Booker T. Washington, Builder of a CivilizationScott, Emmett J. (Emmett Jay)
History
Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization
Scott, Emmett J. (Emmett Jay)
African Americans -- Biography; Educators -- United States -- Biography; Washington, Booker T., 1856-1915
"Many persons will, perhaps, feel that money which is acquired in this
rapid way is likely to do the person who obtains it as much harm as it
does good. I confess that it seems to me that the same amount of money
acquired more slowly would mean more to the man who gained it. On the
whole, however, the Negro race has not reached the point where it has
been troubled by the number of its millionaires. And if getting slowly
and laboriously is a good discipline, the Negro has almost a surplus
of that kind of blessing. I ought to add, also, in justice to Mr.
Terry, that from all I can learn, his rapid rise has neither injured
his character nor destroyed his good sense. I suspect that the effort
to keep all those houses rented and the effort to pay interest on his
mortgages has had a tendency to make him humble."
Although Watt Terry's success is, of course, phenomenal he is only one
of the many notably successful Negro business men who have told their
stories at meetings of the National Negro Business League. Neither is
Mr. Terry the only Negro who has made a big success in real estate. At
the meeting of the league already described, held in Boston in 1915,
Mr. Washington introduced Philip A. Payton, Jr., of New York City;
E.C. Brown, of Philadelphia, Pa.; and Watt Terry, of Brockton, Mass.;
as the three largest real estate operators of the Negro race. Philip
A. Payton, Jr., was the pioneer in opening the Harlem district in New
York City to settlement by Negroes, who had formerly been excluded
from all decent portions of the city and obliged to live on San Juan
Hill and in other sections of unsavory reputation. E.C. Brown made
money in real estate in Newport News and Norfolk, Va., and headed
movements for the establishment of Negro banks in both of these
cities. Afterward he moved to Philadelphia, where he has opened a
bank, and also conducts a real estate business on Broad Street--the
only Negro, it is said, who conducts a large business enterprise on
this important thoroughfare. At the same meeting it was brought out
that a Negro by the name of Phillip J. Allston was chemist for the
Potter Chemical Company, having risen from bottle-washer to that
responsible post. The story of J.S. Trower, caterer, of Philadelphia,
showed that he was frequently engaged for the most important functions
in the city and had been regularly employed by the Cramps Company,
shipbuilders, to take charge of the catering in connection with the
ceremonies accompanying the launching of new ships for the Navy. Mrs.
Bell Davis of Indianapolis, Ind., has become equally successful as a
caterer. When the National Negro Business League met in Indianapolis
it was she who served the annual banquet. Booker Washington took the
greatest satisfaction in disclosing her achievements to the Negro
people who had previously known little or nothing about her. He thus
introduced her at a meeting of the League, "Mrs. Bell Davis, a widow,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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