“The men become clergymen, doctors, lawyers, apothecaries and teachers. Many of the trades are now open to them, thanks to the industrial schools. They are buying land, and through the education they obtain at Hampton and Tuskegee they are cultivating it more intelligently. They have not as yet gone much into business, owing to the want of capital.”
“In the practice of the professions you mention, are they employed by the whites?”
“Hardly at all; but we are eight millions of people, and that is a nation in itself, so that we are independent in that respect, though no doubt in time the whites will become accustomed to seeing us occupying positions requiring education and intelligence, and will employ us.”
“Where do your best pupils come from?”
“From the rural districts. The girls and boys from the country are more anxious to learn, more diligent and ambitious. They turn out better than those from the towns, who are lazy, and are always longing for diversions and ‘fascinating frivolities.’”
From Mr. and Mrs. Satterfield (white), of Scotia Seminary, N. C., we received similar replies to the same questions. Mr. Satterfield said:
“We have been here many years, and I have carefully followed the lives of my girls after they have left, and I can safely say that I can count on the fingers of one hand those who have gone astray. As a rule they marry within five years after they graduate, and their chief ambition is to have comfortable, Christian homes. As they generally marry the young men who have had educations like their own, both work for the same object. In fact,” he added, “the character and intelligence of the negro, like the whites, is the result of environment and heredity, and these factors produce corresponding results upon each.”
In this opinion all the white teachers we saw agreed, from Hampton to Montgomery, without exception. We also learned that the teachers discover no difference in mental capacity between the Afro-Americans of pure blood and those who have an admixture of white blood.
At Tuskegee, Mrs. Booker Washington gathered, from within a radius of seven miles, about thirty married women that we might talk with them, and hear about their lives. Some of them walked seven miles to meet the “Northern Ladies,” and they ranged in age from thirty to seventy years. None had less than five children, and one had had nineteen. Their husbands were all laborers. Some few owned their land and houses, though most of these were so heavily mortgaged as to give them no chance to get ahead, interest sometimes running as high as 20 per cent. Their stories reminded us of the accounts that have come from Russia of the oppression of the peasants by the Jews, which led to the edicts of expulsion of the latter by the late Czar.
These women, however, had all come under the influence which Mr. and Mrs. Booker Washington exercise at Tuskegee. They are striving to have more decent homes, to educate their children, and to get out of debt. They have taken the first step toward elevation; they have learned what is better, and are willing and anxious to work for it.