston a
Negro of exceptional ability, named Prince Hall.
On March 6, 1775, he and fourteen other Negroes

were initiated into the secrets of Free Masonry by
an army lodge attached to one of the regiments of
British soldiers stationed there. According to a custom
of the day, these fifteen coloured men were
authorised to assemble as a lodge, to walk on St.
John's Day, and to bury their dead with due form.
They, however, could do no "work" and make no
Masons until they were warranted.

On March 2, 1784, the members of this lodge
applied to the Grand Lodge of England for a warrant.
It was issued to them on September 29, 1784,
as "African Lodge, No. 459," with Prince Hall as
master, but because of various delays it was not
received until April 29, 1787. The lodge was
formally organised May 6, 1787.

The original warrant establishing Masonry among
the Negroes in America is, considering the time and
the circumstances under which it was issued, a
document of such historical interest that I venture
to reproduce it here in full. The text is as follows:

By the terms of this decree Prince Hall became
the first Grand Master of the first Grand Lodge of
Negro Masons in the United States, and in 1797

issued a licence to thirteen men of colour who had
been made Masons in England and Ireland to assemble
and work as a lodge in Philadelphia. At
Providence, Rhode Island, under Hall's authority,
a lodge was organised for Negro Masons who
resided in that vicinity. In 1808, these three lodges
joined and formed the African Grand Lodge of
Boston, which was afterward called the Prince Hall
Lodge of Massachusetts.

The second coloured Grand Lodge was called the
"First Independent African Grand Lodge of North
America, in and for the commonwealth of Pennsylvania."
Some time after this, the Hiram Grand
Lodge of Pennsylvania was organised, and in 1847,
these three Grand Lodges united in forming a
National Grand Lodge. From this time this order
has grown steadily among the Negroes of the
United States until, in 1904, there were 1,960 Masonic
lodges with 45,835 members.

It is an interesting fact in the history of these
lodges that Negro Masons formed a part of the
funeral procession of the first President of the United
States, George Washington.

The Negro Masons, like other secret orders
formed in the United States before the Civil War,
encountered all the difficulties under which free
Negroes laboured at that time. It is said, however,
that they often received indirect recognition by white
Masons. For example, the first Kentucky lodge

of coloured Masons, known as Mount Moriah, No. 1,
was organised by residents of Louisville in 1850.
It was organised under the jurisdiction of Ohio,
and for three years, on account of the "black laws,"
which forbade the assembling of free people of
colour, met in New Albany, Indiana. After that
time the lodge removed to Louisville. Shortly after,
the rooms of the order were forcibly entered by the
police and twenty-one of the members were arrested.
On arriving at the prison, however, the jailors, it
is said, refused to receive them. The judge of the
court, who was consulted, ordered them discharged
upon their personal recognisance to appear for
trial the next morning. The next morning when
they appeared in a body for trial, they found the
entrance to the courthouse guarded by police, by
whom they were denied admission. They were
told to quietly go their way, say nothing, and
they would not again be disturbed. The explanation
given by the coloured Masons to this extraordinary
proceeding is that the jailors and the
judge were Master Masons.

The next secret order to be formed in the United
States was the Odd Fellows. In 1842, certain members
of the Philomathean Institute of New York
and of the Library Company and Debating Society
of Philadelphia, applied for admission to the International
Order of Odd Fellows, but were refused
on the ground of their colour. Peter Ogden, however,

who had joined the Odd Fellows in England,
secured from the English order a charter for the
first American Negro lodge of Odd Fellows, which
was called the Philomathean, No. 646, of New York.
This lodge was organised March 1, 1843. The
Negro Odd Fellows in America are still under the
jurisdiction of England and regularly represented
in the general meetings of the order. In 1904, there
were 4,643 lodges in the United States, with 285,931
members.

Two other national secret organisations were
organised in the United States before the War. One
of these was the Galilean Fishermen. Another was
the Nazarites. The United Brothers of Friendship
was organised at Louisville, Kentucky, August 1,
1861. It was first a benevolent organisation and
later became a secret order. The Knights of Pythias
of the World was first organised in Washington,
District of Columbia, February 19, 1864.

No other city in the South has been the birthplace
of so large a number of coloured secret and
beneficial orders as Baltimore, Maryland. There
are societies still existing in Maryland that date
back as far as 1820. They were formed in order
that the members might help one another in sickness,
and provide for a decent burial through a system of
small but regular payments. Twenty-five of these
societies were formed before the war. From 1865
to 1870, seventeen more were added to this number,

and since 1870 it is said that at least twenty more
have been added to these.

In 1884 a meeting was held of many persons connected
with these societies in order to arouse a more
general interest in their work. At this meeting
forty of these societies claimed an aggregate membership
of 2,100. It was stated at this time that
nearly fourteen hundred members had been buried
by these orders, and more than $45,000 paid out for
funeral expenses. Something like $125,000 had
been paid as sick dues, and thirty of the societies
paid $27,000 to widows. Among the other items of
expense were $10,700 for house rent and $11,300 paid
for incidental expenses. There had been paid back
to members of the societies, from unexpended balances,
$40,000, and there remained in the banks
and in the hands of the treasurers, $22,800. Five
of these societies had considerable sums invested.
In one case the amount was nearly $6,000. The
total amount of money handled had been nearly
$200,000. One of these organisations was the
Coloured Barbers' Society. It was over fifty years
old, and paid eighty dollars at the death of a member.
It is said that one coloured woman organised three
of these local societies that at one time were very
successful.

It was among these local beneficial and secret
orders of Baltimore that four of the national societies
had their origin. These are the Samaritans,

the Nazarites, the Galilean Fishermen, and the
Seven Wise Men. The order of Galilean Fishermen,
composed of men and women, was started in Baltimore
in 1856, but was not legally incorporated until
1869. It is said to have more than five thousand
members in the State of Maryland alone.

It is said that the beneficial and local secret orders
of Philadelphia date back to the eighteenth century,
and that by 1838 there were as many as one hundred
of these small organisations, with 7,448 members,
in the city. Ten years later there were 8,000 members,
belonging to 106 societies. The plan usually
followed by these societies was to collect twenty-five
cents per month from each of their members
with the understanding that in case of sickness members
should be entitled to receive aid to the amount
of $1.50 to $3.00 per week. In addition to this,
sums varying from ten dollars to twenty dollars
were paid upon the death of any member. A good
many of these organisations have since gone out
of existence, but it is said that at least four
thousand Negroes in Philadelphia still belong to
secret orders and collect annually something like
$25,000, a part of which is paid out in sick and
death benefits and a part invested. The real estate
and personal property of these local organisations
is said to amount to no less than $125,000. One
of the oldest of these organisations is known as
the Sons of St. Thomas. It was founded in 1823,

and was originally confined to the members of the
St. Thomas Church.

In recent years there have grown up, to take the
place of the older beneficial organisations, local
insurance companies. One of these, known as the
Crucifixion, is connected with the Church of the
Crucifixion. Still another, the Avery, is connected
with the Wesley A. M. E. Zion Church. Both of
these have large membership, and are said to be well
conducted.[1]

With the organisation of the national benevolent
and secret orders, large sums of money have come
into the hands of the officers of these societies to be
held in trust for the members of the organisations.
A considerable part of this sum has found permanent
investment, where it frequently yields a good
return. The profits of the Masons indicate that
this organisation has at least one million dollars
invested. Similar reports from other organisations
show that the Odd Fellows have $2,500,000 worth of
property, the Pythians $500,000, the Brothers
of Friendship $500,000, and the True Reformers
$800,000. The other secret orders own over one-half
a million dollars' worth of property, so that it
has been estimated that the Negro secret societies
in the United States own between $5,000,000 and
$6,000,000 worth of property.

The Odd Fellows have erected in the city of

Philadelphia a building which is reported to have cost
$100,000. The Supreme Lodge of Knights of Pythias
has erected in Chicago a building costing about the
same amount. The Knights of Pythias in New
Orleans also have erected a seven-story business
block at a cost of about $100,000.

While on a visit to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, I was
very agreeably surprised to find that the finest and
most expensive office building in the town had been
erected by the Negro Masonic order. The building
was erected for the purpose of furnishing offices
for Negro business and professional men, but it
was so advantageously situated and was so well
adapted for business purposes that it was entirely
occupied by white tenants.

It often happens in a city, where there are a
number of local lodges of the same order, that they
cooperate and erect a building for lodge and business
purposes. Such a building is the coloured
Masonic Temple at Savannah, Georgia, which was
erected by the local Masonic lodges of that city.
This building was erected through a building and
loan association. The income derived from the renting
of store and lodge rooms in the building has kept
up the running expenses and paid for its erection.
The principal reasons why the orders are erecting
buildings are to provide themselves with permanent
homes and to meet the demand of coloured business
and professional men for store and office rooms.

Directly and indirectly the secret societies, in addition
to providing for the families of their members
after death, are doing a considerable amount of
charitable work. For instance, several of the orders
have erected homes and orphanages in different parts
of the country. The Masons are perhaps leading
in this respect at the present time. They established
homes for the aged members of their order
in Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois, and Tennessee.
The Odd Fellows, in addition to the sum paid for
sick benefits and in insurance to widows and orphans,
contribute annually from ten to fifteen thousand
dollars to various kinds of charities. Sometimes
the surplus monies of these different organisations
are invested in other ways. For instance, in 1905,
the Masons of Mississippi purchased a thousand
acres of land in that state. In Maryland and in the
District of Columbia the same organisation has
organised joint stock building associations. In
Massachusetts, which is the home of Negro Masonry,
a monument costing $500 has been erected to Prince
Hall, the first Grand Master of the order. A few
years ago, also, the Massachusetts Masons published
Upton's "Negro Masonry."

Perhaps the secret order having the most romantic
history is the International Order of Twelve of the
Knights and Daughters of Tabor, which was founded
by Reverend Moses Dickson. Mr. Dickson was
born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1824. For a number

of years he worked upon different steamboats runinng
up and down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers
from Cincinnati. During this time he had an opportunity
to see slavery in some of its most disagreeable
aspects, and as a consequence he early determined
to do something positive toward securing the freedom
of the slaves. In 1844, so the story goes, he
and eleven other young men met and formed an
organisation for no less a purpose than the overthrow
of slavery in the United States. After
thinking it over, however, the members decided
to take two years to study over and develope a
plan of action, and agreed to meet in St. Louis,
August 12, 1846.

During the intervening years Mr. Dickson travelled
up and down the Mississippi River as far South
as New Orleans, and as far North as Iowa and Wisconsin,
seeking to prepare plans for the project
he had in view. According to agreement, the
twelve young men met and organised what was
known as the Knights of Liberty. This organisation
having been formed, the twelve members
separated with the understanding that they were
to travel through the South, organising local societies
in the different states through which they travelled.
Mr. Dickson, however, remained at the headquarters
of the order at St. Louis.

It had been agreed among the twelve that they should
spend ten years, slowly and secretly making their

preparations, and extending the organisation of the
society. At the end of this time, however, owing to
the change in conditions in the North and the South,
it was decided to change the plan of operation.
From that time on the Knights of Liberty became
actively connected with the Underground Railroad,
and it was claimed that they assisted yearly thousands
of slaves to escape. The methods by which
the Knights of Liberty expected to accomplish their
great object have never been definitely known, if,
indeed, they were ever definitely formulated. When
the Civil War broke out, Mr. Dickson enlisted.
At the close of hostilities he settled again in Missouri,
and took an active part in establishing the Lincoln
Institute at Jefferson City. For a number of years
he was trustee and vice-president of the Board of
Trustees of that institution.

The emancipation of the slaves ended the work
for which the Knights of Liberty had been formed,
whereupon Mr. Dickson decided to establish a beneficial
order in memory of the twelve orginial organisers
of that society. As a result, the first Temple
and Tabernacle of the Knights and Daughters of
Tabor was established in 1871. The object of
the society is to "encourage Christianity, education,
morality, and temperance among the coloured
people." The order is now reported to have something
over fifty thousand members.

Immediately after the War, when the coloured

people were no longer hindered by restrictive legislation,
a vast number of societies for mutual protection
were organised. The most of these societies
were founded upon the plan of the earlier benevolent
and beneficial societies, with the purpose "of caring
for the sick and burying the dead." At first no
attention was paid to differences of age, and very
little to condition of health of members who were
insured in these organisations. Gradually, as the
societies gained in experience, they learned the
necessity of discriminating in these matters; Eventually
there grew out of these mutual benefit organisations
something corresponding to the insurance
companies conducted upon the mutual benefit plan
by white organisations. Many of the insurance
societies formed in this way had not the excuse of
ignorance for the bad manner in which they were
managed. Many of them, however, have done good
service and have grown in strength from year to
year. In 1907, no less than sixty-five of these organisations
were known to exist in different parts of the
United States.

In the meantime, nearly all the secret orders have
added insurance to the other benefits they offer to
their members. No definite figures are at hand to
show the amount of business done by these different
insurance companies connected with the secret
orders. It is estimated, however, that in seven
years the Masonic Benefit Association of Alabama,

which is the title of the insurance department of the
Masons in that state, is reported to have paid over
$100,000 to widows and orphans of deceased members.
The Texas association reports that in ten
years it has paid $150,000 in death claims. The
Galilean Fishermen claim to have paid $48,900 in
death claims in five years. According to the statement
issued by the True Reformers, that society
paid $606,000 in death claims and $1,500,000
in sick benefits in twenty years. The total
amount paid out since the organisation of the
society in sick and death benefits amounted in
1907 to $2,856,989.25.

There has been one secret and benevolent organisation
of national repute organised in Arkansas. It
was known as the Mosaic Templars of America, and
was organised in 1882 by C. W. Keatts and Hon.
J. E. Bush. In twenty years this organisation paid
$175,000 for the relief of the widows and orphans of
deceased members. During this same time it paid
$51,000 to its policy holders, and in 1902 reported
a property valuation of $225,000. These figures
give a pretty good idea of the amount of money that
is collected and expended for the purposes of benevolence
and insurance among the coloured people
in this country.

One of the most original and interesting of the
benevolent and secret orders formed in the method
I have described is what is known as The Grand

United Order of True Reformers. This organisation
is the more interesting because of the singular
way in which it has widened and extended its activities,
until, while still retaining its fraternal and
benevolent features, it has become a great business
organisation.

The True Reformers, like most secret and benevolent
organisations among Negroes in the Southern
states, was started in a very small and obscure way,
and has grown, apparently, in response to needs that
are peculiar to the coloured people. The order was
started in 1881 by Reverend William Washington
Browne. Mr. Browne was not an educated man,
and he knew very little at the time he started this
organisation about the ordinary methods of conducting
a business of this or any other character.
He was a man of great energy, however, and grew
with the organisation, so that at the time of his death
he had succeeded in building up one of the strongest
business organisations at that time in existence
among the Negro people.

This organisation is in many respects so unusual
that it was made the subject of an investigation by
the United States Department of Labour, from
which I am able to give some details in regard to
its history. I cannot here describe in detail the
different departments of this organisation nor the
methods by which they are conducted, but will
merely indicate the different activities in which the

order is engaged and suggest the necessities out of
which its different departments have grown.[2]

In 1882 the Grand Fountain, which was the central
and controlling organisation of the whole order,
established a real estate department. This grew
out of the need of offices and buildings in which to
carry on the business of the order. The Grand
Fountain had collected a considerable amount of
funds and this offered an opportunity for safe
investment, while at the same time it furnished the
subordinate organisations with the halls in which
to hold their meetings.

The next by-product of the organisation was a
depository for the funds of the Grand Fountain. I
shall describe in a later chapter the circumstances
under which the True Reformers' bank was
organised.

Next the order felt the need of a publication by
which its members, who were now scattered in different
parts of the country, could be kept in touch
with each other and the purposes of the organisation
advertised to the general public. In 1892,
therefore, the publication of The Reformer was
begun. It was described at the time "as the headlight
of the organisation, an industrial, agricultural
and financial paper and economic journal of the
Negro race." It was first published as a bi-monthly,
but after a few months of existence it became a

weekly paper. In 1900, this paper had a circulation
of over 8,000. In that year a job printing
department, which added considerably to the income
of the paper, was established.

The next advance of the True Reformers was along
charitable lines. In 1893, the Grand Fountain,
through its subordinate lodges, began to collect
money for the erection of an Old Folks' Home, "for
the benefit of the old people of the entire race,
regardless of society or denomination." In 1897,
the Grand Fountain advanced sufficient funds to
purchase the Westham Farms and the site of the
Westham Iron Furnace, six miles from Richmond,
in Henrico County. The price paid was $14,400,
and the next year, in August, 1898, an association
was formed under the title of The Old Folks' Home
of the Grand Fountain of the United Order of True
Reformers. In the same year a part of the Westham
Farm was laid out in town lots and a town was
started in the neighbourhood of the Old Folks' Home.
By the sale of these lots the purchase money advanced
by the Grand Fountain was repaid.

At the annual session of the Grand Fountain in
September, 1899, it was decided to apply for a new
charter which would cover all the various activities
which the order was now carrying on. The
importance of this new charter was second only
to the charter granted eleven years before to the
True Reformers' Bank.

The purposes of the new organisation, known as
the "Reformers' Mercantile and Industrial Association,"
as stated in the charter granted at this
time, are as follows:

Under this charter the association in April, 1900,
opened a grocery and general merchandise store
in Richmond. In March, 1901, a second store was
opened in Washington, District of Columbia, and
in December, 1901, a third, fourth and fifth store
was opened successively in Portsmouth, Manchester,
and Roanoke, Virginia. These stores seem

to have been conducted on a sound basis; supplies
were bought in large quantities for cash and were
sold again at retail for cash. The managers of the
stores made weekly reports and remittances. It is
reported that these stores do an annual business of
more than $100,000.

About this time the Hotel Reformer was opened
at 900 North Sixth Street, Richmond, Virginia.
This hotel has prospered and grown until now it
has accommodations for one hundred and fifty
guests. Most of the office force of the Grand
Fountain make their homes in this hotel. Another
enterprise of the organisation is "The Reformers'
Building and Loan Association," which was
incorporated for the purpose of encouraging industry,
frugality, and home building, particularly
among the members of the True Reformers'
Association.

The headquarters of the Grand Fountain are in
a large, four-story brick building, 604–608 North
Second Street, Richmond, Virginia. This building
contains, in addition to the various offices of the
Grand Fountain, a large hall, which is sometimes
used as a theatre and for other entertainments.
In this same building are the offices of the True
Reformers' Bank, the printing-office and the rooms
of the real estate department. In 1908, this department
had three farms and twenty-seven buildings
of a total value of $400,000 under its control. It

leases for the benefit of the order twenty-three
other buildings.

As the members of the association continued to
increase in numbers and the business operations continued
to multiply, there was need in 1901 for an
amendment to the charter to provide for further
expansion of the organisation. One of the changes
made in the charter at that time provided that
the control of all the affiliated organisations of the
order should remain in the Grand Fountain, which
is the legislative body of the order, and meets
annually. Another provision of the charter increased
the amount of real estate that the order might hold
from $25,000 to $500,000.

While the True Reformers was the first and,
perhaps, the most extraordinary of the benevolent
associations which have developed into cooperative
business organisations it is still merely one among
a number of others that have sprung up within
recent years in the Southern states. While it is
probably true that these organisations, owing
to the inexperience of the men who started them,
have not always been formed upon the best
business models, it is still true that they have
responded to some very definite needs of the
Negro people, otherwise they could not have
prospered as they have.

In the first place I think it may be safely said that
these organisations have collected from the masses

of the coloured people large amounts of money that
would not otherwise have been saved. In doing this
they have created a considerable capital, which has
been at the disposal of Negro business men. It
has enabled Negroes to erect buildings, invest in
lands, and greatly increase property in the hands
of members of the race. Indirectly, these organisations
have stimulated thrift and industry among
the masses of the people.

One thing that has made these organisations
especially attractive and valuable to the masses of
the coloured people is that they have grown out of
a kind of organisation for mutual helpfulness with
which coloured people have long been familiar.
Furthermore, they seem to be democratic in their
organisation, although, as a matter of fact, I
think that has seldom been true where the organisations
have been successful. At any rate, the
members of the fraternal organisation have felt that
they were directing and controlling, to some extent,
their own investments, and that gave them an interest
in the business of the organisation that they
would not otherwise have felt.

The chief value of the Negro societies and benevolent
organisations has been that they have been the
schools in which the masses have been taught the
value and the methods of cooperation. In order to
succeed these organisations have been compelled
to enforce upon the masses of the people habits of

saving and of system which they would not otherwise
have been able or disposed to learn. These
societies have contributed in this way, in spite of
their failings, in no small degree to the intellectual
and material development of the Negro race.

CHAPTER VII
THE NEGRO DOCTOR AND THE NEGRO PROFESSIONAL
MAN

IT WAS not until 1884, as near as I can now remember,
that the first coloured physician,
Dr. C. N. Dorsette, set up an office and began
to practise medicine in Montgomery, Alabama.
Previous to that time I do not think there was a Negro
doctor, dentist or pharmacist in the state. At the
present time there are more than one hundred,
and the members of these three professions in
Alabama maintain a flourishing state association,
which in turn is connected with the National
Medical Association, having representatives in ten
Southern and twelve Northern states. I may
add that the first woman physician who was ever
granted a licence to practise medicine in the State
of Alabama was a coloured woman, Dr. Sadie
Dillon, a daughter of Bishop Benjamin Tanner,
and a sister of H. O. Tanner, the distinguished Negro
painter.

It is an indication of the progress of Negro doctors
of Alabama, since Dr. Dorsette first came to the state,
that there are at the present time no less than six

infirmaries or hospitals which have been established
since then and are largely maintained under the
direction of the Negro physicians of this state.
There are, for instance, the Cottage Home Infirmary,
conducted by Dr. W. E. Sterrs, at Decatur; the
Home Infirmary, conducted by Dr. U. G. Mason
and Dr. A. M. Brown; the Selma Infirmary, conducted
by Dr. L. L. Burwell, of Selma, Alabama;
and the Harris Infirmary, conducted by Dr. T. N.
Harris, at Mobile. In addition to these there is the
Hale's Infirmary at Montgomery, Alabama, and the
Institute Hospital at Tuskegee, conducted by Dr.
J. A. Kenney, who is, I may add, Secretary of the
National Medical Association.

The Hale's Infirmary was given to the coloured
people at Montgomery by James H. Hale and his
widow, Ann Hale, at a cost of something like
twenty-five thousand dollars. When the building
was first opened in 1899, Mrs. Ann Hale conducted
it with her own means and what she was able to
solicit from other sources. At the present time
it is supported in part by money given by the
city and by donations from women's clubs, the
contributions of churches and lodges of the secret
orders of the city.

The rapid advancement of the Negro physician
in Alabama is an indication of the progress which is
taking place elsewhere throughout the South. A
few years ago almost the only Negro doctor one ever

heard of in the Southern states was an individual
known as "the root doctor," a kind of mendicant
medicine-man, who travelled about through the
country districts with a little stock of herbs and
philters and a large stock of superstition, with which
he traded upon the credulity of the country people.
The medicines these men used were mostly harmless
and the cures they performed consisted largely in
convincing the people that they were going to get well,
thus putting them in a way to actually recover from
their ailments. They were, in fact, a kind of faith-healers,
though mostly, I fear, they were merely frauds.

The "root doctor" has not entirely disappeared
from the country districts of the South, but more and
more the masses of the people are overcoming their
instinctive distrust of hospitals and surgeons, and
are learning to have faith in scientific medicine. A
striking illustration of one of the ways in which this
change is coming about was furnished me during a
recent journey through South Carolina. At the
Voorhees Industrial School, which is situated a few
miles from Denmark, in the midst of a rich farming
district of Central South Carolina, I observed that a
large and commodious hospital had been erected.
Although at the time I was there this hospital had
not yet been fully equipped and put in working order,
yet it suggested to me one of the unexpected ways in
which an industrial school like this, situated in the
open country as it is, can exercise and is exercising a

civilising and uplifting influence upon the masses of
the people.

Outside of the larger hospitals, like the Freedmen's
Hospital in Washington, District of Columbia,
the Provident Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, and the
Frederick Douglass Hospital in Philadelphia, there
are, in almost every city in the South, these smaller institutions
to which I have referred, established by coloured
physicians in order to provide for the needs of
the coloured population. Although most of these
institutions are poorly equipped, they have proved a
great blessing to the communities in which they were
established. Frequently they have been the only
places in which Negroes, suffering from some unusual
form of disease, could obtain anything like proper
treatment. They have provided the only places in
which serious surgical operations would be performed,
with the assurance that the patient would be
properly cared for after the operation was completed.

At first all the serious surgical operations were performed
by white men but, as coloured surgeons in
different parts of the country have gained in skill
and in reputation, they have been invited to attend
the meetings of the different state associations and
to hold clinics at the different Negro infirmaries and
hospitals. In these clinics the coloured physicians
have had an opportunity to see major operations
performed by experts and specialists of their own
race and thus have gained knowledge and experience

in their profession that they could not otherwise
obtain. For instance, at a recent meeting of the
Alabama State Association at Birmingham there
were present, Dr. George C. Hall of Chicago, Dr
A M Curtis of Washington, and Drs. Boyd, Stewart
and Roman of the Maharry Medical College of
Nashville, Tennessee. All of these men have
gained a national reputation, either as teachers of
medicine or as surgeons.

One of the hospitals to which I have referred, the
Taylor-Lane Hospital, at Orangeburg, South Carolina,
was started by a coloured woman, Dr. Matilda A.
Evans Dr. Evans, aside from the fact that she was
the first woman doctor in Orangeburg, and perhaps
also in the State of South Carolina, has an interesting
history. Her grandmother, who was Edith Willis, was
kidnapped from Chester County, Pennsylvania, when
she was a child, and taken to Charleston, South
Carolina, where she was sold as a slave. She
eventually became a cook on the plantation of Mr.
John Brodie, who was a descendant of one of the old
families of South Carolina. Dr. Matilda Evans
was born on this plantation six years after emancipation.
She was educated in the famous Schofield
School at Aiken, South Carolina, and eventually
studied medicine at the Woman's Medical College in
Philadelphia. Before she started North, however,
she stopped for a few days with a coloured family
at Orangeburg. There she heard for the first time

about Dr. B. W. Taylor, "Mars Ben," as the
people she lived with called him. These people
impressed upon her that if she ever intended to
return to Orangeburg, to practise medicine, she
must go to see "Mars Ben" because he would
help her.

After she had completed her course at the medical
college in Philadelphia, the young woman physician
wrote to Dr. Taylor, and he encouraged her to
return to Orangeburg and take up the profession.
From the first, she says, he, as well as the other white
physicians in the town, assisted her in every way.
She has been unusually successful. About half of
her practice in Orangeburg, I have been told, is
among the white people. Among her patients are
the descendants of the family to which her grandmother
and mother had belonged as slaves. At
the same time she is on the best of terms with all the
doctors in the town, white and black, who have
assisted her in establishing and maintaining the
Taylor-Lane Hospital, of which she is the founder
and has the entire management.

It would be a mistake to assume from what I have
said, thus far, that there were no Negro physicians
in the United States before the Civil War. The
earliest Negro doctor to attain any degree of distinction
was James Derham.

James Derham was born a slave in Philadelphia in
1767. His master taught him to read and write, and

employed him in compounding medicines. After a
time the young slave became so skilful that he was
employed as an assistant by a new master to whom
he was afterward sold. He succeeded, while he
was still a young man, in purchasing his freedom and
eventually removed to New Orleans, Louisiana, where
he built up a lucrative practice. The celebrated
Dr. Rush published an account of him in the American
Museum in which he spoke in the highest terms
of his character and his skill as a physician.

Another Negro doctor, who gained considerable
reputation previous to the Civil War, was Dr.
James McCune Smith, who, unable to obtain a
technical education in the United States, went to
England and eventually graduated at Glasgow.
He practised in New York for twenty-five years,
where he became one of the most influential men of
his race. Dr. Smith was the first coloured man to
establish a pharmacy in the United States.

In 1854, Dr. John V. De Grasse was admitted in
due form as a member of the Massachusetts Medical
Society, probably the first instance of such an honour
being conferred upon a Negro in this country.
When the professional schools began to receive
coloured students after the close of the Civil War, a
number of young men eagerly took advantage of
the opportunity to equip themselves for professional
careers. Howard University in Washington
has graduated over a thousand students from the

medical department alone and almost half that number
from the department of law.

The majority of the Negro doctors, dentists and
pharmacists in the South have been educated at
Howard University, Washington, District of Columbia,
at Meharry Medical College, Nashville,
Tennessee, or at the Leonard Medical College at
Raleigh, N. C. At the Leonard Medical College
from the beginning, a majority of the professors
have been Southern white men residing in Raleigh.

In this connection, I may add, that the Negro
doctor, as soon as he shows fitness for his profession,
is usually treated with every courtesy by white
physicians. White doctors have everywhere encouraged
the building of hospitals for coloured patients.
They have shown themselves, with a few exceptions,
willing and even glad to consult with Negro physicians
whenever they are called upon to do so. In
almost every part of the South which I have visited
the Negro physician is treated with great respect by
white people as well as coloured, and as a rule, I
think it is true that the Negro physicians are entitled
to the consideration and respect of the communities
in which they live. There are comparatively few
of them who have not held their own, from a moral
point of view. The number of those who have gone
down on account of drink, or other had habits, is
comparatively small.

More and more, also, the white people of the South

are beginning to recognise that their own interests,
as far as health is concerned, are intimately interwoven
with those of the coloured race. Disease
draws no colour line. It is not possible that the
conditions of life in that part of the city where the
coloured people live should be filthy and degrading,
such as tend to produce disease and crime, without
these conditions sooner or later affecting the lives of
those who live in other parts of the city. If the
woman who does the household washing lives in a
part of the city where there is consumption or smallpox,
the seeds of that disease will eventually be carried
into the homes of all her employers, no matter how
carefully guarded they are in other respects. If the
servant who prepares the food or has the care of the
children spends a large part of her life among people
who are unclean, and in a region that is infected with
disease, it is inevitable that sooner or later she will
impart that disease to the family under her care.

In the education of the people in the laws of healthful
living and in the improvement of conditions
among the poorer classes the Negro doctor is able to
perform a great service, not only for the people of his
own race, but for all the people in the community in
which he lives.

One of the agencies that has done most to build up
the medical profession among the Negroes is the
National Medical Association, which includes among
its members some three hundred and fifty Negro

physicians, surgeons and pharmacists, and reaches
through correspondence some fifteen hundred others.
This Association grew out of a congress of Negro
physicians and surgeons that was held at the Exposition
at Atlanta, in 1895. Dr. I. Garland Penn, the
assistant general secretary of the Epworth League
of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who was commissioner
of Negro exhibits for the Atlanta Exposition,
was indirectly responsible for it. He conceived
the idea that, in connection with the other
features of the Exposition, an attempt should be
made to bring together as large a number of Negro
physicians and surgeons as possible, because he
believed that the meeting would not only be of
advantage to the Negro physicians themselves, but
also would give the world some idea of the progress
Negroes were making in that branch of science.

It was Dr. R. F. Boyd, of Nashville, afterward
chosen as the first president of the Association, who
was largely responsible for making this congress a
permanent institution. During the first years of
its existence the Association met irregularly. Since
1900, however, the meetings have been held annually.
One of the features of these annual meetings has been
the surgical clinics held by Doctors Daniel H.
Williams, George C. Hall and A. M. Curtis and
others.

