Colored Americans are forging to the front in the arts and 39sciences, trade, commerce, and the professions. It is stupendous progress when we consider that scarcely two generations were required to bring about this uplift of an entire race. It takes the banner of racial improvement. 39 It appears that the manufacturing and mechanical pursuits are very attractive to our Colored Americans, the increase during the last ten years being about 40 per cent. If we may make the comparison, it is on record that 62 and ²⁄₁₀ per cent of all our Colored Americans are engaged in profitable occupations, whereas, there are forty-eight and six-tenths of the White Americans so engaged. TRADE AND MANUFACTURING PURSUITS The employment of Colored Americans in domestic and personal service is becoming less and less every year, under the influence of education, and is being changed into trade and transportation, mechanical and manufacturing pursuits. This means as plainly as anything, that our Colored Americans have found opportunities, and that they are taking advantage of them. And where there have been opportunities to permit such a transformation, there must be others equally as advantageous and numerous—that is a law of trade and of progress. One business or occupation successfully carried on always begets another. THE JEW, THE IRISHMAN AND THE ITALIAN In considering the various occupations, trades, etc., in which our Colored Americans are engaged, the locality must be taken into account. The colored man, like the Jew, the Irishman, and the Italian, meets with more prejudice in one than in another locality, and he must govern his occupation in a great measure by that prejudice, until he is strong enough to overcome it, and intelligent enough to find a way to overcome it. There are many who hold that the Colored American in the South finds less opposition and prejudice against him in the trades and occupations 40than in the North. There is less also in the East than in the West, except that in the Middle West, or the northern portion of Mississippi Valley, where there is less prejudice against the employment of Colored Americans outside the large cities where the trades unions prevail and control. Owing to this diminution of prejudice in the Middle West, the number of Colored Americans in that part of the country is increasing, likewise improving. 40 In the South,
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