gdoms of Belgium and Holland. We have
under cultivation 40,000,000 acres of farm lands, including those farms
rented by our people and those owned in fee-simple, and worth
$500,000,000. The gross incomes from the farms conducted by Negroes
amount to $250,000,000 annually. We own 10,000 business establishments,
300 drug stores, and 57 banks.

At the close of the Civil War we were without schools, without men of
letters, without men in the various professions and lucrative avocations
of life. To-day, we have 200 universities, colleges, and schools of
lower grade supported by the race. We have 3,000,000 Negro children
attending these schools and the public schools of the land. We have
written 2,000 books. We edit and conduct 200 periodicals and magazines.
In forty years we have contributed, as levies for school purposes,
$45,000,000. With a membership of 4,000,000 we have 35,000 churches,
valued at $56,000,000, and contribute annually $7,500,000 to their
support. We contribute annually $6,000,000 to secret and benevolent
societies. We have about 40,000 teachers, 1,500 lawyers, 2,500 doctors,
20,000 preachers, and 80,000 business men--Marvellous!--Marvellous!

A race that can produce in fifty years, beginning with nothing, such a
report as this, whose minutest detail is supported by official
statistics, needs no pity, Mr. Chairman. A race that can produce a
Douglass, a Langston, a Hood, a Scott, a Turner, a Harvey Johnson, a
Bruce, a Payne, an Arnett, a Revells, a Price, an Elliott, a Montgomery,
a Bowen, a Mason, a Dunbar, a Du Bois, and last but not least, a Booker
T. Washington--the foremost genius of our vocational and industrial
training--asks not for pity. It only asks for an equal opportunity in
the race of life; it asks not for special legislation to accommodate any
necessity; it simply asks for a just application of existing laws to all
citizens alike, without any reference to race or color or previous
condition of servitude. The representatives of this race, in this year
of Our Lord, 1913, ask the American people to judge them upon the record
of their great and useful men and women which the race has produced in
less than a half century--and upon the average merit of the mass of the
race since the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by the immortal
Lincoln.

In concluding this brief summary--for at best it can only be regarded as
a brief summary of the doings of the race--and standing on the threshold
of a new