The Savannah morning news., 1903-01-02
WRIGHT SPOKE AT SELMA.
Addressed an Audience on Enamel.
patton Day.

patton Day.
Selma, Ala, Jan. 1.-Prof R. r.
Wright, president of the Georgia State
Industrial College at Savannah, de-
livered an address on the occasion of
the anniversary of the Emancapation
Proclamation to a very large and en-
thusiastic audience of negroes. There
were present also a number of white
people. The speech was well received
Among other things Prof Wright said
with scarcely a battle the negroes, at
a signe bound, came in possession of
the rights, privileges and immunities
which had cost the Anglo-Saxon more
than thousand years of terrible strug-
gle. They have had a hard time to
maintain the position into which they
were thrust, with very little effort on
their part. While they may be seri-
ously handicapped in their elective
franchise as guaranteed in the Four
teenth and Fifteenth amendments, yet
they are secure in their rights and to
the proceeds of their labor and in their
privilege to labor almost anywhere.
Our chances for education have
been wonderful. We have been lit
orally dragged from heathendom and
from slave plantations into the glar-
ing light of the nineteenth century
American civilization. l have often
thought that the fact that our friends
should have judged us prepared for
the ballot and eligible to the New Eng
land colleges ought to be considered
a very great compliment paid directly
or Indirectly the late slave-holding
South; for it is a great distance from
the anarchy of heather Africa, from
the improvidence of a slave plantation,
TO the ballot-boX of our American re-
public. yet slavery was thought to
have bridged that distance.
Judge Speer says that lin the Unit
ed States the negro farmers own and
operate III farms containing 49,
233,933 acres, more land than is con-
tanned in the great state of Georgia.
Judge Speer says this land is worth
$499 943, 7S4; and the same authority
calculates that these farms return a
net profit of $241, 346,572 every year.
Surely, says the judge, it is idle to
speak of the deportation of the pop
ulation so valuable. But these ne
groes have not added alone to the
Golfers of their white neighbors; they
have reduced their own illiteracy so
per cent They have children in the
schools, 1,S00000 students in the
higher institutions of learning, 10000;
teachers, 100000; students pur-
suing classical and scientific
course, 2,400; students taking business
courses, 1000; graduates, $4,000; 300, 600
books in libraries owned by negroes;
100 institutions for higher industrial
education; 500 physicians; 100u books
written by colored authors; & banks; 6
newspapers; libraries worth $500, 900;
school property valued at $12, 000, 900;
church property valued at $500, 000, 900;
personal, $165, 900, 900; homes, 1925, 000,-
600; total, $3.50, 100000, making $S9 per
capita for every black man, woman
and child in America. So that the ne
groes have gained this much in forty
years and have at the same time con-
tributed $4,000, 900, outside of their
taxes, toward their own education, is a
fact that challenges the attention of all
thoughtful men.
Thus the record of the forty years
have settled the fact that the negro
is a patriotic citizen, ready at any
time to take his place in the ranks,
whether as a laborer or as a soldier,
consequently, he is here to stay. I do
not think that there is any large de-
sire to deport the negro, either to the
Philippines or to Africa. America is
the negroes home, and there is not now
or ever will be a sufficient disposition
or power to separate him from it. The
record also shows that the negro is not
likely to die out. Forty years ago he
p was 1000, to-day he is 10, 900, 000
The record would be woefully incom-
plete II there were left out that the
white people of the South as we'll as
of the North, have directly and 1ndi-
rectly done all that is possible, undef
the circumstances, to aid the negro to
make the most of himself.