asterers at work in a new house that a friend
of mine was building. I watched them for an hour. They seemed to know
their trade. I invited them to come over and see me. They came, took the
contract for my work, hired a white man to carry mortar at a dollar
a day, and when they got through it was the best job of plastering
in town. I found that they had learned their trade at Tuskegee. They
averaged four dollars a day each in wages. We tried to get them to
locate in our town, but they went back to school.'

When I was in Mississippi a prominent banker showed me his business
letter-heads.

'Good job, isn't it?' he said. 'A Negro printer did it. He wrote to me
asking if he might bid on my work. I replied that although I had known
him a long time I couldn't give him the job merely because he was a
Negro. He told me to forget his color, and said that if he couldn't do
as good a job and do it as reasonably as any white man could, he didn't
want it. I let him try, and now he does most of our printing.'

Out of such points of contact, then, encouraged by such wise leaders
as Booker T. Washington, will grow an ever finer and finer spirit
of association and of common and friendly knowledge. And that will
inevitably lead to an extension upon the soundest possible basis of the
Negro franchise. I know cases where white men have urged intelligent
Negroes to come and cast their ballots, and have stood sponsor for them,
out of genuine respect. As a result, to-day, the Negroes who vote in the
South are, as a class, men of substance and intelligence, fully equal to
the tasks of citizenship.

Thus, I have boundless confidence not only in the sense of the white men
of the South, but in the innate capability of the Negro, and that once
these two come really to know each other, not at sore points of contact,
but as common workers for a common country, the question of suffrage
will gradually solve itself along the lines of true democracy.

Another influence also will tend to change the status of the Negro as a
voter. That is the pending break-up of the political solidarity of the
South. All the signs point to a political realignment upon new issues in
this country, both South and North. Old party names may even pass away.
And that break-up, with the attendant struggle for votes, is certain
to bring into politics thousands of Negroes and white men now
disfranchised. The result of a real division on live issues has been
shown in many local