DR MATILDA A. EVANS ON THE GREAT PROGRESS OF THE NEGRO IN POST CIVIL WAR (written in 1916)
If the Negroes were not discriminated against in the pursuit of their occupations in the cities: if they were encouraged to buy homes and beautify and improve them, instead of being discouraged by the many obstacles placed in their way, such for instance, as the agitation by some of the best white people and to rent a home built by Negro labor, and the probability of another riot such as that in Atlanta in 1906, it is entirely within his power to eclipse any race of men the Southern white people could possibly induce to come and make homes among them. In time they will do it in the morality of their lives, just as they now are outstripping the members of the race laying claim to the purest blood that ever flowed in Aryan veins, in the art of farming.
The hope of the (Negro) race lies in the multiplication of the opportunities for every member to obtain an education, such an education as Martha Schofield contemplated for all; and the demand by the law abiding, God serving element of the white race that the colored people be given every opportunity for the exercise of their powers and equity and justice dictate. The Negroes want nothing more, ask nothing more, but justice to their own self-respect and the rights of man cannot accept nothing less.
That they have shown themselves worthy of freedom, which certainly cost the white people more than the cost of insuring them certain inalienable rights will entail is emphatically indicated by comparison of Negro per capita property with that of the freed Russian serfs in 1861, two years before the emancipation of the Negro. The Russians situated in the most fertile sections of the Muscovite empire, numbering over 14 million, have in the same time it has taken the Negroes to accumulate dollars in property. The accumulations of the two peoples freed at about the same are $70 per capita for the Negro and $36.00 for the Russians. In the same Russian province only 30 per cent of the serfs can read and write, while in the United States 61 per cent of the Negroes can read and write. Yet in the face of this wonderful development of the race; in opposition to the aspiration necessary to make achievements of this kind possible, there is race prejudice, degradation and humiliation. This is doing more to produce poverty among both races and hold in check the progress of a great section of the country than all the other agencies for evil combined.