intimate relationship of the two. Certainly not a light task. These
lessons could only be learned in the practical school of experience,
then, not in a day. And what has been accomplished? Forty years ago
there was not in the entire Southland a single Negro school; before
the close of the nineteenth century there were twenty thousand Negro
school houses, thirty thousand Negro teachers, and three million Negro
school children happily wending their way to the "Pierian Spring."

Under the "system," generally speaking, it had been considered a crime
to teach the Negro to read or write; and the census of 1870 shows that
only two-tenths of all the Negroes of the United States, over ten
years of age, could write. Ten years later, the proportion had
increased to three-tenths of the whole number; while in 1890 only a
generation after emancipation, forty-three per cent of those ten years
and over were able to read and write; this proportion before the close
of the century reached forty-five per cent.

To wipe out forty-five per cent of illiteracy in less than forty
years; to find millions of children in the common schools; to find
twenty thousand Negroes learning trades under the soul inspiring
banner of free labor; to find other thousands successfully operating
many commercial enterprises; among these, several banks, one cotton
mill, and one silk mill; to find Negroes performing four-fifths of the
free labor of the South, thus becoming a strong industrial factor of
the section is to furnish proof of achievements in the nineteenth
century of which we need not be ashamed; and considering the
restrictions of labor unions, the fields or classes of labor from
which the Negro is practically barred regardless of section, quite
commensurate with the opportunities afforded him during the period in
question.