entative colored men and women
from all sections of the Black Belt. They come in ox-carts, mule-carts,
buggies, on muleback and horseback, on foot, by railroad: some traveling
all night in order to be present. The matters considered at the
conferences are those that the colored people have it within their own
power to control: such as the evils of the mortgage system, the one-room
cabin, buying on credit, the importance of owning a home and of putting
money in the bank, how to build schoolhouses and prolong the school
term, and how to improve their moral and religious condition.

As a single example of the results, one delegate reported that since
the conferences were started five years ago eleven people in his
neighborhood had bought homes, fourteen had got out of debt, and a
number had stopped mortgaging their crops. Moreover, a schoolhouse
had been built by the people themselves, and the school term had
been extended from three to six months; and with a look of triumph he
exclaimed, "We is done stopped libin' in de ashes!"

Besides this Negro Conference for the masses of the people, we now have
a gathering at the same time known as the Workers' Conference, composed
of the officers and instructors in the leading colored schools of the
South. After listening to the story of the conditions and needs from the
people themselves, the Workers' Conference finds much food for thought
and discussion.

Nothing else so soon brings about right relations between the two races
in the South as the industrial progress of the negro. Friction between
the races will pass away in proportion as the black man, by reason of
his skill, intelligence, and character, can produce something that the
white man wants or respects in the commercial world. This is another
reason why at Tuskegee we push the industrial training. We find that as
every year we put into a Southern community colored men who can start
a brick-yard, a sawmill, a tin-shop, or a printing-office,--men who
produce something that makes the white man partly dependent upon the
negro, instead of all the dependence being on the other side,--a change
takes place in the relations of the races.

Let us go on for a few more years knitting our business and industrial
relations into those of the white man, till a black man gets a mortgage
on a white man's house that he can foreclose at will. The white man on
whose house the mortgage rests will not try to prevent that negro from
voting w