Dr. Daniel H. Williams and Dr. George C. Hall,
of Chicago, are probably the most noted Negro

surgeons in the United States. They have to their
credit the performance of some of the most noteworthy
operations that have been undertaken by any
surgeon of any race.

The influence of the Negro doctor in the elevation
of the race has extended further than the mere practice
of medicine. In many cases it will be found that
he is a successful busines man in the community in
which he lives and the owner of valuable property.
In Montgomery, Alabama, for instance, the Negro
doctors own and operate four drug-stores. The
same is true in Birmingham and Mobile. In fact,
outside of the real estate business there is probably
no kind of enterprise in which Negroes have been so
largely successful as in the drug business. There
is hardly a city of any Importance in the Southern
states in which there are not Negro druggists.
From such investigations as I have been able to
make I have learned that, at the present time, there
are no less than one hundred and thirty-six druggists
in the Southern states, and, in most cases, these
stores have been started, in the first instance, by or
under the direction of Negro physicians.

In cases where a Negro physician has started a
store in connection with his office, he will often have
a wife or brother, or, after a time, a son or daughter,
who is a professional pharmacist. He will place his
daughter or his wife in charge of the store, while he
attends to the duties of his profession. In this way

he is able not only to make certain economies in the
business, but also to widen the economic opportunity
of the other members of the family and of the members
of his race.

The progress of the Negro physician and surgeon
is but an instance and an indication of the rise of the
professional class among the coloured people in
America. The first and largest class, since the
first and most pressing need of the Negro after emancipation
was education, is that of teachers. According
to the census of 1900 there were 21,268 Negro
teachers in schools and colleges. This was an
increase of 6,168 from 1890 to 1900, or 40.8 per cent.,
which was more than twice as rapid as the increase
of the Negro population. The increase of the white
teachers for the same period was 27.7 per cent.

It is probable that in the ten years the increase has
been proportionately less among the teachers than
among the other professions, the professions of
medicine, dentistry and pharmacy having become
especially popular in recent years. Next to the
teachers the ministers make up the largest group
among Negroes in the professions. In 1900, the
number of Negro ministers was 15,530, an increase
of 3,371 from 1890 to 1900, or 27.7 per cent. During
the same decade white ministers increased less
rapidly, or 26.4 per cent.

In the other groups of the professional class of
Negroes there were 1,734 physicians and surgeons,

212 dentists, 728 lawyers, 99 literary and scientific
persons and 210 journalists. In each of these groups
there have arisen, within the short period of forty
years, several men and women who, by reason of
their mental and moral qualities, were an honour
to their profession and an inspiration to the members
of their own race, who have seen in their success a
concrete example of what Negroes can do to raise
themselves and make themselves of service to the
world.

In the profession of teaching the work of coloured
women has been, to a marked degree, one in which
heroism has played a part worthy of record and
remembrance. Were I asked to select an example
of the best type of the Negro woman's work for the
uplift of her race since freedom began, without a
moment's hesitancy my choice would be the coloured
woman teacher, especially the one who has borne the
burden of teaching in the rural districts of the South,
where she has had to labor, for the most part, without
the hope of material reward or the praise of men.

I know the names of hundreds of these devoted
women, who have gone out into the country districts
of the South and given their lives in a self-sacrificing
and often apparently hopeless effort to lift up the
masses of their own people. Perhaps the most
remarkable example of what these women have
accomplished is the work of Elizabeth E. Wright,
the founder of Voorhees Industrial School, at

Denmark, South Carolina. She came to us at
Tuskegee, a frail young woman without means
and, as it often seemed, without the physical
strength to carry her through the struggle necessary
to complete her course. She was compelled
to give up for a time and go home until she could
obtain means and strength to go on.

After being graduated at Tuskegee, she became a
teacher in the little town of Denmark, South Carolina,
and, at that place, before she died, succeeded in
building up a school of her own, modelled on that of
Tuskegee Institute. This school stands to-day as a
monument to this young woman's faith and persistence.
It is one of the largest and best equipped
of the industrial schools for Negroes in the Southern
states, and has gained a recognition and support, not
only of the coloured but of the white people in the
community in which it is situated. Having established
the school, Elizabeth Wright literally gave her
life in the effort to support and maintain it, and she
lies buried on the grounds of the school which she
erected with her own life.

The profession of law has enlisted from an early
date a considerable number of talented coloured men
and a few women. The first coloured woman lawyer
was Charlotte Ray, a daughter of Charles Ray, who
was at one time pastor of the famous Shiloh Presbyterian
Church. She graduated from Howard
University about 1872, and was still living in 1908,

I understand, though she was then something over
sixty years of age.

Macon B. Allen was the first coloured attorney
regularly admitted to practice in the United States.
He was admitted to the bar in Maine in 1844.
Robert Morris was admitted to the Boston bar in
1850, on motion of Charles Sumner, where he practised
with marked success until his death in 1882.
He was associated with Mr. Sumner in 1849, in the
famous case before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts,
to test the constitutionality of separate
coloured schools in Massachusetts. John M. Langston
was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1854. The first
coloured man admitted to practice before the Supreme
Court of the United States, was John S. Reck, of
Boston, Massachusetts. He was admitted Feb. I,
1865, on motion of Mr. Sumner.

A few of the coloured men who became Members
of Congress from the Southern states had a legal
training, as well as two or three who have been in
the diplomatic and consular service of the United
States. Among the coloured department clerks
in Washington a surprising number have taken the
law course at Howard University in that city. In
the effort of the American Negro to widen his economic
life, the lawyers of the race are finding a field
for their talents which they have not hitherto had an
opportunity to enter. For instance, in the building
and loan associations; in the mercantile, real estate,

cooperative companies and savings banks of various
kinds that are now everywhere springing up, the
coloured lawyer is finding a clientele far different
from the young coloured men who began the study
of law in the early years following the Civil War,
and looked forward then to a public career, either in
State or national politics as the goal of their ambition.

I have always believed that the stronger the economic
and industrial foundation of the masses of the
race and the more numerous those engaged in gainful
occupations became, the more successful and prosperous
would the professional class among the race
become.

Some mention should be made of the fact that
several Negro lawyers have obtained, either by
election or appointment, a number of minor judicial
positions in which they discharged their duties in an
eminently satisfactory manner. Mifflin W. Gibbs,
for instance, city judge in Little Rock, Arkansas, in
1873, was the first coloured man to be elected
to such a position in the United States. George L.
Ruffin was appointed a judge of a district municipal
court in Massachusetts in 1883. James C. Matthews
was elected a few years ago to a city judgeship, as
a Democrat in the city of Albany, New York. E. M.
Hewlett and R. H. Terrell were appointed by President
Roosevelt as city magistrates in the District
of Columbia; the latter holds his position at the present
writing and is regarded as a very capable and

efficient official. A few assistants to district attorneys,
municipal and Federal, have been given
appointments. In none of these cases have I heard
of a failure.

Another profession in which Negroes have been
making progress in recent years is that of journalism.
The Negro journals were, in certain respects, at
their best before the Civil War, during the period of
the anti-slavery struggle. At that time, when Frederick
Douglass was editor of The North Star, and all
the anti-slavery leaders among the Negro race contributed
more or less to the racial papers, Negro
journals were, for the most part, inspired by high
aims and were a source of inspiration to the masses
of the coloured people in their struggle for freedom.
After emancipation came, the number of these newspapers
increased, but, too frequently, they became
the mere organs of a party or a clique, with no higher
reason for their existence than the temporary success
of some political partisan or the petty spoils that fall
to the lot of the Negro politician.

In recent years, however, the Negro journals,
following the lead of the white journals, have become
less party organs and more newspapers, seeking to
report events and reflect the life and progress of the
whole race. There are at present no less than two
hundred Negro newspapers published in the United
States. Many of them are ably edited.

One hears a great deal in both the Northern and

Southern states of the Negro politician and, incidentally,
of the Negro lawyer and journalist. One hears,
however, very little of the Negro physician and surgeon.
Nevertheless, of all the professions in which
the Negro is engaged, that of medicine is probably
the one in which he has attained the highest degree
of technical skill and the greatest usefulness to the
community in which he lives. In no other direction,
I dare say, has the Negro travelled so far from the
primitive condition and civilisation of his savage
ancestors in Africa.

I was reminded of this fact the more forcibly, a
few years ago, by an incident related to me by Dr.
George C. Hall, of Chicago. In 1905, Dr. Hail was
engaged in holding a surgical clinic before the Alabama
Medical, Dental and Pharmaceutical Society,
at Mobile. While there he visited the African colony
to which I have already referred, situated a few miles
out from Mobile in what is known as the African
village. He had just come from his lectures and
demonstrations in the city of Mobile, where he had
been the guest of an organisation composed of men
who were engaged in applying the latest results of
modern science to the solution of one of the most
complicated of human problems, namely, the cure
of disease. In a half-hour's ride on the street cars he
found himself in the midst of a settlement of native
Africans, who for fifty years had held themselves and
their descendants apart from the Negroes of Mobile,

and had had as little as possible to do with the white
people about them. Although they were employed
as labourers in the saw-mills nearby, and cultivated
the little patches of ground which they owned, they
had remained, in most other respects, practically
untouched by the civilisation about them.

"I could not help thinking," said Dr. Hall, in
speaking of the incident, "that less than half a century
ago the men with whom I had been conferring,
or their ancestors and ours, were as undeveloped as
these primitive people of the African village. I never
realised before the wonderful opportunities which
our race has had in being thrown into contact with
the science and civilisation of this modern world.
Here we can see our people, practically under our
own eyes, making their way, in a few years, or, at most,
a few generations, from the age of stone to the age of
electricity."

Few people, black or white, realise that in the
Negro race, as it exists to-day in America, we have
representatives of nearly every stage of civilisation,
from that of the primitive African to the highest
modern life and science have achieved. This fact
is at once a result and an indication of the rapidity
with which he has risen.

CHAPTER VIII
THE NEGRO DISFRANCHISEMENT AND THE NEGRO IN
BUSINESS

WHEN I began my work in Tuskegee in
1881 the coloured people of Alabama had
just been deprived—in a way that is
now familiar—of many of their political rights.
There were some voting but few Negroes held
office anywhere in Alabama at that time. The
Negroes set great store by the political privileges
that had been granted them during the Reconstruction
Period, and they thought that when they
lost these they had lost all.

Soon after I went into Alabama a new President,
James A. Garfield, was inaugurated at Washington.
A little community of coloured people not
very far from Tuskegee were so impressed with
the idea that the new Administration would do something
to better their condition, especially in the way
of strengthening their political rights, that, out of
their poverty, they raised enough money to pay the
expenses of one of their number to Washington, in
order that he might get direct information and return
and report to them what the outlook was. This

incident struck me as the more pathetic because I
happened to know the man who went on this errand.
He was a good, honest, well-meaning fellow, but
entirely lacking in knowledge of the world outside
his own community. I doubt that he ever got near
enough, even to the inauguration ceremonies, to see
the President, and I am sure he never got inside the
door of the White House. He returned to his people,
at any rate, with a very gloomy report and, although
it was never quite clear whom he had seen or what
he had done, the people understood what it meant.

The people did not say much about their loss.
They preserved outwardly, as a rule, the same
good nature and cheerfulness which had always
characterised them, but deep down in their hearts
they had begun to feel that there was no hope for
them.

This feeling of apathy and despair continued for
a long time among these people in the country districts.
A good many of them who owned land in the
county at this time gave it up or lost it for some reason
or other. Others moved away from the county and
there were a great many abandoned farms. Gradually,
however, the temper of the people changed.
They began to see that harvests were just as good
and just as bad as they had been before the changes
which deprived them of their political privileges.
They began to see, in short, that there was still hope
for them in economic, if not in political directions.

The man who went to Washington to call on the President
is still living. He is a different person now, a
new man, in fact. Since that time he has purchased
a farm; has built a decent, comfortable house; is
educating his children, and I note that never a session
of the monthly Farmer's Institute assembles at
Tuskegee that this man does not come and bring
some of the products from his farm to exhibit to his
fellow-farmers. He is not only successful, but he is
one of the happiest and most useful individuals in
our county. He has learned that he can do for himself
what the authorities at Washington could not do
for him, and that is, make his life a success.

A large part of the work which Tuskegee Institute
did in those early years, and has continued to do
down to the present time, has been to show the
masses of our people that in agriculture, in the industries,
in commerce, and in the struggle toward economic
success, there were compensations for the losses
they had suffered in other directions. In doing this
we did not seek to give the people the idea that
political rights were not valuable or necessary, but
rather to impress upon them that economic efficiency
was the foundation for every kind of success.

I am pointing out these facts here in order to
show how closely industrial education has been connected
with the great economic advance among the
masses of the Negro people during the last twenty-five
years. If the effect of disfranchisment of the

Negro was to discourage and in many instances to
embitter him, industrial education has done much
to turn his attention to opportunities that lay open
to him in other directions than in politics. It has had
the effect of turning attention to the vast quantities
of idle lands in many parts of the South and the
West, and in many instances, has helped him take
up these lands and make himself an independent
farmer. It has turned attention to the opportunities
in business and led him to perceive that in the South,
particularly, there are opportunities for better service
to his own race, which he can perform and more
profitably than any one else.

The fact is, that the coloured people who went into
politics directly after the war were, in most cases,
what may be called the aristocracy of the race.
Many of them had been practically, if not always
legally, free, made so by their masters, who were
at the same time their fathers, by whom they had
been educated and from whom they frequently
inherited considerable property. They had formed
their lives and characters on the models of the aristocratic
Southern people, among whom they were
raised, and they believed that politics was the only
sort of activity that was fit for a gentleman to
engage in. The conditions which existed directly
after the war offered these men the opportunity to
step in and make themselves the political leaders of
the masses of the people.

In the meantime, however, between the close of
the war and the period to which I have just referred,
there had grown up a middle class among the coloured
people. This class is composed, for the most part,
of men who had been slaves before the War. Some of
them had been house servants and had the advantage
of intimate contact with their master's family;
many of them had been slaves of that class of planters
sometimes referred to in the South as the "yeomanry";
others had been field hands on the big
plantations. The majority had had very few opportunities
before the War, except such as they obtained
in practising the different trades, which were carried
on about the plantations. It is from this class that the
greater portion of the Negro landowners have sprung;
from this class that the greater number of mechanics
formerly belonged, and it was from this class that
the majority of the business men of the Negro race
have arisen.

A farmer, who became the owner of a large plantation
of a thousand acres or more, necessarily became
something of a business man. Very likely he opened
a store on his plantation in order to supply the tenants
on his land. That was the case, for instance, with
the Reid brothers, Frank and Dow, who live in
Macon County, Alabama, about twelve miles from
Tuskegee at a little place called Dawkins. The father
of these young men had for a long time leased and
worked a large plantation of some 1,100 acres. He

was enabled to send his sons to school at Tuskegee
and, after their return from school, they leased 480
acres more and subsequently added to that by purchase
605 acres, making a total of 2,185 acres of
land under their control. A larger portion of this
land they sublet to tenants and, as the necessities of
the community they had established manifested
themselves, they established successfully a store,
a cotton-gin, a blacksmith shop, and a grist-mill.

Frequently, in the early days some young coloured
man who had worked in a restaurant or as a waiter
in a hotel, after saving a little money, would start a
business for himself in a small way. Gradually he
would accumulate more capital and enlarge his
business. That was the case of my friend, John S.
Trower, of Germantown, Philadelphia, who is now
one of the leading caterers in the city of Philadelphia,
and, also, with William E. Gross, proprietor of the
Gross Catering Company, of 219 W. I34th Street,
New York. In Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore,
and Washington, there are a number of noted
Negro caterers who began life in the small way I
have described.

Among the earlier caterers of New York was Peter
Van Dyke, who owned a place at 130 Wooster Street.
He became wealthy and left his children and
grandchildren in good circumstances. Another of
these early caterers was Boston Crummell, father of
the late Alexander Crummell, one of the first Africans

to be ordained as a priest by the Episcopal Church.
Boston Crummell was born in West Africa and
brought to America when he was a child. It is an
interesting fact that his son, Alexander Crummell,
after having studied in Queen's College, Cambridge,
England, went to Africa, as one of the first coloured
missionaries sent out from this country to Liberia.

Thomas Downing, who kept the once famous
"Downing Oyster House," was one of the early
Negro caterers of New York. His son, George T.
Downing, built the Sea-Girt House at Newport,
Rhode Island, and was afterward a caterer in Washington,
where he became a friend of Charles Sumner,
Wendell Phillips, Henry Wilson, John Andrews,
and others of the anti-slavery party of that time.

Charles H. Smiley, who was born at St. Catherine's,
Canada, and was at one time one of the leading caterers
of Chicago, began his life in Chicago as a janitor,
but was employed during his spare time as a waiter
at dinners and parties. Francis J. Moultry, who
in 1909 was still conducting a large catering establishment
at Yonkers, New York, got his training and
accumulated his capital for his business career as a
waiter in New York City. Mr. Moultry was at that
time one of the large taxpayers of his city. He
owned stock in several of the Yonkers banks and is
proprietor of what is or was a few years ago the largest
apartment house in Yonkers. Mr. Moultry owned
valuable reality in various portions of the city and

has more than once been on the bond of more than
one of the county officers.

The training which many of the coloured servants
received, both before and after emancipation, gave
them a certain capital in the way of experience with
which to go into business on their own account.
Perhaps the most successful coloured hotel-keeper
in the United States has been E. C. Berry of Athens,
Ohio. "Hotel Berry," as I learned when I
visited Ohio, has had an almost national reputation.
Mr. Berry was one of the most respected
citizens of the town in which he lives and so successful
has he been in conducting his hotel that it
is regarded by the citizens as one of the institutions
of the town.

Mr. Berry was born in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1854.
When he was two years old he was taken by his
parents to the little town of Albany, which is about
seven miles below Athens. At that time, there were
a number of lines of the Underground Railway,
which, starting at different points on the Ohio River,
passed through Albany and Athens. At Albany
there was early established what was known as the
Enterprise Academy for coloured children, and it
was at this Academy that Mr. Berry obtained his
schooling. He first came to Athens when he was
sixteen years old, and went to work in a brick-yard
at the small sum of fifty cents per day, which
was soon increased to one dollar and twenty-five

cents. With the money that he earned in this
way he helped to support the members of his family,
who were still living in Albany. Eventually he
secured employment in Athens in a restaurant, and
it was the training he received there that enabled him
later on to start a little place of his own.

Mr. Berry was successful in business from the first,
and, finally, after giving the matter due consideration
and talking it over with friends in the city, he
made up his mind to open a hotel. It was an entirely
new thing at that time to see a coloured man in the
hotel business in that part of the country, and Mr.
Berry knew that he was going to meet with opposition
on account of his race. He determined to
overcome this prejudice by making his hotel more
comfortable than any other in the city, and by giving
his guests more for their money than they were able
to get anywhere else, not only in the city but in the
state. One thing I remember which impressed
me as indicating the care and thoughtful atttention
which Mr. Berry gave to his guests was the fact
that at night, after his guests had fallen asleep, he
made it a practice to go to their rooms and gather up
their clothes and take them to his wife, who would
repair rents, add buttons where they were lacking,
and press the garments, after which Mr. Berry would
replace them. Mr. Berry's hotel, I may add, is said
by Mr. Elbert Hubbard, the lecturer, who has had
an opportunity to test the quality of a large number

of hotels in different parts of this country, to be one
of the best in the United States.

There are a number of other successful hotel men
among the members of my race of whom I have made
the acquaintance in different parts of the country.
Joseph W. Lee, who, until he died a few years ago,
kept the very popular and successful hotel at Squantum,
a summer resort just outside of Boston, was one
of these.

Negroes both before the War and after, entered
very easily into the barber business, and there is no
business, I may add, in which the Negro has met
more competition from foreign immigrants. In
many cities, both North and South, the Negro barber's
trade is almost wholly confined, at the present
time, to members of his own race. It is interesting
to observe however, that this has in no way lessened
the number of Negro barber shops, and the fact is an
indication of the increasing economic welfare of the
masses of the Negro people. In spite of the competition
which I have mentioned, some of the largest
and best conducted barber shops in the United States
are carried on by Negroes.

As an illustration, I might mention the shop of
George A. Myers, of Cleveland, Ohio, whose place of
business is fitted up, not only with all conveniences
that you will find in other first-class shops, but also
with some that you will not find there. For instance,
when I was last in his shop, he had devised an

arrangement by which a customer could be connected
at once by telephone with any one he wished to
speak to, and that without leaving his chair. He
has also provided a young woman stenographer, to
whom patrons can dictate business letters if they
desire, without interrupting the work of the barber.

Another business in which the Negro early found
an opportunity to be of service to his people is that
of undertaking. As far as they were able, the Negro
people have always tried to surround the great
mystery of death with appropriate and impressive
ceremonies. One of the principal features of the
Negro secret organisations has been the care for the
sick and the burial of the dead. The demand that
these organisations sought to meet has created a
business opportunity, and Negro business men have
largely taken advantage of it.

One of the first men to perceive the opportunity
for coloured business men in this direction was Elijah
Cook, a Negro undertaker of Montgomery, formerly
a member of the State Legislature of Alabama. Mr.
Cook was born a slave in Alabama. He was several
times sold on the auction block during slavery, and
at one of these sales he was separated from his
brother, of whom he has never since heard. He
was taught the carpenter's trade, however, and, after
he had served his apprenticeship, was permitted to
hire his time for $25 per month. When the Civil
War broke out, Mr. Cook still paid his master's

wife the stipulated sum per month and continued
to do so faithfully until he was emancipated. He
was a leader in founding the first coloured school in
Montgomery, which was held in a basement,
under a dilapidated church. He himself was one
of the first scholars and, after working hard all day,
was a faithful attendant of the night school.

Right after the War there was no coloured undertaker
in Montgomery and frequently the corpses of
the coloured people were hauled to the cemetery
in rough wagons. Mr. Cook seeing this, bought
a hearse and went into the undertaking business
for himself. He accumulated a small fortune
during the twenty years or more that he was in
business, and became one of the respected citizens
of Montgomery.

James C. Thomas, who, at the time I write, is said
to be the richest man of African descent in New
York, made a large part of his fortune in the undertaking
business. Mr. Thomas came originally from
Harrisburg, Texas, where he was born in 1864.
In 1881, while he was employed by a steamer plying
between New Orleans, Mexico, and Cuba, yellow
fever broke out in New Orleans. The boat he was
on came to New York to escape the quarantine.
It was thus, quite by accident, that Mr. Thomas
became a New Yorker.

There have been Negro undertakers in New York,
I have been informed, for over 150 years. There were

several Negro undertakers in New York and Brooklyn,
at the time Mr. Thomas went into business, but
the larger part of the trade, which should have come
to the coloured undertakers, went to white men.
In 1909, Mr. Thomas had one of the largest businesses
of any undertaker, white or black, in the city of
New York. He was, in addition, the owner of a
number of valuable properties in New York City
and owned stock in the Chelsea National Bank of
New York.

I shall have occasion to make mention, in another
connection, of the success the Negro has had as a
banker, real estate dealer, and as a druggist, and in
some other forms of business. As illustrating,
however, the variety of enterprises into which the
Negro had entered, I might mention the fact that one
of the best conducted grocery stores in the city of
Montgomery is run by Victor H. Tulane, who started
in business in 1893 in a little building, twelve by
twenty in size, with no experience and a capital of
$90. Mr. Tulane, in 1909, was doing a business of
forty thousand dollars a year. He has been for a
number of years one of the trustees of the Tuskegee
Normal and Industrial Institute.

During my visit of observation and study in the
State of Mississippi in the fall of 1908, I found that
the largest book-store and, I was told, the only one
at that time in the city of Greenville, Mississippi, was
conducted by a coloured man, Granville Carter.

Mr. Carter told me that at one time there had been
as many as five book-stores in the town but he had
succeeded, by close attention to business and offering
his books at prices more favourable than his rivals,
in outliving them all, until at the time I was there,
his was the only book-store in the town. He told
me that he handled the entire book business of
the county and that he sold books in several of the
adjoining counties. He regularly employs four
helpers to assist him in the business and at Christmas
time he has been compelled to increase this number
to ten.

In Jackson, Mississippi, H. K. Rischer had had
for nearly twenty years, at the time of my visit,
a practical monopoly of the bakery business. Mr.
Rischer's bakery was one of the first concerns of its
kind to be established in Jackson. His business,
which amounts to about $30,000 a year, gives employment
to twelve persons and was first established in
1881.

While it is true, as I have already pointed out, that
the disposition of the Negro people to turn their
attention more and more to practical matters and
to business manifested itself at about the same time
that I came to Alabama and has grown with the
increasing interest in industrial education, it is
likewise true that only since 1897 or 1898 has
there been any marked and rapid increase in the
amount of business conducted by coloured people.

When the National Negro Business League met in
Boston, 1900, there were but two Negro banks in the
United States; at the present time there are nearly,
if not quite, fifty such institutions.

In order to illustrate the improvement of the general
mass of the coloured people in the South during
the ten years since 1899, I shall take as an example
the city of Jackson, Mississippi, where in the summer
of 1898, a special study was made of the economic
condition of the people. Up to 1896, Negroes who
represented at that time more than half of the population,
were not reckoned in the business life of the
town. Few of them owned property of any kind.
At the present time, the Negro population is less than
half of the total population of the town, and the
8,000 Negroes who make their homes there, own, it
is estimated, one-third of the area of the town,
although this area represents but one-eleventh of the
value of the city property. Negroes own, for instance,
according to the tax records of the city, $581,580
worth of property. Over one-third of the 566
Negroes on the tax books were assessed for more than
$1,000 and six of them for more than $5,000. The
largest single assessment amounted to $23,800.

A careful investigation brought to light the fact
that about one-half the Negro families of that town
own their own homes, while more than two-thirds
of the houses in which the Negroes live are in the
possession of their own race. Next to the possession

of property, the amount of money deposited in banks
by Negroes is an evidence of their economic condition.
In speaking of this matter during the summer of
1908, the president of one of the prominent white
banks said that Negroes had just begun to save their
money during the last ten or twelve years. He was
in a position to know, for Negroes had deposited in
his bank more than $25,000. Altogether Negro savings
in Jackson banks amounted, at the time, to
something over $200,000, more than one-third of
which was in the hands of the Negro banks.

Perhaps the most successful Negro business man
in Jackson, at that time, was Dr. S. D. Redmond.
Dr. Redmond received his medical training at the
Illinois Medical College and the Harvard Medical College.
When he settled in Jackson ten years ago he
had practically nothing. At the time this is written he
is president of the American Trust and Savings bank,
the oldest of the Negro banks in Jackson and a
stockholder in three banks controlled by the white
people, as well as in the electric power and light company
which lights the city streets. He owns two
drug-stores, one of which is situated on the chief
business street of the town. He receives rent from
more than one hundred houses.

There were in 1908 more than one hundred business
enterprises conducted by Negroes in Jackson.
Among them were the two banks already mentioned,
four drug-stores, two undertaking companies, two

real estate companies, Mr. Rischer's bakery, four
shoemaking and repair shops, one of these doing the
largest business of its kind in the town. One millinery
shop, besides numerous stores, barber shops, and
other smaller business concerns of various kinds.
Forty-five of these, including five contracting firms,
did something like $380,000 worth of business during
the year 1907–1908, and gave employment to two
hundred and thirty persons.

It used to be said, before much was known about
Africa, that the condition of the African people had
remained the same in all parts of Africa through
thousands of years and nothing furnished so convincing
a proof of the inability of the African to
improve as the fact that during all this time he has
not changed. I have already suggested, in what I
have written, that an enormous change has taken
place in the condition, in the feeling and in the
ambitions of the coloured people in this country,
since they obtained their freedom a comparatively
few years ago.

The Negro came out of slavery with a feeling that
work was the symbol of degradation. In nearly all
the schools conducted by Negroes in the South at the
present time, Negro children are learning to work.
The Negro came out of slavery with almost no capital
except the hard discipline and training he had
received as a slave. In the years since that time,
he has not only become a large land-owner, and, to

a large extent, the owner of his own home, but he has
become a banker and a business man. He came out
of slavery with the idea that somehow or other the
Government, which freed him, was going to support
and protect him, and that the great hope of his race
was in politics and in the ballot. In the last decade
the Negro has settled down to the task of building
his own fortune and of gaining through thrift,
through industry, and through business success that
which he has been denied in other directions.

Many of the men to whom I have referred in this
chapter, if I had time to relate their histories, would
illustrate in their own lives the changes to which I
refer. For instance, L. K. Attwood, the president of
the Southern Bank, the second Negro bank in
Jackson, Mississippi, was born a slave in Wilcox
County, Alabama, about 150 miles from Tuskegee,
in 1851. He was sold on the block when he
was eighteen months old. His mother bought
him for $300 and moved with him to Ohio.
In 1874, he graduated from Lincoln University,
Pennsylvania. Two years later he was admitted
to the bar in Mississippi. He served two terms
as a member of the Mississippi Legislature
from Hinds County, and has held the positions of
United States Commissioner and United States
Deputy Revenue Collector for the Louisiana and
Mississippi districts. He is one of a group of professional
coloured men who have found that business

pays better than politics. In addition to his connection
with the bank, Mr. Attwood has been actively
identified with a number of other Negro enterprises
in the town. He has amassed considerable property
and is generally respected as a shrewd and aggressive
business man among the people of his community.

While I am on this subject, I should, perhaps, mention
one other notable example of the business men
who have found a larger opportunity in business than
they did in politics. C. F. Johnson, of Mobile, Alabama,
Secretary and General Manager of the Union
Mutual Aid Association, was for many years Secretary
of the Republican State Executive Committee
of Alabama. He was for a time, also, secretary to the
Collector of Customs at the port of Mobile, but
when Mr. Cleveland was elected President he gave
up that position and took the position as elevator man
instead. One day after he had been there for some
time the new collector, who had been appointed by
Mr. Cleveland, noticed him there and, thinking the
time had come to complete his political house-cleaning,
dismissed him from that position. Because the
new man whom the Collector had to take his place
did not do the work satisfactorily, he asked Mr. Johnson
to return. Johnson said he would come back
if he could have the appointment for four years, but
the Collector would not agree to that, so Johnson
went permanently out of office and into business.
He was largely responsible for the organisation of the

company of which he has been general manager and
is now one of the wealthiest coloured men in the
State of Alabama.

So far as I have been able to learn, no coloured
man has ever been classed among the millionaires,
though several men have had the reputation of being
in that class.

A few years ago there was a coloured man by the
name of Wiley Jones in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, who
owned a street railway, a stable of trotting horses,
and private trotting park. When he died it was
learned for the first time that he had investments in
real estate in a number of large Western cities, but
his estate did not reach, as I remember, more than
one hundred thousand dollars. John McKee, of
Philadelphia, was reputed to be a millionaire, but his
estate in Philadelphia, when he died, amounted to
but $342,832. In addition to this he owned land in
Atlantic County, New Jersey, which was assessed at
$20,650. He also owned a tract of coal and mineral
land in Kentucky, which was assessed at $70,000,
which he hoped would eventually be of great value.
Colonel McKee gave directions in his will that the
rents and incomes of his estate should accumulate
until the death of all his children and grandchildren.
It was to be used to establish a college for the education
of fatherless boys, white and coloured.

