264 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



seven hundred dollars for a common black man, why, you 

 couldn't get as much as fifty cents for the best white man in 

 this room. You see we have always had an advantage of 

 your race, and we want to keep it as far as possible. 



Now, I am speaking seriously, that this business contact 

 and this training placed us, our class that worked in the 

 south, in the position of the skilled laborer in that section. 

 But for twenty years, in methods of education, our people, 

 except General Armstrong, that rare man at Hampton, for- 

 got what had been taking place on the plantations for two 

 hundred and fifty years. Our people were educated by the 

 book and in the matter of religion ; but then the fathers who 

 had learned to be skilled laborers and mechanics during the 

 years of .slavery began to depart by death, and then we be- 

 gan to awake to the fact that we were not educating up black 

 boys suited to take their places. Then from all over the 

 country, from England and from the north, there began to 

 come into the south in a flood skilled hands and educated 

 brains ; and we found they were gradually taking from us 

 the legacy of our skilled labor purchased by our forefathers 

 at the price of two hundred and fifty years of slavery. The 

 only way the negro can establish his industrial basis in the 

 south, and the foundation upon which, gradually, man}' of 

 these troubles and problems will be solved, is this, — not 

 only in our education to turn out men and women educated 

 in head and heart, but to send out every year a stream of men 

 and women whose hands are educated as well as their heads ; 

 and certainly, in order that the negro ma}' become what the 

 country wants him to become, he has got to learn to do 

 three things, — to put brains and skill and dignity into the 

 common occupations that are about his doors. Pie has gut 

 to learn to do a common thing in an uncommon manner, 

 lie has got to learn to do a thing so well, no matter how 

 common that thing may seem, — he has got to learn, whether 

 it is in agriculture or mechanics or domestic service, he has 

 got to learn to do that thing so well that nobody else can 

 improve upon what the negro has done. And I "may add 

 here that it seems to me that the whole future of my race 

 hinges itself upon the question whether we can get him to 



