Since the time the shackles were struck off the slaves, the negroes of the United States have had to their credit two Senators and seventeen Congressmen, besides scores of representatives in the diplomatic service and in official life, municipal, State and national. Negroes have won championships as pedestrians, bicycle-riders, and prize-fighters. As evidence of the intellectual endeavor and capacity of the race there are to-day (1908) 1,200,000 black children in the public schools, 30,000 in the higher institutions of learning, and 200 in northern and European colleges and universities. Over 2,000 have been graduated from colleges, and the professions show 30,000 school-teachers and professors, 2,000 lawyers, 1,500 doctors, dentists and pharmacists, and over 23,000 ministers of the gospel. In addition to all this, the negroes have taken out 500 patents, have published 400 books, composed numerous songs, and now own and edit 12 magazines and 300 newspapers. In a material way the negroes have also made noticeable progress. Besides many industrial establishments, they own and manage 26 banks, own 2½ per cent. of the total valuation of the farm property, produce six per cent. of the total farm products of the United States, and own $900,000,000 worth of real and personal property.—William A. Sinclair, “The Aftermath of Slavery.”
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Booker T. Washington, writing on “Negro Homes” in The Century, says:
The first negro home that I remember was a log cabin about fourteen by sixteen feet square. It had a small, narrow door, which hung on rusty, worn-out hinges. The windows were mere openings in the wall, protected by a rickety shutter, which sometimes was closed in winter, but which usually hung dejectedly on uncertain hinges against the walls of the house. Such a thing as a glass window was unknown to this house. There was no floor, or, rather, there was a floor, but it was nothing more than the naked earth. There was only one room, which served as kitchen, parlor and bedroom for a family of five, which consisted of my mother, my elder brother, my sister, myself and the cat. In this cabin we all ate and slept, my mother being the cook on the place. My own bed was a heap of rags on the floor in the corner of the room next to the fireplace. It was not until after the emancipation that I enjoyed for the first time in my life the luxury of sleeping in a bed. It was at times, I suppose, somewhat crowded in those narrow quarters, tho I do not now remember having suffered on that account, especially as the cabin was always pretty thoroughly ventilated, particularly in winter, through the wide openings between the logs in the walls.
Probably there is no single object that so accurately represents and typifies the mental and moral condition of the larger proportion of the members of my race fifty years ago as this same little slave cabin. For the same reason it may be said that the best evidence of the progress which the race has made since emancipation is the character and quality of the homes which they are building for themselves to-day.
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NERVE
Altho almost completely paralyzed, Fred J. Daniels, an engineer on the Lehigh Valley Railroad, managed to save passenger train No. 2, which he was running, from colliding with the rear end of a freight train. The train was near Maxwell, Pa., when, leaning out of his cab window, Daniels saw the rear lights of a freight.