Perhaps the nearest approach to a coloured millionaire
was Thorny Lafon, of New Orleans, who died

December 23, 1893, leaving an estate appraised at
$413,000, the bulk of which was divided among the
various charities of the city of New Orleans. I
understand, however, that Mr. Lafon had disposed
of a considerable portion of his estate in order to
found various charities before his death.

Mr. Lafon was born in New Orleans, December
28, 1810, of free Negro parents. He began life as a
school-teacher; then he ran for a time a small drygoods
store on Orleans Street. As he accumulated a
little money he began loaning it out at advantageous
rates of interest, and went from that into land speculations,
which made him very wealthy. Before he died
he became much attached to the late Archbishop
Janssens and, under his direction, as I understand,
began disposing of his fortune for philanthropic purposes.
Before his death he had established an asylum
for orphan boys called Lafon Asylum, and after his
death he bequeathed the sum of $2,000 in cash and
the revenue amounting to $275 per month of a large
property at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets.

Other legacies were in favor of the Lafon Old
Folks' Home, previously established, the Charity
Hospital, of New Orleans, the several universities
for coloured children in New Orleans and a number
of charities in charge of the Catholic Church.

In this benevolent way the two largest fortunes
which members of my race have yet accumulated
were dispersed.

CHAPTER IX
THE NEGRO BANK AND THE MORAL UPLIFT

IN the year 1888, the statement was made upon
the floor of the United States Senate that, with
all the progress it had made in other directions,
the Negro race had not a single bank to its credit.
At the time this statement was made it was intimated
that the Negro race never would support a bank;
that, in short, the bank was the limit of the progress
of the Negro in the direction of business.

Twenty years later, in 1908, no less than fifty-five
Negro banks, large and small, had been started
in the United States, and of these forty-seven were
then in operation. There were eleven in Mississippi,
ten in Virginia, five in Oklahoma, four in
Georgia, four in Tennessee, four in North Carolina,
four in Texas, two in Alabama, one in Arkansas,
one in Pennsylvania, and one in Illinois.

These facts illustrate how difficult it is, in the
case of a race which is coming for the first time
into contact with new conditions or new opportunities,
to predict from what it has done in the past
what it is likely to do in the future.

In the course of my travels about the country, for

example, I am constantly meeting men who are
introduced to me as "the first Negro who ever did"
this thing or that thing. Sometimes the claims
made for these men are more modest. In such cases I
am likely to hear not that such a man is the first
and only Negro who ever achieved the particular distinction
mentioned, but that he is the first Negro
in that particular state or community who has
done so. As I have said, I meet hundreds of these
men every year, and the number of them indicates to
my mind that the Negro in America is making great
progress. I mean that, as a race, and with reference
to what they have done in the past, Negroes
are probably doing more new things every year than
can be said of any other race with the exception of
the Japanese.

Negro banks are of various kinds and descriptions.
Some of them, like the Bank of Mound Bayou,
started by Charles Banks, March 8, 1904, are doing
a regular commercial business. This bank is the
centre of the cotton-raising community, and, during
the cotton season, its clearings, through its correspondents
and through other banks, have amounted
to something over $200,000 per month. It had, in
1908, a paid in capital of $25,000 and resources
amounting to $100,000. Other institutions, like the
One Cent Savings Bank of Nashville, Tennessee,
started in 1903 by J. C. Napier, are savings banks,
pure and simple. Mr. Napier is one of the substantial

business men of Nashville, Tennessee. He
has been four times elected a member of the City
Council, and is the owner of a handsome three-story
brick building located on one of the best
streets of that city, containing the offices of the bank,
a spacious hall, and a number of other offices. This
building is known as the Napier Court.

Quite as interesting as these banks, which have
been started on the models of similar institutions
conducted by white men, are some of the smaller
and more obscure savings and loan associations,
which have been started, frequently by untrained
men, in order to meet the necessities of peculiar
and local conditions. I have in mind such a mutual
banking association as was started by fifteen Negro
farmers in the neighbourhood of Courtland, Virginia,
the home of Nat Turner, and the scene of the
Northampton insurrection of 1831. This association
was started under the leadership of Reverend
O. C. Jenkins, and was formed primarily to
enable the coloured farmers in that part of the
country to assist each other in buying land and in
carrying on their farming operations. I mention
this organisation not because of its success but
because it illustrates the sort of experiments that
men, untrained in business, are making in all parts
of the South in order to improve their condition and
lift themselves up to a higher plane of living.

Before there were any banks owned by Negroes

there was the Freedmen's Bank, an institution for
Negroes, established in Washington, District of
Columbia, under the auspices of the Freedmen's
Bureau. No work was ever undertaken for the
benefit of the Freedmen more laudable in its purpose
or more designed to assist a people who had
just come out of slavery to get on their feet. From
1866, when this bank was started, to 1874, when it
failed, the total amount of deposits had increased
from $305,167 to $55,000,000, and when the bank
closed its doors there was due to depositors
$3,013,670. The number of depositors to whom
this money was due was 61,131. Up to March,
1896, $1,722,548 had been re-paid to these depositors.
There still remains in the hands of the Government
$30,476.[1]

This bank had agents all over the South, and
coloured people were induced to deposit their earnings
with it in the belief that the institution was
under the care and protection of the United States
Government. When they found that they had lost,
or been swindled out of all their little savings, they
lost faith in savings banks, and it was a long time
after this before it was possible to mention a savings
bank for Negroes without some reference being
made to the disaster of the Freedman's Bank.
The effect of this disaster was the more far-reaching

because of the wide extent of territory which
the Freedmen's Bank covered through its agencies.

In March, 1888, the Legislature of Virginia
granted a charter for a savings bank to the Grand
Fountain of the United Order of the True Reformers.
This bank was opened for business April 3, 1889,
and received deposits to the amount of $1,268.69
the first day. This was the origin of the oldest
and best established Negro bank in the United
States. It is said that when application was made
to the Virginia Legislature for a charter for this
institution the matter was not treated seriously.
Members of the Legislature looked upon a Negro
bank as a joke, and granted the charter in a spirit
of fun, never expecting to see a real Negro savings
institution in operation in Virginia.

Some years ago W. P. Burrell, secretary of the
True Reformers, in a report made at the Hampton
Negro Conference, related an interesting anecdote
in regard to the circumstances under which this
bank was started. "It might be interesting to
know," said Mr. Burrell, "that this bank, founded
by William W. Browne, had its origin in a lynching
which occurred in Charlotte County, at a point
called Drake's Branch. A branch of the organisation
of True Reformers had been founded at Mossingford
and the fees of the members, amounting to
nearly $100, had been deposited in the safe of a white
man, who had thus an opportunity to see that the

Negroes of the county had some money, and that
they were organising for some purpose. He decided
that this was an unwise thing, and so determined
to break up the organisation. This fact was
reported to Mr. Browne. By a personal visit to
the place, he succeeded in saving the organisation
and, at the same time, had his attention called to the
need of a coloured bank, where coloured people
could carry on their own business. The idea
of a bank was first advanced by a countryman
named W. E. Grant, and immediately adopted by
Mr. Browne. Thus it came to pass that, because of
an unpleasant race feeling in Charlotte County,
Virginia, the oldest incorporated Negro bank came
into existence."

In the report to which I have referred, Mr.
Burrell calls attention to the fact that, with the exception
of the True Reformers' and the Nickel Savings
Bank, which was started in Richmond, Virginia,
in 1896, all the banks then existing in Virginia had
been started since the passage of the new suffrage
laws requiring Negro voters in Virginia to be property
owners, or to be educated, or to be war veterans.

In the early history of the coloured banks of Virginia
it has been told me that considerable difficulty
was experienced because these institutions
were not connected directly with the Clearing House.
The result was, it is said, that the "coloured"
depositors were unwilling to open accounts in

"coloured" banks, since no means existed by which
an exchange of checks among the "coloured" and
"white" banks could take place, and the "white"
banks refused to accept these checks because they
could not "clear" them in the ordinary way. This
policy was broken up, however, when the white
merchants, who had accepted checks upon the
Negro banks, threatened to withdraw their deposits
unless the "white" banks made some arrangements
by which checks on the "coloured" banks
could be cashed. This led, finally, to the voluntary
offer of one of the National Banks to act as
clearing-house agents. At the present time all the
"coloured" banks clear through some member of the
Clearing House, for which privilege they pay a small
annual tax.

Since it was started, the capital of the True
Reformers' Bank has been increased from $4,000
to $100,000, all of which has been paid in. In
addition to this, the bank had, on February 5, 1909,
a surplus of $35,000, and undivided profits to the
amount of $30,220. Since it was organised in 1881
it has held on deposit more than ten million of dollars,
for the most part money collected by the True
Reformers' Association from its members, and has
handled a sum amounting to over eighteen million
dollars, derived largely from the same sources.

After emancipation the masses of the Freedmen
did not turn immediately to the getting of property

and land. The first property acquired by the
former slaves was their churches. Of the twenty-six
thousand churches and the forty million dollars'
worth of property, which these churches represent,
the larger part was contributed by men and
women who had little or no property of their own.
It was the women who toiled over the washtub,
and the men who worked by the day, from
whose earnings for the most part this property
was accumulated.

In conversation, some time ago, with a Southern
white man, who is a trustee of Tuskegee Institute,
he told me that a woman who had worked for a
number of years in his house as a servant, contributed,
year after year, half of her earnings to the
support of the church to which she belonged. This
man had reason to know the facts, since he was
frequently called on to assist in the support of the
same church, and in this way had come to know
something definite about its financial affairs.

After the church, the thing that has appealed
most directly to the masses of the people, has been
the need of making provision for sickness, death and
burial. This is the origin of the Negro benevolent
and fraternal societies, of which there is a large
number at the present time in the United States.
It was out of these benevolent societies that the first
Negro banks sprang. The names of a number of
these banks indicate their origin: for instance, the

True Reformers' Bank, of Richmond, Virginia;
the St. Luke's Penny Savings Bank, of the same
city; the Bank of the Grand United Order of the
Galilean Fishermen, of Hampton, Virginia; the
Knights of Honour Savings Bank, of Greenville,
Mississippi; and the Bank of the Sons and Daughters
of Peace, of Newport News, Virginia. All of
these banks and a number of others first came into
existence as the repositories for funds of fraternal
organisations.

The histories of some of these banks illustrate
the manner in which the Negro has succeeded in
getting hold of corporate methods of doing business
and applying them to his needs. Some time
in the neighbourhood of 1894 a young man by the
name of L. S. Reed came to Savannah, Georgia,
from Atlanta, as the agent of an industrial insurance
company, conducted by white men, with an office
in New York City. He was more than usually
successful in selling this insurance and, because of
his ability in dealing in a business way with the
coloured people' he was sometimes employed by the
Germania Bank to make collections. At the same
time, he was engaged in selling real estate, in which
he had considerable success. About 1903, taking
advantage of the experience he had had as an agent
for industrial insurance, he organised a company of
his own, called the Union Benefit Association.
Like the other associations this one was intended

to afford protection to its members in case of accident,
sickness, or death. In one respect it differed
from the older type of benefit associations: it did not
confine its membership to a single locality, but
extended its work, through the medium of agents,
all over the state of Georgia and into adjoining
states. At the same time the monthly dues were
not the same for every individual, as they had been
in earlier forms of mutual aid associations. Thus
the monthly dues ranged from twenty cents to two
dollars, and the sick benefits from $1.25 to $8 per
week.

The result of this more elaborate form of insurance
was the accumulation of a considerable amount
of capital, the total income for a single year
amounting to as much as $25,000. Having this
amount of funds in hand, it seemed necessary to
re-invest them in some way. For this purpose, in
1905, a bank known as the Union Savings and
Loan Company was organised. This bank became
the depository for the funds of the benefit association.
The character of this bank is indicated by
the fact that it had, at the beginning, 450 stockholders,
and a large part of its loans were made to
its own stockholders.

A few years later the same people, under the
leadership of Mr. Reed, organised the Savannah
Mutual & Fire Insurance Co. This Company
was organised at the suggestion of Professor

D. C. Suggs, of the Georgia State Industrial College.
Professor Suggs is a large property owner in Greensboro,
North Carolina. He has, I understand, a
street named after him in that city upon which he
owns most of the houses. He had become familiar,
while in Greensboro, with the fire and insurance
business, and saw an opportunity for coloured
people succeeding in that line in Savannah.

There is, or was in 1908, another small bank
in Savannah which has an interesting history. It
is known as the Afro-American Union Savings,
Loan & Trust Co. This company was organised
by Reverend William Gray and has received
most of its support from the members of his own
congregation. Reverend William Gray was a
coachman who turned preacher. He started a little
church in a shanty on Hartridge, between Broad
and Price streets, with only eleven members. He
has now one of the largest congregations in the
city, and his church, a brick and frame structure,
cost between fifteen and twenty thousand dollars.

After he became a preacher, Mr. Gray found out
that he needed education. After thinking the
matter over he stated the facts to his congregation,
and told them that he had decided to attend the
Georgia State Industrial College at Thunderbolt,
just outside Savannah. His congregation were
very proud of their minister, and very proud that
he had determined to go to college, so proud, in fact,

that they not only gave their support to his resoultion,
but decided to pay his expenses while he was
there. Mr. Gray was already a mature man when
he started to get his education, but he was a man of
sound understanding, of great industry, and with
considerable administrative ability. He managed,
in some way, to keep up his church work and stick
to his studies until he finally graduated. It is said
of him in Savannah that he has always dealt fairly
and squarely with his people, both in his church
and in business, and, as the man who explained the
circumstances of his success to me said: "He owes
this reputation to the fact that he made the welfare
of his people his burden."

The first and most successful Negro bank in
Savannah in 1908 was the Wage Earners' Loan &
Investment Co. This company was started in
1900. It has an authorised capital of $50,000, of
which, however, only $12,663.40 was paid in up to
1908. This company was started by a number of
well-to-do business men and some others, successful
in other ways, in Savannah. The president, L. E.
Williams, was formerly a railway mail-clerk. The
vice-president, W. R. Fields, was an undertaker.
The secretary-treasurer, Walter Scott, who graduated
fromTuskegee Institute in 1905, was a dry goods
merchant, One of the directors of the company, John
-H. Deveaux, was collector of customs for the port of
Savannah. Another, Sol. C. Johnson, was editor

of the Savannah Tribune. Among the other directors
were L. M. Pollard, a mail-clerk, R. B. Brooks,
a dealer in antique furniture, and J. H. Bugg,
a physician.

In the statement issued by this company October
5, 1908, it is said that the bank began business in
IQOO with $102. Its combined assets, which included
$47,836.36 in deposits, a reserve fund, and undivided
profits in the sum of $8,014.22, amounted in 1908
to $70,553.58. It is also stated that the paid up
stock has earned 12, per cent., dividends for six consecutive
years.

A large part of the business of this bank, like
that of most other of the Negro banks, has been to
assist coloured people in buying homes. In order
to encourage the accumulation of money to buy
property, the bank agreed to accept its own stock as
cash in payment for real estate. In this way, it was
constantly selling and buying its own stock, in order
to encourage the investment of money in homes.

While, perhaps, the majority of the banks in the
Southern states are doing business largely upon
capital which has been accumulated by the fraternal
societies and insurance companies, a bank was
established in Chicago, Illinois, in 1908, which has
grown out of a real estate business conducted very
largely among coloured people. The Commerical
Chronicle of November, 1908, records the completion
of the handsome new office building by Jesse

Binga, 3633 State Street, "where he will conduct
his real estate and loan business, and in addition
he will shortly open a bank at the same place."
This is known as the Jesse Binga Bank, and purports
to do a commercial and savings banking business.
Mr. Binga is one of the nine or ten coloured
real estate dealers in Chicago, and one of the four
or five who have been doing, during the past ten
years, an extensive business among the increasing
Negro population in Chicago.

A careful study of the property owned by Negroes
in Chicago, in the period previous to 1902, has shown
that at that date Negroes owned, according to its
assessed valuation, property to the amount of
$1,960,105. More than five-sixths of this property
was in the hands of 604 individuals, of whom
three owned real estate valued at more than $50,000
each.[2] A more recent investigation made by Mr.
R. R. Wright, Jr., indicates that, during the past
decade, Negroes have been purchasing property in
Chicago at a more rapid rate than at any previous
time. He estimates the present value of the real
estate held by coloured people in Chicago to be
$4,000,000.

The Negro bank with the most interesting history
of any of these yet established is that known
as the Alabama Penny Savings & Loan Co., which
first opened its doors on October 15, 1890, and

received on that day $555. This sum, added to the
$3,000 already paid in from the sale of stock, constituted
the capital upon which this important and
helpful institution began business.

In February, 1909, this bank had a paid-in capital
of $25,000, with a surplus of $6,000, and deposits
to the amount of $193,000. It is the owner of a
handsome three-story brick building, valued at
$25,000, and of real estate to the amount of $52,000.

This bank is important not merely from the
success it has made, but because of the motives that
inspired its organisation. Its workings clearly illustrate
the deep and far-reaching influence that these
savings institutions exercise upon the social conditions
and the moral life of the Negro people.

Birmingham is the centre of a large labouring
population. Negroes are employed very largely in
the extended mining region, of which Birmingham
is the centre, and in the rolling-mills by which it is
surrounded. These men earn good wages, but the
temptations of the city are very great. It is therefore
extremely important that something should be
done there to encourage them in the practice of habits
of thrift and industry. The first man to clearly
perceive this was Reverend W. R. Pettiford, who
came to Birmingham in 1883, as pastor of the Sixteenth
Street Coloured Baptist Church. It was the
perception of this need that suggested to him the
importance of establishing at Birmingham a Negro

bank. In 1900, at the first meeting of the National
Negro Business League in Boston, Mr. Pettiford
told the story of this bank:

Shortly after this occurrence, Mr. W. W. Browne,
who was at that time president of the True Reformers'
Bank at Richmond, Virginia, visited Birmingham.
Mr. Browne was an old acquaintance of Mr.
Pettiford, and they discussed the project of forming
a bank in Birmingham, similar to the one in
Richmond. It was Mr. Browne's idea that the
coloured people in Birmingham should form a
branch bank of the one in Richmond, but, after

talking it over, it was decided to start in Birmingham
an independent institution. At the time the
movement to start this bank was begun, the True
Reformers' Bank, although historically not the first
bank in the United States, was the only one then in
existence. It seemed doubtful whether a Negro
bank could be started and maintained without the
advantage of a large fund collected by a fraternal
organisation, and without the confidence of a large
number of people to back it, such as it would
have if started by a fraternal organisation instead
of by individuals. But Mr. Pettiford and his
associates in Birmingham decided to try the
experiment.

It took about three months' agitation to get enough
sentiment back of the project to give any assurance
of success. After the projectors had succeeded
in getting a small capital of $3,000 together it was
necessary for the president and cashier to study
bookkeeping under a special teacher in order to
prepare themselves for the novel business experiment
which they proposed to undertake. After
they had collected all their resources in cash and
had taken an inventory of their combined business
knowledge the sum did not amount to very much.
Mr. Pettiford, who was a minister, had had some
business experience as Financial Agent of Selma
University, of Selma, Alabama. The man who was
to act as cashier, a graduate of Talladega College,

had been the first coloured school-teacher of Birmingham,
and was at this time a successful grocer.
The vice-president had been a bartender, but he
was a man who had a reputation for honesty and
had the confidence of the coloured population
generally.

The necessities of the business, however, were
soon to increase the business knowledge of the directors
of the new bank, and that in directions in which
very little was to be learned from books. They
found that, in starting a Negro bank on a purely
business basis, they had a task before them quite
different from that which confronts the average
white banker. They had to make known to the
coloured people what the value and use of a bank
was; they had to instruct them in saving, and show
them, later on, how to make investments with the
money they had saved. In order to accomplish this
the officers of the bank began a campaign of education.
It was here that the advantage of having
a preacher attached to a Negro business organisation
became apparent. In order to instruct the
coloured people as to the importance of saving their
money and depositing it in a bank, it was necessary
to preach to them the necessity of securing homes
of their own, and of providing for the education
of their children. In the course of their campaign,
Mr. Pettiford and his associates distributed a vast
number of circulars intended to educate the masses

of the people on the subject of banking. They made
repeated addresses in all the coloured churches in
the city and in the suburbs, and they were successful
in arousing interest.

After the meeting of the Business League in Boston,
in 1900, Mr. Pettiford made it a custom to repeat
the story of his bank to members of the League
every year. I am convinced that the story of that
one bank has done more than any other one thing
to call into existence the fifty and more banks started
since 1900.

In spite of the fact that Mr. Pettiford told his
story so frequently, it was always interesting because
he invariably suceeded in bringing out in his account
some new fact or point of view. For instance,
at the meeting of the Business League in New York,
in 1905, he emphasised the fact that one of the considerations
which led him and his associates to
establish this bank was that it might serve to prevent
the squandering not merely of wages but the
little accumulation of property that the people in
the Birmingham district had succeeded in making.

"During my pastorate in Birmingham," he said,
"there was a family who had two children. Both
of the parents died and the property left to the children
was squandered. The estate was estimated
at $10,000. The administrator sold to the boy,
the elder of the two children, who inherited the
property, old horses and carriages for his interest

in the estate. To make a bond of $20,000, as was
necessary in this case, was impossible for any
coloured man at that time. When I perceived our
helplessness to aid orphan children in saving the
property earned by their parents, I saw that if we
had a strong financial institution which could make
bonds and save the property for the benefit of the
heirs to whom it was left, it would greatly help the
race."

As an indication of the progress which the bank
had made, Mr. Pettiford said:

One of the things which has helped to make the
Alabama Penny Savings and Loan Co. and the
other Negro banks succeed, under conditions and
difficulties which banks of white people would not
survive, is the advantage that Negro bankers have
in dealing direct with Negro people.

"As a rule," said Mr. Pettiford, in one of his
addresses before the "Business League, "the officers
of banks conducted by persons of the other race,
are not well acquainted with coloured persons who
apply for a loan, and, therefore, are unable, in most

cases, to accommodate them. The coloured banker,
however, knows his own people, and is thus enabled
to extend them credit with discrimination."

"By careful and safe methods of extending credit,"
continued Pettiford, "our bank has assisted many
persons in the establishment of small business
concerns, and such persons after getting on their
feet, have proved to be valuable customers. The
management of our bank has all along recognised the
fact that, in order to strengthen the bank, the constituency
must be strengthened. For this reason,
as well as to do good generally, it has been its constant
aim to lose no opportunity to assist in the
general uplift of the people with whom the bank has
had to deal. In this effort not only has the Negro
benefited, but the general welfare of the community
has been subserved."

I have repeated here, in some detail, the story of
the founding and working of this bank, because it
illustrates better than any incident I have been able
to lay my hands on, how closely the moral interests
of the people are interwoven with their material and
economic welfare. The savings bank teaches to
save, to plan, to look ahead, to build for the future.
It is, in fact, one of the most effective means of
developing those latent forces in the masses of the
people from which the fabric of civilisation is woven.
As I have said at another time in another place:

It happened a few years ago that an afternoon
paper in Birmingham published a report to the
effect that there was a run on the Alabama Penny
Savings Bank, and that it was in a shaky condition.
This report grew out of the fact that it was Christmas
week and an unusually large number of coloured
people were crowding into the bank to draw money
to be used during the holidays. This report spread,
and caused the officials of the bank, as well as its
friends, much uneasiness, and it was, for a time,
very uncertain as to what effect it was likely to have.
In the meantime, a white business man, a large coal
operator in the Birmingham district, heard of the
report, and at once telephoned to the Negro bank
that if, on account of the report which had been
spread, they needed any money with which to pay
depositors the next day, he would be glad to let
them have all the cash that was needed. It turned
out, however, that the good offices of the white
friend were not needed, as there was no run on
the bank.

In recent years I have had the privilege of visiting
nearly every one of the communities where

Negro banks are located, and I can state without
exaggeration that I have not found a single one of
them that did not have the good-will and support
of the white business men of the communities in
which they are located. In fact, in a number of
cases, the white bankers have stated that the starting
of a Negro bank has increased the number of
Negro depositors in the white banks, because of
the general moral uplift which the influence of the
coloured bank had brought about.

CHAPTER X
NEGRO COMMUNITIES AND NEGRO HOMES

IN THE year 1821, one of the best known among
the coloured people of Richmond, Virginia,
was a Baptist preacher by the name of Lott
Gary. This man had an extraordinary history.
He was born a slave, about the year 1780, on a
plantation thirty miles below the city of Richmond.
In 1804, when he was twenty-four years of age,
he was taken to the city of Richmond and employed
as a common labourer in the Shockoe
Tobacco Warehouse.

At this time he could neither read nor write, but
one Sunday, listening to the minister in the white
church which he attended read the words of Christ to
Nicodemus, he was seized with the desire to learn to
read. In some way or other he succeeded in carrying
out the purpose he then formed. He read the
Bible first but, as his mind was opened to new
thoughts and ideas, he began reading every book he
could lay his hands upon. His reading extended,
finally, to the subject of political economy, for it is
related that he was discovered one day reading
Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." In the meantime,

he made himself so valuable in the tobacco warehouse
in which he was employed that he was given
considerable sums at different times and for different
purposes as a reward for his services. By the year
1813 he had acquired money sufficient to buy his
own liberty and that of his two children. The sum
paid was $850.

Shortly after this time the subject of colonisation
had become a subject of earnest discussion among
the coloured people, particularly of Maryland and
Virginia. Lott Cary and a brother preacher by the
name of Collin Teage, who was a saddler and
harness-maker by trade, conceived the idea of going
to Liberia to assist in founding the proposed colony
there. Although Cary was at that time in the possession
of a snug little farm in the vicinity of Richmond
and was earning a handsome salary of $800 a
year, he decided to give them up and go to Africa as
a missionary.

He sailed in company with Teage in January, 1821.
When the first settlement was made, the following
year, at Cape Mesurado, Lott Cary became one of
the most active agents in establishing what was,
in fact, though not in name, the first colony of the
United States. During all the difficulties and discouragements
of the first years of that colony he was,
next to Jehudi Ashmun, the leading spirit of the
colony. In 1826, Cary was elected to the position of
vice-agent and, after the departure of Ashmun,

continued until the time of his death the virtual head
of the colony.

Cary, when asked by a brother-minister how he
could think of quitting a position of so much comfort
and usefulness as he at that time occupied among
the coloured people of Richmond, replied: "I am
an African; and in this country, however meritorious
my conduct, and respectable my character,
I cannot receive the credit due to either. I wish to
go to a country where I shall be estimated by my
merit—not by my complexion; and I feel bound to
labour for my suffering race."

An interesting thing about these efforts at colonisation
of Africa by American Negroes is that when the
colonists reached Africa they found that they were
Africans only on the outside. They were Africans
in colour but not, so far as they could see, in any
other respect. Two hundred and fifty years of
slavery in America had converted them into Americans,
at least in all their feelings and in all their
traditions, just as completely as any other race
which has settled on this continent. Thus Liberia
has become in its laws, in its customs, and in
its aspirations an American colony controlled by
American Negroes.

After the settlement of Liberia and while the desire
for colonisation was still strong among the free
coloured people, Benjamin Lundy, the Quaker
abolitionist, established a colony for Freedmen on the

Samana Peninsula on the island of Haiti in the district
of what is now Santo Domingo. Among the
Freedmen sent out had been slaves of David Patterson,
of Grange County, North Carolina. Mr.
Patterson had been converted to emancipation by
Lundy's preaching and desired to emancipate his
slaves, but was not able to do so until he had provided
for their removal from the state.

In March, 1825, Lundy opened at Baltimore an
Haitian office of emigration. He was assisted in
this work by Richard Allen, the founder of the
African Methodist Episcopal Church. Among the
shipments from Lundy's office at that time was a
colony of eighty-eight slaves, valued at $30,000,
who had been emancipated by their owner, David
Minge, of Charles City, Virginia. These slaves
were sent to Haiti, under an arrangement with the
Philanthropic Society of Haiti, which agreed to
advance money for the expense of their passage
with the understanding, however, that each Freedman
was to repay the Society by working on its
plantation for a certain length of time after his arrival.
After the expiration of his apprenticeship, every
Negro man, who had a family, was to receive fifteen
acres of land.

Lundy continued to send colonists to Haiti under
the arrangements with the Philanthropic Society
for some years. In 1825, within a few weeks
after his return from Haiti, he sent out a hundred

and sixteen emancipated slaves and in 1829 he found
it necessary to visit Haiti a second time. He took
with him a small colony of Freedmen, and upon his
return, announced that he had made arrangements
whereby Negroes who wished to go to Haiti could
obtain leases of plantations with buildings on them
for seven years, the first two years free of charge, and
the remaining five at a moderate rent.

In his newspaper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation,
for November 13, 1829, there appeared an
advertisement addressed "to humane and conscientious
slave-holders," asking for from twenty to sixty
slaves "to remove to and settle in the Republic of
Haiti, where they will be forthwith invested with the
rights of free men and receive constant employment
and liberal wages in a healthy and pleasant section
of the country." The advertisement is signed,
Lundy & Garrison. The outbreak at Northampton
shortly after this seems to have put an end to
this emigration, but remnants of these colonies
speaking an English dialect may be still found
living on the Samana Peninsula.

Benjamin Lundy did not at this time cease his
efforts to find a place of refuge for the Freedmen.
He travelled through Mexico and he visited Canada,
in the interest of this purpose. It was in Canada
that the next settlements of Negro colonies of any
size took place. Slavery had been introduced there
under the French. At the request of the inhabitants

a royal mandate was issued as early as 1689,
permitting the holding of Indians as slaves. When
Canada came under the possession of England in 1760
this form of slavery was continued and Negroes were
introduced from the West Indies. But in February,
1800, the slave Robin, belonging to James Frazier,
was discharged from servitude upon a writ of habeas
corpus. In this case the court followed the ruling
of Lord Mansfield, in the famous Somerset case,
which put an end to slavery in England. The
result of the case of Robin was to put an end to
legalised slavery in Canada in the same way that it
had been done away with in England and in
Massachusetts.

Although slavery was not formally abolished by
law until the act of 1833, and slaves were held to
some extent in Lower Canada until that time, fugitive
slaves had already begun to turn their steps in the
direction of Canada in the early part of the century,
A good many of these slaves found refuge among
the Indians. The famous Mohawk Chief, Captain
Brandt, was a. holder of Negro slaves. He had large
estates on Burlington Bay and Grand River. Many
runaway Negroes took refuge there, were treated
hospitably, and began working and living with the
Indians, often adopting their customs and mode of
life.

After the War of 1812, the soldiers who had served
in that war brought back the news that there was

a country to the north of the United States where
coloured men and women were free and there was
no danger of their being captured and taken back
into slavery. From that time on the North Star
came to have a special and peculiar interest for the
discontented slaves, and many of them turned their
feet northward with no other guide than its light
to direct them.

In 1850, it is said that there were thirty thousand
fugitives from slavery in Canada. After the passage
of the Fugitive Slave Law, this number was greatly
increased. In 1860, the number of coloured people
in Canada was variously estimated at from 60,000
to 75,000, of which it is said 15,000 were free-born.

