SOME years ago, in a book called “Up From Slavery,” I tried to tell the story of my own life. While I was at work upon that book the thought frequently occurred to me that nearly all that I was writing about myself might just as well have been written of hundreds of others, who began their life, as I did mine, in slavery. The difficulties I had experienced and the opportunities I had discovered, all that I had learned, felt and done, others likewise had experienced and others had done. In short, it seemed to me, that what I...

THE stories which I heard as a child were what the average American Negro boy is likely to hear in regard to his African ancestors, and my chief reasons for repeating them is that they were very largely mistaken and need to be corrected.

I had always heard Africa referred to as the “Dark Continent”; I pictured it to myself as a black, sunless region, with muddy rivers and gloomy forests, inhabited by a people, who, like everything else about them, were black. I supposed that the nearer I got to the original African, the blacker I would find him,...

SOME time during the latter part of 1899, or the early part of 1900, I received through the German Embassy, in Washington, a letter saying that the German Colonial Society wanted a number of students from Tuskegee to go out to German West Africa to teach the natives how to produce cotton by American methods.

While I had been a student at Hampton Institute, Virginia, it was one of my ambitions, as it has been the ambition of a great many other Negro students before and since, to go out some day to Africa as a missionary. I believed that...

SLAVES were probably brought to America from every part of Africa, for the slave trade seems to have penetrated, before it ended, to every corner of the continent. But the larger number of them came, undoubtedly, from the West Coast. It is said that, at one time, 200,000 slaves sailed annually from the West Coast of Africa, and during a period of two hundred years, it is estimated that 3,200,000 slaves were shipped to America from a single point in the Niger Delta.* These people of the West Coast were, for the most part, the broken fragments of races that...

SOME time in August of the year 1619 a strange vessel entered the mouth of the James River, in what is now the State of Virginia, and, coming in with the tide, dropped anchor opposite the little settlement at Jamestown. This ship, which carried the Dutch flag, had the appearance of a man-of-war, but its mission, as it turned out, was peaceful enough, for its purpose was trade, and among other merchandise it carried twenty Negro slaves.

This Dutch man-of-war, which brought the first slaves to the first permanent English settlement in the new world, is, so far as the...

DURING a recent visit to Baltimore, Maryland, chance threw in my way a facsimile copy of an old Baltimore newspaper, the Maryland Journal, the first number of which was published August 20, 1773. This paper contained one or two items of news, and several advertisements that were peculiarly interesting to me. One of these advertisements, which attracted my attention, was about as follows:

RAN away, on the 6th of July laft, from the fubscriber, living in Bond’s forest, within eight miles of Joppa, in Baltimore County, an Irish Servant Man, named Owen M’Carty, about 45 years old, 5 feet 8...

SHORTLY after I went back to Hampton Institute, in 1879, to take a further course of study, General Armstrong, the head of that institution, decided to try the experiment of bringing some Indian boys from the Western states and giving them an opportunity, along with the Negro, to get the benefits of the kind of education that Hampton Institute was giving. He secured from the reservations something over one hundred wild, and for the most part entirely unlettered, Indians, and then he appointed me to take charge of these young men. I was to live in the same building with...

SOME years ago one of the frequent subjects of discussion among the white people and the coloured people was the question: Who was responsible for slavery in America ? Some people said the English government was the guilty party, because England would not let the colonies abolish the slave-trade when they wanted to. Others said the New England colonies were just as deep in the mire as England or the Southern states, because for many years a very large share of the trade was carried on in New England ships.

As a matter of fact there were, as near as...

SOMETHING like twenty-five insurrections of the slaves took place in the United States, according to Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, previous to the American Revolution. This is taking no account of the outbreaks that took place before that time in Louisiana, nor of those that took place in the other Spanish, French, and English colonies in the West Indies.*

After the English invasion of Jamaica in 1655, for instance, the Negro slaves who had fought with their Spanish masters against the English, betook themselves to the mountains and maintained a number of little insurgent governments for nearly a hundred years until,...

SOME time in the fall of 1828, Benjamin Lundy, the Quaker abolitionist, met by accident, in a Boston boarding house, a young man by the name of William Lloyd Garrison, who was then publishing a total abstinence newspaper, the National Philanthropist. The next year, after returning from a visit to a colony of emancipated slaves which he had succeeded in settling in the island of Haiti, Lundy announced in his paper that William Lloyd Garrison had joined him at Baltimore, Maryland, and would henceforth be associated with him in the publication at that city of The Genius of Universal Emancipation,...

