CONTENTS I Industrial Education for the Negro _Booker T. Washington_ 7 II The Talented Tenth _W.E. Burghardt DuBois_ 31III The Disfranchisement of the Negro _ Charles W. Chesnutt_ 77 IV ... Read more

CONTENTS I Industrial Education for the Negro _Booker T. Washington_ 7 II The Talented Tenth _W.E. Burghardt DuBois_ 31III The Disfranchisement of the Negro _ Charles W. Chesnutt_ 77 IV The Negro and the Law _Wilford H. Smith_ 125 V The Characteristics of the Negro People _H.T. Kealing_ 161 VI Representative American Negroes _Paul Laurence Dunbar_ 187VII The Negro's Place in American Life at the Present Day _T. Thomas Fortune_ 211_Industrial Education for the Negro_By BOOKER T. WASHINGTON,Principal of Tuskegee Institute The necessity for the race's learning the difference between being worked and working. He would not confine the Negro to industrial life, but believes that the very best service which any one can render to what is called the higher education is to teach the present generation to work and save. This will create the wealth from which alone can come leisure and the opportunity for higher education.One of the most fundamental and far-reaching deeds that has beenaccomplished during the last quarter of a century has been that by whichthe Negro has been helped to find himself and to learn the secrets ofcivilization--to learn that there are a few simple, cardinal principlesupon which a race must start its upward course, unless it would fail, andits last estate be worse than its first.It has been necessary for the Negro to learn the difference between beingworked and working--to learn that being worked meant degradation, whileworking means civilization; that all forms of labor are honorable, and allforms of idleness disgraceful. It has been necessary for him to learn thatall races that have got upon their feet have done so largely by laying aneconomic foundation, and, in general, by beginning in a proper cultivationand ownership of the soil.Forty years ago my race emerged from slavery into freedom. If, in too manycases, the Negro race began development at the wrong end, it was largelybecause neither white nor black properly understood the case. Nor is itany wonder that this was so, for never before in the history of the worldhad just such a problem been presented as that of the two races at thecoming of freedom in this country.For two hundred and fifty years, I believe the way for the redemption ofthe Negro was being prepared through industrial development. Through allthose years the Southern white man did business with the Negro in a waythat no one else has done business with him. In most cases if a Southernwhite man wanted a house built he consulted a Negro mechanic about theplan and about the actual building of the structure. If he wanted a suitof clothes made he went to a Negro tailor, and for shoes he went to ashoemaker of the same race. In a certain way every slave plantation in theSouth was an industrial school. On these plantations young colored men andwomen were constantly being trained not only as farmers but as carpenters,blacksmiths, wheelwrights, brick masons, engineers, cooks, laundresses,sewing women and housekeepers.I do not mean in any way to apologize for the curse of slavery, which wasa curse to both races, but in what I say about industrial training inslavery I am simply stating facts. This training was crude, and was givenfor selfish purposes. It did not answer the highest ends, because therewas an absence of mental training in connection with the training of thehand. To a large degree, though, this business contact with the Southernwhite man, and the industrial training on the plantations, left the Negroat the close of the war in possession of nearly all the common and skilledlabor in the South. The industries that gave the South its power,prominence and wealth prior to the Civil War were mainly the raising ofcotton, sugar cane, rice and tobacco. Before the way could be prepared forthe proper growing and marketing of these crops forests had to be cleared,houses to be built, public roads and railroads constructed. In all theseworks the Negro did most of the heavy work. In the planting, cultivatingand marketing of the crops not only was the Negro the chief dependence,but in the manufacture of tobacco he became a skilled and proficientworkman, and in this, up to the present time, in the South, holds the leadin the large tobacco manufactories. Less