As a result of this influx of refugees, there grew up
on the outskirts of the cities numerous communities
of coloured people. In 1855, Benjamin Drew, who
had visited these communities in the interest of the
anti-slavery societies, published an account of the
condition of the fugitives of fourteen different settlements.
These were located at St. Catherine's,
Toronto, Hamilton, Galt, London, Queens-Bush,
Chatham, Buxton, Dawn, Windsor, Sandwich,
Amherstburg, Colchester, and Gosfield, all in the
province of Ontario. The most important and
interesting of these colonies were the Dawn Settlement,
at Dresden, the Elgin Settlement at Buxton,
and the Refugees* Home near Windsor.

In 1849, the Reverend William King, a Presbyterian

clergyman from Louisiana, emancipated his
slaves and settled them on the tract which afterward
became known as the "Elgin Settlement." His
company of fifteen Freedmen formed the nucleus of
the community which was called Buxton, in honour
of the noted philanthropist, Thomas Fowell Buxton.
This community grew rapidly and in 1850 it was
incorporated as the Elgin Association. Under the
direction of Mr. King, the plan was carried out
which provided for the parcelling of the land into
farms of fifty acres each, which were to be sold to the
colonists at the government price of $2.50 per acre.
A court of arbitration was established for the adjudication
of disputes, and a day and Sunday school,
supported by a missionary society of the Presbyterian
Church of Canada, were started, in order to give
the colonists the instruction they needed. Twelve
years later, in 1862, when Dr. Samuel G. Howe
visited this community, he found a settlement of
about one thousand men, women, and children, who
owned two thousand acres of land, one-third of
which had been paid for, including the principal
and interest.

"Buxton," said Dr. Howe, in his report, "is
certainly a very interesting place. Sixteen years
ago, it was a wilderness. Now good highways are
laid out in all directions through the forest; and by
their side, standing back thirty-three feet from the
road, are about two hundred cottages, all built after

the same pattern, all looking neat and comfortable.
Around each one is a cleared space, of several acres,
which is well cultivated. The fences are in good
order, the barns seem well filled, and cattle and
horses and pigs and poultry abound. There are
signs of industry and thrift and comfort everywhere;
signs of intemperance, idleness, of want,
nowhere. There is no tavern and no groggery;
but there is a chapel and a schoolhouse."

Reverend Mr. King said: "I consider this settlement
has done as well as a white settlement would
have done under the same circumstances."

The colony known as Refugees' Home, which was
located at Windsor, Ontario, directly opposite
Detroit, was started by Henry Bibb, himself a fugitive
slave. Soon after the passage of the Fugitive Slave
Law of 1850 he suggested the formation of "a society
which should aim to purchase 30,000 acres of Government
land . . . for the homeless refugees from
American slavery to settle upon."

In the first year of the association's existence forty
lots of twenty-five acres each were disposed of, and
arrangements were made for a school and a church.
Mrs. Laura S.Haviland, who opened a day school and
a Sunday school there in the fall of 1852, says: "They
had erected a frame house for school and meeting purposes.
The settlers had built for themselves small
log houses, and cleared from one to five acres each
on their heavily timbered land, and raised corn and

potatoes and other garden vegetables. A few put
in several hundred acres of wheat and were doing
well for the first year."

The oldest of these communities in Canada, and
in many respects the most interesting, was the Dawn
Settlement at Dresden. It was at this settlement that
Josiah Henson, the original "Uncle Torn" in
Harriet Beecher Stowe's story, lived and worked for
many" years. In the year 1842 a convention of
coloured people was called to decide upon the expenditure
of some $1,500 which had been collected in
England by James C. Fuller, a Quaker. Reverend
Hiram Wilson, a missionary, and Josiah Henson
were on the committee to decide in what way this
money should be expended. It was determined, upon
the suggestion of Mr. Henson, to start a "manual
labour school, where the children could be
taught those elements of knowledge which are usually
the occupations of a grammar-school; and where
the boy could be taught, in addition, the practice of
some mechanic art, and the girl could be instructed
in those domestic arts which are the proper occupation
and ornament of her sex."[1]

In 1852 there were, according to the first annual
report of the Anti-slavery Society of Canada, sixty
pupils attending this school, and settlers on the land
of the institute had increased to five hundred.

In the neighbourhood of the school there was a
coloured population of between three and four
thousand.

Josiah Henson, who was so long connected with
this colony, was born a slave at Fort Tobacco,
Maryland, and escaped to Canada in 1828. He
became a Methodist minister and an anti-slavery
lecturer of considerable influence. He made three
trips to England and, on his final visit to that
country, in 1876, he was entertained by Queen
Victoria.

After the Civil War the interests which had brought
these colonies into existence had disappeared. Many
of the coloured people, particularly those who had
gone out to Canada since 1850, moved back to the
United States. The communities gradually dwindled
away or were absorbed into neighbouring cities, on
whose outskirts they had grown up. In the winter of
1895 and 1896, when I made a visit to several cities
in Canada, I had an opportunity to get information
from some of these fugitives. In Toronto, there was
living at the time I visited the city, Dr. A. R. Abbott,
who had graduated from the Toronto Medical
University before or shortly after the breaking out
of the Civil War in the United States. He enlisted
in one of the coloured regiments and was among the
first coloured men to be admitted to the Army Medical
Service. After the war he returned to Toronto,
where he practised his profession for many years.

It is not often one meets a coloured man acting in
the capacity of mayor of a city of 200,000 inhabitants,
but I met on this visit to Toronto a Negro who
had occupied that position during the previous summer,
while the regular mayor was absent in Europe.
This man was the Honourable William P. Hubbard,
president of the Toronto Board of Control, a body
which, in the government of Toronto, occupies the
position of the mayor's cabinet. Mr. Hubbard was
born in Toronto in 1848. His parents, who were of
African, Anglo-Saxon and Indian origin, came to
Canada from Richmond, Virginia, in 1844. They
had been, like the parents of Dr. Abbott, "free
people of colour." His father, having been employed
for several years as a carver in a Richmond hotel,
had accumulated something like $800 before he left
the South. The family settled on a little piece of
land on the outskirts of the city, where his mother
kept for many years a market garden, while his
father worked in the city. After getting a pretty
good education in the Toronto schools, young Hubbard
went to work as an apprentice in a bakery
shop, where he later served eight years as foreman.
After that he went into the livery business with his
brother, Alexander. In this business he prospered,
and putting his savings into real estate, soon accumulated
a small fortune. I was told at the time of my
visit that Mr. Hubbard paid taxes on $36,000 worth
of property. In 1894, he was elected to the position

of alderman from the Tenth Ward. He held that
position until he was elected, in 1899, to the position
he held at the time of my visit. At this time Mr. J. C.
Hamilton, who has made a study of the Negro in
Canada, said: "Hubbard has about the best record
of any alderman we have. I should not wonder if
he would be mayor of Toronto some day."

I learned also that Mr. Hubbard had a reputation
outside of Toronto and throughout the Province of
Ontario, for he has been elected, during previous
years, president of the Ontario Municipal
Association.

I referred, in an earlier chapter, to the town and
colony of Mound Bayou, which is situated in the
centre of the Yazoo Mississippi Delta, about midway
between Vicksburg and Memphis. This colony
which, as I have said, was founded by Isaiah T.
Montgomery, who had been a slave of Joseph Davis,
the brother of the president of the Confederacy, was
started about 1890. I frequently have heard Mr.
Montgomery tell the story of the way in which he
succeeded in arousing the interest of the first settlers
in this project. When he first went there the country
was a perfect wilderness; it was not believed that
white men could live in that region, and that was one
reason that it was decided to try the experiment of
settling a colony of coloured people there. Mr.
Montgomery finally succeeded in inducing a party of
coloured men to come down and look over the country.

A South-bound train dropped them off at a
saw-mill in the midst of the woods one morning, and
they walked several miles up the railroad track to
the site that Mr. Montgomery had selected for the
town.

"We had been pretty silent on the way up the
track," said Mr. Montgomery, "for we were in
the midst of a perfect wilderness. After we reached
the point where I desired to locate, I turned and
pointed in the direction of the woods and said to the
men: 'You see what this country is, but you should
remember this whole state was once like this. Your
fathers cleared it, cultivated it, and made it what it
now is. They did this for the white man. Now,
the question is, can we do the same thing for
ourselves?

"Well," continued Mr. Montgomery, "some of
them saw the point, and with these men we started in
and began cutting down the timber, and making it
into railway ties. Then we built the saw-mill and,
by that time, the town was fairly started."

I visited the town of Mound Bayou in the fall of
1908. I found a little village, with between five
hundred and a thousand inhabitants, which was the
centre of a community of perhaps four or five thousand
people, among whom there was not a single
white man. There were twenty or thirty little country
stores, three cotton gins, a bank, which at the
time had resources amounting to $100,000, and I

was told had paid 10 per cent. dividend on its stock
of $25,000. The town looked raw, but it looked like
the real thing. I learned that it had been growing
slowly but steadily. During the whole period of its
existence an earnest effort was being made to build
up the schools, and to adapt the teaching in them to
the actual needs of the people.

During my visit I made an address to the people of
that colony. As there was no hall sufficiently large
enough to accommodate the crowds that had
assembled, I spoke from a platform erected upon the
foundation of a new cotton-seed oil mill which was
being erected at the cost of $40,000, a sum collected
among the coloured people in different parts of the
State of Mississippi. The interesting thing to me
was that I found there a sober, earnest, orderly
community of coloured people, who had the respect
of all their neighbours, including the sheriff of the
county, and were going forward in the solution of
their problem, along the lines of orderly industrial
progress.

Mound Bayou is, so far as I know, the oldest
exclusively Negro community established since the
War. There is, however, a flourishing little town
in Oklahoma called Boley, which was started in
1903. There is a story told in regard to Boley,
which, even if it is not true in all its details, illustrates
the temper of the coloured people and their relations
to the white people in that region. Early in the

spring of 1903, so the story goes, a number of gentlemen
were discussing, at the neighbouring city of
Weleetka, the inevitable race question. The point
at issue was the capability of the Negro for self-government.
One of the gentlemen, who happened
to be connected with the Fort Smith Railway,
maintained that the Negro had never been given a
fair chance; that if Negroes had been given a white
man's chance they would have proved themselves
as capable of self-government as any other people of
the same degree of culture and education. The other
gentlemen naturally asserted the contrary, and the
result of this argument was, to state it briefly, Boley.

Just at this time a number of town sites were being
laid out along the railway which connects Guthrie,
Oklahoma, with Fort Smith, Arkansas. In order
to put the capability of the Negro for self-government
to test, there was established in August, 1903, seventy-two
miles east of Guthrie, the site of a Negro town.
It was called Boley after the man who built that section
of the railway, and it was widely advertised as a
town which was to be exclusively under the control
of Negroes.

One thing that, perhaps, made this town attractive
to coloured people was the fact that there are a
number of communities in Oklahoma which rigidly
exclude Negroes from settlement. On the other
hand, there has grown up in other parts of Oklahoma,
communities, like the little town of Taft,

which, although not settled exclusively by Negroes,
are sometimes referred to as "Negro towns," because
of the large proportion of the Negroes in the
population.

A large proportion of the settlers of Boley were
farmers from Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi.
The proprietor of the largest cotton-gin was, in 1907,
C. W. Perry, who came from Marshall, Texas.
Perry had worked in the railway machine shops for
a number of years and had gained enough of the
trade of a machinist to be able to set up his own
cotton-gin and the machinery connected with it.
E. L. Lugrande, one of the principal stockholders
in the second bank in Boley, came to this new
country, like many others, to get land. He had
owned 418 acres of land in Denton County, which
he had purchased some years before at a price of
four and five dollars an acre. In recent years land
has gone up in price and Mr. Lugrande was able to
sell his property for something like fifty dollars an
acre. He came to Boley and purchased a large tract
of land just outside the town. Now a large part of
this acreage is in the centre of the town. Mr.
Lugrande is representative of the better class of
Negro farmers who, for several years past, have been
steadily moving into the new lands in the West.

I might add, in conclusion, that from all I have
been able to learn Boley, which, like Mound Bayou, is
entirely controlled by Negroes, is one of the most

peaceful towns in that part of Oklahoma. When
I was at Topeka, Kansas, in 1907, I was told that not
a single citizen of Boley had been arrested for two
years.

I have spoken of the settlements of Negroes in
Liberia, in Canada, and in the different parts of the
United States in the same connection, because they
seem to me to represent the same wholesome desire
of members of my race to do something for which they
will be respected, not merely as individuals but as a
race; to achieve something in their own way and in
their own right, which would be a worthy contribution
to American civilisation.

The story told by one of the most successful citizens
of Boley, for example, illustrates the motives
which have inspired the building of this bustling and
progressive little Negro city. This man had been a
railway brakeman, was well respected by his
employers, owned a little home of his own, and had
a bank account. When it was learned that he was
selling his property in Texas in order to emigrate to
Oklahoma a number of the prominent white citizens
of the community called upon him and asked him
why he was going to leave. "We know you," they
said, "and you know us. We are behind you and
will protect you."

"Well," he replied, "I have always had an ambition
to do something for myself. I do not always
want to be led; I want to do a little leading."

Whatever one may be disposed to think of this
segregation of the white and black races which one
sees going on, to a greater or lesser extent, in every
section of the country, it is certain that there is a
temporary advantage to the Negro race in the building
up of these "race towns." They enable the
masses of the people to find a freer expression to their
native energies and ambitions than they are able to
find elsewhere, and, at the same time, give them an
opportunity to gain that experience in cooperation,
self-direction, and self-control, which it is hard for
them to get in the same degree elsewhere.

In the year 1905 I had occasion to visit Winston-Salem,
in North Carolina, to speak in a public meeting
in the interest of the Slater industrial and State
Normal School, at that place. This school had been
established some years before by Mr. S.G.Atkins, who
is now Secretary of Education in the A. M. E. Zion
Church. He had been a teacher in the public schools
in Winston. In 1892 he moved to some high ground
outside the city and built himself a home. A few
years later he started a little Industrial School at
this place. As time went on the school increased in
size and importance and a little community grew up
around it.

After the school had been established, Mr. R. J.
Reynolds, of the Reynolds Tobacco Company,
gave Mr. Atkins $4,500 to assist him in building
out there a hospital for coloured people. Mr.

Reynolds was a large employer of coloured labour
in the tobacco factory, and he assisted in establishing
this hospital in order to made some adequate provision
for his own employees in case of sickness.
The thing that impressed me at the time about this
little community was the fine location chosen for it
and the number of thrifty little cottages which I saw
growing up, nearly all of which, I learned, had been
paid for by the people who lived in them.

This was the first time, I think, that my attention
had been specially drawn to a number of quiet, clean,
thrifty little Negro communities that are growing up
everywhere in the South at the present day, frequently
in the neighbourhood of some school. Particularly
has this been true in the last ten years, since Negro
banks and building and loan associations have
sprung up to encourage the people in all parts of the
South, as well as in some of the Northern cities, to
purchase their own homes. Since my visit to Winston-Salem
in 1905 the coloured people in that city
have, I understand, prospered greatly. This is due,
to some extent, to the fact that since the organisation
of the Tobacco Trust they have had steady employment
in the tobacco factories, but it is also due in a
large part to the assistance and encouragement the
coloured people have received from the white people
of that city, particularly from the descendants of the
Moravians of Salem.

In May, 1907, the Forsythe Savings and Trust Co.

was organised at Winston-Salem. This bank, which
was organised largely for the purpose of assisting
coloured people in securing homes, reported in
December, 1908, that it had transacted a volume of
business from the time it was organised which
amounted to $302,738.86. In close connection with
this bank there was organised the Twin City Reality
Company, of which Mr. S. G. Atkins was president,
and Andrew Jackson Brown vice-president.

Mr. Brown is an interesting character. He came
from Lynchburg to Winston to work in the tobacco
factory. After he was forty years old, his home having
been broken up by the death of his wife, he
decided to go to school. He made his home in the
little community, Columbia Heights, which had
sprung up around Mr. Atkins's school. He had been
the chief agent of the True Reformers' Association
in the region before this time, and he supported himself
mainly in this way while he was in school. He
was a man of simple manners and sturdy honesty,
and has become, I have been told, a very positive
constructive force in his community.

What I have described as taking place in Winston-Salem
has been going on, in much the same way, in
every other part of the country where any considerable
portion of the population belongs to the Negro race.
In some places, like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and
New York, whole avenues for considerable distances
have been taken up by coloured people who have

moved out of the slums, in which the masses of the
Negro people are usually to be found during the first
years of their life in the cities. In these new
districts they have been building comfortable
and frequently handsome houses.

Perhaps I cannot better describe the change
that has taken place, in this and other parts of the
South, than in the words of a Southern white man
who has watched the changes I have referred to, and
has been able to appreciate their significance. Writing
in the Century Magazine for June, 1906, Harry
Stillwell Edwards, speaking of this matter, says:

In the course of my journeys about the country
I have had an opportunity to go into many Negro
homes in all parts of the United States, where I have
found, not merely the comforts, but some of the
elegancies of life. Books, pictures, fine table-linen,
furniture, carpets, and not infrequently mementoes
of travel in many parts of this country and of Europe.
What interests me more than anything else, however,
is to see the number of them who are collecting books,
histories, pictures, and all kinds of material concerning
their own race or of work by members of their
own race, showing evidences of its progress.

Aside from Chicago, Philadelphia is the only city,
so far as I know, in which a systematic and careful
study has been made of the condition of the Negro
population. In 1897, Professor W. E. B. Du Bois
estimated that Negroes owned $5,000,000 in that city.
A more recent investigation made by Richard R.
Wright, Jr., indicates that the number of home
owners has increased 71 per cent. since 1900. In 1907
he stated that within twenty months seven real
estate companies had been organised among Negroes
in Philadelphia. One of these had succeeded in
providing homes for twenty-five Negroes within a
year.

Probably the most important influence in assisting
coloured people to obtain homes in Philadelphia has
been the Berean Building and Loan Association,
established in connection with the Berean Presbyterian
Church, which is one of the three coloured
Presbyterian churches in Philadelphia. According
to a report published in 1906, this association has
purchased one hundred and forty-five homes for its
members, valued at $304,500 and has paid back
matured stock to the value of more than $80,000.
The Berean is the largest and the oldest of seven
building and loan associations of Philadelphia.

So far as I know there is no city in the United States
where the coloured people own so many comfortable
and attractive homes in proportion to the
population, as in the city of Baltimore. In what is
known as the Druid Hill district of the city, there are,
perhaps, fifteen thousand coloured people. For
fifteen blocks along Druid Hill Avenue nearly every
house is occupied or owned by coloured people.
In the latter part of the ninties Dr. R. M. Hall, who
is one of the oldest coloured physicians and one of
the wealthiest coloured men in Baltimore, moved into
1019 Druid Hill Avenue. He was almost the first
coloured man to make his home upon that street.
Since that time the white people who lived there
have moved out into the suburbs and the coloured
people have moved in to take their places. I have
been told that fully 50 per cent. of the coloured

people on Druid Hill Avenue own their homes,
though, so far as I know, no systematic investigation
has been made of the facts. This part of the city
has had for a number of years its own coloured
representative, Harry S. Cummings, in the city
council. This district which Mr. Cummings represented
in the city council in 1908 was that, I have
been told, in which, forty-five years before, his
parents had been held as slaves.

CHAPTER XI
NEGRO POETRY, MUSIC, AND ART

THERE is an African folk-tale which tells of
a mighty hunter who one day went into the
forest in search of big game. He was unsuccessful
in his quest, and sat down to rest. Meanwhile
he heard some strange and pleasing noises,
coming from a dense thicket. As he sat spellbound,
a party of forest spirits came dancing into view, and
the hunter discovered it was they who were making
the sounds he had heard. The spirits disappeared,
and the hunter returned to his home, when, after
considerable effort, he found that he was able
to imitate the sounds which he had heard. In
this way, it is said, the black man gained the gift
of song.

The Bantus of South Africa say that African
music at the present time is not what it used to be
in the old days. There was a time, they say, before
the coming of the white man, when musicians had
power to charm the beasts from the forest and the
birds from the trees. Be this as it may, we find
at the present day that singing is a universal practice
among the Africans in every part of the Dark

Continent. The porters, carrying their loads along
the narrow forest paths, sing of the loved ones in
their far-away homes. In the evening the people
of the villages gather around the fire and sing for
hours. These songs refer to war, to hunting, and
to the spirits that dwell in the deep woods. In
them all the wild and primitive life of the people is
reflected and interpreted.

When the Negro slaves were carried from Africa
to America they brought with them this gift of song.
Nothing else which the native African possessed,
not even his sunny disposition, his ready sympathy
or his ability to adapt himself to new and strange
conditions, has been more useful to him in his life
in America than this. When all other avenues of
expression were closed to him, and when, sometimes,
his burden seemed too great for him to bear, the
African found a comfort and a solace in these simple
and beautiful songs, which are the spontaneous
utterance of his heart.

Nothing tells more truly what the Negro's life
in slavery was, than the songs in which he succeeded,
sometimes, in expressing his deepest thoughts and
feelings. What, for example, could express more
eloquently the feelings of despair which sometimes
overtook the slave than these simple and expressive
words:

The songs which the Negro sang in slavery, however,
were by no means always sad. There were
many joyous occasions upon which the natural
happy and cheerful nature of the Negro found
expression in songs of a light and cheerful character.
There is a difference, however, between the music
of Africa and that of her transplanted children.
There is a new note in the music which had its
origin on the Southern plantations, and in this new
note the sorrow and the suffering which came from
serving in a strange land finds expression.

The new songs are those in which the slave speaks
not merely the sorrow that he feels, but also the new
hope which the Christian religion has lighted in his
bosom. The African slave accepted the teachings
of the Christian religion more eagerly than he did
anything else his master had to teach him. He
seemed to feel instinctively that there was something
in the teachings of the Bible which he needed. He
accepted the story that the Bible told him literally,
and, in the songs he composed under its influence,
he has given some wonderfully graphic and vivid
pictures of the persons and places of which the
Bible speaks, as he understood them. Grotesque
as some of these pictures may seem, they are merely
the vivid and literal interpretation of what he heard,
and all of them are conceived in the spirit of the
deepest reverence.

Neither the words nor the melodies of these songs

originated after the manner in which music is ordinarily
composed nowadays. In fact, these songs are
not the music of any one individual. They were
composed under the excitement of a religious meeting.
Some black bard, under the inspiration of
the moment, flung out a musical theme which
was taken up by the whole company, and words and
music were thus spontaneously composed upon the
spot. These songs, still sung with the old-time
fervour in the little country churches throughout
the South, were created in the same way in which
the students of literature and language tell us that
the early Scotch and English ballads were composed,
by crowds of men and women singing together.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was, I believe,
one of the first, if not the first man to make a study
of this music of the slaves. While he was in charge
of a black regiment at Port Royal, South Carolina,
he had abundant opportunity to hear these songs,
as they were sung by the Negroes, who had been
freshly recruited from the plantations in that region.
In his interesting book, "Army Life in a Black
Regiment," he has given a very vivid and a very
accurate description of this music. Among other
things he says:

One of the songs which Mr. Higginson quotes,
and which he regards as one of the most expressive
songs that he heard while he was in the South, is
the following:

"Never, it seems to me," says Mr. Higginson,
"since man first lived and suffered, was his infinite
longing for peace uttered more plaintively than in
that line, 'I'll lie in de grave and stretch out my
arms."'

Another and more familiar one of the plantation
hymns which Mr. Higginson quotes is the following:

There is something in this slave music that touches
the common heart of man. Everywhere that it has
been heard this music has awakened a responsive
chord in the minds and hearts of those who heard
it. Antonin Dvorak, the eminent Bohemian composer,
who lived for several years in this country,
in his admirable symphony, "Out of the New
World," used several themes taken from these
Negro folk songs. S. Coleridge Taylor, the well-known
coloured English composer, has used this
music for many of his best known piano compositions.
Edward Everett Hale once said it was the
only American music.

Not only is the music of these songs strangely
touching and beautiful, but the songs themselves
contain many striking and significant expressions,
as Mr. Higginson has pointed out, which indicate
a native talent in the masses of the people for poetic
expression. For example, one of these songs in
referring to the Judgment Day, describes it as the
time "when the stars begin to fall." Another of

these songs suggests the terrors of the last Judgment,
in the refrain, "O Rocks, fall on me."

There was a time, directly after the War when
the coloured people, particularly those who had
a little education, tried to get away from and forget
these old slave songs. If they sang them still
it was about the home and not in public. It was
not until after years, when other people began to
learn and take an interest in these songs, that these
people began to understand the inspiration and the
quality that was in them. It is an indication of
the change that has gone on among the Negro people
in recent years that more and more they are beginning
to take pride in these folk-songs of the race
and are seeking to preserve them and the memories
that they evoke.

As an illustration of what I have said, I cannot
do better than quote the lines of James W. Johnson,
a Negro poet and writer of popular songs, which
suggest, better than anything I have heard or read,
what seems to me the true significance of this music.
In the Century Magazine for November, 1908, the following
poem was published, addressed to the unknown
singers who first sang these heart songs of my race:

I have already referred to the fact that Thomas
Wentworth Higginson was the first, so far as I know,
to take note of this slave music and make a serious
study of it. The first man who seems to have realised
that this music would touch the popular heart,
if it could be made known, was George L. White,
the man who was responsible for the success of the
Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee.
It was the Fisk Jubilee Singers who first
made the Negro folk-music popular in America
and in Europe. They not only made this music
popular, but upon their return from their second

concert tour, in 1874, they brought back ninety
thousand dollars as their contribution to Fisk
University.

Perhaps one thing that made the singing of these
songs more effective was that the singers themselves
had, in many cases, been slaves, or were
directly descended from slave parents, and they
felt the music they sang more deeply than others
who have tried to sing it since. One of the most
interesting of these singers was Ella Sheppard, who
was born in Nashville, in 1851. Ella Sheppard's
father ran a livery stable in Nashville before the War.
He had succeeded in purchasing his own freedom
for $1,800, and was hoping to be able to purchase
that of his wife and family, when suddenly he was
separated from them by the fact that his wife's
master removed from Nashville to Mississippi.
Mr. Sheppard heard very little from his wife and
child after this until one day a white man, who had
been in Mississippi on business, returned and told
him that his little girl was dying from neglect. He
added that, as the child was sickly, possibly her
father would be able to purchase her for a small
sum. Mr. Sheppard started to Mississippi, purchased
his child for $350, and brought her back to
Nashville. Shortly after this he attempted to purchase
his wife, but for some reason or other, after
the sale had nearly been completed, her master
refused to sell her and she did not succeed in

gaining her freedom until the Civil War finally
emancipated her.

Before freedom came, Mr. Sheppard failed in
business and was compelled to move secretly to
Cincinnati to prevent his creditors seizing his children
for debt. There Ella Sheppard gained a little
education in what was known as the Seventh Street
Coloured School. When she was thirteen years
old she commenced taking lessons in music from a
German music teacher. About this time her father
died and she was compelled, as she says, to go to
work, for herself "in right good earnest." Fortunately,
she made the acquaintance of Mr. J. P.
Ball, of Cincinnati, who adopted her and gave her
a thorough musical education, with the understanding
that she was to repay him at some future time.

"I took twelve lessons," she says," in vocal music
of Madame Rivi. I was the only coloured pupil,
and was not allowed to tell who my teacher was.
More than that, I went up the back way to reach
my teacher and received my lesson in the back room
upstairs from nine to a quarter often at night."

After teaching school for a time, Ella Sheppard
entered Fisk University, where, by teaching music
and sewing at odd moments, or when she was confined
to her bed, as she frequently was by illness,
she managed to make her way through the University
until she joined the first campaign of the Jubilee
Singers through the Northern states. Ella Sheppard

is still living in Nashville. She is now the
wife of Reverend George W. Moore, who is the field
superintendent of the church work of the American
Missionary Association, and one of the most distinguished
men of his race. Mr. Moore was, for
a number of years, pastor of the Lincoln Memorial
Church in Washington, District of Columbia. In
all the work which this church attempted to do for
the masses of the coloured people in Washington,
Mr. Moore was greatly assisted by the labours and
counsel of his wife.

Another distinguished member of the Jubilee
Singers' Band, as it was called, was Jennie Jackson,
who afterward became the wife of Professor
DeHart, until recently teacher in the public schools
of Cincinnati. Jennie Jackson was born free, but
her grandfather was a slave and body-servant of
General Andrew Jackson. During the War and
afterward her mother supported the family by
washing and ironing. It was by assisting her
mother in this work that Jennie Jackson earned
enough money to make her way through school,
until, her voice having attracted the attention of her
teachers, she became a member of the Jubilee Singers,
whose fortunes she shared until the end of their
campaign.

Maggie Porter was another of the singers who
distinguished herself. She was born in 1853, at
Lebanon, Tennessee. Her master was Henry

Frazier, and the owner of some two hundred slaves.
Her mother was a house servant, and Maggie was
brought up in the household of her master. In
January, 1866, when the Fisk School was first
opened, Maggie Porter was one of the three hundred
pupils who gathered, during the first week,
in the old hospital barracks. She was one of the
first of the pupils at the Fisk School to enlist as a
teacher in the country districts. She taught in different
parts of Tennessee until Mr. White, who
knew of her natural musical talent, sent for her to
take the part of Queen Esther in the cantata that
the students of Fisk University were preparing to
give. She was so successful in this part that she
became a member of the first band of Jubilee
Singers that went out from Fisk in the following fall
of 1871. After the disbandment of the Jubilee
Singers Maggie Porter travelled for a number of
years as a concert singer in various parts of
the United States. Her name at present is
Maggie Porter Cole. She is living with her husband
in Detroit, where she has a beautiful home,
and is making her life of great service to her
people.

Of the other singers of whom I have been able
to get some recent record, I recall the name of
Thomas Rutling, who is now a teacher of English
language and literature in a school at Geneva,
Switzerland. He was the son of a runaway slave,

and was born while his mother was hiding out in
the woods in Wilson County, Tennessee.

There was, as I have said, a peculiar pathos about
the old slave songs that invariably touched the
hearts of those who heard them. Through these
songs the slaves found a means of telling what
was in their hearts when almost every other
means of expressing their thoughts and feelings
was denied them. For this reason, if for no other,
they will always remain a sacred heritage of the
Negro race.

The creation of music so original, by a people so
wholly lacking in musical education, indicates a
natural taste and talent for music in the Negro
race which, perhaps, has not been equalled by
any other primitive people. This native talent
has manifested itself not only in the songs, spontaneously
produced by the slaves on the plantation,
but by the ease with which Negro musicians have
been able to execute and interpret the music of all
other peoples.

The most noted example of this native talent for
music in a member of the Negro race is Thomas
Greene Bethune, who was better known under the
name of "Blind Tom." Blind Tom was born near
Columbus, Georgia, May 25, 1849, and died July 3,
1908. He was blind from birth, and while deficient
in some other directions, he manifested from infancy
an extraordinary fondness for musical sounds. He is

said to have exhibited his musical talent before he
was two years old.

It is said that he showed, from the first, great
interest in every kind of musical sound, "from the
soft breathing of the flute to the harsh gratings
of the corn-sheller." He also showed a remarkable
power for judging the lapse of time. There was a
clock in his master's house that struck the hour.
Every hour in the day, just before this clock made
the sharp click preparatory to striking, Tom would
be there and remain until the hour was struck, and
it was evident that he took the greatest delight in
the musical tones which the clock gave forth. Frequently
in the evening the young ladies of his master's
family would sit on the steps and sing. At
such times Tom would invariably, if he were allowed
to do so, come to the house and sing with them. One
evening one of the young ladies said to her father:
"Pa, Tom sings beautifully, and he don't have to
learn any tune, for as soon as we sing he sings right
along with us." Then she added: "He sings
fine seconds to anything we sing."

