The Negro Problem

The Negro Problem

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Title: The Negro Problem
Author: Booker T. Washington, et al.
Release Date: February 14, 2005 [EBook #15041]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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THE NEGRO PROBLEM

CONTENTS
I Industrial Education for the Negro _Booker T. Washington_ 7
II The Talented Tenth _W.E. Burghardt DuBois_ 31
III The Disfranchisement of the Negro _ Charles W. Chesnutt_ 77
IV The Negro and the Law _Wilford H. Smith_ 125
V The Characteristics of the Negro People _H.T. Kealing_ 161
VI Representative American Negroes Paul Laurence Dunbar 187
VII The Negro's Place in American Life at the Present Day _T. Thomas Fortune_ 211
[_Transcriber's Note: Variant spellings have been left in the text. Obvious typos have
been corrected and indicated with a footnote._]

Industrial Education for the Negro By BOOKER T. WASHINGTON,
Principal of Tuskegee Institute
The necessity for the race's learning the difference between being worked and working.
He would not confine the Negro to industrial life, but believes that the very best service
which any one can render to what is called the "higher education" is to teach the present
generation to work and save. This will create the wealth from which alone can come

leisure and the opportunity for higher education.
One of the most fundamental and far-reaching deeds that has been accomplished during
the last quarter of a century has been that by which the Negro has been helped to find
himself and to learn the secrets of civilization--to learn that there are a few simple,
cardinal principles upon which a race must start its upward course, unless it would fail,
and its last estate be worse than its first.
It has been necessary for the Negro to learn the difference between being worked and
working--to learn that being worked meant degradation, while working means
civilization; that all forms of labor are honorable, and all forms of idleness disgraceful. It
has been necessary for him to learn that all races that have got upon their feet have done
so largely by laying an economic foundation, and, in general, by beginning in a proper
cultivation and ownership of the soil.
Forty years ago my race emerged from slavery into freedom. If, in too many cases, the
Negro race began development at the wrong end, it was largely because neither white nor
black properly understood the case. Nor is it any wonder that this was so, for never before
in the history of the world had just such a problem been presented as that of the two races
at the coming of freedom in this country.
For two hundred and fifty years, I believe the way for the redemption of the Negro was
being prepared through industrial development. Through all those years the Southern
white man did business with the Negro in a way that no one else has done business with
him. In most cases if a Southern white man wanted a house built he consulted a Negro
mechanic about the plan and about the actual building of the structure. If he wanted a suit
of clothes made he went to a Negro tailor, and for shoes he went to a shoemaker of the
same race. In a certain way every slave plantation in the South was an industrial school.
On these plantations young colored men and women were constantly being trained not
only as farmers but as carpenters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, brick masons, engineers,
cooks, laundresses, sewing women and housekeepers.
I do not mean in any way to apologize for the curse of slavery, which was a curse to both
races, but in what I say about industrial training in slavery I am simply stating facts. This
training was crude, and was given for selfish purposes. It did not answer the highest ends,
because there was an absence of mental training in connection with the training of the
hand. To a large degree, though, this business contact with the Southern white man, and
the industrial training on the plantations, left the Negro at the close of the war in
possession of nearly all the common and skilled labor in the South. The industries that
gave the South its power, prominence and wealth prior to the Civil War were mainly the
raising of cotton, sugar cane, rice and tobacco. Before the way