convinced that the Anglo-Saxon and the Jew really need the black man’s charity. Though I cannot point out, then, to the members of this graduating class openings in established business houses, I can point out that their success in business will provide opportunities for some later class, and will help to make the spending of Negroes enrich Negroes. Let me suggest two other ways in which the Negro business men may be of great service to the many. In the first place, the rents charged Negroes in cities, for example, Washington, are considerably higher for the same accommodations than the rents charged white people. By offering good houses at reasonable rents to the Negro working[15] class, the Negro business man will find a paying investment and a means of much service. In the second place, hotels, restaurants, and theatres even in the capital of the nation are open to black men and women only on degrading terms, or not open at all. The closing of such accommodations is really the opening for black business men of the doors of opportunity.

[14]

[15]

In discussing ways of direct service I have then mentioned teaching and preaching as types of the work in which the decisive factor is personal influence. Medicine and business I have mentioned as types of the work in which the decisive factor is directing intelligence.

And now I wish to discuss two ways in which educated Negroes may be of indirect service,—first, by offering their fellows copies for imitation, and, second, by establishing the dignity of the race. In 1881, hardly a white man or a black man in the country dreamed that in twenty-two years a Negro would have achieved the building of a beautiful city in a Southern wilderness, would have organized efficiently the business of that industrial community of some 1700 people, would have won the abiding confidence of white men and black men North and South, would have brought the white North and the white South into intelligent co-operation in the uplifting of black men, would have worked out a solution for the central problem in American education, would have been acknowledged master of arts by the oldest university in the land, would have written one of the impressive books of the century, would have been asked by the British Government for help in the reconstruction of South Africa, would have been called by the sanest of British critics of affairs the most notable figure in the[16] American Republic! And yet, this miracle you and I see to-day with our own eyes. The example of this man is being imitated in a hundred educational and industrial communities in the 

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