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  Transcriber’s Note
  Italic text displayed as: _italic_




  August 15, 1922      Supplementary to the Brick News


  A TRIP TO CALIFORNIA

  And Several Addresses to the
  Negro Farmers’ Congress of
  North Carolina

  BRICK SCHOOL IN RETROSPECT

  [Illustration]

  By Principal T. S. INBORDEN
  Joseph Keasby Brick Agricultural, Industrial and Normal School
  Bricks, North Carolina

  President of the North Carolina Negro Farmers Congress
  President of the North Carolina Negro Historical Association
  Twenty-seven years Principal of Brick School

  MITCHELL PRINTING CO., RALEIGH




INTRODUCTORY


  APRIL 22, 1922.

  MY DEAR FRIEND:

You will be interested to know that I am again back from my five months
trip to the North and Northwest. While away I covered, according to
the railroad time tables, about twelve thousand miles. This took me
through most of the Northern States and the New England States and in
the Western States.

I left Chicago the 21st of January and visited and stopped at the
following places: St. Paul and Minneapolis in Minnesota; Aberdeen
in South Dakota; Marmarth in North Dakota; Miles City, Three Forks,
Butte and Gerson Hot Springs in Montana; crossing Idaho into Spokane,
Washington. We crossed the Continental Divide a few miles east of Butte
in four or five feet of snow in an elevation of six thousand feet above
sea level. This train was pulled by powerful electrical engines for
six hundred miles over the most picturesque mountains in the world. We
crossed the tributaries of the great Missouri River more than a score
of times, and scaled many mountains, from the highest elevations and
glided down into Seattle, Washington, into an elevation of fifteen feet
on Puget Sound. Trees were budding and many flowers were already in
bloom. After a few days we went to Tacoma in Washington and Portland in
Oregon. Then we were off to Sacramento, San Francisco in California.
The course took us from the beginning of the Sacramento River in the
Siskiyou and Shasta Mountains to its mouth at San Francisco Bay or
to the Straits of Carquinez, landing us at Port Costa for Richmond,
Berkley and Oakland in Alameda County. At the fine Oakland pier we
disembarked from the train and took the ferry boat four miles to San
Francisco, passing the Government Island to the left looking right into
the setting sun through the Golden Gate.

A few days here in this beautiful setting and we were off for Los
Angeles, five hundred miles to the south still. Fresno, Bakersfield,
Tehachapi, across the snow-clad Sierra Madre ten thousand feet
elevation and in sight of Mount Whitney four thousand feet higher. Down
a mountain incline for fifty or more miles to Mojave Desert into Death
Valley and to San Fernando and Burbank and Los Angeles. Then to the
Orange Show at San Bernardino, passing on our way Pomona, San Gabriel,
Claremont and Garrett & Co.’s grape vineyards, one of the homes of
the Virginia Dare Extracts. Mr. Garrett is an Enfield man. We could
spend only a few days at Los Angeles, then we were off the Coast Route
to San Francisco again. Santa Barbara, Ventura, Guadaloupe, San Luis
Obispo, Delmonte, Santa Cruz, San Jose, Santa Clara, Red Wood Cities
are familiar names. It took three steam engines to pull the train
over the mountains coming north. A few days later we were off again
for Sacramento, and Salt Lake City in Utah, and Glenwood Hot Springs
in Colorado. Passing Florence we came into sight of Pike’s Peak more
than a hundred miles east of us, and passing the water-swept city of
Pueblo and Colorado Springs into Denver the mile high city. A few days
spent here and I was off again for Phillipsburg and Des Moines and
to Chicago, coming through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska,
Kansas, Iowa and Illinois. I spent a few days in Chicago, was held up
on my arrival from the station to my stopping place in Chicago, but
was not robbed. My outcry for “Police and help!” thwarted their plans.
Then I was off to Washington City and home on the 22nd of March. At the
station I was overwhelmed by the students, teachers and friends in the
community who had come to welcome me home with school yells and band
music.

I traveled two thousand miles in California alone. I gave twenty-eight
addresses, attended eight recitals, fourteen lectures, four theaters
where persons of color were the stars, three ministers’ meetings, one
annual conference, the meeting of the American Missionary Association,
the annual meeting of the Connecticut Congregational Association,
visited ten colleges and schools, nine state capitals, seventeen city,
state and municipal and school museums, twenty public markets. In
addition I talked with Japanese and Chinese farmers, fruit growers,
cattle men, sheep men, miners, negro ranchmen. I met them on the
trains, on the farms, in the hotels and restaurants, on the boats, on
the streets, in the stores, markets, and everywhere. I came back with a
few pounds less in weight, but with a vision that money could not buy.

  I am very truly,
  T. S. INBORDEN.




JUST A MINUTE


I am here for only a couple of days. It is a long ways from Bricks,
North Carolina, to Seattle, Washington. I still have two thousand miles
before me before I turn my face eastward. One gets an idea of this
great big country only by traveling over it, as I have done for the
past three months. He can get it no other way. Such a trip ought to
condition every young man graduating from an Eastern college.

Here we go from Bricks in the eastern part of North Carolina to
Washington City. The Atlantic Coast Line train takes us through
the most historic setting of the Coastal Plains of that eastern
section into the foothills of the Old Dominion, through the Civil
War battlegrounds of national fame, up the historic Potomac, passing
Richmond, Fredericksburg, the rustic triangular monument to the great
general who in his unfortunate retreat met death at the hands of his
own men, into Alexandria, the most historic and conservative town of
the pre-war days. Alexandria, the other end of the old pike leading
from the “far west” through Winchester Town seventy-five or more miles
away. This old pike was put in history by Sheridan’s ride, twenty miles
away from Winchester Town.

Well, we cannot stop in Washington City. It needs nothing that I
can say. From Washington we went up into Old Virginia. Taking the
Southern train we went through the Virginia Valley and the Shenandoah
Valley. The trip took us right through the heart of the battle-fought
country of Manassas, Bull Run, over “Goose Creek,” “Painter Skin,”
“Jeffries”—creeks that are well known to all Virginians. We went right
into the heart of the Old Blue Ridge, and looking down on Harper’s
Ferry, Winchester, Middleburg, Leesburg, Upperville, Berryville, the
Shenandoah River, on to Washington itself, sixty miles away. Here are
five counties: Fauquier, Loudon, Warren, Clark, Jefferson and others in
the distance, covering an area of more than ten thousand square miles
of the finest country in the world, all to be seen from one level space
without moving ten feet on this historic old mountain. Corn, wheat,
cattle, and sheep, fill her valleys. There is no part of these valleys
and mountains that cannot, and that do not, grow the finest apples and
peaches that are grown in the world. (I am saying this in Seattle,
Washington.)

I went back to Washington from this fine country, and from Washington
to Jersey City. From there I went over to New York and Brooklyn, and
out on Long Island Sound. From New York I went to Springfield, Mass.
From Springfield I went to the great meeting of the American Missionary
Association, which was held at New London, Connecticut. From there
I went back to New Haven for Armistice Day and to see Marshal Foch
receive his degree from Yale, and the great football game where there
were eighty thousand people. I went back to New York again, where I put
in two very profitable weeks studying racial and living conditions.

From New York City I went to Rochester and put in several days speaking
here and there to small groups of people. From there I went to Batavia
for only a few hours, and then to the city of Buffalo. From Buffalo
to Cleveland and Oberlin, Ohio, and in two weeks on to Detroit, Mich.
A few days spent in Detroit, and I was on my way to Ann Arbor, Jackson
and Kalamazoo, Mich. I reached Chicago a few days before the Christmas
holidays. After the Christmas vacation I visited the high schools
of Gary, Indiana, and put in another week attending the Mid-Winter
Conference of Congregational Workers of the United States. Only three
other colored men were in attendance at this conference. They were Dr.
Alfred Lawless, of New Orleans; Dr. Kingsley, of Cleveland; Dr. C. W.
Burton, of Chicago.

We learned in this great Mid-Winter Conference that there are other
problems besides the Negro problem. Indeed, he was scarcely discussed
at all.

Immediately after the Conference I turned my face westward. It did not
seem safe that I should go alone to buy my ticket and to have my money
put into travelers cheques before leaving, so our good friend, Mr. J.
E. Wade, of the police force, offered his services and accompanied me
to the bank and ticket office. Mr. Wade was formerly from Elerby, N.
C. He and his nephew from Richmond County are giving fine services
on the police force of Chicago. I was told that they have about a
hundred colored men on the police force. All of these men are giving
excellent service. I was surprised and glad to see in many of the
largest business houses in Chicago our colored men and women doing
business over the counters. I saw them in the shipping houses and in
the ticket offices. In the city postoffice of Chicago I was told by one
of the “checkers” that out of about eight thousand or more employees
that nearly two thousand were colored. I was escorted through every
department of the great postoffice and saw the men handling the nine
hundred tons of mail that go through the office every day. Many of the
men I knew personally, and some were relatives. Most of the men were
experts at their job. A very large number of them are graduates from
our best colleges. All of them were fine looking, well groomed men.
They were not the least in appearance when compared with the other
racial groups.

From Chicago I took the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul train to St.
Paul. The glacial swept areas of Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota
abounds with natural resources aside from the farm products. This is a
community of wheat, corn and flour mills. It is the home of the world’s
best packing houses. Minnesota is the synonym for “Gold Medal”; it also
says the last word on poultry feed and products. I was shown through
a sanitary packing-house where nearly or quite a thousand people were
given employment. Coffee, tea, spices and sugar and other commodities
are shipped in daily by the train loads and made into new products,
repacked and shipped out daily to all parts of the world. The amount of
all sorts of candy, cakes, etc., handled was a revelation. Machinery
has taken care of every operation in this great establishment, except
the absolute thought of man. To the uninitiated it might seem to think
also. The world’s best brand of cheese comes from these parts also. I
was surprised to learn that one little community east of St. Paul, in
Wisconsin, called Rio, shipped two years ago more than two hundred and
twenty-five thousand dollars worth of the finest grades of tobacco.

Some of the soldier boys will be interested to know that some of the
buildings, probably most of them, at Camp Douglass were still intact as
we sped by them through the cliffs and dells.

From St. Paul we turned our face westward for a two thousand mile jaunt
on one of the best equipped and finest trains that ever rolled the
iron. Not a minute late on its own account, up hill, down grade, across
deep canyons, under the mountains, over the top of the mountains,
spanning valleys, across the river beds and lowlands, with the same
speed, whether in eight feet of snow on the Cascade Mountains or
whether there is no snow, and on to the Pacific Coast. Pulled by the
most powerful electric engines in the world, she leaps onward by the
touch of her engineer like a thing of life and thought.

Our first stop was in Aberdeen, in South Dakota. It was night on our
arrival, and I left the train to spend the night for the rest, so that
I might have the day to see—yes, just to see. I had been to Aberdeen
in 1909 and knew what to expect. The porter advised me not to go out
without wrapping up well, as it was about twenty degrees below zero. I
went to the first place where the sign read “hotel.” I was comfortably
located, and after I had gotten a lunch thought I would find the school
where I once spoke, but before I had gone very far I decided that my
room was the best place for a stranger in that sort of weather. My face
could not have been colder if it had been buried for twenty minutes
between two blocks of ice. This particular community is noted for its
fine quality of white potatoes. They are grown in great quantities, and
they are the last word in potato growing. There are none any better
anywhere else in the world for flavor and texture.

In a country so cold and bleak one would not expect to find much
vegetation. Quick maturing crops of wheat and corn are grown. Hogs,
cattle and sheep abound. For hundreds of miles in every direction there
is absolutely nothing but a barren track of land which affords great
quantities of the finest hay, which grows naturally. Every mile looks
for the world just like the one from which you have just come. There is
nothing to break the monotony of the landscape except the monotony of
another one. The porter or conductor comes in and says, “Twin Brooks,”
“Stone Falls,” “Odessa,” etc., and you look out when the snow does not
blind the view and you see nothing but a few houses, a wheat elevator,
or a lot of sleds drawn by two or four horses; not a tree except
perhaps a few planted by the government agents. As you reach the North
Dakota line not a tree to mark even the site of the little towns that
may be more pretentious.

At Marmarth we come into Montana at an elevation of 2700 feet, having
put behind us nine hundred and ninety-five miles since leaving Chicago.
We have already passed Wakpala, an Indian Reservation, and school.
These are easily in sight. We have also left the Missouri River and
the Little Missouri River behind. We come into Musselshell Division,
and soon cross the Yellowstone River. Miles City is our station for
the night. It is nearly twelve hundred miles out of Chicago with 2300
feet elevation. Several smaller tributaries to the Yellowstone River
are passed. Small shrubbery and a few trees in the river courses are a
great relief to the landscape. But before we reach the “City” to which
we are destined for the night we come into “Bad Lands.” Here nature
went into contortions and left an awful frown upon her face. I asked
the white porter, a very fine fellow (a Lutheran by faith), what was
the matter with the country. He said “This is Bad Lands.”

