educator, as a writer, and as, a public speaker. His
modesty, discretion, and industry were phenomenal, at once constituting
him a leader of his race and rendering his leadership valuable. He
eschewed politics, avoided in everything the demagogue's ways, and never
spoke ill of the whites, not even of Southern whites.

But, unfortunately, a great negro such as Washington stood like a
mountain in a marsh, sporadic and solitary.

[Illustration: People walking in front of a large columned building.]
The Atlanta Exposition.
Entrance to the Art Building.

Save in West Virginia, Florida, and the black belts the whites at the
South increased more swiftly than the blacks. Certain of what Malthus
called the "positive checks" upon population--viz., diseases, mainly
syphilis, typhoid, and consumption--decimated the negroes everywhere.
Colored population drifted from the country to cities, which probably
accounted for the fact that in 1890 more negroes lived in the North than
ever before. In the South itself, on the other hand, the movement of
colored population was southward and westward, from the highlands to the
lowlands, so that Kentucky, along with western Virginia, northeastern
Mississippi, and rural parts of Maryland, North Alabama, and eastern
Virginia, had, in 1890, fewer colored inhabitants than ten years
previous.

These confusing data explain why few were rash enough to prophesy the
fate of the American negro. Such predictions as were heard, were, in the
main, little hopeful. Colonization abroad was no resource. In 1895 the
International Immigration Society shipped 300 negroes to Liberia, and in
1897 the Central Labor Union of New York 311 more, but no movement of
the kind could be set going. In fact, the one certainty touching the
American negroes' future was that they would remain in the United
States.

From 1870 to 1880 the percentage of negroes to the total population had
increased, but a century had reduced this ratio from 19.3 per cent. to
12 per cent. The climatic area where black men had any advantage over
white in the struggle for life was less than eight per cent. of the
country. White laborers competed more and more sharply. The paternal
affection of the old slave-holding generation toward negroes was not
inherited by the makers of the New South.

There was one hopeful force at work--Booker Washington at Tuskegee, in
the very heart of the Alabama black belt. His personality, his example,
his idea