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 could be prepared for
the proper growing and marketing of these crops forests had to be cleared,
houses to be built, public roads and railroads constructed. In all these
works the Negro did most of the heavy work. In the planting, cultivating
and marketing of the crops not only was the Negro the chief dependence,
but in the manufacture of tobacco he became a skilled and proficient
workman, and in this, up to the present time, in the South, holds the lead
in the large tobacco manufactories.

In most of the industries, though, what happened? For nearly twenty years
after the war, except in a few instances, the value of the industrial
training given by the plantations was overlooked. Negro men and women were
educated in literature, in mathematics and in the sciences, with little
thought of what had been taking place during the preceding two hundred and
fifty years, except, perhaps, as something to be escaped, to be got as
far away from as possible. As a generation began to pass, those who had
been trained as mechanics in slavery began to disappear by death, and
gradually it began to be realized that there were few to take their