n by winning, in
several well-known instances, some of their highest honors for
scholarship, proficiency and oratory.

2. The Negro has demonstrated his capacity for imparting an education
to others after he has himself received it. He is an essential and
established factor in the public school system of the South. It is he
that is intrusted with the primary education of his people, and it is
due largely to him that his people in thirty-five years have reduced
their illiteracy 45 per cent. During those thirty-five years he has
become professor of law, medicine, theology, mathematics, the
sciences, and languages. In the colleges devoted to the education of
the colored men, there are colored professors who have become eminent
in their departments and who would fill with credit similar chairs in
white institutions of learning. All of the colored state colleges of
the South are under the management of Negroes as presidents and
professors.

3. The Negro has also demonstrated his productivity in the field of
_authorship_. In this particular he has shown a white man's capacity.
In calling attention to the Negro's achievement in this particular, it
may be well to note the fact that the Negro's white neighbor, although
he lives in a clime similar to that which produced in Greece,
philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and poets like Homer, Euripides,
and Sophocles, and in Italy poets like Virgil and Horace, has not
produced a philosopher or a first-class poet, with all the leisure he
enjoyed while the Negro has been engaged in enforced labor for him. In
the highest field of thought as in philosophy and the works of
imagination the South presents a barren field. In the sphere of
authorship usually entered by white men the Negro has already worked
his way. He has already produced meritorious books on mathematics,
sociology, theology, history, poetry, travels, sermons, languages, and
biographies. There have been three hundred books written by Negroes.

4. Nor has the Negro's mind followed slavishly in the beaten path of
imitation. He has demonstrated that he possesses also a high order of
intellect by his inventive genius. The "lubricator" now being used on
nearly all the railroad engines in the United States was invented by a
colored man, Mr. E. McCoy, of Detroit, Michigan. Eugene Burkins, a
Negro, was inventor of the Burkins' Automatic Machine Gun, concerning
which Admiral Dewey said it was "by far the best machine gun ever
ma