All of this shows what a Negro who is industrious, and who comes up on a plantation where the landlord is not oppressive, can do. And despite the fact that much is heard on the one hand of the lazy and worthless Negro, and on the other of the landlord who holds his Negroes in practical slavery--it is significant that many Negroes are able to get ahead. In Pulaski County there are Negroes who own as high as 1,000 acres of land. Ben Gordon is one of them, his brother Charles has 500 acres, John Nelson has 400 acres worth $20 an acre, the Miller family has 1,000 acres, January Lawson, another of Mr. Brown's former tenants, has 500 acres; Jack Daniel 200 acres, Tom Whelan 600 acres. A mulatto merchant in Hawkinsville, whose creditable store I visited, also owns his plantation in the country and rents it to Negro tenants on the same system employed by the white landowners. Indeed, a few Negroes in the South are coming to be not inconsiderable landlords, and have many tenants. Hawkinsville also has a Negro blacksmith, Negro barbers and Negro builders--and like the white man, the Negro also develops his own financial sharks. One educated coloured man in Hawkinsville is a "note shaver"; he "stands for" other Negroes and signs their notes--at a frightful commission. Statistics will give some idea of how the industrious Negro in a black belt county like Pulaski has been succeeding. Total Assessed Acres of Value of Land Owned Property 1875 4,490 $ 43,230 1880 5,988 60,760 1885 6,901 59,022 1890 12,294 122,926 1895 14,145 144,158 1900 13,205 138,800 It is surprising to an unfamiliar visitor to find out that the Negroes in the South have acquired so much land. In Georgia alone in 1906 coloured people owned 1,400,000 acres and were assessed for over $28,000,000 worth of property, practically all of which, of course, has been acquired in the forty years since slavery. Negro farmers in some instances have made a genuine reputation for ability. John Roberts, a Richmond County Negro, won first prize over many white exhibitors in the fall of 1906 at the Georgia-Carolina fair at Augusta for the best bale of cotton raised. _Little Coloured Boy's Famous Speech_