When Tom was about four years of age his master
purchased a piano and brought it to the house. The
first note from this new instrument brought Tom
into the house. He was permitted to indulge his
curiosity by running his fingers over the keys. As
long as anyone would play on this piano Tom was
content to stay out in the yard, where he would

dance and caper to the music, but as soon as the
music ceased he would try to get to the instrument
in order to continue the sweet sounds in which he
took such delight.

One night when the parlour door had been left open,
Tom escaped from his mother and crept into the
parlour. Early in the morning the young ladies of
the household were awakened by hearing some one
playing upon the piano. The music continued to
reach their ears from time to time, until at the usual
hour they arose and went into the parlour where,
to their astonishment, they saw Tom playing the
piano in what seemed to them a remarkable way.
Notwithstanding this was his first attempt to play
this instrument, they noted that he played with
both hands, and used black as well as white keys.

After a time Tom was allowed free access to the
piano and commenced to play everything he heard.
After he had mastered all the music that he heard
any one play, he commenced composing for himself.
He would sit at the piano for hours playing over
pieces he had heard, then he would go out, run and
jump about the yard for a little while and, after
returning, play something of his own. If any one
asked him what he was playing, he replied that it
was something that the wind said to him, or "what
the birds said to me," "what the trees said to me,"
or what something else said to him. Speaking of
the natural sense for music which this strangely

gifted Negro boy displayed, the biographer of Blind
Tom says:

When Tom was eight years of age he was permitted
to appear in a regular concert in the city of
Columbus, at which a German, the leading musician
of the town, was present. The next day this man
was asked to undertake Tom's musical education.
He replied: "No, sir, I can't teach him anything;
he knows more of music than any of us know or
can learn. All that can be done for him is to let him
hear fine playing. He will work it all out by himself
after a while, but he will do it sooner by hearing
fine music"

This man was correct. Tom did work it all out
by himself after a while, and became one of the most
noted musicians in the world. He gave concerts in
every important city of the United States, and in all
the principal cities of Europe. It was said of him,

as showing the remarkable power which he possessed,
that he could stand with his back to a piano and
let any number of chords be struck simultaneously,
thereupon he would instantly be able to tell every
note sounded, showing that his memory retained
all the notes distinctly, and in such a manner that
he was able to discriminate between every sound
made.

In 1867 Blind Tom gave a concert in Glasgow,
Scotland. The following morning the Glasgow
Herald, in its account of his performance, made
the following interesting statement, which gives a
very accurate estimate of Tom's musical talent at
this time:

Some of the most interesting music, produced
by the Negro slaves, was handed down from the
days when the French and Spanish had possession
of Louisiana. All these songs, many of which
have been preserved through the writings of George
W. Cable, were composed in the Creole dialect of
Louisiana.

From the free Negroes of Louisiana there sprang
up, during slavery days, a number of musicians and
artists who distinguished themselves in foreign
countries to which they removed, because of the prejudice
which existed against coloured people. Among
them was Eugène Warburg, who went to Italy and
distinguished himself as a sculptor. Another was
Victor Sejour, who went to Paris and gained distinction
as a poet and composer of tragedy. Another
by the name of Dubuclet was a physician and musician
of Bordeaux, France. The Lambert family,
consisting of seven persons, were noted as musicians.
Richard Lambert, the father, was a teacher
of music, Lucien Lambert, a son, after much hard
study, became a composer of music. He left New
Orleans, however, and went to France, where he
continued his studies. Later he went to Brazil,
where he engaged in the manufacture of pianos.
Among his compositions are: "La Juive," "Le

Départ du Conscript," "Les Ombres Aimées,"
"Le Niagara."

Another brother, Sidney Lambert, stimulated by
the example and fame of his father and brother,
made himself a name as a pianist and a composer
of music. He wrote a method for the piano of such
merit that he received a decoration in recognition
of his work from the King of Portugal. At last
accounts he was a professor of music in Paris.
Edmund Dèdè, who was born in New Orleans, in
1829, learned while a youth to play a number of
instruments. He was a cigar maker by trade and,
being of good habits and thrifty, accumulated enough
money to pay his passage to France. Here he took
up a special study of music and finally became director
of the Orchestra of L'Alcazar, in Bordeaux,
France.

The late J. M. Trotter, of Boston, himself a
Negro of unusual intelligence, has written a history
of the Negroes who distinguished themselves in
music in the period from 1850 to 1880. In this
history he mentions more than fifty Negroes who
achieved distinction in some form of music, either
as singers, performers on musical instruments, or
composers. One of the most famous of these was
Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, who was known as
the "Black Swan." She was born in Natchez,
Mississippi, in 1809. When about a year old she
was brought to Philadelphia by an exemplary

Quaker lady, Mrs. Greenfield, by whom she was
carefully reared. One evening, while visiting at
the house of a neighbour, the daughter of the house,
who knew something of her ability, invited her to
sing. Every one present was astonished at the
power and richness of her voice, and it was thereupon
agreed that she should receive music lessons.

These lessons were carried on at first without
the knowledge of Mrs. Greenfield, because, according
to the discipline of the Friends, music, like every
other art, was a forbidden occupation. When the
good lady learned that Elizabeth was taking music
lessons, she summoned her to her presence. Elizabeth
came, trembling, and prepared for a severe
reprimand.

"Elizabeth," said she, "is it true thee is learning
music and can play upon the guitar?"

"It is true," Elizabeth reluctantly confessed.

"Go and get thy guitar and let me hear thee sing."

The girl obeyed, and when she had finished was
astonished to hear her kind friend say: "Elizabeth,
whatever thee wants thee shall have."

From that time on Mrs. Greenfield assisted her
in every way to make herself proficient in the profession
of music, which she had chosen to follow.

When her benefactress died, the young coloured
girl was thrown upon her own resources. Remembering
some friends in Western New York, who
had been very kind to her, she resolved to visit them.

Her chance singing upon a boat, which was crossing
Lake Seneca, gained her new friends and
opened a way for her to come prominently before
the public.

In 1851 she gained a reputation by her singing
before the Buffalo Musical Society. From that time
on she was known as the "Black Swan," and invitations
to sing in concerts came to her from cities
in all parts of the North. In 1853 she gave a concert
in Exeter Hall, London, England, where she
made a great success.

Among other distinguished singers of this period
were the Luca family, father and three sons, of
Cleveland, Ohio. The father was born in Milford,
Connecticut, in 1805. He was a shoemaker
by trade. He became a chorister in one of the Congregational
churches of New Haven, and his choir
was considered one of the best in the city. The
children inherited their father's talent, and in the
fifties travelled about the Northern states, giving
musical entertainments.

Among the more recent singers, perhaps the most
distinguished is Madame Sissieretta Tones. She
was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1870. Her
father was pastor of the local Methodist Church.
When still a young woman her parents moved to
Providence, Rhode Island, where her voice soon
attracted public attention. After making a number
of public appearances in Providence, she was

invited to go to New York and sing at Wallack's
Theatre. Her success was so great that she was
immediately engaged to tour South America and
the West Indies. In 1886 she sang with great success
in Madison Square Garden. She has sung with
success in all the principal cities of Europe, and
during recent years has had her own company,
known as the Black Patti Troubadours, at the head
of which she has appeared in every important city
in the United States.

Except as a singer in concerts or as a musician,
almost the only opportunity that the Negro has had
until recently to appear upon the stage has been as
a minstrel. The first Negro minstrels were white
men, and they sang songs and cracked jokes that
were invented by white men in imitation of the
songs and jokes of the Negroes, with which the
Southern people had become familiar during slavery
days. Immediately after the War, however, there
was a company of coloured minstrels organised,
known as the "Georgia Minstrels." These minstrels
became famous and were succeeded by others.
Out of these minstrels there grew later a kind of
Negro comedy, in which there was some attempt
to depict the characters and tell the story of Negro
life. The man who made this transition from the
old Negro minstrels to the more modern Negro
comedy was Ernest Hogan, who died in the spring
of 1909, in New York, and was buried from the

church of St. Benedict the Moor, an honoured and
respected member of his profession.

The success of Ernest Hogan has made it possible
for other Negro comedians to gain a foothold in
the better class of the theatres, and create a more
worthy kind of Negro comedy. Among the more
talented of these players are Bert Williams, George
Walker, and his wife, Aida Overton Walker,
Bob Cole, and J. Rosamond Johnson.

Year by year the character of the pieces
produced by these men has improved in quality,
both as to the music and as to the manner and style
of presentation. At the present time I have heard
it said that there are few musical comedies on the
American stage that equal those that are produced
by some of the players to whom I have referred.

Little by little these players, and the men who
have written their songs and music, have managed
to bring into connection with the rather rough
humour of these comedies, music and songs of a
much higher order than are usually heard in this
kind of entertainment. Among the men who write
the music and these songs are some men like James
W. Johnson, whose poetry I have already quoted,
and Harry T. Burleigh, a concert singer of more
than ordinary cultivation and refinement. The
songs which these young men have written are not
only among the most popular songs of the day, but
some of them must be counted among the very few

which have real and permanent value. There is
a note in the best of them which is entirely distinctive.

The most noted figure among Negroes who have
appeared upon the stage was Ira Aldridge. He
was born near Baltimore in 1804. In 1826 he met
Edmund Kean, with whom he travelled for several
years. He accompanied Keene to Europe, and
when, finally, he expressed to him a desire to become
an actor himself, the distinguished tragedian encouraged
him in that ambition. Ira Aldridge made his
first appearance as Othello at Covent Garden,
London, April 10, 1839. Keene took the part of
Iago, and from that time on the success of the
coloured actor was assured.

In 1852 Ira Aldridge appeared in Germany, where
his success was so great that the King of Prussia
conferred a decoration upon him and sent him an
autograph letter, expressing his appreciation of his
performance. The coloured actor afterward received
the Cross of Leopold from the Emperor
of Russia. He played in all parts of Europe, and
finally died at Lodz, Poland, just as he was preparing
to come to America to fulfil an engagement.

In recent years the number of coloured performers
upon the stage has multiplied rapidly. At the
present time one of the regular features of the
coloured newspaper is a theatrical column, which is
devoted entirely to chronicling the doings of the

coloured theatrical performers. So successful have
these performers been that, in a number of cities,
theatres owned and conducted by coloured people
have been started expressly for the use of coloured
companies. Theatres were owned and operated
by coloured people in 1909 in Chicago, Illinois; New
Orleans, Louisiana; Jackson, Mississippi; Memphis,
Tennessee; Atlanta, Georgia; Columbus, Ohio;
Jacksonville, Florida; Yazoo City, Mississippi; Baton
Rouge and Plaquemine, Louisiana.

The ability which the Negro has shown to express
his feelings in the form of music is also shown, in a
lesser degree, in expressing himself in poetry and
in other forms of art. The natural disposition
of the native African to express himself poetically
has been frequently noted by students of African
life. The traveller Schweinfurth noted among the
peoples of Central Africa a number of striking
expressions. For example, one tribe referred to
a leaf as "an ear of the tree," and in speaking of
a man's chest, called it "the capital of the veins."
In many parts of the black man's Africa there are
professional singers who practise the art of improvising
songs upon almost any topic that may be
assigned to them.

I have myself frequently noticed the striking
expressions that are sometimes used by the people
in the country districts, when they wish to make
any particular impressive statement. For instance,

in talking with an old farmer in the vicinity of my
home at Tuskegee, I happened to give expression
to some opinion or idea that struck him with peculiar
force when he exclaimed: "Mr. Washington,
you said a thousand words in one." At another
time there was a coloured preacher who had a church
which was near a plantation school and settlement
that had been started by some of the teachers at
Tuskegee. Some one asked this preacher if the
school had made any change in conditions in that
neighbourhood since it had been established. He
raised his hands and exclaimed: "I'll tell you in a
word. When this school started it was midnight;
now it is dawn." Upon another occasion, when one
of these men was describing his religious experience,
how he "came through," as the expression is, he
used these words: "All of a sudden a star busted in
my breast and I was mighty happy in the Lord."

This same natural gift of expression, which is
frequently possessed by some of the rude and unlettered
people of my race, has been frequently noted
by other persons. A typical example of this is
Harriet Tubman's description of the Battle of Gettysburg,
which Professor Albert Bushnell Hart has
noted in his "History of Slavery and Abolition." He
heard this description from Harriet Tubman's own
lips as she was describing some of her experiences
during the Civil War. One sentence from that
description was as follows: "And then we saw

the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we
heard the rainfall, and that was the drops of blood
falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it
was dead men that we reaped."

It is this same natural ability for picturesque
expression which makes the Negro a natural orator.
Even the disposition of the Negro to pick up and
repeat high-sounding words and expressions is but
another indication of his sense for impressive language.

I have noted, also, that where Negro college
students do not excel their fellows of the white race
in other branches of study, they frequently come
off first in oratorical contests. For example, in 1907,
a Zulu, who some years before came from Africa
to America to get an education, carried off the
oratorical honours at Columbia University. The
name of this orator was Pixley Isaka Seme. When
I last heard from Mr. Seme he was a student at
Jesus College, Oxford, where he, with a number
of other African students, was studying preparatory
to going back to South Africa to enter the
colonial civil service.

One of the most striking illustrations of the
natural poetic talent in a member of the Negro race
is in the verses of Phillis Wheatley. It requires a
considerable amount of natural talent for any person
to master a strange language and to learn to
express himself poetically in it. It would seem

that this must be particularly difficult for one coming
from a condition and a life as remote and as
different from that of a civilised European people
as that of the primitive African. Nevertheless,
the Negro has shown his ability to accomplish this
feat.

One day in the year 1761, Mrs. John Wheatley,
of Boston, went into the city slave market to purchase
a Negro servant girl. She selected as suitable
for her purpose a child between seven and
eight years of age who had but recently come from
Africa, and was hardly able to speak a word of
English. The little girl was taken home and soon
showed such marked intelligence that her mistress's
daughter determined to teach her to read. Within
sixteen months she had so far mastered the English
language that she could read with ease and
apparent understanding the most difficult passages
of the Scriptures. She acquired the art of writing,
it is said, almost wholly by her own exertion and
industry. The great interest that she showed in
learning to read and write, and the eagerness with
which she read the books that were supplied to her,
were so unusual at that time that it attracted general
attention.

After a time she began to write verses. She
was about fourteen years old when she wrote the
first verses that attracted any particular attention.
From this time until she was nineteen years of age

she seems to have written all the poems which she
gave to the world. They were published in London,
in 1773, and dedicated to the Countess of
Huntingdon, who had been her friend and patron.
A letter of recommendation, signed by the Governor,
Lieutenant-governor and several other respectable
persons of Boston, was printed by the publishers as
a sort of introduction to this little volume. This
letter of recommendation was as follows:

Phillis Wheatley addressed a poem to General
Washington, which seemed to have pleased him very
much. In a letter to Joseph Reed, dated February
10, 1776, from Cambridge, General Washington
made the following reference to this poem:

This kindly reference of George Washington
to the Negro slave girl poet and the uniform kindness
and courtesy with which he is known to have
treated black men and women in every station
in life has gone far to endear the memory of the
Father of our Country to the coloured people of
the United States.

Phillis Wheatley died December 5, 1784, when she
was thirty-four years of age. She was one of the first
women, white or black, to attain literary distinction
in this country. I have frequently noticed, in
travelling in different sections of the country, that
many of the literary organisations and women's clubs
among the members of my race bear the name of
Phillis Wheatley, showing how well her name is still
remembered among the masses of the Negro people.

Another slave poet whose name is remembered,
but whose history is shrouded in mystery, is George
M. Horton, of Chatham County, North Carolina.
Horton could not write, but his poems were taken
down by some white man and were regarded as of
such importance that they were printed in a small
volume in 1829.

Frequently I have run across the names of Negroes

from the West Indies or elsewhere who have written
poetry in the Spanish or French languages. Now
and then I have received a volume of poems in some
language that I was not able to read, which were
written by some Negro poet in some part of the
world. The great national poet of Russia, Alexander
Sergeievich Pushkin, although of noble family,
inherited African blood from his mother.

The history of Alexander Dumas, who was born
of a Negro mother in one of the West Indian islands
belonging to France, is familiar.

One of the most charming writers of verse in
America at the present day, William Stanley Braithwaite,
of Boston, is a young coloured man who was
born in the West Indies. He is the author of several
books of verse, one of them entitled "Lyrics of Love
and Life," published in 1904. He is a frequent
contributor to the magazines.

I should mention here, also, the name of Charles
W. Chesnutt, the novelist, who makes his home in
Cleveland, Ohio. Mr. Chesnutt, although he was
born in the North, is descended from free coloured
people of North Carolina, Shortly after the War
his parents returned to the South, where Mr. Chesnutt
was for some time a school-teacher. It was
while thus occupied that he obtained that acquaintance
with the South upon which his stories are
founded. Among them are: "The Conjure
Woman," "The House Behind the Cedars," "The

Wife of His Youth," and "The Marrow of Tradition."
This latter is said to be the best description
of the Wilmington riot and the events that led up to
and produced it that has yet been written. Mr.
Chesnutt's last story of Southern life is called "The
Colonel's Dream," and describes the efforts of a
Southerner who had gone North and become wealthy
to return to his native village and build up its
resources and make it prosperous.

But the poetry to which I have referred was
written for the most part at a time when the masses
of the Negro people could not read. It was the
work of men who were, to a large extent, out of
touch with the masses of the Negro people. The
poems they wrote were not in the language which
the masses of the people spoke, sometimes not even
in a language which they could understand, and did
not in any sense express or interpret the life of the
Negro people.

Almost the first representative poet of my race
was Paul Laurence Dunbar. Of Dunbar, William
Dean Howells, to whom he owed to some extent his
success, said that Dunbar was the only man of pure
African blood and of American civilisation "to feel
the Negro esthetically and express it lyrically." And
that the Negro race "had attained civilisation in him."
Mr. Howells believed that Dunbar more than any
other Negro had gained for the Negro a permanent
position in English literature.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton,
Ohio, in 1872. His parents had been slaves. He
received a high school education, but before his
education was completed, while he was still working
as an elevator boy, he began to write verses.
He succeeded after a hard struggle in gaining recognition
for his poetry, and became a frequent contributor
to the leading magazines of the country. He
was, likewise, a successful reader of his own verse.
He published a number of volumes of poetry and of
prose. To the time of his death, February 9, 1906,
he seemed to be gaining in intellectual power and
in popularity.

Shortly before he died, when it had become clear,
even to his naturally hopeful mind, that he had not
long to live, he wrote the following verses which are
so full of pathos and express so clearly at once the
strength and the weakness, as he felt them, not only
of himself, but perhaps also of his race, that I quote
them here:

It has always seemed strange to me that Dunbar,
who was born in a Northern state, and knew so little

from actual experience of the life of the Negro in
the South, could have been able to interpret that
life so sincerely, so sympathetically, and so beautifully.
No doubt the most that he knew about the
life of the Negro before and after the War he gathered
from the lips of his devoted mother, who had been
a slave and had known and felt it all. There were
no bitterness and no harsh notes in Dunbar's music.
Perhaps this also is due to the fact that he saw the
condition of his race sympathetically, through his
mother's eyes. His songs have been of great service
not only to his own race, but to the rest of the
world. He was in a sense a direct descendant of the
old slave singers. He expressed intelligently and
poetically the deeper feelings and thoughts of the
masses of the Negro people, so that the world could
understand them. He was, in fact, the poet laureate
of the Negro race.

From among the Negroes in the United States
there have come from time to time not merely singers,
but artists. One of the most noted of these, and
the earliest to gain reputation, was Edmonia Lewis,
who was born of Negro and Indian parentage in the
State of New York, in 1845. During a visit to
Boston she chanced to see a statue of Benjamin
Franklin. She stood transfixed before it. Perhaps
it was the latent genius within her which was stirred,
for after looking at it with deep emotion she said:
"I, too, can make a stone man."

It was William Lloyd Garrison to whom she turned
for advice, who gave her encouragement to study
sculpture. She first attracted attention by exhibiting
in Boston, in 1865, a bust of Colonel Robert
Gould Shaw. The same year she went to Rome
to study and has resided there permanently since
1867. She has created a number of works of merit,
the most noted of which are, "The Death of Cleopatra,"
which was exhibited at the Centennial
Exhibition at Philadelphia, in 1876; "Asleep,"
"Marriage of Hiawatha," "Madonna with the
Infant Christ," and the "Freedwoman." She has
made a number of portrait busts in terra cotta,
among which are those of Longfellow, Charles
Sumner, John Brown, and Abraham Lincoln, The
bust of Abraham Lincoln is in the public library
at San José, California.

A younger sculptress, who has recently attracted
attention, is Meta Vaux Warrick. She was born in
Philadelphia, and gained her first lesson in modelling
clay flowers in the public kindergarten. Afterward
she secured a free scholarship in the Pennsylvania
School of Industrial Art. Her first piece of original
work in clay was the head of Medusa. In 1899 Miss
Warrick went to study in Paris. She finally succeeded
in attracting the attention of the famous
French sculptor, Rodin, who is said to have given
her his approval in these words: "My child, you are
a sculptress. You have the sense of form." One

of her best pieces of work was made for the Jamestown
Tercentennial, and represented the advancement
of the Negro since he landed at Jamestown,
in 1619.

The Negro artist who has gained greatest fame,
however, is Henry O. Tanner, son of Bishop Benjamin
T. Tanner, of the A. M. E. Church. After
studying for a time in the Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts, he opened a photograph gallery in
Atlanta, Georgia. This venture was unsuccessful,
however, and the next year he taught freehand
drawing in Clark University, in the same city. His
ambition, however, was to go to Paris and study
under one of the living masters of art. By the
assistance of friends he was finally able to gratify
this desire. His first picture to receive official recognition
was entitled, "Daniel in the Lions' Den,"
which received honourable mention in the Paris
Salon of 1896. The next year his "Lazarus
Rising from the Dead," received the third medal,
and was purchased by the French Government
for its collection of modern art in the Luxembourg
gallery.

From that time until this Mr. Tanner has produced
something every year, and every year the
painting which he exhibited has been better
than that of the previous year. In December,
1908, a comprehensive exhibition of his paintings
was made in New York City. At the time the

art critic of the New York Herald said of Mr.
Tanner and his art:

What impresses me most about Mr. Tanner's
paintings is the vividness, the sincerity and, I may
say, literalness with which he has depicted the
incidents of the Bible story. He paints all these
things, it seems to me, with something of the spirit
in which these same incidents are pictured in the
old plantation hymns, vividly, as I have said, literally,
and with a deep religious feeling for the significance
of the things that he paints.

CHAPTER XII
NEGRO WOMEN AND THEIR WORK

DURING his travels in Africa Mungo Park,
the famous African explorer, came one day
to Sego, the capitol of the Kingdom of
Bambara, which is situated on the Niger River. Information
was carried to the king of that country that
a white man wished to see him. The king in reply
sent one of his men to inform the explorer that he
could not be received until his business was known.
He was advised to find lodgings for the night in a
neighbouring village. To his great surprise, Park
found no one would admit him. After searching for
a long time he finally sat down, worn out, under the
shade of a tree, where he remained for a whole day
without food.

As night came on the wind arose and a heavy
storm threatened. To the other dangers of the situation
was added the fear that he might be devoured by
the numerous wild beasts that roamed about in that
region. Just as he was preparing to climb into a
tree, however, a woman passed by and perceiving
his weary and dejected appearance, spoke to him
and inquired why he was there. On receiving his

explanation she told him to follow her to her house.
Here he was given food and a mat was spread on
which he lay down to sleep. The women of the
house were meanwhile employed in spinning cotton
and, as they worked, they lightened and enlivened
their labour by songs. One of these songs was
extemporised in honour of their guest. Park described
this music, in the story of his travels, as sweet
and plaintive. The words were:

This incident has been often quoted. Sometimes it
has been referred to as an illustration of the easy and
spontaneous way in which the African people are accustomed
to express their thoughts and feelings in song.
To my mind, however, it seems rather an illustration
of that natural human sympathy which is characteristic
of the women of most races, but particularly
so of Negro women, whether in Africa or elsewhere.

Whatever may be said about the thoughts and the
failings of Negro women, no one, so far as I know,
has ever denied to them this gift of sympathy.
Most people have recognised this quality but nowhere
is the kindness and helpfulness of Negro women

better known and appreciated than among the white
people of the Southern states. The simple-hearted
devotion of the Negro slave women to their masters
and their masters' families was one of the redeeming
features of Negro slavery in the South.

The devotion the slaves sometimes showed to
their masters did not fail to inspire a corresponding
affection in the members of the master's family.
I know of scarcely anything more beautiful than the
tributes I have heard Southern white men and
women pay to those old coloured mammies, who
nursed them as children, shared their childish joys
and sorrows and clung to them through life with an
affection that no change of time or of circumstance
could diminish.

Southern literature is full of stones which illustrate
the strength of this mutual affection, which bound
the young master or the young mistress to his or her
faithful Negro servant. When all other ties which
bound the races together in the South have snapped
assunder, this tie of affection has held fast.

I remember reading a few years ago, shortly after
the Altanta riots, a story written by a young Southern
white man entitled, "Ma'm Linda." The central
theme of this story was the affection of a young white
woman for her coloured "mammy." This affection
was strong enough to resist and finally overcome
attachments that divided the community in which
these two persons are supposed to have lived. It put

an end to an exciting episode which would otherwise
have terminated in a most hideous mob murder.

As an illustration of this devotion of some of the
slave women to their masters and masters' families,
the following incident, which took place in Washington,
District of Columbia, in 1833, is in many
ways typical. A Southern gentleman and his family
were stopping at a Washington hotel when he began
a conversation with some persons who were opposed
to slavery. After they had discussed the question
at some length the slave-holder said to them: "Here
is our servant; she is a slave, and you are at liberty
to persuade her to remain here if you can." The
anti-slavery people sought out the young woman
and informed her that having been brought by her
master into the free states she was, by the law of the
land, a free woman.

The young woman promptly replied that this could
not be so. They talked the matter over thoroughly
and made every effort to show her that she
was free under the existing laws, but she shook her
head, saying that a legal decision did not touch her
case, "for you see," she said, "I promised my mistress
that I would go back with the children."

An attempt was then made to induce her to break
her promise. It was pointed out that a promise
made while she was not free could not be binding,
but the young slave woman refused to look upon it
in that light.

At length one of the abolitionists said: "Is it
possible that you do not wish to be free?"

"Was there ever a slave that did not wish to be
free?" the girl replied. "I long for liberty. I will
get out of slavery, if I can, the day after I return, but
I must go back because I have promised."

Among those slaves who became free, either
through the kindness of their owners or as a result
of their own individual efforts, the number of Negro
women is large. Olmsted, in his "Cotton Kingdom,"
records an instance of a woman who had obtained
her freedom in Virginia, but, being in fear that she
might be reenslaved, fled to Philadelphia. Here
for a time she almost starved. One day a little girl,
who saw her begging on the streets, told her that her
mother wanted some one to do her washing. When
the poor woman applied for this work she was at first
refused, because her prospective employer was
afraid to trust valuable clothing to so unfortunate
appearing a creature. The coloured woman
begged earnestly for the chance to do this work
and finally suggested, if there was any fear she
would not return the clothes, that she should
be locked in a room until the work was completed.
She pleaded so earnestly that she was
allowed to do this work, and in this way began
her life in Philadelphia.

Ten years afterward a white man from her old
home in Virginia happened to be in the city. The

coloured woman recognised him and was overjoyed
to see some one from her old home. She
invited him to come to her house. He did so and
found it a handsomely furnished three-story building.
From the window she pointed out three other houses
in the vicinity which she owned and rented. In
order that her children might be educated she had
employed for them a private instructor. This story
illustrates the manner in which many other Negro
women set to work, after emancipation, to build
homes for themselves and their children.

To the twenty-five million dollars, which it is
estimated the free Negroes accumulated before the
Civil War, the thrift and industry of Negro women
contributed no small amount. Likewise, in the
remarkable amount of property accumulated and
in the home-building which has gone forward for the
last forty years, the women of the Negro race
have ever been foremost.

I have seldom found an instance where a man of
my race has accumulated property, that his wife has
not only urged that a home be bought but has likewise
aided, by extra work, in buying it. In the
struggle for homes and for a substantial family life
the women of no race have shown a greater devotion
and more constant self-denial than have the Negro
women since the masses of the race have become
free. They have engaged in all forms of personal
and domestic service, to supplement the small wages

of their husbands, in order that their children might
be fed, clothed, kept in a school and something laid
aside to pay on a home that more than likely is
being purchased through some building and loan
association. These women have frequently had
almost no learning in books and but little idea of
the settled and traditional regard of mankind for
the sacredness of the home and family ties. When
they began to lay the foundation of the Negro family
life they were simply following the dictates of their
own hearts, and the natural instincts which their
ancestors had brought from Africa. For, contrary
to the general notion, it will be found that family
life, where native institutions have not been broken
down through contact with the white race, is highly
developed among the native Africans.

Some idea of the part that the Negro women are
taking in the economic development of the race may
be gained by considering how large a place they hold
in the field of industry. The statistics show that
coloured women, as wage-earners, do more than their
full share of the work of the race. According to the
census of 1900, for every thousand coloured women
or girls, ten years of age and over, four hundred and
seven were reported as bread-winners. In the case
of white women, on the contrary, the corresponding
number was one hundred and fifty. This means that
about two coloured women out of five and one white
woman out of six work for wages. Of the total

number of Negroes engaged in gainful occupations
in 1900, nearly one-third were women. The proportion
of coloured women to the whole number of
Negroes employed in various groups of occupations
was as follows: in agriculture 27.1 per cent., in the
professions 32.9 per cent., in domestic and personal
service 51.5 per cent., in trade and transportation
1.9 per cent., and in manufacturing and mechanical
pursuits 12 per cent.

In the professional class there were 262 women who
followed the stage as a career; 164 were ministers,
7 dentists, n journalists, 10 lawyers, 25 were
engaged in literary and scientific work, 86 were
artists and teachers of art, 160 physicians, 1,185
musicians and teachers of music, and 13,525 were
school-teachers. In the 140 groups of occupations,
concerning which statistics are given in the census,
coloured women are represented in 133. The
remaining groups were of such a character that men
alone could be employed in them.

It is, perhaps, in the matter of educating their
children that Negro women have made their greatest
sacrifices. I have referred to the freed woman in
Philadelphia, who employed private teachers for
her children. Thousands of Negro women at the
present day are working in the kitchen, over the washtub,
or in the field in order that their children may
have the advantages of an education.

A considerable number of Negro women have distinguished

themselves as teachers of their people.
The fourth school established in the District of
Columbia for coloured children was started by Mrs.
Anne Maria Hall. This school was opened in 1810.
The Costin sisters, Louisa and Martha, from 1823
to 1839, did much to improve the character of the
education of coloured children in the District of
Columbia. Fannie Jackson Coppin, wife of Bishop
Levi J. Coppin, of the African Methodist Episcopal
Church, was one of the best known of the women
coloured teachers in the United States. She was
born a slave in Washington, District of Columbia,
in 1837, and was purchased by her aunt. She
graduated with honours from Oberlin College and
began to teach in 1865. From 1869 to 1899 she was
principal of the Institute for Coloured Youth in
Philadelphia. The present principal of that school,
Hugh M. Browne, was her pupil.

