de." Many other useful inventions in the country are credited by the
Patent Office to the Negro.

5. The Negro has also demonstrated in thirty-five years his capacity
for organizing, controlling, and directing great and diversified
interests. Capacity to organize, maintain, and direct presupposes a
high order of mind. Executive ability requires accompanying
intellectual ability and not mere brilliancy. Unaided and alone the
Negro has set on foot great ecclesiastical organizations which he is
maintaining and developing with much credit to himself. In all these
organizations, leadership to the few has been cheerfully conceded by
the masses. As a church builder, with little means at his command, the
Negro stands without a peer. Within the last thirty-five years of the
nineteenth century the Negro has founded high schools, academies and
colleges, and he is successfully supporting and managing them. If it
is fair to estimate the ability and worth of men by real achievements,
then it must be conceded that the foremost man for real ability
throughout the entire South is a Negro, and we refer to the eminent
founder and developer of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. It is
unquestionable in our mind that the greatest enterprise conceived and
executed by any one mind, in the entire South, during the past forty
years, was that conceived in the brains of a single Negro, the child
of a slave mother, that resulted in the world-renowned Tuskegee
Institute. The results at Tuskegee will demonstrate that the highest
order of mind in the South, as well as the most famous, is in the
keeping of the Negro. The leading Presbyterian institution of learning
in the South for the education of colored men is now managed
successfully by Negro scholars. We refer here to Biddle University.

6. In business and politics the Negro, despite the odds arrayed
against him, is succeeding reasonably well. He is constantly
undertaking new business enterprises, and wherever the government or
state has intrusted him with official position the intelligent Negro
has discharged his public functions with credit to the government and
glory for himself. Whenever failure is recorded against the Negro it
is not due to his lacking the mental endowments equal to that of the
white man, but because he was denied the white man's favorable past,
and because a white man's opportunity is denied him. Equality of
opportunities and equality before the laws should be cheerfully
g