IN THE latter part of the year 1852 was organised or rather re-organised, in the rooms of the Anti-slavery Society, at 107 North Fifth Street, Philadelphia, what was known as the “Vigilance Committee.” The chairman of this committee was a coloured man, Robert Purvis. He was descended from a free coloured woman of Charleston, whose mother was said to have been a Moor. His father, Robert Purvis, was an Englishman. He was brought to Pennsylvania by his parents in 1819; was a member of the Anti-slavery Convention in 1833, and was one of the signers of its declaration of sentiments....

A FEW miles west of Xenia, Ohio, is a quiet little community of which one occasionally sees the name in the newspapers, but in regard to which very little is known by the outside world, even among its immediate neighbours. This is the Negro town of Wilberforce, which is, however, not a town in the ordinary sense of the word, but rather a suburb of Xenia, from which it is distant an hour’s walk and with which it is connected only by stage.

What distinguishes Wilberforce from other communities in the North is the fact that it is the home...

ONE of the interesting documents relating to the early history of the Negro in the United States is a paper, written in the quaint, old-fashioned style of a hundred years ago, and entitled: “Narrative of the Proceedings of the Coloured People During the Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793; and a Refutation of Some of the Censures Thrown Upon Them in Some Publications.”

In the year 1792 and 1793, Philadelphia was stricken with a sort of plague. Hundreds of people died and hundreds more left the city, frequently leaving the dead unburied in the houses. It was believed...

A GOOD many stories have been told about John Randolph of Roanoke, and his peculiar opinions in regard to slavery. One of these concerns his reply to a man who asked him who, in his opinion, was the greatest orator he had ever heard. John Randolph was a great orator himself, and he had known Patrick Henry, but, in reply to this question, he said: “The greatest orator I ever heard was a woman. She was a slave. She was a mother, and her rostrum was the auction block.” With that he arose and imitated the thrilling tones with which...

NEGRO soldiers have fought in every war, I suspect, that has ever been waged on the American continent. Negroes fought at Bunker Hill and all through the Revolutionary War. Before that time, Negroes are known to have been engaged, in one way or another, in most of the Indian wars. They were conspicuous in the battles of New Orleans and of Lake Erie, in the War of 1812. They fought on both sides in the Civil War, and from that time on they have been an important part of the standing army of the United States. In most of these...

THE Negro slaves always believed that some day they would be free. From the Bible — the only book the masses of the people knew anything about — they learned the story of the children of Israel, of the house of bondage, and of forty years of wandering in the wilderness, and they easily learned to apply this story to their own case. There was always a feeling among them that some day, from somewhere or other, a prophet would arise who would lead them out of slavery. This faith was the source of the old “freedom songs,” which always...

SOME years ago I was asked by the editor of a well-known English magazine to write an article on what he termed the “Racial Feuds” in the southern part of the United States. I was compelled to reply that I could not write such an article as he desired because, so far as I had been able to learn, no such thing as a feud existed between the races in the Southern states. I said to him, as near as I can remember, that I had frequently heard of feuds among certain of the white people living somewhere in the...

ONE of my most vivid boyish recollections is of the period just previous to the end of slavery, when my stepfather, who at that time was, I take it, a man of about fifty years of age, would return to his family at Christmas time and tell us stories of his adventures during his long absence from home. I recall that I would sit for hours in rapture hearing him tell of the experiences he had had in a distant part of Virginia, where he and a large number of other coloured people were employed in building a railway. Although...

NEGRO crime in the United States reached its highest point in the years of financial strain, beginning in 1892 and ending in 1896. The United States Census Statistics of Crime show that from 1870 to 1890 there was an enormous increase of Negro criminality, particularly in the Northern states. The total number of Negro criminals enumerated in the Census of 1870 was 8,056; in 1880 this number had increased to 16,748; in 1890 it was 24,277; and in 1904 it was 26,087. This meant that for every one hundred thousand Negroes in the United States there were, in 1870, 162...

IN THE spring of 1907, Colonel Henry Watterson, of Louisville, Kentucky, the noted Democratic editor and statesman, made an address at a great meeting in Carnegie Hall, New York City, in the interest of Negro education in the South. Speaking of the work that has been accomplished in this direction since the War, he said: “The world has never yet witnessed such progress from darkness into light as the American Negro has made in the period of forty years.”

