[135:12] “Negro Education,” Government Printing Office, 1917, Vol. I, p. 8. [135:13] U. S. Educational Report, 1914, Vol. I, pp. 612-13. [135:14] _Baltimore Sun_, Jan. 30, 1917. [135:15] “Negro Education,” Government Printing Office, 1917, Vol. I, p. 12. [136:16] James Ford Rhodes, “History of United States,” Vol. VI, p. 305. [137:17] Quotation from a letter shown to the writer, which was written by a woman in Richmond. CHAPTER VII THE FUTURE OF THE NEGRO Many solutions of the Negro problem have been proposed. Men so gifted with imagination that they do not find it necessary to consider either logic or facts, over and again, in a single speech or magazine article, have solved it to their individual satisfaction. Such proposed solutions are usually no less preposterous than visionary. With these I have nothing to do. As elsewhere in this study, so also here, I consider only what seems to have a firm basis of fact. However, in passing, I may be pardoned, if I have the temerity to suggest the following, which, although seemingly fanciful, yet may have sufficient ground in reason as to merit some consideration: If about 100,000 square miles of territory on the Gulf of Mexico, embracing, say, Louisiana east of the Mississippi River, excepting New Orleans,—the southern part of Mississippi and Alabama, the part of Florida south of Alabama, and a small part of southwest Georgia, were set apart as a State or States to which all the Negroes in other parts of the country be encouraged or obliged to migrate, it might result in great good to both races. Something like half the population of this section are Negroes, while the whites that are here are mostly in the towns and cities. The area suggested is more than that of New York and Pennsylvania combined. There would be room for all Negroes in the country for generations to come. As the Negro states would be members of the Union, with representatives and senators in Congress, the Negroes would have an opportunity under the Federal Government to develop a political and social world of their own removed from the overshadowing presence of the white man. If the Negro showed himself unable to develop the power of local self-government under such an arrangement, his case would be absolutely hopeless. However, there are so many difficulties in the way and so many objections that might be made that no one need either hope or fear that any such thing will ever be undertaken.