Miles City was not a bad looking city. It had all the modern
improvements. For several hundred miles we followed the valleys of the
Musselshell River and the Yellowstone River, crossing and recrossing
the rivers and valleys, sometimes over a high mountain and then almost
precipitously down and under another mountain, only to rejoin the river
again through another tortuous valley. We reached the Rocky Mountains
Division at Harlowton, Montana, thirteen hundred miles west of Chicago
at an elevation of 4,000 feet. If you have any heart trouble you will
know that something outside in the physical world has happened before
you get here. On we go over the “Summitt of Big Belts” literally up,
up, up, around this curve, across that ravine, up by this tall hill,
finally on the top, and you look back for five, ten, fifteen or twenty
miles and you see the ribbon of track you have spun out. You see the
thousands of waste acres of snow and the cattle hugging the hills for
protection against the winter’s cold. They are inured to it. Ours
would die the first night out. The reader would get sleepy before he
had spent one hour out there. That is the way you freeze to death;
you just get sleepy. We pass Ringling, the Montana Canyon, and again
miles further Montana Canyon, with rocks projecting hundreds of feet
above you, still we speed along and cross the great Missouri River
seven hundred miles above where we crossed a few days ago. Near Eustis
we cross the Jefferson, Madison, Gallitin rivers forming the Missouri
River. Bull Mountains have been left three hundred miles behind and
still we speed along. Our horse neither tires nor pants. They feed him
“white coal” generated at great substations from fifty to a hundred
miles apart. Generated by mountain streams in their mad rush to the
great bosom of waters.

At dark I wanted to stop at some small mining town for the night so as
not to miss any scenery. The conductor advised against this because
of the condition of the people and their accommodation for strangers.
I listened, and stopped at his advice at Three Forks, almost fifteen
hundred miles out from Chicago, and still 4,000 feet elevation. This
was in a valley of farming land of more than three hundred thousand
acres of the best farming land in Montana. The great valley was very
beautiful, with the mountains ten, twenty, thirty, fifty and a hundred
miles away in every direction, silhouetted above the clouds, and dotted
with its own shadows. As the sun came up from the east and spread
its majesty over the snow-clad peaks every one was made a diamond of
beauty. But we were not to stay at Three Forks over Sunday. We are
traveling on trains 15 and 17. If we leave 15 over night we take 17 the
next morning, and so we had 15 or 17 every day. At 8:50 we departed in
very cold weather—ten degrees below zero, they said. It was only three
hours ride from Butte, Montana. I did not want to pass the highest
point reached on the whole trip in the dark. I wanted to have my eyes
open and see when I went over the real top. Well I did. It was 10:53 by
my watch—1,505 miles out from Chicago, 6,322 feet elevation.

The writer of the “Ex-Colored Man” said when he was in Paris with his
landlord he was very fond of music, etc., and so one night he went to
one of the finest theaters in the city. Soon after he had taken his
seat a very aristocratic looking gentleman came in whom he had at one
time seen at his mother’s house in the state of Georgia. He was very
small at the time he saw him in Georgia, and he was sure it was the
same gentleman. He had with him his beautiful wife and a more beautiful
daughter. To his amazement they sat almost adjoining him in the
theater so close that he might have touched them. They did not know
him. He knew that it was his own father, and this beautiful girl just
finishing high school was his own sister, flesh and blood. He wanted to
speak, but conventionality and tradition had closed his mouth, and to
save tragedy he arose and left in silence.

I have looked forward all my life for just such an opportunity to see
this great country, as I have now had, and as I am having, because I
still have 5,000 miles ahead. Most of my younger life was spent in
trying to get an education. Most of my grown life has been spent in
missionary service on small salary, and with a family of children to
educate and prepare for a larger life than I had the opportunity of
having. This opportunity now comes to me through the officials and
friends of the American Missionary Association under whose auspices I
have worked for thirty-two years. It comes as an appreciation on their
part for my long service. I may not have done everything they wanted me
to do, but I have tried to follow the dictates of an honest conviction.

When I passed over the great _Continental Divide_ I remembered my dream
of forty years. I knew no one and had no one to talk to about it. I
looked into space and thanked the Lord of all of us that I had cast
my lot where the rewards had been faithful and abundant. I felt like
crying out in paroxisms of joy.

We are still “a-going.” We reached Butte, Montana, at noon Sunday,
January 29th. It was very cold, but I found a good hotel near the
station, so that I did not have to be in the cold very long. I was
advised and was quick in deciding that I would in an hour take the
trip to Gerson Hot Springs, eighteen miles away. Several miles from
the place I saw what seemed to be smokestacks with steam pouring out
each one. I found on arrival that these were just openings in the roof,
forming vents for the steam from the hot water as it comes from the
mountains at a temperature of 195 degrees. The water has wonderful
healing properties. I did not take the bath because of the extreme
temperature outside. The hot springs are very numerous in these parts
of the country. All the rivers were frozen several feet deep but here
and there where the streams pass very close to the mountain gorges one
can see the temperature of the water change by the warmer currents
coming right out of the hills.

Butte is the largest mining center in the world. One hill is the
richest hill in all the world—is worth more than all of Wall Street,
New York. The bar-iron, copper, silver, gold, and other by-products
probably go down to the center of the earth. I went 2,200 feet down,
and I was then 800 feet from the bottom of it. I was donned in a real
miner’s outfit, including a miner’s acetelyne lamp. Our descending cage
was about four feet square, and held four men. It was built to bring up
twenty tons of ore about every minute of the day. State laws define how
fast human beings shall be brought up or taken down. The installation
that operates this mine cost more than a million dollars. It is the
finest electrical outfit I ever saw. The house in which the machinery
is located that operates the pulleys, under air pressure, is more than
a hundred feet square. When the signals are given, twenty-eight feet
down, one man brings the load to the tenth of an inch exactness to
any level in the pit or on top of the ground, a hundred feet high if
necessary. Thousands of wheels, belts, pulleys, pistons, etc., move
in every part of this building to the touch of one man. If he makes a
single mistake it may cost one life or a thousand in the mine. It may
cost a mint of money in destruction. Efficiency, absolute efficiency is
the only thing that counts.

Five very large pumps about twelve feet square each bring up the
surplus water from below. They are located many feet below the surface
of the ground, and it is never cold down there. The water is charged
with copper, and this disintegrates any other metals, so that the pipes
must be lined with wood and brass. This water is run through long
troughs over old tin cans and iron waste, where the copper is deposited
and afterwards taken off. I did not have time to get all the details of
the process. Mr. J. D. Rockefeller, I was told, owned most of the stock
of this particular mine.

In the morning of the same day I visited one of the best schools in
this country. It was a city high school. Everything taught in this
school leads to mining. That is the big job there. The youths are
prepared to do the things they will have to do when they leave school.
Boys ten to fifteen years old are experts already in the machine shop.

We left at noon Tuesday, and my destination was Spokane, Washington. We
crossed the Missouri River, the valley of the same name, and saw scores
of apple orchards. Near East Portal we crossed Bitter Root Summit and
Bitter Root Valley, also made famous by its fine apples and vegetables.
We passed again under the mountains two miles. Here we were eighteen
hundred miles from Chicago in an elevation more than 4,000 feet. At
Superior we were delayed several hours in the night on account of a
freight wreck. We arrived in Spokane about noon Thursday. We crossed
the Cascade Mountains in eight feet of snow. This was after leaving
Spokane. We visited the Spokane Valley, another valley made famous by
its apples. I talked with a banker about the products of the community.
They are trying to get emigrants from the East to come into the
community. It is a farming and lumber community. I visited the exhibits
of farm products kept by the chamber of commerce of the city. They are
wide awake. I saw all sorts of vegetables grown on irrigated land and
by dry farming methods that would make our farmers take notice. I never
saw finer vegetables anywhere. They are grown under great pressure.

From Spokane 1,900 miles west of Chicago, in an elevation of 1,882
feet, we dropped down here (Seattle) in a few hours to 2,200 miles west
of Chicago and to sea level. From eight feet of snow crossing into a
temperature of 36 degrees above zero. No snow and no ice.

February 2nd we arrived at Seattle. Twelve days and about twenty-two
hundred miles from Chicago. This is considered the chief city of all
this part of the country. It has a population of about 350,000 people.
Its scenic environment, with its background of mountains and its valley
intersected by sounds, bays and rivers, make it the most beautiful city
in the world. It is called the “Floral Paradise.” I saw many flowers
blooming in the open. It is said to be the cleanest and best lighted
city in the world.

I wanted to see Puget Sound, so the next morning bright and early I
found my way over the network of railroads on a high elevation above
the streets to the fine pier several hundred feet above the water.
Here I had a fine view of the Sound and the great expanse of water and
mountains yonder a few miles, and literally thousands of boats of
every kind and from everywhere in the world. The place from which I
made the observation was a fine room with large glass windows, leather
seats, heat, restaurant, etc., to make the weary traveler rested and
welcome. This was Puget Sound. This is where literacy has the highest
rating of any American city. If any city is cleaner or better lighted I
have yet to see it.

In these parts there are billions of feet of lumber untouched by the
despoiler. I saw fir trees measuring four and six feet in diameter.
I was told they were three and four hundred feet tall. I saw two men
sawing with a cross-cut saw, one on one side and one on the other side,
and the diameter was so great that only one man could be seen below his
head.

The Sound itself is said to be large enough to contain all the navies
of the world and still have more room. The diversity of scenery,
its climate, air, beautiful sunshine, mountains, sounds, and inland
waterways, woods, flowers, parks, fine hotel, theaters, public markets,
and city railway system, postoffice, and the State University, give
that place a setting hard to describe in this limited space. The
three or four public markets are works of art. One on Second Street
was terraced, and is the cleanest market I ever saw, and I have seen
a great many. The markets will generally indicate what the farmers
are doing. They show the best products raised in the community. The
arrangement of these country products will give you an idea of their
artistic values. The Japanese were in evidence everywhere. They were
universally polite and clean. They may be ubiquitous, but they are
certainly utilitarian. They know how to get the best results from
the soil as farmers. They had the best things I ever saw from the
farms. They are credited with having a lot of sense and of being very
industrious. These are very important assets in the development of any
community, whether in California or in North Carolina. Having sense
means having efficiency, knowing how to do. Industry means power and
wealth.

As much as I would have loved to linger here longer, I had to divide
my time with other points of interest. I left there early Sunday
morning, the fifth of February, for Tacoma, about forty miles away.
Through miles and miles of orchards of raspberries, loganberries and
blackberries, apples and pears and walnuts, passing great canning and
packing houses, irrigation projects, mining sections, etc., and at
10 o’clock the Olympian rolled into Tacoma. Mount Rainier, Mount St.
Helena, Mount Hood, and Mount Adams, off in the distance had already
come into view. You are overwhelmed by their vastness and grandeur.
Their snow-capped peaks, timbered inclines and fertile valleys cannot
be equaled anywhere else in the world.

We are still on the Puget Sound. The city has a population of more
than a hundred thousand souls. They represent every nationality under
the sun. It has the finest harbor and the most equitable climate in
the world. The rainfall is around thirty-five inches a year, which
insures better farming conditions. The Chamber of Commerce of Seattle
and Tacoma are vieing with each other as to which will show the best
exhibits of the state. Their great varieties of wheat, corn, flax,
rye, oats, grasses, barley, buckwheat, apples, pears, small fruits and
nuts, and their by-products: honey, preserved fruits, tomatoes, and
manufactured products, views and paintings of cattle and sheep raising,
lumbering, etc., simply baffle the imagination. You want to sit and
look for hours and write impressions in your notebook, and then go out
and come back again and do the same thing as long as you have a minute
to spare.

Tacoma has a stadium that seats forty thousand people. Nothing else
like it in the United States except the college stadia at Cambridge and
New Haven. Schools and churches are the finest in the whole country.
It was my pleasure to speak twice the Sunday I was there in one of the
largest and finest churches in the city (white), and in the evening to
one of our colored churches. The museum contains pictures of the early
pioneers and Indian history curios. It was in this community where the
earliest white settlements were made. The stadium and Stadium High
School are located on one of the highest points in the city overlooking
Puget Sound, which is precipitously, several hundred feet at the base
of the hill. Trains may be seen for miles and miles coming from the
East and North, and boats from Alaska, Seattle and Vancouver as they
turn the western promontory. I traveled with an elderly gentleman who
built almost the first house in that part of the city for the father of
the present occupant, and I also had dinner in that house overlooking
the stadium and the Sound. The minister living in the house is an
eastern man, and his wife is the daughter of a missionary to Honolulu.
She went over in the Morning Star soon after its construction forty
years ago, in company with President Fairchild of Oberlin College. At
that time she was a small child.

