“We all had our black mammies—they treated us as if we were their own babies. Can you blame us if sometimes we love them as our own flesh and blood? All the trouble we have is due to Northerners coming South. And if a Negro gets lynched, what a fuss is made of it!” I met the manager of a tobacco warehouse. He was not willing that I should see his Negroes at work and talk to them, but he assured me in a bland way, cigar in hand, that his pickers were a jolly crowd who knew they were well paid and would never go on strike. He paid thirty to thirty-five cents the hour for Negro labor. “The war has played the devil with the niggers,” said he. “It has spread about the idea of high wages. The North has been especially to blame, luring the niggers up there with the bait of big money. It has caused a rise in wages all over the South.” His employees were unskilled. In his opinion no Negroes were ever used for skilled work. What I had to tell him of Newport News and its shipyards was beyond his comprehension. As for Hampton Institute, he averred that he had never heard that it produced capable artisans. In his opinion there had been some good Negro carpenters and wheelwrights in slavery, but none since. Freedom had been very bad for the Negro. Yes, he utterly approved of lynching. It was always justified, and mistakes were never made. He had a water-tight mind. A mile or so away was Virginia College, a red-brick structure in the woods, where in happy seclusion a few hundred colored men and women were being enfranchised of civilization and culture. A student took me to his study-bedroom, hung with portraits of John Brown and Booker T. Washington. The Bible was still the most important book, and it occupied the pride of place, though it was interleaved with pages of the Negro radical monthly, _The Crisis_. The student was an intense and earnest boy with all the extra seriousness of persecuted race consciousness. He said, in a low voice, that he would do anything at any cost for his people. He said the present leaders of the Negro world would fail, because of narrow outlook, but the next leaders would win great victories for color. And he would be ready to follow the new leaders. What a contrast they were!—the boss of the tobacco factory, cigar in hand, “talking wise” on the nigger, and the quiet Negro intellectual in his college, whetting daily the sword of learning and ambition. III ORATORS AND ACTORS, PREACHERS AND SINGERS The aspirations and convictions of the Negroes of to-day were well voiced in a speech I heard at Harlem. I had been warned that I ought to hear the “red-hot orator of the Afro-American race,” and so I went to hear him. The orator was Dean Pickens, of Morgan College, Baltimore. When he came to the platform the colored audience not only cheered him by clapping, but stood up and cried aloud three times: “_Yea, Pickens!_”