Produced by Suzanne Shell, Melissa Er-Raqabi, and the PG Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net [Illustration] THE NEGRO PROBLEM CONTENTS I Industrial Education for the Negro _Booker T. Washington_ 7 II The Talented Tenth _W.E. Burghardt DuBois_ 31 III The Disfranchisement of the Negro _ Charles W. Chesnutt_ 77 IV The Negro and the Law _Wilford H. Smith_ 125 V The Characteristics of the Negro People _H.T. Kealing_ 161 VI Representative American Negroes _Paul Laurence Dunbar_ 187 VII The Negro's Place in American Life at the Present Day _T. Thomas Fortune_ 211 [_Transcriber's Note: Variant spellings have been left in the text. Obvious typos have been corrected and indicated with a footnote._] _Industrial Education for the Negro_ By BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, Principal of Tuskegee Institute The necessity for the race's learning the difference between being worked and working. He would not confine the Negro to industrial life, but believes that the very best service which any one can render to what is called the "higher education" is to teach the present generation to work and save. This will create the wealth from which alone can come leisure and the opportunity for higher education. One of the most fundamental and far-reaching deeds that has been accomplished during the last quarter of a century has been that by which the Negro has been helped to find himself and to learn the secrets of civilization--to learn that there are a few simple, cardinal principles upon which a race must start its upward course, unless it would fail, and its last estate be worse than its first. It has been necessary for the Negro to learn the difference between being worked and working--to learn that being worked meant degradation, while working means civilization; that all forms of labor are honorable, and all forms of idleness disgraceful. It has been necessary for him to learn that all races that have got upon their feet have done so largely by laying an economic foundation, and, in general, by beginning in a proper cultivation and ownership of the soil. Forty years ago my race emerged from slavery into freedom. If, in too many cases, the Negro race began development at the wrong end, it was largely because neither white nor black properly understood the case. Nor is it any wonder that this was so, for never before in the history of the world had just such a problem been presented as that of the two races at the coming of freedom in this country.