The state of Washington produced in 1921 28,000,000 bushels of apples
alone that were worth more than $30,000,000. At the same time New
York is said to have produced 14,000,000, California 6,000,000, and
Michigan 6,000,000 bushels of apples. At the time Spokane County,
in which Spokane is located, is said to have produced 80,000,000
bushels of wheat. I went through this valley, a part of Yakima and
a part of Wenatchee valleys. One wonders at the great productivity
of this country when he thinks of the great mountains almost
everywhere—mountains where absolutely nothing can grow. The valleys
are protected by these mountains. They are for the most part virgin
soil. Irrigation projects have brought the melting snow to the ripening
fruit and grain. The sun, penetrating into these mountain recesses have
brought color and flavor equaled by no other community.

Pity it is that we cannot stay here to see more of this environment.
We must go to Portland, Oregon. “We pass Rainier National Park on the
left closed to winter tourists, and the towering sentinels already
mentioned. We are in sight of them until we get to Portland, nearly two
hundred miles away. Portland is a fine city of unusual wealth, fine
houses, parks, hotels, banks, more than two hundred miles of street car
lines, beautiful stores and public buildings, and flowers, flowers,
everywhere flowers. The mountains back of the city are circled by
beautiful drives and street car lines, and every sort of house that can
be built on the face of the earth, terraced from top to bottom, trees,
ferns, flowers, vines, form the most perfect menagerie of vegetation
and of art that one can conceive. It looked like the composition of one
mind. It was the coöperation of many minds for civic beauty. The view
from Council Crest—see it once and you will never forget it if you have
any imagination. The Columbia River cutting in half and stretching away
for miles in the distance, the towering snow-capped mountains already
named above, the beautiful Willamette River whose course for several
hundred miles we shall soon follow, the Cascade Range, thousands of
acres of fine farms and beautiful farm homes spreading out in every
direction as far as the eye can see, a flock of sheep, a few thousand
cattle, a herd of ponies and horses, the weird whistle of steamers
coming up the river, and trains passing up the several valleys, all
seen from Council Crest give you a feeling of scenic beauty that you
cannot overcome. What a paradise for botanists. How I would like to
have lingered in that environment until the foliage came into their
glory! The markets are again gems of beauty. One has to buy whether
he needs anything or not. The sellers are so courteous and polite.
The arrangement of the products are so unique and artistic; they
have so much and so great a variety; the people handling the goods
were so clean in their pure white garbs; the tables and stands were
immaculately clean; everything put on the market was absolutely clean
and pretty. You just had to stop and taste here and there and buy. I
bought here several kinds of honey for samples, which I brought six
thousand miles home. I carried it all the way. Sage honey, clover
honey, alfalfa honey, apple honey, orange honey, olive honey, raspberry
honey, etc.

At night I saw a big roller machine actually scrubbing the streets.
Beat that if you can. I saw it. The Chamber of Commerce gives out every
year free literature telling about the products of the state, and
they have a show of the farm and mineral products that simply cannot
be equaled anywhere. The market stands I was told were owned by the
city and are rented to the farmers and others on condition that only
farm-grown products produced by themselves were to be on sale in them.
The rent was just a nominal rent to encourage the farmer to bring his
wares and sell it.

The Southern Pacific train took us south from Portland. The road leads
for many miles up the Willamette River through the most beautiful
valley, then up the Umpqua River, and the Umpqua River Valley, and into
the Rogue River Valley. The climatic conditions are well adapted for
grains, grasses, fruits and walnuts. The growing seasons are especially
long, and there is not much danger from frost. The fruit orchards
yield from five hundred dollars to a thousand dollars an acre. Some
of course with less care, yield much less. The higher figures show
the possibilities under the best care. On my way south I saw a great
many apples thrown out in the fields. I was advised that the fruit
association were not getting their prices, and they were thrown away
to save cheap sales. They picked last year 2,650,000 boxes of apples
valued at $2,600,000. These apples were the Spitzenbur, Yellow Newton
Pippins, Jonathan, Rome Beauty. These are the varieties prized for
their color, keeping quality, flavor and conformity to the best types.
The trees come into bearing the fourth and fifth years, and increase
their yield from one bushel to seven a year, and as they get older
the increase may reach twenty boxes a year. Their apple pests are the
same as ours. They must spray to get the best results. The trees are
not large. The average yield to the acre is from three hundred to four
hundred bushels, at a total cost of about forty and sixty cents a
bushel.

Large acreages of pear trees of the standard varieties are grown, and
they are more prolific bearers. The yield is said to be higher per
acre than that of apples. I saw scores and scores of very large pear
orchards. The trees are less trouble to care for than apple trees.

I saw thousands and thousands of trees in the Willamette, Umpqua and
Rogue River valleys that baffled me to know what they were. They did
not look like any sort of trees I had even seen, and yet I did not
want to appear too ignorant to my fellow travelers. I had only one way
to find out, and that was to ask somebody who knew. They were _prune_
trees. The cost of caring for a prune orchard is said to be from five
to seven dollars an acre. The average crop an acre is about five tons.
The average value per acre is from $75 to $250. About thirty million
tons are produced, and the demand is growing. They have not begun
to fill the demand. People are learning more than ever the food and
medicinal value of this fruit.

Nearly fifty million pounds of cherries are produced annually at a
value of more than two hundred thousand dollars. They yield about
six thousand pounds to the acre at a profit of from one hundred to
eight hundred dollars an acre. In Western Oregon, the Upper Columbian
Valley, and the southwestern part of the state peaches are grown on a
large scale and at great profit. Grapes, strawberries, raspberries,
blackberries, loganberries and currants are grown in great quantities.
At La Grande, Oregon, there is a sugar beet factory whose capacity
is three hundred and fifty tons daily. Beets are grown largely in
that section. French walnuts are grown in large quantities. Seedlings
are grafted with improved varieties. The largest I ever saw were in
the markets. I stopped one night at Grant’s pass and saw some of the
largest and finest pumpkins that can be grown in the world.

Stock raising probably stands at the head of the productive resources
of the state. Great quantities of cattle, sheep, horses, mules, hogs,
and even goats are raised. The income from this industry would be
many millions of dollars. Poultry is grown all the year, and millions
of dollars are realized yearly from dairying. The annual output of
honey is around two million pounds, averaging more than three hundred
thousand dollars.

I have said nothing about the fisheries, the fertility of the rivers,
lakes and bays, and the lumber conditions. There are about twenty
million acres of land in Oregon unappropriated, waiting for brain
and brawn. It belongs to the government. You may have it if you will
qualify and meet the conditions.

On my way to San Francisco I had planned to stop at Eugene and see
the State University, but I found that I could not do so without very
much delay, and also because the weather conditions were bad. It is a
railway center of considerable importance. Passing Cottage Grove we
crossed the Umpqua River and went up the valley some distance, and
up the Rogue Valley close by the river of the same name into Grant’s
Pass. Here I preferred to stay all night so as not to miss any view or
things of interest. We were never out of sight of picturesque scenery
and mountains of great height and beauty. Orchards and fine gardens of
vegetables were ever in sight. Our train has taken us into Cow Creek
Canyon, beautiful and picturesque. Grant’s Pass is the fruit shipping
center for this part of the state, and I saw many packing houses. On to
Ashland at the foothills of the Siskiyou, where the lythia water and
mineral springs attract your attention as you pull into the station,
and all get out to try the water as it comes fresh up into the glass
receptacles for you to drink. Ahead and around you on every side
nothing but mountains towering a mile high. You wonder how you are to
scale that tower in your front. Your train takes on another engine,
possibly two, and off you go up the Rogue Valley till the Rogue River
is lost in the mountain stream. When you can go no further your train
cuts across the head of the valley on a high bridge and climbs the
opposite mountain parallel to the track you have just come on the other
side, going directly north, exactly reversing your course. We zig-zag
up that mountain for an hour till we reach an elevation of nearly ten
thousand feet. All this time we are in sight of Ashland, fourteen miles
below, lying placid, warm and quiet. The snow plows are busy keeping
away the snow and the men are clad in the warmest sheep skins from head
to foot. A mile off to the left, a thousand feet higher, is “Pilot
Rock,” lying as if it had been hurled by some powerful giant. This is
the landmark that guided the early pioneers and Indians in their early
explorations through that unknown country. Freeing our train from her
extra engines, we sped off at a tangent through a fine growth of timber
and cut over land. This is the Shasta route, and we have just scaled
the Siskiyou Mountains. Now we start down the slope, entering the
Cantara Loop and crossing at the very head of the Sacramento River.

Now we have crossed the line into California. Mount Shasta, the most
majestic peak of the western continent, fourteen thousand feet and
more, towers above us, and off at some distance. We enter Sacramento
River Canyon and stop at Shasta Springs, which is a source of this
river. There we got off the train and drank the finest water that ever
came from the earth. This is probably the greatest summer resort on the
Pacific Coast. I saw one rabbit sitting in his burrow on the side of
the hill. The snow was falling terrifically.

Miles and miles down this canyon we go, passing ferns and moss hanging
from a thousand crags. We pass Castle Crags away to the west like
sentinels guarding our entrance. More than four hundred miles we go,
following this tortuous river valley until it spreads out into San
Francisco Bay. We pass Chico, a community of fruit interest and great
vineyards. If one will look at the map of the state of California
he will see that almost all the state is included in two great
valleys, especially in the northern part of the state called Northern
California. These valleys lie north of the Sierra Madre Mountains,
which form the natural divide between Northern and Southern California.
These are the valleys of Sacramento adjacent to the Sacramento River,
which runs the entire length of the valley and into the Straits of
Carquinez and into the San Francisco Bay. The other valley is San
Joaquin. In the first of these is located Sacramento, the capital of
the state, and in the second valley is Fresno, near the southern part
of the valley, and also Bakersfield.

We are told that about half of the cultivated land in California, or
that which may be cultivated, is in the valleys. They form more than
fourteen million acres. They are about four hundred and fifty miles
long and more than forty miles wide. The Sacramento and San Joaquin
rivers are the drainage for this great basin. These two great rivers
come together near Walnut Grove, one from the south and one from the
north. I traveled the entire valleys of both these rivers. There are
almost three millions of acres in the Sacramento Valley alone, and from
my observation not more than half of it seems to be in cultivation.
Thousands of acres of it are in citrous fruits and other fruits and
walnuts. At the same time of my visit large areas of the two valleys
were under water. The lands are rich and yield readily to various kinds
of cultivation.

When the overflow from the rivers during the rainy season is
controlled, there is no reason why these lands should not be more
valuable to the state. Large areas are still in the formation, and look
as if they might make great rice plantations. I heard while out there
that something was being done to get Japanese farmers to work these low
areas into rice farms.

I stopped one night at Redding. This is only a few miles inside of the
state line. It was here that the “Gold Rush” was made in 1849. Some of
the old settlers are still here and remember the “rush.” I was told
that two per cent of our gold still comes from this community. It was
here that I really saw the first sign of California. The next morning
after my arrival, while waiting for my train, I saw oranges in the
parks and about the homes near the central part of the town. Magnolia
trees and palm trees showed that we were in a new and strange country.
Tropical plants of one sort or another can be grown from one end of the
state to the other. One man said that he could pick oranges at the same
time watch the melting snow on the nearby mountains.

The rainfall varies from fifteen to thirty inches, whether in the
lower or upper part of the state. Irrigation projects are on foot, and
furnish all the water needed for the crops. As the acreage increases
these projects will grow. Sacramento River and Feather River are the
main sources of water for this upper country. I traveled through both
of these valleys and to the very mouth of the rivers.

We arrived at Benecia late in the afternoon, and the entire train is
put aboard the largest ferry boat in the world, and carried across
four miles to Port Costa, across the Strait of Carquinez. We pass
Richmond, Berkley, Oakland. At Oakland we pull into the Oakland ferry
and disembark again to a large ferry boat, and in twenty minutes we are
in the city of San Francisco. We are here for only a few days, then we
leave for the southern part of the state. We reserve our impressions of
the city till our return.

The other valley further south is supposed to be eleven thousand
square miles, and has about seven million acres of arable land. It is
a boundless area and productive of the greatest quantity of oranges,
olives, grapes, etc. We spent a part of two days at Fresno, and
addressed the colored Baptist Church at night. There are some colored
farmers in that section who are doing well on their farms. We regretted
very much that we could not count them by the thousand. They are
altogether too few.

Bakersfield, which is in the southern part of this valley, is a great
oil section of the state. There are four such centers in this state.
Their combined output a few years ago was ninety-two million barrels.
Oil has taken the place of coal in almost all the industries of the
state. The refineries are seen almost everywhere. Stock raising,
grapes, orange orchards, peach orchards, olive orchards, fig orchards
border every road. I saw at least one flock of sheep numbering more
than three thousand.