The first coloured school-teacher in the public
schools of Philadelphia was Cordelia A. Jennings,
who for a number of years maintained a private
institution for coloured children in the city. In
1864, her school having reached an enrollment of
one hundred and fifty, Miss Jennings decided to
apply for recognition and support as a public school.
Under the regulations that prevailed at that time
she was entitled to do this. The request aroused
considerable discussion, but was finally granted,
and Miss Jennings's school became part of the

public school system, with its former teacher as
principal.

After forty-five years, this school is still in existence.
During this time it has had but two principals; the
present incumbent being Miss Caroline R. Le
Count, who has under her as teachers a number
of those who had previously been her pupils. It
is now well known under the name of the Catto
school, named after Octavius V. Catto, a coloured
schoolmaster, who was killed in the election riot
in October, 1871.

Miss Jennings was born in Poughkeepsie, New
York, in 1843. She graduated from the Institution
of Coloured Youth in Philadelphia. After leaving
Philadelphia, she helped to establish at Louisville,
Kentucky, in 1886, the first coloured high
school in that state. While there she became the
wife of Reverend Joseph S. Attwell. Mr. Attwell,
who was born in Barbadoes, British West Indies,
in 1831, had come to America about 1864, to collect
funds to assist a number of his countrymen to
emigrate to Liberia. He succeeded in collecting
about twenty thousand dollars, and thus became
instrumental in founding the settlement known as
Crozerville, on the Liberian coast.

After the close of the War, Mr. Attwell went
South as agent of the Episcopal Church. He established
mission churches in several cities in Kentucky,
founded a mission church in Petersburg,

Virginia, and was for several years rector of St.
Stephen's Church, Savannah, Georgia. He finally
became rector of St. Philip's Church, where he
died in 1881. St. Philip's Church, New York, is
said to be the richest coloured church in the United
States. It bears, in this respect, somewhat the
same relationship to the other coloured churches
that Trinity Church, New York—from which,
in fact, it is an offshoot—does to the white churches
of the city.

During all this time Mrs. Attwell was active as
a teacher or as a worker in other directions, for
the benefit of her race. She was principal of the
parochial school, at Petersburg, and principal of
the West Broad Street School, at Savannah, and
after her husband's death, in 1881, she worked as a
professional trained nurse. Mrs. Attwell was, for
a time, matron of the Home for Aged and Infirm
Coloured Persons in Philadelphia, and was afterward
in charge of the Industrial Home for Working
Women, at Germantown, Pennsylvania. At
present, 1909, she is living with her son, Ernest T.
Attwell, who is Business Agent of the Tuskegee
Institute.

Mrs. Attwell's mother, Mrs. Mary McFarland
Jennings, was herself a school-teacher. When, in the
summer of 1909, I made an extended trip of observation
through the Southern part of Virginia, I
passed through Kenbridge, Lunenburg County,

where Mrs. Jennings was born, and where, after
the War, she conducted a school for many years
for Freedmen. For four years after the close of
the War, Mrs. Jennings carried on this school at
her own expense and without salary. In 1869,
however, through the intervention of her son-in-law,
Mr. Joseph S. Attwell, the support of the school
was taken over by the Domestic Missionary Society
of the Protestant Episcopal Church. The school
was closed in 1894, but at the time of my visit to
Kenbridge, citizens of the county and former pupils
of the school had purchased land and were preparing
to erect a building for a memorial school
to be established there in memory of Mrs. Jennings
and her work.

Lucy C. Laney, a graduate of Atlanta University,
has done an interesting and important work in education
in Georgia. She was for a time principal of
a public school in Savannah, In 1886, however,
she resigned this position and went to Augusta,
Georgia, in order to establish in that city an industrial
school. Although she started this school almost
unaided, making herself responsible for the support
of the teachers and the expense of the institution,
somehow or other the school has grown steadily
from the time it was started. It has since then
received a liberal support from the Presbyterian
Church and is now the chief school supported by
this denomination south of North Carolina.

In this connection I want to mention the noble
work for the care and education of orphans and
neglected children, which has been carried on for
many years by Dinah Pace at Covington, Georgia.
This is known as the Reed Home and School. After
years of struggle Miss Pace has been able to build up
at Covington, largely through the assistance of her
own pupils and teachers, an industrial school and
orphans' home which is valued at the present time at
about ten thousand dollars. Another of the early
schools established in the way I have described is the
Industrial School at Manassas, Virginia, which was
started by a coloured woman by the name of Jennie
Dean, and is now in charge of Mr. Leslie P. Hill
and his wife, both of whom were formerly teachers
in the institute.

I feel certain that, if I had space to do so, I could
name hundreds of other women who are doing, in
different parts of the South, a work similar to that I
have already mentioned. The names of these women
are frequently scarcely known outside of the communities
in which they live and labour, but the value
of the service they have rendered is greater than can
ever be fully measured or known.

In speaking of the coloured women who have
distinguished themselves as teachers, 1 should not
fail to mention the name of Maria L. Baldwin, a.
coloured woman who is principal of one of the best
graded schools of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in

which she has under her care not less than 600 white
children. Miss Baldwin is one of the best known
women of her race in New England and is frequently
called upon to address teachers' associations in
different parts of New England. At Hampton
Institute, Hampton, Virginia, and at the Institute
for Coloured Youth at Cheyney, Pa., her summer-school
classes have had a large and enthusiastic
attendance.

Negro women have not only been, to a very large
extent, the teachers of their race, both before and
since the War, but several of them played important
parts in the antebellum struggle for freedom. I
have already referred, in another part of this
volume, to the story of Harriet Tubman. Another
woman, who did much to change sentiment in the
United States in regard to slavery, was Sojourner
Truth, one of the most original and best known
of anti-slavery characters.

Sojourner Truth was born about 1775. She was
brought as a child with her parents from Africa and
sold as a slave in the State of New York. She has
described this incident in her own picturesque
language.

"Ye see," she once said, "we was all brought
over from Africa, father an' mother an' I with a lot
more of us. We was sold up an' down, an' hither
an' yon; an' I can 'member, when I was a little thing,
not bigger than this," pointing to her grandson,

"how my ole mammy would sit out o' doors in the
evenin', an' look up at the stars an' groan. She'd
groan an' groan, an' says I to her: 'Mammy, what
makes you groan so?' An' she'd say,' Matter enough,
chile! I'm groanin' to think o' my poor children:
they don't know where I be, an' I don't know where
they be; they looks up at the stars an' I looks up at
the stars, but I can't tell where they be.'"

Sojourner Truth was called Isabella by her
parents. Her parents' names were James and Betsy.
They were owned by Colonel Ardinburgh, who lived
in Hurley, Ulster County, New York. At nine
years of age Isabella was sold to John Nealy, of the
same county, for $100. She thought that her sale
in some way was connected with a flock of sheep.
At any rate, it was the beginning of her trials, for her
former master belonged to the class of people called
Low Dutch, and she had not learned the English
language and no one in the family except Mr. Nealy,
her new master, understood the Dutch language.
This led to frequent misunderstandings and punishments
for Isabella. Her mother had said to her
when she was very small, that when she should grow
up and be sold away from all of her old friends
and had great troubles, that she was to go to God
and he would help her.

"An' says I to her,' Who is God, anyhow, mammy?'
An' says she, "Why chile, you jes look up dar! its
him dat made all dem.'"

At the Nealys' she had many occasions to
remember the words of her mother. Once she was
ordered to go to the barn, where she found her
master with a bundle of rods waiting for her. She
was stripped to her waist and given the most cruel
beating she ever received, and she never knew why
she was so cruelly whipped. Often afterward she
would say: "When I hear 'em tell of whippin'
women on the bare flesh it makes my flesh crawl an'
my very hair rise on my head. Oh, my God, what a
way is this of treatin' human bein's!" And then she
said, "I thought about what my old mammy had
told me about God, an' I thought I had gone into
trouble sure enough, an' I wanted to find God, an'
I heerd somebody tell a story about a man that met
God on the threshing floor, an' I thought, good an'
well, I will have a threshing floor.

"So I went down in the lot an' I thresh down a
place real hard, an' I used to go down there every
day an' pray an' cry with all my might, a-praying
to the Lord to make my massa an' missus better."

The Lord, however, did not answer her prayer
and so she said, "Why, God, maybe you can't."
She then proposed to the Lord that if He would help
her to get away she would be good. "But if You
don't help me I really don't think I can be."

Then she said the Lord told her to get up about
three o'clock in the morning and travel. In the
course of the day she came to the house of some

Quakers, who treated her very kindly, and after
supper they took her into a room in which there
was a bed and told her to sleep there. But instead
of sleeping in the bed she slept under it, and in the
morning, when they came to ask her if she hadn't
been asleep, she said, "Yes, I never slep' better."

"Why, you haven't been in the bed at all," they
exclaimed.

"Laws, you didn' think of sech a thing as my
sleepin' in dat ar bed, did you?" she replied. "I
never heerd o' sech a thing in my life."

The immediate cause of Sojourner's running away
from her master was that, by an act of the New York
Legislature, passed in 1817, all slaves forty years
of age were to be liberated at once, children
on reaching their majority, and the others, in 1827.
Sojourner would have been free on July 4, 1827, but
her master, in consideration of her long years of
faithful service, had promised to give her free
papers a year in advance of the time which the law
had set. He backed out of this agreement, however,
on the plea that during the year her hand
had been disabled; and, therefore, she had not
performed as much work as he had expected.

The next year, after the law had made her free,
Sojourner's former master came to her and invited
her to come back and see his family. When she
reached her master's house, she found, to her great
sorrow, that her son, who was a small boy, although

free according to law, had been carried off by the
daughter of her former mistress to Alabama.
Sojourner vowed that she would have the child back.
She was told to present her case to the Grand
Jury. She had never heard this word, Grand Jury,
before, and thought it meant some sort of a very
important individual. She went to town, therefore,
when the court was in session.

"An' I stood 'round the court-house," she said,
"an' when dey was comin' out I walked right up
to de grandest one I could see and I says to him,
' Sir, be you a Grand Jury?'"

The Grand Jury took up her case, and, in the
course of time, her child was restored to her. Then
an incident took place which illustrates how easily
a Negro woman forgives and forgets, as soon as her
sympathies are touched.

When she found that her child had been unlawfully
taken to Alabama, Sojourner prayed, in the
bitterness of her despair, that the Lord would render
unto her mistress double for all the trouble and
sorrow she had been instrumental in bringing
upon her former slave. Shortly after this Sojourner
happened to be at the home of her former master
when a letter was received, saying that the daughter
in Alabama had been murdered by her husband,
while he was in a drunken frenzy. Sojourner,
feeling that her prayer had been answered, now
repented having called upon the Lord to revenge her

injury. Her account of what then took place has
been reported as follows:

A few years after this Sojourner felt called of
God to labour for the salvation of souls, and the
good of her own people. It was at this time she
decided to change her name. She has described
how this was done:

Sojourner could neither read nor write, but she
soon became widely known in the North, and was
a prominent figure at anti-slavery meetings. One
day she was speaking at one of these meetings when
a man interrupted her and said: "Old woman, do
you think that your talk about slavery does any
good? Do you suppose that people care about
what you say? Why, I don't care any more for
your talk than I do for the bite of a flea."

"Perhaps not," she answered, "but, the Lord
willin', an' I will keep you scratchin'."

About this time an insect known as the weevil
appeared in different parts of the country and
destroyed a large part of the wheat crop. Sojourner,
taking this for her text, made the following point
on the Constitution:

On another occasion Parker Pillsbury, in speaking
at an abolition meeting one Sunday afternoon,
criticised the attitude of churches in regard to
slavery. Just then a furious thunderstorm came up,
and a young Methodist minister arose and interrupted
the speaker, saying, among other things,
that he was fearful God's judgment was about to
fall on him for daring to sit and hear such blasphemy;
he said it almost made his hair rise in terror.

"Chile," said Sojourner in a voice that was heard
above the rain and thunder, "don't be skeered;
you're not goin' to be hurt. I don' spect God ever
hearn tell on you."

On another occasion Sojourner Truth was at a
woman's rights convention, in which the ministers
of the town turned out and took issue against
the ladies. Public sentiment was turned against
them, and for a time the women sat in despair.
Suddenly Sojourner voluntarily stepped to the
front and made a speech which won a complete
victory for the women. This speech contains
so much unlettered eloquence that it seems to
me worth repeating here. As reported, this is
what she said:

Wendell Phillips said that he never knew but one
human being who had the power to bear down a
whole audience by a few simple words, and that person
was Sojourner Truth. As a case in point, he
relates how once, at a public meeting in Boston,
Frederick Douglass was one of the chief speakers.
Douglass described the wrongs of the Negro, and,
as he proceeded, grew more and more excited until
he ended by saying that there was no hope of justice
from the whites, no possible hope except in
their own right arms. It must come to blood.
They must fight for themselves or it would never
be done.

Sitting on the very front seat, facing the platform,
was Sojourner Truth and, in the hush of deep
feeling, as Douglass sat down, she rose and uttered
these words:

The effect was electrical, and thrilled through
the house, changing, as by a flash, the whole feeling
of the audience.

Mr. Story, the sculptor, has attempted to preserve
the spirit of Sojourner Truth and the impression
she made upon him, in his statue called the
Lybian Sybil. After a sojourn of more than one

hundred years on this earth, during which she
always proclaimed the truth, Sojourner Truth
passed to her reward November 26, 1883.

I have ventured to describe the doings and sayings
of this remarkable woman at some length,
because the pithy sayings she uttered, and the
sympathy with suffering that she showed, are typical
of a large class of Negro slave women.

Another woman, of a very different type, who
distinguished herself during slavery days, was
Frances Ellen Watkins. Born in Baltimore, Maryland,
in 1825, she went to school to her uncle,
Reverend William Watkins, who taught a school
in Baltimore for freed coloured children. About
1851 she moved to Ohio and began teaching. A
little later she taught at Little York, Pennsylvania.
It was here that she became acquainted with the
workings of the Underground Railway.

A law had been enacted in Maryland preventing
free people of colour from entering that state, on
pain of being imprisoned and sold into slavery.
A free coloured man, however, who had unwittingly
violated this statute, had been sold into
Georgia, but had escaped by secreting himself
behind a wheel-house of a northbound steamship.
Before he reached freedom, however, he was discovered
and sent back to slavery. This incident,
which came directly under her notice, made a great
impression upon the young coloured school-teacher,

and it was this that finally determined her to devote
her life to the cause of anti-slavery.

After she came to Philadelphia, Miss Watkins
made her home at the station of the Underground
Railway. Here she had abundant opportunity to
see the passengers and hear their tales of hardship
and suffering. She began her career as a public
lecturer in 1854, and, for a year and a half, spoke
in the Eastern states. In 1856 she visited Canada
and lectured in Toronto. From 1856 to 1859 her
work was mainly in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New
York and Ohio.

Not only did she give of her time, but of her
limited means to the cause of freedom. William
Still, in his Underground Railway, gives a number
of instances where she gave him financial aid.
In one case she wrote: "Yesterday I sent you
thirty dollars; my offering is not very large, but if
you need more send me word."

In the fall of 1860 she was married in the city of
Cincinnati to Fenton Harper. She gave up her
public work until the death of her husband, May
23, 1864. She had by this time become known
as an anti-slavery writer in both prose and poetry.
After the close of the War she came South, and
began to work for the uplifting of her people in the
states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and
Mississippi.

To the present generation of coloured people

Mrs. Harper is known principally as a writer. She
has published a number of books of poetry. Her
best known prose work is "Iola Leroy, or the Shadows
Uplifted." On returning from her work in
the South she became a lecturer and writer on temperance,
and for some time had charge of the
W. C. T. U. among the coloured people. She now
makes her home in Philadelphia.

Another somewhat remarkable character is Amanda
Smith, the evangelist. She was born a slave at
Long Green, Maryland, January 23, 1837. Her
father wanted to free himself and his family, so he
worked at night, making brooms and husk mats,
and burning lime. During harvest time he would
work in the grain fields until one and two o'clock
in the morning. In this way he first purchased
himself and then set himself to the task of buying
his wife and five children. After he had succeeded
in this, he moved his family to Pennsylvania.

Amanda taught herself to read by cutting out
large letters from the newspapers, laying them on
the window sill, and getting her mother to make
them into words. When she was eight years old,
she attended a private school for six weeks. Five
miles from her home there was a white school, to
which the few coloured children in the neighbourhood
were allowed to go. They were, however,
placed at a disadvantage, for all the white children
had their full lessons first and then, if any time was

left, the coloured children had a chance. It often
happened, therefore, that after Amanda had walked
the five miles through the deep snow she would
get but one lesson, and that would be while the white
children were taking down their dinner pails and
putting on their wraps. In this way she received
three months' schooling, and this was the end of her
education in the schoolroom.

Amanda joined the Methodist Episcopal Church,
and it was in the great camp-meetings of this church
in the seventies, that her power as an evangelist
was first manifested. In a little book, "Amanda
Smith's Own Story," an extended sketch of her
evangelistic labours are given. In this work she
laboured not only in this country, but also in India,
in Africa, in England and Scotland. Bishop J. M.
Thoburn, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, gives
the following concerning her:

Amanda Smith has now largely given up her
evangelistic labours and conducts the Amanda
Smith Orphans' Home for Coloured Children, at
Harvey, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois.

One of the ablest and best known women lecturers
before the public at the present time is Mary Church
Terrell. Her opportunities and training have been
exceptional. She was born in Tennessee, a daughter
of well-to-do parents, graduated with honours from
Oberlin College in 1884, and finally spent two years
in European study and travel. She was for a time
a teacher of ancient and modern languages at Wilberforce
University, and later, in the high school for
coloured children in Washington, District of Columbia.
At the International Congress of Women in
Berlin, Germany, in 1904, it is said that Mrs. Terrell
had the unique distinction of delivering one speech
in excellent German and another in equally good
French. Mrs. Terrell has been prominent in the work
of the National Association of Coloured Women, of
which she several times has been president.

Another woman who has gained some public
distinction is Mrs. Lucy Thurman, of Jackson,
Michigan, who succeeded Mrs. Francis E. W. Harper
in charge of the work of the W. C. T. U. among
the coloured people.

The most important work done by coloured
women for coloured women has been through the
coloured women's club movement. As early as
1890 there were coloured women's clubs in nearly
every large city where there was any considerable
coloured population. The best known of these
are, perhaps, the Phillis Wheatley Club, of New
Orleans, of which Mrs. Sylvania Williams is the
head, and the Woman's Era Club, of Boston, which
was founded by Mrs. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin.
In addition to these clubs there were in existence
at the date of which I have mentioned, the Ellen
Watkins Harper Club, of Jefferson City, Missouri;
the Loyal Union Club, of Brooklyn, New York;
the Ida B. Wells Club, of Chicago, Illinois; the
Sojourner Truth Club, of Providence, Rhode Island;
and, quite as influential as any other, the Woman's
League, of Washington, District of Columbia.

The first National Conference of Coloured Women
was held in Boston in the latter part of July, in 1895.
The person more responsible than any one else for
the first national meeting of coloured women was
Mrs. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, the founder and
first president of the Woman's Era Club, of Boston.

Mrs. Ruffin was born in Boston, in 1844. Her
father, John St. Pierre, had the blood of three races
in his veins—namely, French, Indian, and African.
Her mother was an English woman, a native of
Cornwall, England. As a girl Mrs. Ruffin attended
the public schools of Salem, Massachusetts, and
later studied at a private school in New York.
While still a girl in school she married George
Ruffin, of Richmond, Virginia. I have already
referred, in an earlier chapter, to the position which
Mr. Ruffin made for himself in Massachusetts.

Mrs. Ruffin early became interested in the advancement
and welfare of coloured women. During the
period of the "Kansas Exodus," in 1879, she
called together the women of her neighbourhood,
in the West End of Boston, and organised the
Kansas Relief Association. In the work that this
association undertook Mrs. Ruffin was greatly
aided by the counsel of William Lloyd Garrison,
and other prominent anti-slavery people. A large
amount of clothing, old and new, and a considerable
sum of money were collected and forwarded to the
Kansas refugees.

The success of this work of philanthropy lead to
Mrs. Ruffin's connection with the Associated
Charities which, at that time, was just being organised
in Boston. For the next eleven years she
acted as a local visitor for this organisation. She
also became a member of the Country Week Society,

devoting herself to the difficult task of finding places
in the country for coloured children.

The work that Mrs. Ruffin did in this, and other
directions, brought her in contact with many of
the best and most cultivated women of New England.
She became a member of the Massachusetts
Moral Education Association, and of the School
Suffrage Association, of Massachusetts; was for
a number of years one of the members of the executive
board of both these organisations. Later she
became prominent in the Woman's Educational
and Industrial Union, of Boston.

The work Mrs. Ruffin did in these various organisations
did not cause her to lose interest in the work
she had begun to do for the members of her own
race. On the contrary, the experience she obtained
served to make her more useful in all that coloured
women were at this time attempting to do for
themselves.

The Woman's Era Club, of which, as I have said,
Mrs. Ruffin was founder, became one of the most
influential of coloured women's clubs in America.
In the interest of this organisation a paper, The
Woman s Era, was started, and Mrs. Ruffin was
for years its editor. It was as editor of this paper
that she first gained a national reputation. It was
through this paper that, in 1894, she advocated the
holding of a National Conference of Women's Clubs.

The immediate cause of holding this conference,

however, was the publication, by an editor in
Missouri, of an open letter to Mrs. Florence Belgarnie,
of England, who had manifested interest in
the American Negro. In this letter the editor
declared that the coloured women of America had
no sense of virtue and were altogether without character.
As a result of the agitation begun at this
time, about one hundred women representing about
twenty-five clubs, from ten different states, gathered
in Boston, July 29, 1895. As a result of this meeting
it was determined to establish a permanent
organisation. The first officers of the association
were: Mrs. Booker T. Washington, of Tuskegee,
Alabama; Mrs. U. A. Ridley, of Brookline,
Massachusetts; secretary, Mrs. Libbie C. Anthony,
of Jefferson City, Missouri; treasurer, and Mrs.
Victoria E. Matthews, of New York, chairman of
the executive committee.

For the organisation of the National Federation
of Coloured Women's Clubs, Mrs. Ruffin was
largely responsible. Through the paper, of which
she was editor, she has exercised influence on the
coloured women throughout the United States.
Under her influence the Woman's Era Club had a
large part in enlarging what is known as Mrs.
Sharpe's Home School in Liberia, Africa. When
the American Mt. Coffee School Association was
formed in January, 1903, to aid this work, Edward
Everett Hale was elected president and Mrs. Ruffin

vice-president. She is still active in all good work
for the coloured women of her race, not only in New
England but throughout the United States.

Since the organisation of the National Federation
of Coloured Clubs the number of these clubs
has greatly multiplied. In many cases they have
been organised into State Federations.

As an illustration of the sort of work that these
women's clubs do in some of the Southern states, I
may cite the case of the Alabama Federation, of
which I happen to know more than of some of the
other organisations. A few years ago this Alabama
Federation of Coloured Women's Clubs established
a reformatory for boys which is located at Mt. Meigs,
Alabama. During the year 1908, over forty boys
were received at this reformatory from the police
court of Montgomery and Birmingham. During
that year the clubs raised something like $2,283.73,
a large part of which was expended in paying for
and maintaining the reformatory at Mt. Meigs,
to which I have referred.

The work of the women's club at Tuskegee is
typical of what many of the other clubs are doing.
The work of this club is carried on through the
following departments: current literature, music,
prison work, open-air meetings, settlement work,
and temperance work. At the present time this
club is carrying on a Sunday-school in a neglected
part of the Tuskegee town. Sunday meetings are

held in the town jail, more than twenty mothers'
meetings have been organised among the farmers'
wives in the country districts surrounding the town.
These mothers' meetings are maintained under the
supervision of the club. A woman's rest room, for the
benefit of farmers' wives, who usually come into town
on Saturday in large numbers, is maintained in
town. The club has recently taken care of the
family of a man who has been sent to prison for life.
It is paying for the education of a boy and girl of
whom it has had charge since they were small children.
The Tuskegee Town Reading Room,
Library, and Night School, which are now carried
on by the Tuskegee Institute, were first established
by the Tuskegee Woman's Club.

These facts show, it seems to me, that Negro
women, in spite of criticism, are going forward
quietly and unostentatiously doing those things
which develop that character and moral sense in
the members of the race in which it is sometimes
said that Negro women are lacking.

CHAPTER XIII
THE SOCIAL AND MISSION WORK OF THE NEGRO
CHURCH

THE first mission of the Negro Church was
started in 1824, in the Black Republic of Haiti.
This was only eight years after the first
general conference of the African Methodist Church
was held at Philadelphia. Bishop Allen, the first
bishop of the African Methodist Church, was associated
about this time with Benjamin Lundy, the
Quaker abolitionist, in the effort to colonise free
coloured people on free soil, outside the limits of
the United States, in Mexico, Canada, and Haiti.
The Black Republic, where a few years before
Negroes had established an independent government,
seemed a proper place to establish a branch of the
Independent African Church. Thus it came about
that in close connection with the colony started by
Benjamin Lundy, the mission work of the African
Methodist Church was begun.

This Church has, in the meantime, extended its
influence over several of the other West India Islands,
chiefly in those regions which have not yet been
reached to any extent by missions of the other

Protestant churches. The society reports fifteen
missionaries in the Windward Islands, three in Cuba
and twenty stations in British Guiana, with five
thousand adherents.

About the same time that the African Methodist
Church was seeking to extend its work and influence
to the Republic of Haiti, Lott Cary, the noted
slave preacher of Richmond, Virginia, was the head
of a little local missionary association, started by
the Negro Baptists of Richmond, Virginia.

The Negro churches of Richmond seem to have
been stirred at that time by the general excitement
aroused by the colonisation movement, and this
mission society was founded by the Negro Baptists
at this time in the hope of sending out a missionary
from its own number to Africa.

As a matter of fact, Lott Cary, who went out to
Liberia in 1821 with the second shipload of colonists
from America, became the first Negro missionary to
that country. The mission work of the Baptist Church
owing to its congregational organisation, has never
been so systematic or so vigorously carried on as
that of the African Methodist Society, which has
maintained a strong central organisation. It is,
nevertheless, worth noting that the first Negro missionary
to Africa was of that denomination and the
name and memory of Lott Cary are still preserved today
among the Negro Baptists in this country, through
the work of the Lott Cary Missionary Society.

At the present time, the African Methodist Church
has mission stations in Sierra Leone, Lagos, and
Liberia on the west coast of Africa. It also has
churches scattered all over South Africa, as far north
as Rhodesia. It supports at the present time more
than three hundred preachers and has 11,000 members
among the native Africans.

The rapid growth in numbers and influence, during
recent years, of the African Methodist Church
in South Africa has been due to the withdrawal, in
1894 and 1895, of a number of the native members of
the Wesleyan Methodist Church in the Transvaal,
in order to form an independent Ethiopian Church.
The seceders afterward united with, and became a
part of, the African Methodist Episcopal Church
of the United States.

Whatever may have been the occasion for this
independent movement, the real causes for it seem
to be similar to those which have gradually brought
about a separation of the races, in their church life,
in this country. While there are some disadvantages
in this arrangement, and these disadvantages
may be greater in South Africa than they have
been in the United States, there are reasons, more
potent than those which appear on the surface,
that have brought this separation about and made
it perhaps inevitable. It seems rather curious to
Americans that the secession of a few of the native
churches should have caused so much alarm in

South Africa. In this country, whenever the Negro
takes it into his head to go off by himself, the white
people usually give him every encouragement. It
is a little hard to understand why a similar movement
in South Africa should make a commotion.
Perhaps, as has been asserted, the time was not ripe
for such a separation. I am inclined to believe,
however, that if it is wisely dealt with, the so-called
Ethiopian Movement, which has been the source
of so much apprehension to the British Government
in South Africa, should work to the advantage of
both races in Africa, just as the separate church
movement has done, on the whole, it seems to me,
in the United States.

In my opinion, there is no other place in which the
Negro race can to better advantage begin to learn
the lessons of self-direction and self-control than in
the Negro Church. I say this for the reason that,
in spite of the fact that other interests have from
time to time found shelter there, the chief aim of
the Negro Church, as of other branches of the Christian
Church, has been to teach its members the
funamental things of life and create in them a desire
and enthusiasm for a higher and better existence
here and hereafter.

More than that, the struggle of the masses of the
people to support these churches and to purify their
own social life, making it clean and wholesome, is itself
a kind of moral discipline and one that Negroes need

quite as much as other people. In fact, I doubt if
there is any other way in which the lessons that
Christianity is seeking everywhere to enforce, could
be brought home to the masses of the Negro people
in so thorough-going a way as through their own
societies, controlled and directed by the members
of their own race.

Aside from those missionaries sent out to Africa
by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, some
of the most enterprising and successful missionaries
sent out to Africa by the white churches have been
Negroes. Some of the most distinguished of these
men, also, have been native Africans. There was,
for instance, Samuel Crowther, who was rescued
when a boy from a slave-ship; taken to Sierra Leone,
where he was educated in Fourath Bay College, and
in 1864, consecrated in Canterbury Cathedral, England,
the first native Bishop of Africa. In the
same year he received the title of Doctor of Divinity
from the University of Oxford, and afterward became
a member of the Royal Geographical Society, because
of the contributions he made to the knowledge of
the geography of Africa. He helped to translate
the Bible into the Yoruba language, and his studies
in the Nupe and Ibo languages are said to have
shown unusual ability.

The story of Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce,
another and a later of these African missionaries,
reads like a romance. Daniel Flickinger was a

companion of George Thompson in Africa. He
aided in establishing the United Brethren Mission
on the west coast of Africa, and made six voyages
through that continent. During his first visit to
Africa, in 1855, while at Good Hope Station, Mendi
Mission, on the eastern banks of Sherboro Island,
he employed a native to watch him at night. While
this native was so employed, his wife gave birth to a
child, which he named Wilberforce, and then, in
honour of the visiting missionary, he added the
name Daniel Flickinger.

Sixteen years later, in 1871, while his boxes were
being loaded and unloaded at the American mission
rooms in New York, Dr. Flickinger noticed
a young Negro employed about the offices of the
Missionary Association, who seemed to take an
unusual interest in the names upon the boxes which
he was assisting to load and unload. It turned out
that the name of this boy was Daniel Flickinger
Wilberforce, and the reason he was so interested
in the boxes was that he had been able to decipher
a portion of his own name upon them. It appeared
that the boy had been sent over from Africa as a
servant to one of the missionaries who was returning
home ill. Dr. Flickinger became so interested
in the young man that he determined to give him
an education. He was sent to Dr. Flickinger's
office in Dayton, Ohio, with an express-tag around
his neck. Seven years later he returned to Africa

as a preacher, teacher and physician. He had succeeded
in completing his education in the primary
school in four years, from there he went into the
Dayton High School, where he graduated at the
head of his class, having completed the course in
three years. In the meantime he had been given
instruction in medicine and in theology, so that he
went out to Africa a fully equipped missionary.

