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.

4,490

5,988

60,760

6,901

59,022

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.

[Pg 92]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.

[Pg 92]

Little Coloured Boy’s Famous Speech

I was at Macon while the first State fair ever held by Negroes in Georgia was in progress. In spite of the fact that racial relationships, owing to the recent riot at Atlanta, were acute, the fair was largely attended, and not only by Negroes, but by many white visitors. The brunt of the work of organisation fell upon R. R. Wright, president of the Georgia State Industrial College (coloured) of Savannah. President Wright is of full-blooded African descent, his grandmother, who reared him, being an African Negro of the Mandingo tribe. Just at the close of the war he was a boy in a freedman’s school at Atlanta. One Sunday General O. O. Howard came to address the pupils. When he had finished, he expressed a desire to take a message back to the people of the North.

“What shall I tell them for you?” he asked.

A little black boy in front stood up quickly, and said:

“Tell ’em, massa, we is rising.”

Upon this incident 

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