We crossed the Sierra Madre over the Tehachapi loop at an elevation of
more than seven thousand feet. Going down the mountain we passed into
the great Mojave Desert. Death Valley, 290 feet below sea level, forms
a part of this desert. There must be several thousand square miles of
country in this area, and I would not give fifty cents for the whole of
it. The discovery of oil may give value or the irrigation projects may
save it for farm developments. Yucca, sage and sand seemed to be its
chief products at present. Mojave, Lancaster and San Fernando are our
next stop. A few hours later we are in Los Angeles.

The object of my trip West was to study farming conditions with
reference to the colored people and to acquaint myself with living
conditions in that part of the country.

There is little that I can say about Southern California, and Los
Angeles especially, that the world does not know. It is separated
from the northern part of the state by the range of mountains already
referred to, known as the Tehachapi Mountains, which are a part of the
Sierra Madre. There are seven counties south of this mountain divide.
It has a reputed population of more than six hundred thousand people.
They represent every nationality. There are forty-five thousand colored
people in the city. The state as a whole is the most cosmopolitan I
ever saw.

I wanted to take some data from the printed matter sent out from the
Chamber of Commerce. The products of the county must measure in a very
large way the industry and happiness of the citizens.

It is the leading county in the United States in the value of all
crops. It ranks first in the value of farm property, in the value
of all farm crops, in the value of fruits and nuts, hay and forage,
dairy products, bearing lemon trees, beet sugar production, and in
bearing olive trees. It ranks second in poultry, bearing orange trees,
irrigation enterprise, and walnuts products.

The conduit which brings the city water for more than two hundred
miles was built at a cost of twenty-five million dollars. There are
four trans-continental railways that enter the city of Los Angeles,
and probably a dozen other smaller lines. They have more than twelve
hundred miles of improved streets and more than nine miles of sewer.
There are twenty-five public parks. I visited a number of them. They
have more than five hundred miles of electrical car lines and more
than a thousand miles of electrical lines running to all parts of the
county. Their schools are the best in the whole country. They have
hundreds of churches that are well attended.

I took daily tours to many of the suburban towns in twenty and thirty
miles radius. Culver City, Santa Monica, Venice, Beverly, Hollywood,
Long Beach, Redondo, Pasadena, Pomona, Claremont, Ontario, San Gabriel,
Burbank, etc. These are all beautiful spots. Some of them are real
little cities with every modern facility. I thought at the time of
my visit that if people who live under such an environment as I saw
were not happy, they have no need to go to heaven when they die. They
told me that I ought to have made my trip in the summer when I could
see the country in its glory. I went in an auto bus to San Bernardino
seventy miles through the country to the orange show. It is called the
Gate City to Southern California. The county itself is a wonder in
its output of fruits and walnuts, oranges especially. I saw millions
of bushels of the yellow fruit everywhere for miles and miles till
the eye tired of seeing what I called an awful waste of nature’s
products. The city is called the commercial center of the orange belt.
It is a beautifully laid out city with semi-tropical plants growing
everywhere, luxuriantly beautiful. The show takes up more than an
acre of ground, and oranges were blended in the most gorgeous display
in every conceivable figure. Oranges, lemons, grape fruit and their
by-products by the millions.

The trip through the valley took me over the finest roads in the world.
They could not be finer. I was more than interested to pass “Garrett
and Company’s” vineyards, one of the homes of the Virginia Dare
products. Mr. Garrett himself is an Enfield, N. C., man. The extracts
are bound to be right if it is “Virginia Dare.”

What is said of any one of the southern counties may be well said of
any other, except perhaps the “Imperial Valley County.” I did not go to
that county, but from what I heard about the county it looks as if a
special edict was issued from the maker of all the counties to do some
special work on that county alone. It was the last county formed in the
state, and its area is more than four thousand square miles. It is in
the extreme southwest part of the state. The lay of the land, the soil
itself, the climate, location, altitude make it the best place in the
world for stock raising and fruit production. There are more turkeys
grown in this one county than in other similar sections in the world.

I was very much impressed with the fine school houses and churches.
No money or care seemed to be lacking in the construction of these
important centers. Every one I saw in the country or city was decked
with profusive growths of shrubbery and flowers. While I was in
Spokane, the city claimed the lowest death rate per thousand of its
populations. When I was in Seattle that city claimed the same thing.
When I was in Tacoma they claimed they had the lowest death rate;
when in Sacramento they claimed to have the lowest death rate. In San
Francisco they claimed the lowest death rate; Oakland claimed the
same; Los Angeles claimed the lowest also. When we were crossing the
Tehachapi Mountains ten thousand feet elevation I saw a fine graveyard
up further on the side of the hill, and I was surprised. They might
have been soldiers killed in the war. One almost wonders why folks
should ever die in such a beautiful country. Conditions are so good for
living right along. Good churches, excellent schools, clean cities,
perfect climate, all must contribute greatly to long life. They
ought to be happy, but happiness cannot be bought with luxuries; it
contributes more than anything else to long life when other conditions
are good.

The city of Los Angeles is twenty miles from the Pacific Ocean, and I
venture to predict that in less than twenty years the city will extend
and include Venice, Santa Monica, Long Beach and all the little coast
towns along the water front, and the largest ocean vessels will be
doing business in the heart of the business section as they are in
Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland. Their population
will soon be in the millions. It is growing by leaps and bounds every
day, every week and every month. Fourteen thousand people come there
every year. The people are busy everywhere. They have the secret of
getting a larger population. Create industrial interests and the folks
follow. Good schools and good churches; a community in which there is
compatibility between all classes and not hatred. These are the best
drawing cards.

One does not travel many miles in California without asking questions.
Many of the questions will have to be answered by history. Cortez, Juan
Rodriguez, Cabrillo, Don Gasper de Portola, Fray Junipero Serre are
familiar names in its early history. The country was known as Alta and
Baja, which was upper and lower California. It began in the extreme
southern part of the state and went as far north as the foot of man
could tread. The old maps show the southern part of the state as being
a part of Mexico. It was sometimes called the land of the Heart’s
Desire. To use the words of another it was in 1769, “That destiny
marked Southern California for its own, ordering the fig and the vine
to make soft the dessert wastes, lemon and orange bloom for the upland
slopes, herds for a thousand hills, living water to make green the
sun-browned land; and, last, not the dream of seven mythical cities of
gold, but the bright reality of thrice seven times seven golden cities
that now throb with the tides of commerce and the tread of countless
feet.”

At the beginning of its history the King of Spain ordered that in order
to make the country safe for Spain and its religion, that missions
should be established. Under the orders of the great Catholic church
fifteen or more missions were established—fifteen of them along the
coast. My trip back to San Francisco, five hundred miles north, took me
along the Pacific Coast in sight of many of these missions. We follow
what was called the “Highway of the King.” Those we passed were San
Buenaventura, Santa Barbara, San Miguel, and Santa Clara. The southern
part of the state especially owes a lot to these early missionaries.
They gave harbor to the traveler, irrigated the land and started the
early settlers and Indians to farming.

From San Francisco to Los Angeles along the coast is a country backed
by mountains of great height and beauty with slopes and valleys
surpassing any description. For hundreds of miles our train slipped
right along the edge of the Pacific waters, sometimes forty or a
hundred feet above these waters, sometimes nearer, then off on a hill
top, then across an arm of the sea, then headlong toward the water as
if to go right into it, only to swerve around some high hill and then
out into some beautiful valley. You have to see it to appreciate it.

Passing San Fernando, Oxnard, Ventura, we come to Santa Barbara in
Santa Barbara County. The county is mountainous and has four large
valleys. The valleys are the Santa Ynez, Los Alamos, Lompoc, and Santa
Maria. The last named valley is said to have four hundred square miles,
and can support ten times its population. Mustard seed is the leading
agricultural product in the county. The whole county is well adapted
to all vegetables and fruits that are common to that part of the
state. I saw many orchards of great size. It is said that three-fifths
of the prunes and three-fourths of the apples grown in the state
grow in these valleys adjacent to the coast. This is due to the fact
that perhaps the rainfalls is greater than further inland. Printed
matter on this section tell us that the products of this coast range
are the following: beet sugar, wheat, barley, hay, garden seed, oil,
coal, asphaltum, cement, lime, live stock, butter and cheese, fruits,
berries, vegetables, olive oil, walnuts.

I saw great flocks of sheep, cattle and horses. Millions of wild ducks,
and we were never out of sight of sea gulls. They are the scavengers on
land and water. I was fortunate in meeting people here and there who
could give me lots of the sort of information I wanted.

As our train rounded the coast of Santa Barbara we caught sight of
the Islands of Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, San Miguel. They may have been
thirty miles to our left.

Passing Point Conception, a lighthouse here and there, a large open
field in the actual making, or a sandhill thrown up in the past few
months, crossing Santa Maria River, leaving Lompoc and Ynez Valleys
behind, we came to San Louis Obispo. Great quantities of oil are
delivered to this port for shipment. It is also the seat of the state
polytechnic school. The rainfall here is very light, so that farming
is not profitable. The western slopes of the mountains for nearly a
hundred miles afford good grazing for cattle and sheep. The water
is largely mist from the Pacific Ocean with a very low rainfall. At
this point our train leaves the sight of the coast and we climb the
Coastal Range, being pulled by three powerful steam engines up an
elevation of great height, more than seven thousand feet, and head
into the Salinas and Santa Clara Valley. Salinas Valley has an area of
500,000 acres and the two valleys are almost 150 miles in length and
fifty miles wide. We head toward “Bishop Peak” no less than four times
climbing this mountain. We go down into Monterey County and follow the
Salina River till we get to Monterey Bay near Del Monte. Santa Cruz
is our next stop. We pass the Lick Observatory. We enter Santa Clara
Valley crossing the mountains by the same name. We also pass Stanford
University. We leave San Mateo County on the left and we speed along.
We pass San Jose. Dark covers us, but at Redwood City we come into
sight of San Francisco Bay and thirty miles further we are in San
Francisco again.

Five hundred miles are covered in about fourteen hours. The mountain
ranges on both sides for several hundred miles, and the mountain on
one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other for several more hundred
miles with an ever changing view of mountain inclines, rivers, valleys,
irrigation projects here and there, the excitement of high elevation,
crossing some divide, farming operations throughout the entire course,
fruit orchards, vineyards, gardens, great flocks of sheep, cattle,
etc., chateaux, villages, mining operations and oil wells. This is the
panorama that simply bewitches the brain. It was such as this that the
old colored preacher saw when he could no longer contain his emotions
when he said, “My God, look at that Glory.” It is glory, and the man
whose soul does not feel it is dead. Add to this the ocean scene with
every angle the train makes, the steamers away out, the sunset behind
these beautiful waters, and do you wonder that I have been dreaming
this thing every night since I had the experience of it. It gets into
your soul in some way. Some one has said, “Its all California from east
to west, from north to south.” I traveled two thousand miles in the
state alone in every direction. The inspiration is the same.

I spoke in one of the largest churches out there, heard some of the
finest speakers in the world, saw some of the best shows, tramped over
some of the orange, apple, fig, prune and berry orchards, bee and
poultry yards. I visited soldiers’ homes, city parks, city museums and
farms in the country. I visited some of the best schools in the West
and Northwest, including the state universities where they are really
doing things.

Our eyes are now set toward the east and home. We are at San Francisco.
Before we leave here we must revert to the lower part of the state
again. The city of Los Angeles gets its water from a distance of more
than two hundred miles from the snow-capped slope of Mount Whitney.
They are the highest mountains in the United States, except in Alaska.
The aqueduct is the largest in the world. The reservoirs are located in
the San Fernando Valley. The pipes taking this water from its source to
its outlet are eight to ten feet in diameter. Forty miles of this water
is run in open lined canals. The line was pointed out to me many miles
out of Los Angeles by a fellow traveler who knew the history of its
construction.

As one travels from north to south in this state and from east to west
he is very much impressed with the great network of wires stretched
everywhere, apparently reaching every farmhouse and factory. These are
high-powered electric wires carrying power to the industrial centers
and to the farms for light and power—for power more than light. Water
has to be supplied to all the farms by irrigation. Where gravity does
not do the work they must depend on pumps. The electric power is used
to run the pumps. This power is generated by the mountain streams
hundreds of miles away. The great power plants are largely owned by
companies in the East. The irrigation projects, I presume, are the most
wonderful in the world. I was advised that it cost about eight dollars
an acre to get the canals into operation.

Another interest of great importance in the growth of a country is
the public roads. The roads were universally good. I traveled several
hundred miles over the public roads in Los Angeles and San Bernardino
counties, and for the long stretches I never saw better roads.

Hollywood, which is really a part of the larger city, is a very pretty
place. The streets are paved and there was not a shoddy nor a cheaply
constructed house to be seen. I counted seven moving picture studios.
I had no idea that these studios were built on so vast a scale. It
seems that all the stars in the moving picture world have their studios
here, and their fine homes—Charlie Chaplin, Douglass Fairbanks, Mary
Pickford, and others. Many of the great meat packers of Chicago, Omaha
and Denver have million-dollar homes in or near this little suburb. The
south side of Beverly Hills is covered with these expensive homes.