While young Wilberforce was studying in the
high school, Paul Laurence Dunbar, who was
born in Dayton, Ohio, was a boy playing about
the streets. Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce left
Dayton in 1878, and returned as a missionary to his
own people, where he has since lived and worked.

One of the most successful of the missionaries of
Africa to-day is W. H. Sheppard, who was a student
in my day at Hampton Institute, and later at the
Stillman Institute at Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He
went out to the Kongo in 1896 with Reverend Samuel
N. Lapsley, of Alabama, as a missionary of the
Southern Presbyterian Church. Mr. Lapsley chose
a station to establish his mission at Luebo, far in
the interior of Africa, and Mr. Sheppard remained
and worked with him there until Mr. Lapsley's death.
After this the work of the mission was continued,
with great success by Mr. Sheppard, in association
with Mr. William Morrison. Mr. Sheppard has
returned to America several times since then, and
spoken throughout the South in the interest of his

work in Africa. Everywhere I hear him referred to
with the greatest respect, and even affection.

I have spoken thus far of the work that the
Negro churches are doing for missions in Africa
and elsewhere. The amount of money raised for
this purpose is small compared to that which is
contributed every year by the Negro churches
for the purpose of education. Unfortunately, no
detailed study has ever been made, so far as I know,
which gives any adequate notion of the money that
is actually contributed by Negroes through all the
religious organisations to which they belong, to their
own education.

The Negro Baptists, for example, have never
published a complete list of the schools conducted
by their different churches and church organisations.
In the Year Book for 1907, one hundred and ten
schools were reported as owned by Negro Baptists.
There were 16 in Louisiana, 13 in North Carolina,
11 in Mississippi, 9 in Kentucky, 8 in Arkansas,
6 in Texas, 5 in Virginia, 5 in South Carolina, 5 in
Florida, 4 in Georgia, 3 in Tennessee, 3 in West
Virginia, 2 in Illinois, 2 in Oklahoma, 1 in Kansas,
1 in Missouri, I in Ohio, 1 in Maryland, 1 in Indiana,
and 5 in Africa. Besides those mentioned in the
Year Book there are, I have been told, several others
in Louisiana, Virginia, and North Carolina, so that
all together there are no less than 120 schools owned
entirely by Negro Baptists.

During the year 1907, these schools employed 613
teachers, and gave instruction to 18,644 students.
During this year also the Baptist churches reported
collections for educational purposes amounting to
$97,032.75. This did not include the amounts
raised in Maryland, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia,
churches in those states for some reason or
other making no report.

Educational work of the Negro Baptist churches
was at first largely carried on under the control of
the American Baptist Home Mission Society, which
is managed by white people. In recent years, however,
there has been a movement among Negro
Baptists to do their educational work independently.

One of the first things that was done after the
Negro Baptists had decided to carry on their Sunday-school
and educational work independently
of the white Baptist churches, was to establish
a printing plant in order to publish books and
pamphlets needed in Sunday-school and church
work. In 1896, Reverend R. H. Boyd established
the National Baptist Publishing Company. Mr.
Boyd had been a preacher in Texas, and his only
experience as a publisher was a brief one, in association
with a white man, from which he emerged,
as he says, with much valuable experience, but
with a financial loss of five hundred dollars.

The new publishing business was started with
almost no capital, and under the most discouraging

circumstances. Nevertheless, the enterprise has
prospered steadily until, at the present time, the
value of the stock equipment and property of the
concern is worth, according to an inventory made
by Bradstreet's Agency, not less than $350,000.

The building in which the company is located
occupies half a block in the business portion of
Nashville, Tennessee. According to a statement
made at the National Negro Business League at
Louisville, Kentucky, in 1909, the Company circulated,
during the previous year, not less than
12,000,000 issues of the different periodicals that
it published. During the same year the Company
paid its employees $165,000 for labour.

Notwithstanding that many Negro Baptists have
become independent, the Baptist Home Mission
Society (white) is every year receiving an increasingly
large number of contributions for the schools they
maintain from the Negro themselves. Of the
twenty-three schools under the direction of this
society, for instance, fourteen are owned by Negroes
themselves. The report of the educational work
of the society for the year 1907–08 shows that the
receipts for that year from all sources, including
the fees paid by students, were $269,795.78. Of
this amount $10,782.36 was contributed by white
churches and individuals, while $27,724.42 was contributed
by Negro churches and individuals.

The educational work of the African Methodist

Episcopal Church began in 1844, with the purchase
of 120 acres of land in Ohio for the Union
Seminary, which was opened in 1847. In 1856,
the A. M. E. Church united with the Methodist
Episcopal Church (North) in establishing Wilberforce
University. In 1863, this University became
the sole property of the A. M. E. Church. At the
present time this denomination maintains twenty
schools and colleges, one or more in each of the
Southern states, two in Africa, and one in the West
Indies. These schools and colleges employ 202
teachers and have something like 5,700 pupils.

The third Sunday in September is set aside in
all of the A. M. E. churches as Educational Day.
On this day a general collection is taken in all the
churches for educational purposes. The amount
collected in 1907 was $51,000. In addition to this,
every member of the church is taxed eight cents per
year for the general educational fund. I have not
been able to learn the amount of money collected
in this way, but the quadrennial reports show that
these schools collect from all sources, including the
fees paid by students, something like $150,000 a
year.

The A. M. E. Zion Church carries on educational
work in twelve institutions, four of which are colleges,
one a theological seminary and seven secondary
schools. These schools have 150 teachers and more
than 3,000 pupils. During the year 1907, these

schools raised from all sources something over
$100,000.

In 1906 I had an opportunity to be present and
take part in the twenty-fifth anniversary exercises
of Livingstone College at Salisbury, North Carolina.
This college was established and has been maintained
by the A. M. E. Zion Church. The leading
spirits in establishing it were the present Senior
Bishop, Right Reverend J. W. Hood, and the late
Dr. Joseph C. Price, who was its first president,
and did the most to put the college on its feet and
make it known to the world.

Joseph Price was a remarkable man. He was,
in the first place, like Lott Cary, Alexander Crummell,
and Henry Highland Garnet, a man of
unmixed African blood. He was a remarkable
orator, and when only twenty-seven years of age,
he was sent as a delegate of the A. M. E. Zion
Church to the Ecumenical Council in London.
While he was there, through the eloquence with
which he described the condition of education in
the South, he succeeded in raising ten thousand
dollars, which was used in purchasing the grounds
upon which Livingstone College now stands, and
in erecting some of the buildings.

During the days that the anniversary celebration
lasted, something like $8,000 in cash and pledges
was secured for the benefit of the college. I was
interested to see the way in which this money was

secured. When the hour for taking the subscriptions
arrived, you would see, perhaps, a coloured
bishop rise and announce his subscription for
something like fifty dollars. Then a coloured
woman would stand up and announce that she
would give ten dollars. Then others would announce
more modest sums. Altogether the amounts of
the different contributions ranged, as I remember,
from twenty-five cents to a thousand dollars. The
man who gave a thousand dollars would not permit
his name to be known, but it is now an open
secret that this generous gift was contributed by
Dr. W. H. Goler, the Negro president of the college.

The Coloured Methodist Church, which was
organised among the coloured people who, after
the Civil War, still clung to the Southern branch
of the Methodist Church (South), has done, according
to the number of its members, quite as much
as any other coloured religious organisation for the
education of the Negro race. This denomination
controls six educational institutions, among them
Lane College, at Jackson, Tennessee, founded by
Bishop Isaac Lane, and the Mississippi Theological
and Industrial College, founded by Bishop Elias
Cottrell, of Holly Springs, Mississippi.

The interesting thing about Bishop Cottrell's
school is that it was started as a result of the veto
by Governor Vardaman of the appropriation for
the State Normal School, which was formerly

located at Holly Springs. When that school went
out of existence, as a result of this action of the
Governor, the Negroes of Mississippi, under Bishop
Cottrell's leadership, determined that they would
build a school of their own to replace it. They
succeeded in raising in the short period of three
years something like $65,000, and erected two handsome
modern buildings. At the last meeting of the
National Negro Business League in Louisville,
Kentucky, Bishop Cottrell said that within the last
eight years, the Coloured Methodist Church had
raised, within the State of Mississippi alone, over
$100,000, of which all but $35,000 had been collected
in small contributions from the Negro people themselves.

The African Union Methodist Protestant Church,
which has less than 6,000 members, has been able,
in spite of its small membership, to support three
schools—one at Baltimore, Maryland, one at
Franklin, Pennsylvania, and a third at Holland,
Virginia.

Besides the contribution of Negroes to Negro
education, made through their own Negro organisations,
the coloured people have contributed
largely to education through the Freedmen's Aid
Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church (North);
the Freedmen's Board of the American Missionary
Association, the Church Institute for Negroes of the
Episcopal Church, and through the Catholic Church.

No record has been published of the amount of
money contributed by Negroes to the support of
schools conducted by the Catholic Church, but
the total amount must have been considerable.
For instance, in 1829, when the St. Francis Academy
was founded in Baltimore by Negro sisters of the
Catholic Church in the West Indies, these sisters
gave all that they had in the way of furniture and
real estate to this institution. Nancy Addison left
this institution $15,000 and a Haitian, by the
name of Louis Bode, left the institution $30,000.
The contributions of Colonel John McKee, of
Philadelphia, and Mr. Thomy Lafon, of New
Orleans, made to the Catholic schools and benevolent
institutions, amounted, at a low estimate, to
something like a million dollars.

The contributions, made through the churches,
do not include those that are constantly made by
coloured people to local and independent institutions,
which are not connected with any church
organisation. For example, Tuskegee Institute
receives annually a number of small contributions
from the coloured people of the country, and from
its former students. The largest sum received
in this way was the legacy of Mrs. Mary E. Shaw,
a coloured woman of New York City, which
amounted to $38,000.

Among the other notable contributions which
have been made from time to time to Negro education

by Negro philanthropists, I might mention
that of a coloured man by the name of George
Washington, a former slave, of Jerseyville, Illinois,
who is said to have left $15,000 to Negro education.
Mr. Thomy Lafon gave Straight University, of
New Orleans, $6,000. It is known that Bishop D.
A. Payne, the founder of Wilberforce, gave at different
times and in different amounts, several thousand
dollars to that institution. Mr. Wheeling Gant
gave $5,000 to Wilberforce. Bishop J. B. Campbell
gave $1,000, Bishop and Mrs. J. A. Shorter
gave $2,000, and Henry and Sarah Gordon gave
$2,100 toward the endowment of this same school.

Recently Mr. French Gray gave land, said to be
valued at $2,000, to the Dooley Normal and Industrial
School in Alabama. Bishop Isaac Lane has
given at various times considerable more than a
thousand dollars to the college bearing his name
at Jackson, Tennessee. Fisk University received
from Mrs. Lucinda Bedford, of Nashville, Tennessee,
$1,000, and John and James Barrows, of the
same city, gave $500 to the same institution. Joshua
Park gave $6,000 to the State College of Delaware,
George, Agnes and Molly Walker gave $1,000 to
Straight University, New Orleans.

After the Kentucky Legislature, in 1904, passed
a law which made it illegal for white and black
students to attend the same school, Berea College,
which had been conducted as a mixed school for

both races since 1865, was closed to Negroes. After
the case had been finally settled in the highest
courts, a campaign of education was started under
the direction of Reverend James Bond, the coloured
trustee of the college, to raise money to
found a school for coloured students to take its
place. In about twelve months, $50,000 was
raised in the state of Kentucky. Of this sum,
$20,000 was pledged by the coloured people of
Kentucky.

Considering the small amount of money that
Negroes have thus far accumulated, and the
hard struggle that they have had to get it, the
facts that I have mentioned indicate that Negroes
appreciate the value of education for their race and
are willing to contribute generously to its support.[1]

While the chief work of the Negro church has
been and still is among the people of the small towns
and the country districts, where the bulk of the
Negro population is located, in recent years a serious
effort has been made by some of the larger city
churches to deal with some of the comparatively
new problems of the city Negro. I have already
mentioned the work of the First Congregational
Church, under H. H. Proctor, in Atlanta, and of
the Berean Presbyterian Church, of Philadelphia.
In addition to the Berean Building and Loan Association,

to which I have referred, the Church started,
in 1884, a free kindergarten, which it still maintains.
Then in 1889 the Berean Manual Training and
Industrial School was started, which gives instruction
in carpentry, upholstering, millinery, practical
electricity, plain sewing and dressmaking, stenography,
cooking, waiting and tailoring. Two years
before this, in 1897, a bureau of mutual help was
established in order to find employment, particularly
in domestic service, for the large numbers of coloured
people who are constantly coming to Philadelphia
from the South.

Another organisation, the Berean Trades Association,
seeks to aid Negro tradesmen and other
skilled workmen to find employment in the trades.
In addition to these the church has charge of the
Berean Seaside Home, a seaside resort for respectable
coloured persons, near Asbury Park, New
Jersey. In 1900 the Berean Educational Conference
was started, and in 1904 there was added to this
the Berean Seaside Conference. All of these institutions,
though started and maintained by this
Church, are each independent of the other, and are
patronised by thousands of persons who are neither
members of the congregation of the Berean Church,
nor of the Presbyterian denomination.

In addition to these institutional churches there
have grown up in connection with the large city
churches, literary societies and organisations for

mutual improvement, which meet Sunday afternoon
to read papers or discuss general topics. These
societies help to furnish wholesome recreation for
young men and women, and sometimes they do
something more than this. For example, there was
organised in Savannah, Georgia, in 1905, what was
known as the Men's Sunday Club. At that time
there was very little effort made to close the saloons
in Savannah on Sunday; a law against minors entering
these places was not enforced, at least with respect
to the coloured youths. Thousands of coloured
people spent their Sundays at a park in the suburbs
of the city, which had been erected for the special
use of the coloured people, and which was infested
by a number of disreputable characters who made it
a dangerous place for young men and girls to go.

The Young Men's Sunday Club, which was
composed of some of the better educated and more
serious young men of the city, determined to do
something to counteract the evil influences of this
resort. By means of this club hundreds of young
men and women were kept off the streets, and were
induced to come to the meetings of this society,
where they heard interesting discussions, not merely
of literary subjects, but topics of vital interest to
the coloured people of the city. One of the things
that the club attempted to do was to inculcate a
respect for law and order, and make the coloured
people realise the fact that it was especially important

for them, who so frequently needed the protection
of the law, to see to it that they themselves
obeyed it.

One of the chief temptations to the coloured
young men and women of Savannah were dance halls,
run in connection with saloons in those sections of
the city in which the majority of the coloured people
lived. The Men's Club was instrumental in having
these dance halls abolished by law. After the
law had been passed a committee of the club was
appointed to see that it was enforced.

After a time there was organised, in connection
with the Men's Club, a woman's auxiliary, which,
in turn, organised a number of mothers' clubs in
various sections of the city.

In these mothers' meetings an effort was made
not only to interest mothers in keeping their children
off the streets, and away from the association of
criminals, but also to teach the proper care of children
and inculcate some of the simple rules of the
hygiene of the home.

Another organisation which is now doing an
important and valuable work for Negroes is the
coloured Y. M. C. A. Under another name the
work of this organisation has been carried on since
before the Civil War, although no definite organisation
was formed until 1879, when the first international
secretary to take charge of the work among
the coloured people was appointed.

From 1879 to 1890 this work was carried on under
the direction of Henry E. Brown. In 1890, the first
coloured international secretary, Mr. W. A. Hunton,
was appointed to do this work. In 1898 another
secretary, Dr. J. E. Moorland, was appointed to
assist Mr. Hunton.

These two men now have under their supervision
one hundred and ten associations. Seventy-three
of these are student associations, and thirty-seven
of them are city associations. Sixteen of these
associations employ general secretaries and twelve
of them conduct night schools. The total membership
in these associations now exceeds 9,000 men.
Twelve associations own real estate to the value of
$80,000.

One of the most interesting of these associations
is that which was formed at Buxton, Iowa. This
town is made up almost wholly of Negro miners.
Of the population of five thousand, 93 per cent. are
black and 7 per cent. white. It has no regular city
government, since all the property in the town belongs
to the Consolidated Coal Company, in which these
men are employed.

This mining company is therefore enabled to
exercise a benevolent despotism, so far as maintaining
order in the community is concerned, and no disreputable
characters are allowed to remain there. In
the company's plan of government the Y. M. C. A.,
which was conducted for some time, and very

successfully, under the direction of Lewis E. Johnson,
a young coloured man, who is now secretary of the
Y. M. C. A. in Washington, District of Columbia,
has played an important part.

The mining company at Buxton erected a $20,000
Y. M. C. A. building, which was provided with a
library, and served as a social centre for the 1,500
coloured employees of the company, which make
up the bulk of the population. By furnishing innocent
recreation for the miners during the time that
they were idle, by encouraging them to read, save
their money, and by giving them religious instruction,
it was found possible to maintain something approaching
perfect order in this little town, without
the necessity of banishing any large number of the
employees of the company for misbehaviour.

Perhaps the greatest achievement, in a material
way, of the coloured Y. M. C. A., has been the
undertaking to erect a $100,000 building in Washington,
District of Columbia. Washington has the
largest coloured population of any city in the United
States, and in this city the problems of city life present
themselves in a most difficult form. It is,
therefore, peculiarly appropriate that in the nation's
capital, where so large a number of coloured people
live, the work of the Y. M. C. A. should be conducted
on a scale adequate to the need.

In the fall of 1906 Mr. John D. Rockefeller offered
to give $25,000 toward the erection of a permanent

home for the coloured Y. M. C. A. in Washington,
provided a similar sum could be collected from
among the coloured people of the city. From April
7 to May 7, 1908, a campaign was carried on among
the coloured residents of Washington, and $30,535
in subscriptions was secured. Since that time this
amount has considerably increased, and it is hoped
eventually to raise enough money to insure the
erection of a $100,000 building, for which plans have
already been drawn.

Aside from the direct influence which the coloured
Young Men's Christian Association has been able
to exert upon its members, these local organisations
have frequently exercised an important indirect influence
for good in the community. For example, I
learned, during the meeting of the National Negro
Business League, in Louisville, in August, 1909, that
the Young Men's Christian Association had been
largely instrumental in securing, for the coloured
people of Louisville, the magnificent library they now
possess, erected in 1908 by the generosity of Mr.
Andrew Carnegie. This library, which is a regular
branch of the Louisville Public Library, is probably
the most complete and best equipped library for
coloured people in the South. The total cost,
including the books, was something like $42,000.
Thomas F. Blue, who was formerly Secretary of
the Coloured Young Men's Christian Association, is
the librarian in charge.

The work of the coloured Y. M. C. A. began in
the colleges. It is gradually reaching out, however,
to the larger cities and, to some extent, into the
smaller towns. As this work extends steadily it is
getting a larger hold upon the masses of the coloured
people, and is forming a nucleus for work of social
service in the cities, the places where that work is
most needed. In this way the Y. M. C. A. is
supplementing the mission and social work of the
Negro Church.

CHAPTER XIV
LAW AND ORDER AND THE NEGRO

NOT infrequently I hear it said that, since the
overthrow of the Reconstruction governments,
and particularly since the passage
of the disenfranchisement laws, the Negro has lost
his place in Southern politics. This depends, to some
extent, on what one means by politics. Negroes
still vote in all the Southern states, though the
number of Negro voters has been very greatly
curtailed in some states, and particularly in those
which suffered most from the vices and mismanagement
of the Reconstruction governments. Negroes
still hold offices under the Federal Government, and
the proportion of Negroes in the civil service of the
United States is constantly increasing.

Aside from the number of votes cast, however,
and the number of offices which these votes controlled,
Negroes probably exercise a greater influence
on public order and public policy in the Southern
states to-day than they ever did before. Directly
and indirectly, through their churches and through
their schools; through their doctors of medicine,
lawyers, and business men; through their lodges,

banks, corporations, clubs, law and order leagues,
etc., Negroes are exercising a very large and a very
positive influence upon the lives of the communities
in which they live. As an illustration of what I
mean I want to relate, as briefly as I am able, the
story of the coloured Law and Order League, of
Baltimore, Maryland.

In the city of Baltimore there is one of the largest
and most populous coloured neighbourhoods in any
city in the world. I have already referred to this
neighbourhood as one which possibly contains more
homes and better homes, owned and occupied by
coloured people, than any other similar district in
any of the large cities of the country.

This district extends along Druid Hill Avenue
from Utah Street to North Avenue, and with the
adjacent streets covers an area a mile and a half
long, by from one-sixteenth to one-half a mile wide.
The upper part of this district is given up to the
better class of residences, usually three-story brick
buildings, fronting directly on the street, and is
comparatively free from saloons or other nuisances.
A few years ago this region was inhabited by some
of the best white families in the city, but as the
city has grown these people have moved out into
the suburbs, and the coloured people have come
in to take their places.

The lower end of Druid Hill Avenue is a district
of quite a different character. In a section seven

blocks long and two blocks wide there were, a few
years ago, before the coloured Law and Order
League began its work, no less than forty-two
saloons. What made this situation the more disagreeable,
and even dangerous, was the fact that
these saloons were located in close proximity to
most of the Negro churches and Negro schools in
that district. For example, there were, all in close
proximity to the saloons I have mentioned, fifteen
churches, twelve schools, one home for old people,
one home for friendless children, the Coloured
Young Men's Christian Association, and the
Coloured Young Women's Christian Association.
In addition to the forty-two saloons there were, in
this same region, numerous dance-houses, billiard-halls,
and club-rooms, where gambling was openly
carried on, which frequently became places of
assignation for girls and young women.

The better class of coloured people on Druid
Hill Avenue had long looked with concern on the
condition of things that existed in the lower part
of the district. But it is not an easy thing for
Negroes to take the initiative in matters of this kind.
For one thing, Southern white people, as a rule,
do not expect it of them, and it is true of the race as
it is of an individual, that you rarely get from
them anything more or better than you expect.
Another thing that, perhaps, made the coloured
people hesitate was the fact that a large propertion

of the saloons in the district, more than half,
although they were supported by Negroes, were
kept by white people. Besides that, these places
seemed to have had a sort of police protection,
which, because it was long established, would be
hard to break up. It was, perhaps, true also, that
in Baltimore, as in some other cities, saloons and
dens of vice which were not allowed to exist in other
parts of the city, were permitted to take refuge in
the districts where the masses of the coloured people
lived. For this reason many people have been led
to assume that respectable and industrious Negroes
do not have the same objection to the presence of
vice among them that other people have.

It was the Atlanta riot, I have been told, that set
the better class of coloured people to thinking, and
led them finally to the conviction that this reform
movement must be undertaken by themselves. In
October, 1906, a meeting was called by Reverend
John Hurst, one of the most progressive of Baltimore's
coloured ministers. At this meeting there
were present W. Ashbie Hawkins, one of the leading
coloured lawyers of the city; Dr. Howard E.
Young, a druggist; Dr. Whitfield Winsey, a physician
who had practised for thirty years among the
coloured people; Dr. Thomas S. Hawkins, one of
the younger coloured physicians of the city; Heber
E. Wharton, vice-principal of one of the coloured
public schools; Harry T. Pratt, a grade supervisor

in the public schools; Dr. J. H. N. Waring, principal
of the Coloured High School; Reverend E. F.
Eggleston, pastor of the Grace Presbyterian Church,
and Reverend J. Albert Johnson, who shortly
afterward became a bishop of the A. M. E. Church.

At this first meeting it was decided to make a
careful study of the actual conditions among the
coloured people in the city. The committee divided
themselves into sub-committees. One of these
made a study of the sanitary conditions; another
investigated the moral influence surrounding the
schools.

One of the facts which the committee learned
from a study of a map furnished by the health office,
was that a narrow street, called Biddle Alley, running
off from Druid Hill Avenue, was the "tuberculosis
centre" of the state. This meant that in that
particular region there were more deaths from
tuberculosis than at any other point in the whole
State of Maryland. One line from the report of
the Association for the Improvement of the Condition
of the Poor, indicates at least one cause
for this condition. The report stated that of the
two hundred and fifteen houses in Biddle Alley
seventy-one had leaky roofs.

In these narrow alleys, however, tons of washing
were gathered every week from the best homes
in the city, to be laundered by the Negro washer-women
who lived in this district. This condition

is, of course, not different from what may be found
in almost any other Southern city, but it makes
clear the danger that threatens the more well-to-do
portion of the population, when the people, who
work for them and are dependent upon them,
are thus neglected and allowed to live in filthy,
unwholesome, and immoral surroundings.

As the committee progressed in its investigation
and sought to lay its plans to improve the conditions
that they had discovered, they were made
to feel their dependence upon the white people of
the city and their inability to accomplish anything
unless they secured their support. Liquor boards
had been accustomed to ignore the protests of the
coloured churches. Police boards were not inclined
to consider their complaints. There seems to have
been a general feeling that coloured people were
either themselves so criminal, or so disposed to shield
and protect criminals of their own race, that their
protests against lawlessness and law-breaking were
not to be taken seriously. It became absolutely necessary,
therefore, that the committee should secure the
support of the influential white people of the city, if
they hoped to be successful in the campaign they had
planned.

The next move, therefore, was to appoint a subcommittee
to secure the active interest of leading
white men. This committee visited the late Daniel
C. Oilman, ex-president of Johns Hopkins University;

Mr. Douglas H. Wylie, at that time president of the
Chamber of Commerce; Mr. Eugene Levering, president
of the Commercial National Bank; Bishop
Paret, head of the Episcopal Church in the Baltimore
Diocese; Mr. Joseph Packard, at that time
president of the Board of School Commissioners;
Mr. Robert H. Smith, a leading lawyer; Mr. John
C. Rose, United States District Attorney, who subsequently
acted as legal advisor for the committee;
Mr. Isaac Gate, a retired capitalist; Mr. John M.
Glenn, secretary of the Sage Foundation; Judge
Alfred S. Niles, of the Supreme Court of Maryland,
and Mr. W. Hall Harris, city postmaster.

All of these men, as soon as the matter was fairly
presented to them, showed the heartiest interest in
the plans and purposes of the committee. The
members of the committee found, however, that
there were certain questions, which continually
occurred, to which they felt compelled to find a
definite answer. For instance, one of the questions
that was frequently asked was whether or not the
saloons and dives, which they wanted suppressed,
and the conditions of immorality surrounding them,
were not due for the most part to the idleness and
laziness of the coloured people. A study of the
statistics compiled by the U. S. Census Bureau
showed, however, that a larger percentage not only of
the coloured women, but of the coloured men of
Maryland, were at work than is true of the whites.

The committee were frequently asked in regard to
the home life of the coloured people. In reply to
this inquiry the committee pointed out that, while
the conditions in Negro homes are, in many cases,
not what they should be, nevertheless the rapid
increase in the ownership of homes, particularly in
the Druid Hill District, indicated that there was an
upward movement in this direction, and this is true
not only in the cities, but in the country districts as
well. The statistics of the United States Census Bureau
show, for instance, that the coloured farmers of
the State own 57 per cent, of the farm lands they till.

Another question frequently asked of members
of the committee concerned the effect of education
upon the Negro. One of the men, I was informed,
who was most helpful to the committee in its work,
did not believe that the education paid the state
what it cost, or was of any particular value to the
Negro himself. In reply to this question the committee
was able to show that the Coloured High
School, which has been in existence more than
twenty-five years, in all its history had furnished
but one inmate for a jail or penitentiary. The
committee was able to show, not only that this
school had not made criminals of its students, but
that, on the contrary, its former students and graduates
were nearly all of them engaged in occupations
in which they were more useful to the community
than they otherwise could have been.

In order to illustrate the value of the education
of the Negro to the community at large the committee
cited the history of a Negro criminal, Ike Winder
by name, who had murdered a toll-gate keeper in
Baltimore County. To arrest, try, imprison and
execute Ike Winder cost the state $2,000 more than
it cost to educate one of the graduates of the Coloured
High School. Assuming that Ike Winder, if
he had been graduated from the high school, would
have done as well as the other graduates, the state
lost, not only the money expended in convicting and
executing him, but it lost the economic value of an
educated citizen. The committee estimated that
the average earnings of an ignorant Negro in the
state of Maryland were not much more than fifteen
dollars a month, while the average earnings of an
educated Negro averaged about seventy-five dollars
a month.

The full and frank discussion of these questions
between the members of the committee and representative
white citizens whom they visited showed
that there was a basis for cooperation between the
best whites and the best blacks of the city. The
result was the formation of a joint plan of action
in which both races might unite their efforts. It
was decided, among other things, to appoint an
advisory committee of the whites to act in conjunction
with a similar committee of the coloured
people.

The first thing attempted was the organisation
of a larger and more representative body of coloured
men to be known as the Law and Order League.
The purpose of this Law and Order League was,
first of all, to create a public spirit among the masses
of the coloured people which could be positively
opposed to all forms of vice, immorality and crime,
such as is fostered by the low saloon and dive.
Petitions were drawn up and sent to the Liquor
Board and the Police Board for the purpose of securing
a better enforcement of the law and, if possible,
a suppression of some of the more notorious saloons
in the district. A series of meetings were held at
Grace Presbyterian Church, at which the coloured
ministers, doctors, lawyers, and business men all
took part. In this way a campaign was begun to
give Baltimore's coloured children a real chance
in life.

A law and order league was formed and a
petition to the Liquor Licence Board was drawn
up. A bill was drawn up for presentation to the
Legislature to prevent the sale of liquor in certain
sections of Baltimore.

Finally, it was decided, in order to arouse sentiment
in favour of the work of the League among the
white people, to take measures to present their case
to the ministers of both races. Members of the
committee appeared before the Association of Presbyterian,
Congregational, and Reformed Church

ministers, before the Ministerial Union, the Methodist
Ministers' Association, before the African
Methodist Episcopal Ministers' Association and
the Coloured Ministerial Union. One of the ministers,
who was most helpful to the committee, I was
informed, was an ex-Confederate chaplain, and
three or four of the other white men who took an
active interest in the work were Confederate soldiers.

After the petition, drawn up by the Law and
Order League, had been approved by the Advisory
Committee of white men, it was presented to the
Board of Liquor Licence Commissioners. Perhaps
because of the source from which the petition came,
it created considerable comment in the newspapers.
The Baltimore Sun, in commenting upon it, said:

An interesting feature of the struggle was the
petition sent in by property-holders on McCulloh
Street. McCulloh Street immediately adjoins Druid
Hill on the north, and marks the boundary between
the white and the coloured districts. The people in
this street bitterly resented the "invasion" of Druid
Hill Avenue by the blacks. Their action in coming
to the support of the Law and Order League was
consequently a great and welcome surprise.

One of the points brought out in the discussion
before the Board of Liquor Licence Commissioners
was that the presence of so large a number of
saloons in this neighbourhood had depreciated the
value of the property in some cases as much as 100
per cent. There was a disposition at first to charge
this depreciation in value to the presence of coloured
people. It was asserted that coloured people
always lowered the value of property. This charge
was easily disproved by showing that on the upper
end of Druid Hill Avenue, in the neighbourhood into
which the better class of coloured people were moving,
property was actually selling at higher prices
than it had reached when it was inhabited wholly by
whites. One of the first coloured men to buy property
in the upper Druid Hill District bought a house

in a row in which prices have advanced over 60 per
cent. It is said that houses in this neighbourhood
rent and sell for from 20 to 50 per cent, higher than
prevailed when the neighbourhood was white.

