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.
The negro problem of which we hear so much does not seem to us as difficult to solve as the labor problem of the North, complicated as that is by the mixture of races and religions. The negroes, on the contrary, are a homogeneous race, Afro-Americans, knowing no other country than the United States, and desiring no other; agricultural in their habits and tastes, intensely attached to the soil, loyal to the government, and mostly Protestant in faith, except in Louisiana and parts of Florida.
The Afro-American to-day in the five central Southern States is not so degraded or ignorant as was the French peasant before the revolution of 1792. In fact he is less degraded, for while his poverty and ignorance are no greater, he is not unjustly oppressed nor weighed down by taxation.
Mr. Arthur Young, whose account of his travels in France on the eve of the revolution is quoted authoritatively by historians, states:[3] “Husbandry is not much further advanced than among the Hurons, and the people almost as wild as their country. Their houses brutally filthy, no windows, no other light than the door, mud floors and chimneys. The people can neither read nor write, girls and women terribly ragged, if possible worse clad than with no clothes at all. All without shoes and stockings. People so ignorant that they know nothing of their own weights and measures.”