There are a number of these studios in Culver City. This is a small
place about fifteen miles toward the Pacific from Los Angeles. The
dominating genius of it is Mr. Harry Culver. Ten years ago it was not
born, and today it has a population of about two thousand people. The
little railroad station, the little homes, the well paved streets and
business houses, all show signs of taste and industry. Here is where
“Fatty Arbuckle” got his start, and his studio is still there as a
reminder. Several boulevards and electric lines pass through the town
from Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean, which is only five miles away.
Venice, with a dozen other settlements along the coast for ten or more
miles, is the Coney Island of Southern California. Street cars and
boulevards give one ready access to every part of the beach. They have
all the eating houses, cheap shows, swindling games and junk shops for
the attractions.

The building lots in some of these little villages are sold under
restrictions. I was curious to know the restrictions. Houses that are
put on them must not cost less than twenty-five hundred dollars,
and no lot shall be sold to any one except purely Anglo-Saxon—a fine
opportunity for unanimity of spirit and exclusiveness if not tested
under the state law by some ubiquitous spirit.

The problem of racial identity is a complex one in that country. I saw
Mexicans who looked all the world like Negroes, and Negroes who looked
all the world like Mexicans. Their language was the only distinguishing
features, and in many cases the Negroes were better clad and better
groomed. Negroes spoke the unadulterated English language. Their
Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana or Texas previous environment
may have given them more of the Southern brogue. The Mexicans have
clung to their Spanish tongue or some broken dialect. Japanese,
Chinese, Filipinos, Porto Ricans and others form another group. Then
there is another group from northern Europe and southern Europe
belonging to the white races, and all these units speak a language of
their own and follow largely the customs of their country. I wondered
who was _fit_ and who could _qualify_ under “The Restrictions.”

I will say nothing about Chicago, but let me start at Butte, Montana.
From Butte, Montana, to Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, San
Francisco, Oakland, Fresno, Los Angeles to the least city in the West
there are all sorts of secret organizations and labor unions, selfish
and otherwise, cliques and clans, to whom you must pay obeisance. Add
to this the rankest Bolsheviki spirit, from the four ends of the earth,
and you have a problem worth the attention of our best statesmen.

I have been trying to get away from San Francisco, but it is hard to
leave a community of so inviting environment. I can only name a few
places now that are strikingly full of interest. Here is the Golden
Gate Park, over yonder a short distance the Presidio, a little further
around on the bay the Art Palace. Here is where the exposition was
held. Down on the beach are the Sutro baths and cliff houses. From this
fine eminence I saw seven seals, some sleeping, some bathing, some
growling. They were on the rock a few hundred feet off the beach. Rural
paintings in the museums, depicting wild animal life in their natural
setting with the mountain background, etc., were very real.

The Southern Pacific station, located between Third and Fourth streets,
and the ferry at the foot of Market Street, or at the head possibly,
are works of art. They are the last word on station building. Market
Street has four electric lines, and it is the leading thoroughfare of
the city. Practically all the other streets of the city run into it at
some angle. Sixteen blocks from the ferry is the civic center. Here are
located the city auditorium, which seats ten or twelve thousand people,
the courthouse, one of the finest buildings in the state next to the
capitol itself, the city library, and one of the high schools. These
are circled about a square which has a large fountain of flowing water.
A very large area of the city was burned when the earthquake was some
years ago, but this has been rebuilt so well and completely that one
would never know it. I went over most of this area.

I visited the University of California, which is located in Berkley,
and had only time to go through the library and agricultural building.
They have a campus of 264 acres and an enrollment of ten thousand
students. They have a theater that seats ten thousand people. They
have a tower 302 feet high built of white granite. In this tower is
located the clock and chimes. They have in mind a large project for an
athletic field and stadium. This will be located back of the college
in the hills, which is the property of the college. Oakland is the San
Francisco terminal of three trans-continental railroads. They are the
Southern Pacific, the Western Pacific, and the Santa Fe.

We take the Western Pacific for Sacramento at 9 o’clock in the morning.
At 2 o’clock in the afternoon we have made the trip of more than a
hundred miles through the San Joaquin Valley and again into Sacramento
Valley. We spend a part of two days here. The state capitol is a very
fine building. The ground adjoining the building forms the finest park
in the world. They have searched all the world to find trees and rare
plants for this wonderful park. They have them from every known country
and from every accessible community. Many of these trees were in full
bloom the 28th of February when I was there. An officer of the grounds
told me to find the keeper and he would give me all the cuttings I
wanted, but unfortunately I could not find him.

The city is located in rather a flat country. It has not been a great
many years, geologically, since this was all under water and a part
of San Francisco Bay. The two large rivers intersecting this valley
have done their work in transporting silt, sand and debris from
the mountains so well that most of the community is inhabited. The
periodical overflow of these rivers still gives the traveler an idea
that it is a part of the bay. I saw nearly a hundred miles of it under
water, when I wondered how the farmers got from the house to the barn.

We leave Sacramento at midnight on the Western Pacific Railroad for
Salt Lake City, Utah. We pass Marysville, which we have already seen on
our southern journey, Oroville a little further north, and we follow
the Feather River and the Feather River Canyon. At daylight we find
ourselves climbing the mountains again in snow several feet deep. The
canyons are narrow and deep. The mountains above are beautiful, rugged.
Vegetation and all sorts of timber come into sight again. The mountain
streams are beautiful and clear. We arrive at Reno Junction about 10
o’clock in the morning. At Paxton we pass the little narrow gauge road
leading into Indian Valley. The canyons look too narrow for another
railroad, but just below us clinging to the rocks and the mountains the
little road leads off into another mining section and through gorges
that look impassable.

Of the more than two hundred stations along the way a great many of
them are scarcely stopping places. A few are only places for the train
crew to examine the cars. At Reno Junction, Nevada, we come into a
country that is more open, and where the population is larger.

We cross Honey Valley, Winnemucca Valley, scale the Virginia Range, and
come into Smoke Creek Desert, pass to the right of Granite Peak, and we
come into Black Rock Desert. We pass what is called the Alkali Flats.
This is a vast area of country with no vegetable growth of any sort.
Nothing can grow on it. This reminds one of a very large bowl. We are
moving along with great speed through the valley with the side of the
bowl towering up at a tremendous height. We cross the Antelope Range
in the northern part of Granite Spring Valley. A few miles further we
come into the little town of Winnemucca. This is a railroad center and
a cattle country.

We are in Humboldt County and follow Humbolt River. We have passed
Winnemucca Peak, Black Butte, the Eugene Mountains, and other points
of interest and beauty. It would tire the reader to follow us for the
next several hundred miles through this tortuous river course, through
large and small valleys, through mountain gorges, up the side of
mountain ranges, over some of the highest peaks, under the tunnels and
through great banks of snow. At Sulphur we passed several men and their
horses with a big mountain lion they had just killed. The government
pays twenty-five dollars for each lion killed. They are destructive
to sheep. The Denver Sunday papers had the incident written up in the
papers Sunday following the killing.

We cross the Desert Range at Wendover, Utah, and strike out for
forty-eight miles through the Great Salt Lake Desert, leaving Grass
Mountain Summit to our left, we enter another range of mountains to
emerge near the south end of Salt Lake. I do not know the area of the
Great Salt Lake Desert, but it is a very large area numbering perhaps
several thousand square miles of country. Water and irrigation would do
it no good. It looks like desolation carried to the nth degree. It must
have been at some time a part of the Salt Lake. It supports absolutely
no vegetation of any sort. It is a barren waste.

There is no other place in the world exactly like Salt Lake and Salt
Lake City. The city is eighteen miles from the Lake. One cannot drown
in the water of this lake because of the density of the water.

The city is one of the best laid out in the world. The mentioning of
Salt Lake City suggests to you at once the Mormon Church. This church
was organized in 1830 in the state of New York. The Mormons located
later in Kirkland, Ohio, and there erected a temple which is said to
be standing today. The church was persecuted, and Joseph Smith was
martyred. It was moved from place to place, and finally Brigham Young,
its President, had a vision. He saw a land in the far west, and was
directed to go to this remote country, far away from persecutions,
where the colony might worship in their own way. They started out for
this far country, and were many months making the trip. The party was
composed of 143 men, three women and two children, and three colored
servants. The names of all are on the fine monument at the head of the
principal street of the city.

When they had reached the place the President said, “This is the place
I saw in the vision.” The men were advised to go to work at once on
small farms. The first year they grew a good crop by irrigation, but
about the time the crops matured the cricket’s came and almost ate the
crops. The sea gulls from the lake eighteen miles away came and ate up
the crickets. This saved the pioneers. They have in the sacred square
a monument to the sea gulls. It is known as the Temple Square. The
temple is the most unique building in the world. It was forty years in
construction, and it cost a million dollars. It is built of native gray
granite which was hauled by teams for more than twenty miles away.

The Tabernacle standing in the same square is also a unique
construction. It will seat ten thousand people and has in it one of the
best organs made. The building is a “long, oval shape, dome top. The
hearing qualities are perfect. One may drop a pin in a hat or on the
floor, and two hundred feet away, at the other end of the auditorium,
hear it fall.” No nails are used in its construction. Pillows support
the arches, while wooden pegs tied with raw hide support the individual
pieces.

The gray stone Assembly Hall, where relics and art collections are
kept, is also in the same square.

One should visit the state capital. It is located on one of the
nearby mountains. This mountain is at the head of several streets and
had an electric line running around it and to the top. The building
itself is one of the finest in the country. It has large granite
supports measuring three or four feet in diameter, twenty or more feet
in length, of Georgia marble, polished to a finish, each weighing
twenty-five thousand pounds. These great pillows were brought from
Georgia on forty-six cars.

One could spend weeks in this fine building studying the art of it and
the great display of relics of the early pioneer life. Several Mormon
sisters have charge of the collections, and they are very interesting
as well as very entertaining.

We leave Salt Lake City, and forty miles east we come to Provo. We are
more than four thousand feet in elevation. It is called the “Garden
City.” It is near the Wasatch Mountains. We pass through the Provo
Canyons. This is unlike anything else we have seen. We climb the
mountains overlooking a most beautiful valley off to the left with
a very fine stream said to contain trout. There are fine homes and
orchards and many flocks of sheep and cattle. There is some mining a
few miles across the valley on the opposite mountain side.

A railroad stretches across the valley to connect with this mine from
the main line. A few apple orchards. Some fine red barns. The meadows
evidently afford a great deal of hay. Hundreds of stacks of hay, as
green as if just cut, dotted the valley. We are in several feet of snow
and being drawn by several massive steam engines. Up, up, up we go till
we reach Soldiers’ Summit, seven thousand and four hundred feet high.
Your heart begins to beat a little faster, some one has the headache,
another has bleeding of the nose. If you have slept all the way through
the valley and up the mountains you will begin to wake up when you
reach this high elevation. Unless your heart is seriously affected you
do not need to worry, for you are in this elevation only a few minutes,
when you begin to drop to normal altitude for these parts. The snow is
about six feet deep and sparkling. The air is fine and pure, and your
mouth grows dry for some of the crystal liquid you have just passed.
It comes from crags and crevices for more than a half mile above you,
scarcely missing the sides of your train as it passes its narrow
channel.

A crowd of a dozen or more school girls get on the train. They are
all the world like our own girls, only they were white, every one of
them. They sang songs, made speeches, moved from place to place on the
train, recited their lessons, talked kindly of their teachers and their
fellows, of the loved ones they have left behind for a few months—they
were just school girls, that was all. The tourists, including my lonely
self, were glad to have this merry bunch—this innovation to break the
monotony. They leave us at Green River, and we settle down again to our
usual repose when we are soon disturbed by the news butcher saying,
“The mountain ahead is one-half mile high, the canyon ten feet wide,
just wide enough for the train to pass.” “It is Castle Gate.” The walls
of the red stone stand up like the walls of a sixty-story sky-scraper.
On both sides these walls tower up till your neck tires looking up at
them.

Here the engineers have defied nature. You follow the river and the
canyon, sometimes on this side, sometimes on that side, rising and
falling in elevation till you reach Mack, near the state line of
Colorado at an elevation of four thousand and five feet. You pass
through a valley widening out from a ten-foot gorge to forty or fifty
miles, and absolutely fenced all around by these massive walls for
fifty or more miles as effectively as if done by the master hand of
some giant. We follow Hog Back Canyon and a tributary of the Colorado
River. We arrive at Glenwood Hot Springs at 10:30 at night, four
hundred miles from Salt Lake City in an elevation of five thousand and
seven hundred feet. We stop here for the night and take the 6 a. m.
train the next morning for Denver.