The testimony offered by the coloured people,
by the men who owned the saloons and by the police,
was so conflicting that the Liquor Licence Commissioners
determined to make a personal inspection.
They found eleven saloons openly violating the law,
and determined that these eleven should not be
re-licensed. The next day the Baltimore News
gave the following account of the results of the
inspection made by the Licence Commission:

The rejection of the application of the eleven
saloons for renewal of their liquor licences was
immediately followed by renewed applications under
other names. But the Law and Order League
had the support of all the best white and coloured
people in the city, and the licences were not renewed.

I have described the work of the Baltimore Law
and Order League[1] at some length because it illustrates
the way in which the better element in both
races are quietly getting together, in many parts
of the South, in order to bring about an improvement
in conditions which are dangerous to both
races. Similar efforts in other directions and on a
smaller scale are being made in many of the smaller
cities in the Southern states. Even where these
movements have not been wholly successful, the
effort of the two races to get together in the way I
have described seems to me a hopeful sign, and one
on which we cannot place too much emphasis.

In regard to the political influence of the Negro,
I might say, also, that close observation in every
state in the South convinces me that while the Negro
does not go through the form of casting the ballot

in order to express his political influence to the extent
that the white man does, in every Southern community
there is a group of property-holding men,
and often women, of high character, who do always
exert political influence in the matters that concern
the protection and progress of their race. Sometimes
this influence is exerted individually, sometimes in
groups, but it is felt nevertheless. I know any
number of Negroes in the South whose influence is so
strong because of their character that their wish or
word expressed to a local or state official will go
almost as far as the word of any white man will go.
There is a kind of influence that the man exerts who
is prosperous, intelligent and possesses high character,
a kind of influence that is intangible and hard
to define, but which no law can deprive him of.

I do not mean to suggest that the sort of personal
influence I have described is in any way a substitute
for the ballot, or can be expected to take its place.
It ought to be clearly recognised that, in a republican
form of government, if any group of people is left
permanently without the franchise it is placed
at a serious disadvantage. I do not object to restrictions
being placed upon the use of the ballot, but if
any portion of the population is prevented from taking
part in the government by reason of these restrictions,
they should have held out before them the
incentive of securing the ballot in proportion as they
grow in property-holding, intelligence, and character.

I have already referred, in another part of this
book, to the town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi.
This town, with the colony of which it is the centre,
is one of the few places in this country in which the
government is carried on entirely by Negroes. A
few years ago I made a special study of this town, and
I was very much impressed with a statement which
I heard frequently repeated that Mound Bayou was
one of the most orderly communities in the Yazoo
Delta.

The records of the mayor's court show that, as
Delta towns go, Mound Bayou is a remarkably quiet
and sober place. There have been but two homicides
in twenty years. Both of these were committed
by strangers—men who drifted into the community
in the early days before the local self-government
and the traditions of the town had been established.
One of the men killed was Benjamin T. Green,
who was the partner of Isaiah T. Montgomery
in the early days of the town. The man who committed
this crime was afterward identified as a
fugitive from justice, who was wanted for some
desperate crime committed in the vicinity of Mobile.
The murder was the result of a trivial altercation
in regard to a box of tacks.

During the whole twenty years of the town's existence,
only three persons have been sent to the Circuit
Court for trial. Two of these were men convicted
of theft. Since the town obtained its charter

in 1898, there have been, up to February, 1907, but
163 criminal cases tried in the town. Of these, fifty
were committed by strangers or by men who had
come into town from the surrounding community.
Twenty-eight cases were either never tried or were
of so trivial a nature that no fine was imposed.
Sixty-four were cases of disturbing the peace.

It is interesting to read the records of the mayor's
court. They are an index to the life of the village,
and reflect the changing current of public opinion in
regard to the moral discipline and order of the town.

In July, 1902, the records show that fourteen
persons were arrested and fined for failure to pay
the street tax. Every citizen of the town is required
to do three dollars' worth of work on the streets
every year. Some had neglected to pay this labour
tax, and allowed the streets to fall into a condition of
neglect. As a result of a discussion of the matter
in the town council, a number of the delinquents
were arrested and compelled to pay fines amounting
to $3.30, and costs amounting to $1.40 each.

Again, in 1904, a man was arrested for gambling.
He had established what is known in sporting parlance
as a "crap" game, and on Saturday nights a
number of young men of the village were accustomed
to gather at his place to gamble. He was repeatedly
warned, and finally the town marshal and some of the
more substantial citizens made a raid upon the
place and arrested fifteen persons. The cases

were dismissed after each man had paid a fine of
two dollars. A year later, another man was arrested
for running a "blind tiger," selling liquor without
a licence. He formerly owned a store in the town,
but began selling liquor, then commenced to drink,
and was rapidly going to the dogs. After his place
had been closed, he went out into the country and
took up farming again. It is reported that he is
doing well there.

During the year 1905, there were several disturbances
in the town which were traced directly
to the illicit liquor sellers. Men would come into
town on Saturdays to do their marketing, fall to
drinking, and end in a fight. Things became so
bad at last that a public meeting was held in regard
to the matter. As a result of this meeting, the
town marshal, the mayor, and the treasurer were
appointed to get evidence and secure the conviction
of those who were guilty. Six persons were convicted
and fined at that time. One of these, a woman,
left town. Another is still under suspicion, and the
rest, now on their farms, have become respectable
citizens.

To my mind, the interesting fact in regard to
these prosecutions is that they served not merely
to correct a public abuse, but to reform the men who
were prosecuted. In most cases, these men went
back to the farms and became useful members of
the community.

It seems to be pretty well agreed that the moral
conditions of the Mound Bayou colony are better
than those in other Negro settlements in the Delta.
Some years ago, when the question was an "issue"
in the community, a committee was appointed from
each of the churches to make a house to house canvass
of the colony in order to determine to what
extent loose family relations existed. The report
of this committee showed that there were forty families
in the colony where men and women were living
together without the formality of a marriage
ceremony. As a result of this report, the people
of the town gave notice that these forty couples
would have to marry within a certain length of time
or they would have to be prosecuted. Nearly all
of them acted upon this suggestion; the others moved
away.

"Since then," said Mr. Montgomery, the founder
of the colony, in speaking about the matter, "we
have had no trouble of this kind. Upon occasions,
the women who are conspicuous in towns and cities,
and who travel in the Delta, making the various
camps on pay-days, and who more or less infest
the larger plantations, have tried to get a footing
here, but have never succeeded. They can get no
place to stay and have to leave on the next train.
This is now generally known and we have no trouble
on that score."

When I asked Mr. Montgomery how he explained

the fact that they had been able to obtain such good
results in the way of order and morality among
the people of the colony, he said: "I attribute it to
the force of public opinion. The regulations that
we enforce have public sentiment behind them.
The people recognise that the laws, when they are
enforced, represent the sentiment of the community
and are imposed for their own good. It is not so
easy for them to realise that where the government
is entirely in the hands of white men."

One thing that has helped to maintain order in
the colony is the fact that Bolivar County prohibits
the sale of liquor. More than once the liquor men
have attempted to pass a law that would license the
selling of liquor in the county. Some years ago
a determined effort was made to repeal the prohibition
law. In order to secure the vote of Mound
Bayou, which seems to have the balance of power in
the county on this question, a "still hunt" was
made among the voters in the community. A plan
was arranged by which a saloon was to be established
in the town and one of the citizens made
proprietor.

"This scheme came very near going through,"
said Mr. Montgomery. "The plan was all arranged
before we heard of it. Then we called a meeting
and I simply said to the people that experience in
our own town had taught us that a saloon was a bad
thing to have in the community. I said that if the

law was passed, a coloured man might run the
saloon here, but in the rest of the county they would
be in the hands of white men. We would pay for
maintaining them, however, and we would be the
ones to suffer. We voted the law down and there
has been no serious attempt to open the county to
the liquor traffic since."

In a certain sense, it may be said that the Mound
Bayou town and colony have been a school in self-government
for its colonists. They have had an
opportunity there, such as Negro people have rarely
had elsewhere, to learn the real meaning of political
institutions and to prepare themselves for the duties
and responsibilities of citizenship.

It is interesting to note, in this connection, that
this is one of the few instances in which Negroes
have ever organised and maintained in any Southern
state a government which has gained the entire
respect of the Southern people. A writer in a recent
number of the Planter's Journal, published in Memphis,
says:

In view of the oft-repeated statement that Negroes
have made a failure of government wherever they
have tried it, either in Africa or America, how can
we account, we may ask, for the success of the
Mound Bayou colony?

In the first place, I should say it was due in part
to the fact that the colony is small. I think it will
be found that in most cases where a people have
learned to govern themselves they have taken their
first lessons in small communities. In fact, government
in the United States has grown gradually out
of the Town Meeting, where the interests of all
individuals were so closely knit together that each
member was able to feel and understand his responsibility
to every other as he could not so readily have
done elsewhere.

Another reason why this town has succeeded
thus far is, I believe, because it is a pioneer work of
Negroes themselves. The men who came and
settled in this town have had an opportunity to
grow up with it and the growth of the town has
been an education to them. Besides, in this town
Negroes are not merely inhabitants, but they are
owners, and they feel the responsibility of ownership.
They possess the land, they own the stores,
the cotton-gins, the bank, and the cotton-seed oil mill.

More than any other one thing, however, the
Mound Bayou colony owes its success, I suspect,
to the vision, the enterprise, and the public spirit
of the men who have been its leaders: Isaiah T. Montgomery,
the founder, and Charles Banks. These
have clearly seen that their own permanent success
is identified with the success of the people by whom
they were surrounded, and that their greatest opportunities
are in helping to build up the members
of their own race.

I have spoken, in what preceded, of what Negoes
are doing in the way of self-government in towns
like Mound Bayou, and of what Negroes are doing
through the Law and Order Leagues, as in Baltimore,
to secure the enforcement of the law in the communities
in which they live. I should like to say
a word, in conclusion, of another organisation, which
although it has not sought to exercise any direct
influence in securing good government and the
proper enforcement of the law, has done much to
bring about better conditions, in this and other
directions, among the people where it exists. I
refer to what is known as the Farmers' Improvement
Society, of Texas, one of the most interesting
of the many organisations of coloured people which
have sprung up since emancipation, and one that
has exercised an inspiring and helpful influence
upon the people it has reached.

This society, which had a membership, in 1908, of

9,256 among the Negro farmers of Texas, was
organised, in 1895, under the leadership of R. L.
Smith, of Paris, Texas. It was the outgrowth of a
village improvement society which Mr. Smith
organised in Freedmantown, which was the name
given to the coloured quarter of Oakland, Texas,
where he was teaching at the time. It is an interesting
fact in this connection that Mr. Smith received
the suggestion for the organisation of this society
from reading an article in the Youths' Companion,
describing the work of the Village Improvement
Society in Litchfield, Connecticut. This circumstance
suggests one of the benefits which the art
of reading conferred upon the coloured people of
which we do not usually take an account.

While the first purpose of this society was to save
money for its members by purchasing provisions
in common, and in large quantities, it eventually'
sought to improve its members in every direction.
In order to do this, Mr. Smith decided to adopt
the forms of fraternal organisations and confer
degrees, first, upon those who succeeded in getting
out of the chronic condition of debt in which they
lived; and, second, upon those who, in the comprehensive
language of Mr. Smith, "made the
most progress in civilisation."

The degrees were twelve in number. The first
degree was conferred upon the member who
succeeded in "running" himself three months,

without opening an account; the second, upon the
member running himself six months; the third,
nine months, and the fourth twelve months; the
fifth was conferred upon the members who maintained
themselves the entire year, and had a surplus
of twenty-five dollars; the sixth, the same, with
a surplus of one hundred dollars; the seventh the
same, with a surplus of one hundred and fifty dollars;
and the eighth, with a surplus of two hundred
dollars; and so on, up to the twelfth degree, which
was called the Grand Patriarch degree, and entitled
its possessor to membership in the annual convocation
without election, "thereby creating," as Mr.
Smith explains, "a permanent delegateship of successful
members, who had worked out their salvation
and were actually fitted for leadership by growth
in the essentials of civilisation."

In 1907 members of the organisation owned
71,439 acres of land, which were worth considerably
over one million dollars. The estimated value
of their live-stock was $275,000.

In 1906 the Farmers' Improvement Association,
having raised among its members something over
twelve hundred dollars, purchased land and started
an Agricultural College. The purpose of the
society was to provide a school in which their sons
and daughters could have the sort of training that
would prepare them to stay on the farm, and not
leave it for the doubtful advantages of the city.

R. L. Smith is one of the younger generation of
coloured men. Born in Charleston, South Carolina,
in 1861, he was a student for a while during Reconstruction
days at the University of South Carolina,
but was eventually starved out when the law passed
which cut off the funds for the scholarships
of Negro students. He afterward was graduated at
Atlanta University, returned to Charleston and
ran a Republican paper. That enterprise naturally
failed with the downfall of the Reconstruction
government in the South, and Mr. Smith
decided to go to Texas and begin life anew as
a teacher.

Although he had intended to keep out of politics
after leaving South Carolina, he found himself,
in 1895, running for the Legislature of Texas. Much
to his surprise he was elected, a majority of white
voters having given him their support. "Since the
white people," said Mr. Smith, in relating this
experience, "were kind enough to say that a man
who felt so much interest in the upbuilding of his
own race should be endorsed in some way by the
whites, I thought that the race problem was solved
sure enough."

Mr. Smith has continued in the work which
he began, and, although he had had one or two
offices under the Federal Government since that
time, he has never permitted that to turn him aside
from the important original work which he has

undertaken for the improvement of the Negro
farmers in Texas.

In spite of Mr. Smith's election to the Legislature,
the race problem is not yet solved in Texas. Nevertheless,
at our annual Negro Conference at Tuskegee,
Mr. Smith has never failed to be present and to
report progress.

CHAPTER XV
THE NEGRO'S PLACE IN AMERICAN LIFE

ONE of the most striking and interesting things
about the American Negro, and one which
has impressed itself upon my mind more
and more in the course of the preparation of this book,
is the extent to which the black man has intertwined
his life with that of the people of the white race
about him. While it is true that hardly any other
race of people, that has come to this country,
has remained, in certain respects, so separate and
distinct a part of the population as the Negro, it is
also true that no race, which has come to this country,
has so woven its life into the life of the people
about it. No race has shared to a greater extent in
the work and activities of the original settlers of the
country, or has been more closely related to them
in interest, in sympathy and in sentiment, than the
Negro race.

In fact, there is scarcely any enterprise, of any
moment, that has been undertaken by a member of
the white race, in which the Negro has not had
some part. In all the great pioneer work of clearing
forests, and preparing the way for civilisation,

the Negro, as I have tried to point out, has had his
part. In all the difficult and dangerous work of
exploration of the country the Negro has invariably
been the faithful companion and helper of the
white man.

Negroes seem to have accompanied nearly all the
early Spanish explorers. Indeed, it has even been
conjectured that Negroes came to America before
Columbus, carried hither by trade winds and ocean
currents, coming from the west coast of Africa.
At any rate, one of the early historians, Peter
Martyr, who was an acquaintance of Columbus,
mentions "a region in the Darian District of South
America where Balboa, the illustrious discoverer
of the Pacific Ocean, found a race of black men who
were conjectured to have come from Africa and to
have been shipwrecked on this coast."

It is said that the first ship built along the Atlantic
Coast was constructed by the slaves of Vasquez de
Ayllon, who, one hundred years before the English
landed there, attempted to found a Spanish settlement
on the site of what was later Jamestown,
Virginia. There were thirty Negroes with the
Spanish discoverer, Balboa, and they assisted him
in building the first ship that was constructed on
the Pacific Coast of America. Cortez, the Conquerer
of Mexico, had three hundred Negro slaves with him
in 1522, the year in which he was chosen Captain-general
of New Spain, as Mexico was then called,

and it is asserted that the town of Santiago del
Principe was founded by Negro slaves who had
risen in insurrection against their Spanish masters.

In the chronicles of the ill-starred Coronado expedition
of 1540, which made its way from Mexico
as far north as Kansas and Nebraska, it is mentioned
that a Negro slave of Hernando de Alarcon was the
only member of the party who would undertake to
carry a message from the Rio Grande across the
country to the Zunis in New Mexico, where Alarcon
hoped to find Coronado and open communication
with him.

I have already referred to the story of Estevan,
"little Steve," a companion of Pamfilo Narvaez, in
his exploration of Florida in 1527, who afterward
went in search of the seven fabulous cities which
were supposed to be located somewhere in the
present state of Arizona, and discovered the Zuni
Indians.[1]

Negroes accompanied De Soto on his march
through Alabama, in 1540. One of these Negroes
seems to have liked the country, for he remained and
settled among the Indians not far from Tuskegee,
and became in this way the first settler of Alabama.
Coming down to a later date, a Negro servant
accompanied William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark
Expedition, which, in 1804, explored the sources of the
Missouri River, and gained for the United States

the Oregon country. Negroes were among the first
adventurers who went to look for gold in California;
and when John C. Fremont, in 1848, made his desperate
and disastrous attempt to find a pathway
across the Rockies, he was accompanied by a Negro
servant named Saunders.

Recently in looking over the pages of the National
Geographical Magazine, I ran across an article
giving an account of Peary's trip farthest north.
Among the pictures illustrating that article I noticed
the laughing face of a black man. The picture was
the more striking because the figure of this black
man was totally encased in the snow-white fur of
a polar bear. I learned that this was the picture of
Matt Henson, the companion of Peary in his most
famous expedition to reach the pole. Just now, as
I am writing this, I learn from the newspapers that
Peary claims he has reached the North Pole and that
Matt Henson was his companion on this last and
most famous journey.

One reason why the Negro is found so closely associated
with the white man in all his labours and
adventures is that, with all his faults, the Negro
seldom betrays a specific trust. Even the individual
who does not always clearly distinguish between
his own property and that of his neighbour,
when a definite thing of value is entrusted to him,
in nine cases out of ten, will not betray that trust.
This is a trait that characterises the Negro wherever

he is found. I have heard Sir Harry EL Johnston,
the African explorer, use almost exactly the same
words, for example, in describing the characteristics
of the native African.

Some years ago I was travelling through Central
Alabama, and I chanced to stop at a crossroads
country store. While I was talking with the storekeeper
a coloured man, who lived some distance away,
chanced to pass by. It happened that the merchant
had a considerable sum of money which he wanted to
send to some of his friends some miles distant. He
called the coloured man into the store and put the
money into his hands with the request that he deliver
it to his friend as he passed by the house on his road
home. My attention was attracted by this transaction,
and I asked the white merchant how it was
that he was willing to entrust so large a sum of money
to this particular coloured man. My question
brought out the fact that the merchant did not even
know the name of the man to whom he had entrusted
this money. He was familiar with his face, knew that
he had lived in the neighbourhood for a number
of years, and felt quite secure in putting the money
in his hands to carry to its destination.

In explanation the merchant told me that, in all
his experience in dealing with coloured people in
that neighbourhood, he had never been deceived when
he asked one of them to perform some specific act
which involved direct, personal responsibility. He

went on to say that while the man to whom he had
given this money, if the opportunity offered itself,
might yield to the temptation of pilfering, he still
felt perfectly sure that the money he had entrusted
to him would be delivered in exactly the shape in
which it had been turned over.

It is a common thing in the South for the heads
of the household to leave home and be away for
weeks and even months, without a single thing of
value in the house being left under lock and key.
In such cases Southern white people are willing to
entrust, apparently, all their property to the care
of Negro servants. In spite of this fact, I have
rarely heard of a case of this kind in which the
Negro servants have proved dishonest. I very
seldom go into any Southern city that some banker,
or retail or wholesale merchant does not introduce
me to some individual Negro, to whom he has
entrusted all that is valuable in connection with his
banking or mercantile business.

I have already referred to the part that the Negro
took in the wars which were fought to establish,
defend and maintain the United States. One of
the soldiers of the Revolutionary War who afterward
distinguished himself in a remarkable way
was Reverend Lemuel Haynes, and as I have not
mentioned him elsewhere, I will do so here. Lemuel
Haynes was born in West Hartford, Connecticut,
in 1753. In 1775 he joined the Colonial Army

as a Minute-man, at Roxbury, Massachusetts,
having volunteered for the Ticonderoga Expedition.
At the close of the War he settled in Granville, New
York, where he worked on a farm, meanwhile
studying for the ministry. By some means or other
he succeeded in securing an exceptionally good
education. In 1785 he succeeded in securing a
position as a minister to a white congregation in
Torrington, Connecticut. As there was objection
from some members of the congregation on account
of his colour, he removed to Rutland, Vermont,
where he served as a minister from 1787 to 1817.
In 1818 he went to Manchester, New Hampshire.
It was while there that he made himself famous
by opposing the execution of the Boone brothers,
who had been condemned to death for murdering an
insane man. He visited the brothers in the prison,
and having listened to their story became convinced
of their innocence, whereupon he took up their
defence in the face of violent opposition. In spite
of his efforts they were convicted, but a few days
before their execution the man they were supposed
to have killed, Louis Calvin, returned alive to his
home. At that time people generally believed it
was the coloured minister's prayers that brought
him back.

In 1822 Mr. Haynes returned to his former home,
at Granville, where he continued to preach until his
death. He is most widely known for his "sermon

against universalism," which he preached in opposition
to Hosea Ballou. This sermon, which was
preached impromptu and without notes, created
a great impression. It was afterward published
and circulated widely all over the United States
and in some parts of Europe. Lemuel Haynes died
in Granville, in 1832. He was, so far as I know,
the first coloured Congregational minister.

During the Civil War there were several Negro
officers appointed to take charge of the Negro troops,
and immediately after the War several Negroes were
admitted to West Point. Three of these have
graduated. The only one of these now in the service
is First Lieutenant Charles Young, who was
Major of the Ninth Ohio Battalion United States
Volunteers in the Spanish-American War.

Negro soldiers took a more prominent part in
the Spanish-American War than in any previous
war of the United States. In the first battle in
Cuba the Tenth Cavalry played an important part
in coming to the support, at a critical moment, of the
Rough Riders under Colonel Theodore Roosevelt,
at the Battle of Las Guasimas.

The Twenty-Fifth Infantry took a prominent
part in the Battle of El Caney. It is claimed by
Lieutenant-colonel A. D. Daggett that the Twenty-fifth
Regiment caused the surrender of the stone
fort at El Caney, which was the key to all the other
positions in that battle for the possession of San

Juan. Eight men of this regiment were given
certificates of gallantry for their part in the battle
of San Juan Hill. The other Negro regiments which
took part in these battles was the Ninth Cavalry
and the Twenty-fourth Infantry, both of whom
did heroic service in the famous battle for the crest
of San Juan hill.

What impresses me still more, however, is the part
which these black soldiers played after the battle was
over, when they were called to remain and nurse
the sick and wounded in the malarial-haunted camp
at Siboney, at a time when the yellow fever had
broken out in the army.

To engage in this service required another and
a higher kind of courage, and I can perhaps give no
better idea of the way in which this service was performed
by these black soldiers than to repeat here
the account given by Stephen Bonsai in his story
of the fight for the possession of Santiago. He says:

I have described the manner in which the Negro
has adapted his own life to that of the people around
him, uniting his interests and his sympathies with
those of the dominant white race. Perhaps I should
say a word here of the way in which he has managed
to keep his life separate and to prevent friction in
his dealings with the other portions of the community.
Few white people, I dare say, realise what the Negro
has to do, to what extent he has been compelled to
go out of his way, to avoid causing trouble and prevent
friction.

For example, in one large city I know of a business
place in which there is a cigar stand, a bootblacking

stand, a place for cleaning hats and a barber shop,
all in one large room. Any Negro can, without
question, have his hat cleaned, his boots blacked,
or buy a cigar in this place, but he cannot take a
seat in the barber's chair. The minute he should
do this he would be asked to go somewhere else.

The Negro must, at all hazard and in all times
and places, avoid crossing the colour line. It is
a little difficult, however, sometimes to determine
upon what principle this line is drawn. For instance,
customs differ in different parts of the same town,
as well as in different parts of the country at
large. In one part of a town a Negro may be able
to get a meal at a public lunch counter, but in
another part of the same town he cannot do so. Conditions
differ widely in the different states. In Virginia
a Negro is expected to ride in a separate
railway coach, in West Virginia he can ride in the
same coach with the white people. In one Southern
city Negroes can enter the depot, as they usually do,
by the main entrance; in another Southern city there
is a separate entrance for coloured people. While
in one Southern city the Negro is allowed to take
his seat in the main waiting-room he will be compelled
at another depot, in the same city, to go into
a separate waiting-room. In some cities Negroes
are allowed to go without question into the theatre;
in other cities he either cannot enter the theatre at all,
or he has a separate place assigned to him.

In all these different situations, somehow or
other, the Negro manages to comport himself so
as to rarely excite comment or cause trouble.

He often hears the opinion expressed that the
Negro should keep his place or that he is "all right
in his place." People who make use of these expressions
seldom understand how difficult it is, considering
the different customs in different parts of the
country, to find out just what his place is. I might
give further illustrations of this fact. In the
Southern states the Negro is rarely allowed to enter
a public library. In certain parts of the United States
the Negro is allowed to enter the public high school,
but he is forbidden to enter the grammar school,
where white children are taught. In one city the
Negro may sit anywhere he pleases in the street car;
in another city, perhaps not more than twenty miles
away, he is assigned to special and separate seats.
In one part of the country the Negro may vote freely,
in another part of the country, perhaps across the
border of another state, he is not expected to vote
at all.

As illustrating the ability of the Negro to avoid
the rocks and shoals, which he is likely to meet in
travelling about the country, and still manage to get
what he wants, I recall an experience of a coloured
man with whom I was travelling through South
Carolina some time ago. This man was very
anxious to reach the railway train and had only a

few minutes in which to do so. He hailed, naturally
enough, the first hackman he saw, who happened
to be a white man. The white man told him that
it was not his custom to carry Negroes in his carriage.
The coloured man, not in the least disturbed,
at once replied: "That's ail right, we will fix that;
you get in the carriage and I'll take the front seat
and drive you." This was done, and in a few minutes
they reached the depot in time to catch the train.
The coloured man handed the white man twenty-five
cents and departed. Both were satisfied and
the colour line was preserved.

The facts I have detailed serve to illustrate some of
the difficulties that the coloured man has in the North,
as well as in the South, with the present unsettled
conditions as to his position in the community. The
Negro suffers some other disadvantages living in the
midst of a people from whom he is so different, with
whom he is so intimately associated, and from whom
he is, at the same time, so distinctly separate.

In living in the midst of seventy millions of the
most highly civilised people of the world, the Negro
has the opportunity to learn much that he could not
learn in a community where the people were less
enlightened and less progressive. On the other
hand, it is a disadvantage to him that his progress
is constantly compared to the progress of a people
who have the advantage of many centuries of civilisation,
while the Negro has only a little more than

forty years been a free man. If the American Negro,
with his present degree of advancement, were living
in the midst of a civilisation such as exists to-day
in Asia or in the south of Europe, the gap between
him and the people by whom he is surrounded
would not then be so wide, and he would receive
credit for the progress that he has already made.

In speaking of the progress of the Negro in
America, I want to refer to a letter, published in
Virginia in 1801, and addressed to a member of the
General Assembly of Virginia. This letter, which
in many respects is a remarkable document, is supposed
to have been written by the Honourable Judge
Tucker, and was occasioned by a slave conspiracy
which greatly disturbed the people of Virginia about
that time. This letter is, in part, as follows:

I have quoted this letter at some length because
it seems to me to describe, in a very remarkable way,
the process and the method by which the Negro
masses have advanced slowly but steadily before
emancipation, more rapidly but not less steadily since.

The story of the American Negro has been one of

progress from the first. While there have been
times when it seemed the race was going backward,
this backward movement has been temporal, local
or merely apparent. On the whole, the Negro has
been and is moving forward everywhere and in
every direction.

In speaking of his experiences in the South Mr.
Ray Stannard Baker, whose articles on Southern
conditions are in many respects the best and most
informing that have been written since Olmsted's
famous "Journey through the Seaboard Slave
States," said that before he came into the South he
had been told that in many sections of the country
the Negro was relapsing into barbarism. He, of
course, was very anxious to find these places and see
for himself to what extent the Negro had actually
gone backward. Before leaving New York he was
told that he would find the best example of this
condition in the lowlands and rice-fields of South
Carolina and Georgia. He visited this section of
South Carolina and Georgia, but he did not find any
traces of the barbarism that he expected to see.
He did find, however, that coloured people in that
part of the country were, on the whole, making
progress. This progress was slow, but it was in a
direction away from and not toward barbarism.

In South Carolina he was told that while the people
in that part of the country had not gone back into
barbarism, if he would go to the sugar cane regions

of Louisiana he would find the conditions among
the Negroes as bad as in any other part of the
United States. He went to Louisiana, and again he
found not barbarism but progress. There he was
told that he would find what he was looking for
in the Yazoo Delta of the Mississippi. In Mississippi
he was told that if he went into Arkansas he
would not be disappointed; he went to Arkansas,
but there, also, he found the coloured people engaged
in buying land, building churches and schools, and
trying to improve themselves. After that he came
to the conclusion that the Negro was not relapsing
into barbarism.

The Negro is making progress at the present time
as he made progress in slavery times. There is,
however, this difference: In slavery the progress of
the Negro was a menace to the white man. The
security of the white master depended upon the
ignorance of the black slave. In freedom the
security and happiness of each race depends, to a
very large extent, on the education and the progress
of the other. The problem of slavery was to keep
the Negro down; the problem of freedom is to raise
him up.

The story of the Negro, in the last analysis, is
simply the story of the man who is farthest down;
as he raises himself he raises every other man who
is above him.

In concluding this narrative I ought to say, perhaps,

that if, in what I have written, I seem to have emphasised
the successes of the Negro rather than his
failures, and to have said more about his achievements
than about his hardships, it is because I
am convinced that these things are more interesting
and more important. To me the history of the
Negro people in America seems like the story of a
great adventure, in which, for my own part, I am
glad to have had a share. So far from being a misfortune
it seems to me that it is a rare privilege to
have part in the struggles, the plans, and the ambitions
of ten millions of people who are making their
way from slavery to freedom.

At the present time the Negro race is, so to speak,
engaged in hewing its path through the wilderness.
In spite of its difficulties there is a novelty and a zest
as well as an inspiration in this task that few who
have not shared it can appreciate. In America the
Negro race, for the first time, is face to face with the
problem of learning to till the land intelligently; of
planning and building permanent and beautiful
homes; of erecting schoolhouses and extending school
terms; of experimenting with methods of instruction
and adapting them to the needs of the Negro
people; of organising churches, building houses
of worship, and preparing ministers. In short,
the Negro in America to-day is face to face with
all the fundamental problems of modern civilisation,
and for each of these problems he has, to some extent,

to find a solution of his own. The fact that in his
case this is peculiarly difficult only serves to make
the problem peculiarly interesting.

We have hard problems, it is true, but instead of
despairing in the face of the difficulties we should,
as a race, thank God that we have a problem. As
an individual I would rather belong to a race that has
a great and difficult task to perform, than be a part
of a race whose pathway is strewn with flowers. It
is only by meeting and manfully facing hard, stubborn
and difficult problems that races, like individuals,
are, in the highest degree, made strong.