poses, and the property
per capita for every colored man, woman, and child in the United States
is estimated at $75.

We are operating successfully several banks, commercial enterprises
among our people in the Southland, including 1 silk-mill and 1
cotton-factory. We have 32,000 teachers in the schools of the country;
we have built, with the aid of our friends, about 20,000 churches, and
support 7 colleges, 17 academies, 50 high schools, 5 law schools, 5
medical schools, and 25 theological seminaries. We have over 600,000
acres of land in the South alone. The cotton produced, mainly by black
labor, has increased from 4,669,770 bales in 1860 to 11,235,000 in 1899.
All this we have done under the most adverse circumstances. We have done
it in the face of lynching, burning at the stake, with the humiliation
of "Jim Crow" cars, the disfranchisement of our male citizens, slander
and degradation of our women, with the factories closed against us, no
Negro permitted to be conductor on the railway-cars, whether run through
the streets of our cities or across the prairies of our great country,
no Negro permitted to run as engineer on a locomotive, most of the mines
closed against us. Labor-unions--carpenters, painters, brick-masons,
machinists, hackmen, and those supplying nearly every conceivable
avocation for livelihood have banded themselves together to better their
condition, but, with few exceptions, the black face has been left out.
The Negroes are seldom employed in our mercantile stores. At this we do
not wonder. Some day we hope to have them employed in our own stores.
With all these odds against us, we are forging our way ahead, slowly,
perhaps, but surely. You tie us and then taunt us for a lack of bravery,
but one day we will break the bonds. You may use our labor for two and a
half centuries and then taunt us for our poverty, but let me remind you
we will not always remain poor. You may withhold even the knowledge of
how to read God's word and learn the way from earth to glory and then
taunt us for our ignorance, but we would remind you that there is plenty
of room at the top, and we are climbing.

After enforced debauchery, with the many kindred horrors incident to
slavery, it comes with ill grace from the perpetrators of these deeds to
hold up the shortcomings of some of our race to ridicule and scorn.

"The new man, the slave who has grown out of the ashes of thirty-five
years ago, is inducted into the politica