We are on the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. We pass up the Colorado
River Canyon. The road is tortuous, the stream abounds like the waters
of “Galore,” the mountain crags are high and precipitous, every foot
has tested the skill of the engineer. It is wonderful. We go through
Tennessee Pass, sight Mount Jackson toward the west. Mount Elbert
to the left more than fourteen thousand feet high is seen. We leave
Readville to the left and pass through the richest mining region in
the world. Georgetown, Red Cliff, Fair Play, Platt Ranch, Buena Vista,
Cripple Creek, Anaconda Goldfield. All these are centers of mining
interests. They abound in gold, silver, lead, copper, zinc, etc. We
come south from Glenwood Springs to Salida nearly a hundred miles and
into the Arkansas River Valley and follow this river to Florence and
Pueblo.

It will be remembered that in the summer of 1921 there was a cloudburst
in that section of the country, and Pueblo was in the midst of the
washout. Hundreds of lives and millions of dollars worth of property
were lost. The valley still shows great evidence of that destruction
everywhere you look. This was particularly true of the city itself. I
stood under the pier of their fine station, and the high water mark
was two feet above my head. We are seven hundred miles from Salt Lake
City and still seventy-five miles from Denver. We are at Colorado
Springs. Denver is our destination for the night. As we leave Cannon
City and Florence we sight to our north perhaps a hundred miles Pike’s
Peak. This is early in the afternoon, and we do not lose sight of that
majestic wonder of the world until we have passed Denver for almost
another hundred miles.

We spend four days in Denver very pleasantly and profitably. It is the
“Mile High City.” We have left all the mountains behind. The community,
including Colorado Hot Springs and Denver and Pike’s Peak need no
description from me. They are too well known. It is the healthiest
place in all the world. I saw no graveyards, and I presume they are few
and very far between. The elevation is more than five thousand feet. We
are now seven hundred and fifty miles east of Salt Lake City. Denver is
a fine place in which to live. I am not so sure about the conditions of
earning a living.

We leave Denver at 10 in the morning and stop for the night at
Phillipsburg in Kansas. The country is practically all prairie land
suited for cattle, horses and sheep, corn, wheat, and the grasses. It
is an open country with few trees excepting the low sections and river
bottoms.

We pass Lincoln City in Nebraska and later the city of Omaha. We have
already crossed the La Platte River and now at Omaha we cross the
Missouri River. Passing Council Bluffs in Iowa we speed along to Des
Moines, Iowa, where we plan to spend the next night. We arrived late in
the evening and left early the next morning for Chicago. The country
was largely given to farming and stock raising.

We were in Chicago about two weeks, and were then off for Washington
City, where we spent another week, then we came home, arriving here at
Bricks the 22nd of March. A most cordial reception awaited me here.
I was met at the station by teachers, students and friends of the
community, all led by the school band.

Not many colored people on the Pacific Coast as compared with our
eastern country. They are scattered here and there throughout the
middle west. Most of those I saw looked as if they had good jobs and
were busy. I saw a great many very nice homes of our colored people. I
visited a great many places of business entirely colored. The colored
ministers were all educated men. The colored churches were up to date.
I spoke in a number of them, and the audience looked well groomed and
happy. I quizzed the professional men, and they advised me that the
outlook for the colored people generally was good. All advised that
colored men going west ought to have some money to start a business.

If colored men would go west and enter farming their opportunities
would be unlimited. They ought to have money enough to carry them till
their crops come to maturity. If they grow fruit it takes the young
trees five years to come into bearing, and they must have something
to depend upon during that time. At the same time there is no time of
the year in California when a farmer cannot grow vegetables. There are
fruit growers’ associations that take care of everything the farmer
grows. He can become a member of any of them irrespective of his color.
He must have some money and some farming sense. There are forty-five
thousand colored people in Los Angeles. Only a few are farming. There
are not enough farmers to attract any attention. I am always sorry
to see so many of our folks flock to the cities when the farms are
offering so many opportunities for independence and a better living.

There is nothing needed in the west so much as water and people—_water
and people_. If they get the people the irrigation projects will soon
give the water. They need not only people who are not dependent upon
others for every move they make, but people who are industrious and who
have the brain.

We hear in the East a great deal about the Japanese. I hear more about
them here than I heard on the coast. Out there they have the reputation
of being industrious, smart and great organizers. I do not think those
are bad qualities. They are qualities that we have been taught to
prize. There is no reason why we should prize them in one race and
despise them in another. They are universally courteous. Some Northern
people think they will get all the land. I saw millions and millions of
acres of land in California alone that somebody needs to get and put to
use. Then I saw other millions stretched four thousand miles and more
across the American continent that will feed all the world when brought
under cultivation and development.

They tell us out West that all the mountains in that country are full
of minerals. If that is true we have not touched the world’s supply.
From the unoccupied land I saw there must be enough to feed a hundred
times our present population. In some of these states one can travel
almost a hundred miles and not see a sign of human life except the
little station settlements. New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and
a few other cities are too congested for healthy environment, and some
propaganda ought to be started by some organization or somebody to
popularize the country and the farms.

The spirit of competition in our large cities in any occupation is
virulent. It is not worth the struggle. Manhood and womanhood is
stagnant. It is truly the survival of the fittest. I never saw a Negro
farmer in the South begging bread. Vast areas of our best farming land
ought to be bought by this congested crowd filling our large cities.

Our people go to the city because of the lack of compatibility of
people in the community where they want to live. They may not like the
other races out West, but there was great silence and a unanimity of
opinion relative to an open expression of their hatred. Poor execution
of the laws, open expressions of hatred, fear of personal molestation.
These were the expressions I met in Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago.

Norman Angell expresses it in his book, “The Fruits of Victory,” when
he gives the cause of the world’s restlessness and war. He says they
have resulted from our wrong thinking. We have got to be big enough
to forget some things and start off right. Correct our thinking. I
attended a Christian Science Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, and one of
the tenets of their church is that if you have a pain just forget about
it and it goes. It seems to work, for that church is doing a great
business all over the country. That is what we have got to do in the
political world and in the world where our relations interlock. We do
not get anywhere by hatred and fighting.

Every city and every town I visited from Spokane to Seattle to San
Bernardino, seventeen hundred miles south is on a boom and every one
you meet is a boomer. That is the way to build up a community or a city
or a town, or anything else. I was not supposed to give any addresses
while on this trip, unless there was some fine opportunity to make
friends for the American Missionary Association and for Brick School.
I could not afford to let such opportunities pass even though I was
out seeking recreation and rest and change. This opportunity came to
me at least twenty-eight times. I was invited to speak twice in Dr.
H. H. Proctor’s Church in Brooklyn, N. Y. Dr. Proctor was a classmate
of the writer at Fisk University. He had one of the largest churches
in all the South, the First Congregational Church in Atlanta. When
the migration of colored people began to be a problem in the Northern
centers, Dr. Proctor was called to Brooklyn to meet the impending
onrush. He has projected one of the largest church enterprise in
Greater New York, and his bringing the enterprise to a successful
fruition will mean great things for New York and for the colored people
generally.

Dr. Proctor is a large man, mentally and physically, and he has a large
vision. His vision is not larger than the times are demanding. Our
church people are demanding a larger programme. Some of our churches,
perhaps all of them, have been too reticent and conservative, holding
on to the dead past and lost prestige with the masses. Dr. Proctor is
planning a progressive and constructive programme. I could not lose
the opportunity which his kind invitation gave me to tell our Northern
friends what our Southern brethren are doing along many lines. I also
had the invitation to address a large Baptist Church in Brooklyn where
more than a third of its membership of more than three hundred members
were from Gloucester County in Virginia. A former Brick School boy was
the shepherd of this flock.

Out on Long Island we had the pleasure of addressing a small
Congregational Church under the leadership of Rev. G. W. Hinton. We
found here a goodly number of our North Carolina friends, and they were
glad to hear from their friends here in North Carolina.

Later the Fisk University singers from Nashville, Tenn., met with the
Greater New York Fisk Club at the Y. W. C. A. in a Harlem Cafeteria,
and a fine programme was given. I was invited to speak at the Baptist
Ministers’ meeting in New York in one of the largest churches in
the city. If the size of the church, the furnishings, etc., and the
appearance of the men meant anything it certainly looked as if our
friends in New York City were very prosperous. The young lady who
directs all the work of the Y. W. C. A. on 137th Street is a Brick
School girl who later graduated from Pratt, and we have every evidence
that she is making good in that great city.

At Springfield in Massachusetts we had the pleasure of speaking three
times for Rev. William N. DeBerry. Dr. DeBerry is a product of Fisk
University and Oberlin Theological School. He has the finest work of
any of our men. His church organization is unique; he is progressive
and constructive, at the same time scholarly and conservative. He is
the most aristocratic Negro preacher we have today. His spirit is
contagious, and he has the finest coöperation of his members from the
oldest to the youngest.

At Rochester we had the invitation to address a very fine gathering
of friends who had met at a reception to the teacher of their
Sunday-school class and to the minister of their church.

At Buffalo we also gave an address at another Baptist Church. In all of
these places we met scores of people from North Carolina.

In Cleveland, Ohio, I had the invitation to speak several times at the
Mount Zion Congregational Church. Rev. Harold Kingsley is the present
pastor. Rev. Kingsley is a product of Talladega College, Ala. His wife
was a former teacher here at Bricks. We had a most cordial reception at
his church and at his home.

It was in this church where I read my first essay nearly forty years
ago. Its pastor at that time was Rev. Dr. S. N. Brown, who is now Dean
of Theology at Howard University. The church has had a great history.
The former pastor was Rev. George V. Clark, of Charlotte, N. C. Dr.
Clark was a Liberty County (Georgia) boy and a product of Atlanta
University. The church is now in the most congested Negro section of
Cleveland and has before it a great destiny and future. The present
minister is a young man of great enthusiasm and well prepared to meet
its growth. The city of Cleveland has a congested Negro population: I
saw a statement in the Cleveland papers from the head of the Cleveland
“Community Chest” that of all racial groups in the city the colored
people had more than done their part with the least expenditure of
effort.

I visited several of the larger churches—Baptist and Methodist
churches. All the Cleveland churches seem to be in the most progressive
state. Their church buildings are among the very best in the country.
Their membership and attendance are very large.

In Detroit we attended Rev. Dr. Bradby’s church, which is said to
have a membership of four thousand people. I also spoke at one of
the services. They had four services going at the same time. About a
third of these people held up their hands indicating that they were
from North Carolina. The day was very cold, but their spirits were
very warm. Dr. Bradby is a Canadian, but understands thoroughly the
Negro temperament, and gives them exactly what is best fitted to that
temperament. He speaks with authority.

At night I attended one of our churches ministered to by Rev. Brooks.
The church has some institutional feature and is doing excellent
service for the community. Mrs. E. E. Scott, of Montgomery, Ala., is
assistant in these civic service features.

In Kalamazoo, Mich., we attended a revival meeting in the Methodist
Church. The temperature outside did not disturb the emotional elements
the least when the several ministers put on the “arousements.” I had to
wonder whether I was in northern Michigan or in North Carolina.

I spoke in a Baptist Church in Chicago where they are said to have a
membership of ten thousand people. Several services were going on at
the same time. I also addressed a congregational audience in Chicago
presided over by Rev. Dr. C. W. Burton. Dr. Burton is a product of
Talladega College, and Yale Theological School. He is a fine type of
minister and is doing great good.

In Butte, Montana, I was told there are about five hundred colored
people and three colored churches. These churches had no regular
ministers at the time of my visit. The colored men work as porters and
miners. They have mixed schools. They have several social clubs and
secret orders, such as the Masons and Odd Fellows.

In almost all of the cities I visited mixed schools are the rule,
and many of them have a percentage of colored teachers. In Cleveland
especially I was told that the colored teachers are liked very much by
their students and parents of the opposite races. In many places it
would be most difficult to tell who are colored and who are white. Most
of the teachers I met are very efficient and alive to their job.

In Tacoma I spoke to the Sunday-school in the morning and in the
evening I spoke at the evening services of the First Congregational
Church, Rev. Dr. Edgar C. Wheeler, minister. Prof. Oliver H.
Richardson, of the University of Washington, followed me with an
address on the “Study of International Relations.” The subject of my
address might have been “Inter-Racial Relations.” At the close of this
address I visited the colored Methodist Church, and also spoke there.
The church was well filled, and the services were full of interest. The
minister was a well trained man, and had the best order and system in
the church.