When the Negro was made free and became an American citizen, it is safe to say that not more than 5...

THERE are about twenty national Negro secret societies in America. The older and better known of these are the Masons, the Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias, United Brothers of Friendship, Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, Knights of Tabor, Benevolent Order of Buffaloes, Ancient Order of Foresters, The Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen, Good Samaritans, Nazarites, Sons and Daughters of Jacob, The Seven Wise Men, Knights of Honour, Mosaic Templars of America, and the True Reformers.

In addition to these there are a number of smaller organisations, most of them local in character, but quite as interesting in...

IT WAS not until 1884, as near as I can now remember, that the first coloured physician, Dr. C. N. Dorsette, set up an office and began to practise medicine in Montgomery, Alabama. Previous to that time I do not think there was a Negro doctor, dentist or pharmacist in the state. At the present time there are more than one hundred, and the members of these three professions in Alabama maintain a flourishing state association, which in turn is connected with the National Medical Association, having representatives in ten Southern and twelve Northern states. I may add that the...

WHEN I began my work in Tuskegee in 1881 the coloured people of Alabama had just been deprived — in a way that is now familiar — of many of their political rights. There were some voting but few Negroes held office anywhere in Alabama at that time. The Negroes set great store by the political privileges that had been granted them during the Reconstruction Period, and they thought that when they lost these they had lost all.

Soon after I went into Alabama a new President, James A. Garfield, was inaugurated at Washington. A little community of coloured people...

IN the year 1888, the statement was made upon the floor of the United States Senate that, with all the progress it had made in other directions, the Negro race had not a single bank to its credit. At the time this statement was made it was intimated that the Negro race never would support a bank; that, in short, the bank was the limit of the progress of the Negro in the direction of business.

Twenty years later, in 1908, no less than fifty-five Negro banks, large and small, had been started in the United States, and of these...

IN THE year 1821, one of the best known among the coloured people of Richmond, Virginia, was a Baptist preacher by the name of Lott Cary. This man had an extraordinary history. He was born a slave, about the year 1780, on a plantation thirty miles below the city of Richmond. In 1804, when he was twenty-four years of age, he was taken to the city of Richmond and employed as a common labourer in the Shockoe Tobacco Warehouse.

At this time he could neither read nor write, but one Sunday, listening to the minister in the white church which...

THERE is an African folk-tale which tells of a mighty hunter who one day went into the forest in search of big game. He was unsuccessful in his quest, and sat down to rest. Meanwhile he heard some strange and pleasing noises, coming from a dense thicket. As he sat spellbound, a party of forest spirits came dancing into view, and the hunter discovered it was they who were making the sounds he had heard. The spirits disappeared, and the hunter returned to his home, when, after considerable effort, he found that he was able to imitate the sounds which...

DURING his travels in Africa Mungo Park, the famous African explorer, came one day to Sego, the capitol of the Kingdom of Bambara, which is situated on the Niger River. Information was carried to the king of that country that a white man wished to see him. The king in reply sent one of his men to inform the explorer that he could not be received until his business was known. He was advised to find lodgings for the night in a neighbouring village. To his great surprise, Park found no one would admit him. After searching for a long...

THE first mission of the Negro Church was started in 1824, in the Black Republic of Haiti. This was only eight years after the first general conference of the African Methodist Church was held at Philadelphia. Bishop Allen, the first bishop of the African Methodist Church, was associated about this time with Benjamin Lundy, the Quaker abolitionist, in the effort to colonise free coloured people on free soil, outside the limits of the United States, in Mexico, Canada, and Haiti. The Black Republic, where a few years before Negroes had established an independent government, seemed a proper place to establish...

NOT infrequently I hear it said that, since the overthrow of the Reconstruction governments, and particularly since the passage of the disenfranchisement laws, the Negro has lost his place in Southern politics. This depends, to some extent, on what one means by politics. Negroes still vote in all the Southern states, though the number of Negro voters has been very greatly curtailed in some states, and particularly in those which suffered most from the vices and mismanagement of the Reconstruction governments. Negroes still hold offices under the Federal Government, and the proportion of Negroes in the civil service of the...

ONE of the most strikihg and interesting things about the American Negro, and one which has impressed itself upon my mind more and more in the course of the preparation of this book, is the extent to which the black man has intertwined his life with that of the people of the white race about him. While it is true that hardly any other race of people, that has come to this country, has remained, in certain respects, so separate and distinct a part of the population as the Negro, it is also true that no race, which has come...