In Portland I attended a meeting of a select group of ladies and
gentlemen of the Theosophical Society. I did not speak, but went
primarily to hear an old friend speak on the subject of “Racial
Unity.” His lectures covered a number of cities on the coast, and his
subjects, “The Unity of Religions,” “Seven Valleys,” “Inter-racial
Amity,” “Harmony Between Religion and Science,” “The Mashrak; Ulkar or
Universal Science,” “What is a Bahai?” “Four Stages in Man’s Growth.”
All of these different lectures are summed up in the one though, “The
Fundamental Unity of Races and Religion.” The object of the lectures
are the promotion of universal brotherhood, international coöperation,
universal education, the abandonment of prejudices. The lecturer was
a colored man, a product of Fisk University, and of the law school
of Howard University. He has traveled through Europe, Egypt, and
Palestine. His thought and language is clear and convincing. Our friend
Dr. Gregory proved himself a master with these subjects.

The subjects above are very suggestive. There is nothing else to be
said when the speaker has finished his address. What does it mean? In
New York, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St. Paul, and all our
large centers there are the finest temples and edifices built to the
new cult, new thought, new religion. Many of our traditional churches
in these large centers have a hard fight to get a hearing. I attended
one of these new thought churches in St. Paul where the interest was at
white heat with an attendance of more than seven hundred people. The
temperature outside was fourteen degrees below zero. This was at night.
All these cults are based in one way or another on the Bible, but we
seem to have adapted for our own spiritual edification and practice
that which fits our own mind and temperament. We then argue that
everybody else is dead wrong. Some of the finest minds I know are lined
up with these new cults. Surely they must have some basis for their
mental attitude.

I was asked by the Secretary, Rev. Dr. George Hinman, of the American
Missionary Association office in San Francisco, to fill an appointment
for him in Berkley, Cal., February 26th. This was at the North
Congregational Church at Berkley. This church was right under the
shadow of the University of California, and I counted it a great
honor to be asked to speak there. The minister of the church was Rev.
Mr. Ralph Baxter Larkin. He was sick the day of my visit, and I was
introduced by Rev. Dr. Sargent. The printed programme announcing the
service for the day with my address had this on the first page, “A
Church of Reverent Worship, open mind, intellectual freedom, social
conscience, spiritual aspiration and human sympathy. It seeks to
discover and interpret the meaning of life in the life of the eternal.”
This expression gave me great poise for what I had to say. I was at
once at ease.

It is fine to speak to people who have a sympathetic spirit especially
when you have a feeling that you have an unpopular subject. My racial
identity was not clear in the mind of the gentleman who introduced me.
He said something like this: “Professor Steiner, of the University of
California said somewhere that if he had to be born again he would
like to be born a colored man, so that he might be able to study the
colored problem from the inside. We have with us today a gentleman
who understands the colored problem, and who did not have to be born
colored either.” These may not be the exact words, but it is the
thought. The first thing that I had to do was to dispel the mind of my
audience of the fact or statement just made, that I did not have to be
born a colored man, and that I wanted them to know that the traditions
of our country and the laws in many, if not all the states, had said
that any man is colored who has one iota of Negro blood in his veins.
“I am glad to have the honor to address you as a colored man.” Those
who know me best tell me that I do not have many stopping places. So I
fore-warned my friends in the front of me that sometimes my address was
three in one and sometimes one in three. Three in one when I have only
one hour in which to speak and one in three when I have three hours
in which to speak. Speaking to a Congregational Church, and a white
church, too, one has to observe the traditions very closely. These
traditions limit us to about thirty minutes, and unless one is very
interesting he had better stop in twenty-five minutes. So my address
had to be three in thirty.

The audience was scarcely dismissed when a large crowd gathered at
the corner of the church to ask more about certain topics which I had
only the time to touch. They were seeking to discover and to interpret
the meaning of life. I was invited to go home with many friends, but
I could not go with all, so a compromise was effected, and several
families joined, and I was the guest for the afternoon of these
families. One of these families had been missionaries in China. Others
had worked among the Japanese. There we were exchanging our experiences
each for the edification of the other. We were all happy that our lot
had been cast in these divergent directions.

I cannot continue this without becoming monotonous. I was most happily
received in a great many other churches, colored as well as white.
My message was generally, “The Amistad,” “The American Missionary
Association,” “General O. O. Howard and Reconstruction,” “The Schools
of the American Missionary Association,” “The Progress of the Colored
People,” “Inter-Racial Relations,” etc. One can see a wide latitude in
these subjects.

At the theaters we saw several colored stars. In Buffalo Charles Gilpin
in “Emperor Jones.” Gilpin is an artist of the first magnitude, but
I did not like his selection. I am not a critic of such matters, but
it did seem to me that his piece was coarse. It was very popular. One
could hardly find seating room in the large house where the play was
given.

In New York “Shuffle ’Long” was exciting great interest. There must
have been twenty or more taking part in the play, and every character
was an artist. I never saw anything finer. These people played in New
York in one house for nearly a year, and while the entrance fees were
high the house was packed every night.

In Chicago Bert Williams was the whole attraction. I saw him at the
Studebaker in “The Loop” just before his breakdown. I was told that
after his death the company broke up. They could not find another “Bert
Williams.” In his death the race has lost one of the greatest stars in
the theatrical world, irrespective of color. It is an awful tragedy of
our times that racial prejudice is blind to art when the artist happens
to be colored. It is no fault of the artist that he was born colored.
The theatrical field has been rather restricted so far as our colored
artists are concerned, but wherever they have had the opportunity they
have not been found wanting.

“Broadway Rastus and Sambo” are in a class by themselves. The play is
clean and fine, every whit of it. It will cure the blues. The singers
are the best on the American stage. The vaudeville is equal to any I
have seen in the best white theaters.

Every place visited we met very prominent colored men and women who
were formerly from North Carolina. We are compiling some interesting
data on them which we hope to give to the public later.

In Cleveland we met our old friend Lawyer J. P. Green. He has been a
lawyer there for forty years. He has written a splendid book of his
life. He has been Recorder of Deeds in Washington, and for several
terms member of the Ohio Legislature.

Mr. Charles Smith, whose parents were North Carolina people, has served
on the Cleveland police force twenty-five years, and is now retired.
His parents lived at Chapel Hill this state, and migrated to Oberlin
where he, with several other brothers and sisters, were educated.

Mrs. Mary Talbert, of Buffalo, is President of the Negro Women’s
League, which is a national organization of women. She was educated
in Oberlin. Her parents migrated there before the Civil War from this
state. It would take a chapter to tell what great things she has done
for the colored women and what she is now doing. She is a traveler,
lecturer and scholar. She has recently raised the money to have the
Fred Douglass Home in Washington City as a Memorial to the greatest
Negro who ever lived. It will be dedicated the 12th of August, 1922.
Her husband, Mr. William Talbert, is a city official in the treasurer’s
office, of Buffalo, New York.

Mrs. Clara Hardy, of St. Paul, Minnesota, a sister of Mrs. Talbert, is
also a graduate of Oberlin College. She has held many places of honor
in her adopted city. She is now Court Bailiff. She is a writer and
speaker of no mean ability. Her home was a perfect model.

In California it was my pleasure to stop with Dr. R. R. Robinson. He
is a Halifax County man. He was a student here for a number of years
working his way with his hands. He laid out our walks, planted many of
our older trees and helped to “Start Bricks.” He took an agricultural
course at the A. and T. College in this state and went to Tuskegee,
where he taught several years. He married a North Carolina girl from
Bethel, who was a trained nurse. Later he went to Nashville, Tennessee,
and took a course in medicine. After graduating he practiced medicine
in Brunswick, Ga., through the flue, and was very successful. After
the world war he went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and was there when the riot
broke out. He saved his life by hiding in the woods three days, he and
his wife. He lost all his office fixtures and medical instruments,
and every remnant of personal apparel. He is now a very successful
physician in Los Angeles, California.

I have given only an outline of some impressions of my trip to
California with the hope that it may inspire some reader to know, to
go, and to acquire a larger vision of the world and of life.




FARM LIFE


For many years the farmer has been the laughing stock of the country.
The conduct of his farm and his business methods have brought him more
gibes and thrusts than are brought to any other professional class. The
late Booker T. Washington described the characteristics of his class
many years ago. The poor old mule or horse and often the ox, hitched
to a single plow, scratching the earth with as much effectiveness as
an old Plymouth Rock rooster would scratch for newly planted oats. The
farmer follows behind this slow plodding plow in tatters and rags, illy
fed, too often diseased with hook worm or some other infectious malady.

His road sides and ditch banks for ten or twenty feet back are filled
with weeds and shrubby growth to sap the vitality from the growing
crops in their proximity. He has stagnant pools all over his patch in
wet weather to further deplete the growth of his crops that may be left
from the weeds by the roadside and ditch banks.

His home, the home of the old farmer, is the last thing to which any
attention need be given. He has followed his methods for “Fifty years
or more.” He has cotton right up to the door, potatoes, peanuts or corn
filling the yard. No place is left for flowers or ornamentation of any
sort. The old log house, just a place in which to sleep and in which to
hide when it storms outside. It has only two rooms for a large family.
The old man is in tatters, the wife is in tatters and the children are
in tatters, I have seen many, the least of the little ones, as naked as
they came into the world.

The implements of such a farmer never saw shelter or protection from
the weather from the time they were bought from the store until they
had been disintegrated by rust and rot and had gone back into the
original mother earth to rest forevermore.

The farmer himself had a personality that was uninviting and dirty.
He thought the good Lord had created him for just the sort of life he
was eking out, and he eschewed all progress. Good roads and decent
schools were things he never needed and he would not consent for such
improvements if they cost him anything. The old mongrel hen was good
enough because she could roost in the trees and lay at the same time.
The pinewood rooters were all right because they could make their
living by eating pine roots and other people’s crops. A half dozen dogs
were useful to feed. The old cow was still kept in the family because
of the ancestral history and not because of her utility.

Slipshod methods in business have been the handicap of more farmers
than all the evils attending them. We very often receive congratulatory
letters from business men on our farmers’ programme and at the same
time these business men lament the fact that our farmers’ business
methods are so poorly managed.

Not long ago we received notice that two of the wealthiest farmers,
Negro farmers, in Georgia had died. They were reputed to be worth more
than a hundred thousand dollars in cash besides the great land holdings
and other property they owned. Later when their estates were settled
up their business was in such a tangled condition, all interwoven with
that of their neighbors’, that there was nothing left for the wife and
children. I hope that we do not have in North Carolina such tangles as
the above. Whatever else the farmer does he ought to keep his business
straight. We have found out through our Federal Farm Loan Organization
that many farmers have bought and paid for farms and have paid taxes on
these farms for twenty years, but it would take a “Philadelphia Lawyer”
to find out whether the legal owner was the farmer, the banker, or
the land company, or the merchant. That is bad business. Any man who
mortgages his farm after he has paid for it seriously jeopardizes his
future as far as his farm is concerned. If you have debts that must
be met you had better sell a portion of your farm outright and keep
the other clean and clear. The mortgage business is a bad business for
the average farmer to take into his partnership. The merchants, the
business men, the state government and national government, are all
emphasizing every movement tending to the exit of this mortgage system.
The farmer, first of all, should give it a hard kick.

It is a matter of education first. These farmers’ meetings give us
an opportunity to inform ourselves. Our schools and our colleges are
helping us to get informed. The local conferences have no other purpose
than to help you to be informed on farm and business matters relative
to your farm. Bulletins sent out by the State and National governments
are among the greatest educational agencies. They are all practically
free. The farmer _who does not and will not_ take advantage of such
agencies of information is certainly destined to be at the foot of the
ladder; and there is where he belongs. The farmer who is given all the
agencies and says he will not pull himself up ought to go down. The
sooner he goes with that spirit the better, so that some other man can
take his place and make good. I still see some of these old timers
carrying water across the field a half mile away, still taking care of
the family wash down by the river side, still holding on to the old
ash pile. These relics have been heirlooms in the family and we are
reluctant to let them go. It takes some spirit, some purpose and a
great will to tear away from these old traditions. It must be done if
we are going to advance. We must learn the lessons of experience. They
have been sad lessons to many farmers. These farmers’ conferences are
bringing to you lessons of scientific farming. Let the traditions go to
the wind and take hold of the new problems in your farming and farming
business that will bring success, happiness and a life.

Today as never before the farmer is coming into his own. Watch the
agricultural papers and magazines. Visit our county and state fairs.
See the interest and note the comparisons in our community fairs.
Progress is in the air. If there are those who do not believe it, they
will believe it, and feel the impress of the upward move, or they must
get out of the business. Any farmer, white or colored, who does not
line up with the best farming methods of the community is bound to lose
out on his farm. The lessons may be hard, but as a class of farmers you
must get these lessons.

The first lesson that must come to every farmer is that he must line
up or unite with other farmers in the prosecution of his work. Every
industry is organized except that of farming. The farmer produces his
crops, and, unorganized, sells them to any bidder who comes along and
takes his price or nothing. Organization will help the farmer to get
the best price for his products. No man works very long by himself at
anything. You cannot make it alone. Coöperation is the word. You get
coöperation by organization. Every industry that is worth the name is
organized.

Organization helps you to buy as well as it helps you to sell. It will
get you the lowest prices for what you have to buy, and the highest
prices for what you have to sell. Single handed you pay what is charged
and sell it for what you can get, much or little. The government is
fostering the Federal Farm Loan Organization in order to put the
farmer on his feet. Are you using that organization? The state is
encouraging farm unions. They can be formed in every community where
you can find ten men, _ten real men_. Are you using this organization?
Some communities are using them very effectively. Our own Federal Farm
Loan Organization, the Tri-County Federal Farm Loan Organization, of
Bricks, N. C., has put into Negro farms and farm improvements about
seventy-five thousand dollars and has applications for nearly as much
more. Do we have your application?

Let us illustrate what we want to impress relative to coöperation and
organization. A few years ago two renters came to the Brick School
farm. Each had one horse. The wives had a lot of small children and
could not be expected to do very much on the farm. One day I saw a team
of two horses plowing. The two men had united their horses and were
plowing their ground with a double team. One was plowing and the other
man was clearing up the ditch banks. They worked tandem all summer and
seemed to get fine results. They were happy in their work and each was
company for the other.

A few years ago we needed here on the Brick School farm a peanut
thresher. No one could get the thresher alone, so an organization
was perfected and a peanut thresher was bought for two hundred
dollars. This thresher did fine work for many years, and brought the
stockholders a nice little revenue as long as it was in service. I
cannot see why a few men in every community cannot unite their efforts
and get everything they need on their farms.

Every time I go to Rocky Mount I see scores and scores of wagons on the
road hauling tobacco to market. These wagons go in groups for company
and mutual help. I have counted as many as twenty in one group, and
I am sure the different groups represent a certain community. These
communities of small farmers ought to unite and buy jointly a truck.
Some of these grouped teams travel, to my personal knowledge, thirty
miles with their tobacco. This trip takes two days and one night to
land the sale. The teams and the men alike are unfit for work for
several days thereafter. Count the cost of man, wagon and animals. The
automobile will do the same work in a few hours and be ready instantly
for other work. If the farmer drives his wagon half of his time on the
road is lost driving this way and that getting out of the road for
trucks and automobiles. If you cannot put your products on the market
as fast as your neighbor you cannot compete with him. That is all. If
you cannot do it single handed unite your forces. That is the commonest
of common sense.

Farmers cannot hire ditching done any more. Ditching with pick and
shovel is a past art. You cannot pay the price, and you cannot find
the ditcher. Ditching is now a profession. The last time we had our
work done by hand the gentleman came in a large Buick, worked a few
hours for a few days and the job was done. The element of drudgery is
too great. We are living in an age of steam and gas and power. Why
strain the muscles when you can turn the throttle with the weight of
one finger and the work is done? You can buy a machine ditcher, drawn
by horse power, for as little as forty dollars. If done with hired help
it does not take but a few yards to cost forty dollars. Two mules and a
machine ditcher will make more ditches in a day than ten men can make
in a week. Here the drudgery is eliminated. Any boy can drive the team.
Why not join your forces and buy a ditcher or buy it by yourself? A
dozen peanut growers will pay more to thresh their peanuts in one year
than a whole peanut outfit will cost. At the same time it is yours and
you can thresh your peanuts when you please to do it. You will have
the outfit for many years, depending upon the care you give it. We
are paying now around ten dollars a cord for cutting wood. The best
woodcutters cannot cut more than two cords of wood in the woods a day.
Do you know that you can buy a wood saw that will fell the tree and cut
up the wood, and that one man can cut as much as fifteen cords in one
day? Muscular strength and drudgery are again eliminated. Why not a
few of you unite your forces and buy a machine, and in a few days lay
in all the wood you need for the winter and summer use? Do you like to
trudge along the old way because it is traditional? I do not know of
anything more annoying than to have to run to the woods or wood pile
morning, noon and night, to cut wood for the preparation of the meal.
To me it would be enough to spoil the temper of a saint.

Here is a fine proposition suggested to me by a former Brickite. I am
not sure that it is original with him, but it is a fine proposition and
I am passing it along:

The average farmer who is working on his own farm or farming on his
own account must grow not less than four or five hundred bushels of
peanuts yearly or more. Some, to my knowledge, grow eight hundred
and a thousand bushels. It usually costs twenty-five cents a sack
to thresh this amount. One sack holds about four bushels. It will
cost twenty-five dollars to thresh one hundred sacks or four hundred
bushels. Form a company of sufficient numbers and let them pay for
their stock exactly what they would pay to an outsider for threshing
their peanuts. If properly handled it would pay for itself in one year
and after that it ought to clear a dividend.

There is one outstanding difficulty in this as in nearly everything in
which we engage in coöperative manner. That one man who will take the
leadership. Where is he? He must be unselfish, honest and level-headed.

I am speaking especially with reference to farmers who have limited
means and not much help. Coöperation and organization ought to mean
more than a little partnership. To organize and coöperate for community
uplift and progress takes a lot of intelligence and honesty. I would
not impugn your citizenship and standing in the community to say that
you lacked either as farmers. It is a fact that most of us as farmers
are hard to understand some of the simplest business relations. When
the business demands that we shall pay our bills by a bank check and
require a receipt, and that all these operations should be booked, and
when an auditor is called in to balance our accounts and check up our
mistakes we are too quick to think that our honesty is questioned.
There is no other way to do business when others are involved in that
business. _The honest man wants to be checked up._ It gives him a
standing that nothing else will. Treasurers and secretaries of any
organization, whether churches, Sunday Schools, secret orders, debating
societies, or what not, have no business keeping other people’s money
in their personal possession. The banks are the national depositories
for all such organizations and other people’s money ought to be kept
there.

It should not only be put in the bank, but it ought to be put there
to the credit of the institution to which it belongs. This may not be
good farming, but it is good business. I know of at least one man who
went to the penitentiary for using other people’s money for only a
few days and could not replace it. Organizations and companies should
demand cancelled checks and receipts for all expenses every so often
in a joint meeting. If officers count this an infringement upon their
personal integrity dismiss them and get officers who do not so regard
it. It is the only way to do business.

We do not organize more and do not succeed better because we lack
faith in each other. This is perfectly natural. The Negroes have been
schooled in credulousness for a great many years. The encumbrance of
so long an inheritance cannot be so easily thrown off. Expect the
best that is in your neighbor and your neighbor will prove up to your
highest expectation. You not only make your neighbor better by your
good thoughts of him, but you add to your own spiritual and mental
growth incalculably. You grow yourself.

Farmers must buy modern machinery for their farm. It is the best
investment you can make. Corn planters, cotton planters, gang plows,
and machinery of every sort that will save you worry and steps should
be bought. You cannot afford to farm without these implements. If you
do you must be left behind in the occupation of farming. You can not
make it. I think a farmer who can buy an automobile ought to be able
to buy a tractor engine. With a tractor engine you can plow, harrow,
and plant your ground while your neighbor is breaking his ground, and
you have beaten him a hundred miles in the manner in which you have
prepared the soil. At the close of the day you are not too tired to
go with your family to the moving picture show or to some community
entertainment where you may get an inspirational uplift for the next
day’s work. Look at your neighbors. That is what they do and keep ahead
of you.

I think the farmer who is making good ought to buy a Ford car. I saw
a big farmer the other day who lived out about eight miles from Rocky
Mount. He was driving a horse and buggy. I asked him how much money
he had cleared the year before on his farm and he said that he had
cleared over and above all expenses about three thousand dollars. It
took him a good half day to drive to Rocky Mount for his plow point.
He might have saved the trip or run over there in twenty minutes and
made his purchase and had the rest of the day for work on his farm if
he had owned a Ford car. I am not arguing that one should purchase
modern machinery with which to facilitate his work in order to give him
more time to be idle. It will give him more time to do the things that
machinery cannot do. The good farmer never has idle time. Time spent
at a farmers’ conference is not idle time. The matter of getting the
latest and best information on farming methods is the most important
thing that a farmer can do. One cannot put into practice on his farm or
anywhere else what he does not know.

Improved machinery means more intelligence on the farm. Farming is the
most complicated and diversified occupation there is in the world.
It takes a horticulturist to grow apples to perfection. It takes a
dairyman of the best type to put milk and butter on the market to meet
state and county inspection and public approval. It takes a mechanic of
the highest quality to keep up repair on the farm of fences, houses and
machinery. It takes a bookkeeper to keep farm accounts and records. He
must be something of a Wall Street broker to keep up with market prices
so that he will know how and when to sell his farm products. He must be
an electrician and an engineer as well if he is going to compete with
his neighbor who lights his house with a Delco light and runs all of
his machinery with power.

When you come to live stock you have a world without end of necessary
information for your success. Cattle, cows, sheep, hogs, horses,
poultry, bees, and scores of special strains of each, every one of them
requiring special treatment and expert knowledge. If the farmer has
the inclination and the will he can become specialist in any one of
these lines. There are men who do nothing but breed the special brands
of high bred stock. There are those who breed bees and who supply the
world’s demands of purebred queen bees. The higher you go in this
specialization the more you become the world’s greatest benefactor.

I have been studying about the value of limes upon the soils. To be a
first-class farmer you must be a chemist of the first magnitude. You
as farmers, have no idea of the part that chemicals must play in the
production of your crops. The fertilizer that will bring to perfection
one crop will kill another. You must know the fertilizer and know the
nature of the soil on which this fertilizer is to be used and you must
know how well a certain grade of fertilizer is adapted to the seed you
want to produce. Every first-class farm is a chemical laboratory and
the farmer is a chemist. Every first-class farmer must be something
of a physicist as well. Every first-class farmer must be something of
a doctor as well for all animals are subject to bodily disorders that
must be corrected by medical advice. He must also be a weather prophet.
You cut your hay and let the storm come on it and see where your
profits go. You must be able to read the signs in the heavens and the
published directions. Your job is a big one requiring as you go up the
most complicated knowledge about every thing under the sun. I have said
nothing about plant diseases and insect life affecting the success of
the farmer nor that world or destruction hid in the unseen bacteria. As
farmers you may be sluggards moving along on the lowest possible level
of life or you may be a prince living in a palace. There are a lot of
us on the lower levels who ought to move up to the higher gradations.
You can get more out of your farm life but you must _know how_.

If you expect to work simply as a hireling you will not need this
information to any great extent. You only have to do as you are told
to do as a hireling. You may never as a hireling be asked to use even
your own initiative in an emergency. If you expect to manage a farm you
must have initiative and some executive ability. Twenty acres or more
constitute a farm. If you have that much land you are a farmer and you
must move on your own initiative.

The days of ignorant farming are passing. The government cannot and
does not encourage ignorant farming. The times are demanding better
schools and better roads. These two improvements are here and the
farmers must pay the bills. Your farm must make you a living and
enough more to meet these public expenses. If your intelligence will
not make the ends meet, then before a great while the taxes will eat
you up and your land will go into the ownership of men who have the
intelligence to make the land meet the bills for public improvements.
As farmers you must subscribe to every public improvement that comes
into your community. You must buy stocks, bonds and meet public taxes.
These improvements all increase the value of your farm. Selfishness
and personal ends must not hold back community progress in any line.
You are a part of the community and when you hold back its progress
you defeat yourself. Not to know is no longer an excuse. _You must
know._ You cannot stay at home and pride yourself that you never go to
a farmers’ meeting and expect to know. Wherever people are gathered
together to discuss public problems there you may go to learn. There
is where you get in the spirit of things. There is where you get
knowledge. There is where you get the inspiration. The spirit of
rivalry and competition will go a long way to help us in our farm
operations. There is a farmer in Nash County who thinks he can beat
every one else in the county growing watermelons. There is a score of
farmers in his community quietly trying to beat _him_. The result is
that there are better watermelons grown in that community than in any
other community in the county.




  RURAL LIFE
  (continued)

FARMERS’ CONGRESS, AUGUST 16, 17, 1921


It is worth very much to any man who is interested in agricultural
operations to take a leisurely trip four hundred miles through North
Carolina in an automobile. A party of us left Bricks July 11th and
joined Rev. P. R. DeBerry in Raleigh. Taking his big Studebaker car, we
were off the 12th for a two days trip among the colored farmers of the
central and western part of the state.

We were not touring, nor sightseeing, nor joy riding. Our one purpose
was to study the land, the people and the conditions under which our
colored farmers were living. We wanted to see what conditions were
compatible and what were not compatible. The trip took us through about
eighteen counties.

We started our study in Edgecombe County. This is the county in which
Brick School is located. This county should be the first in all of its
operations because of its educational advantages and the inspiration it
ought to receive from this institution.

There are in the county now about 25,000 Negroes. These Negroes own
4,000 farms and homes, numbering about 17,000 acres of land. Some
individuals own as much as 500 acres. We are sorry to say that most
of this land is not under the most improved condition. We have not
been able to have in this county a full time farm demonstration agent.
The Brick School and our farm meetings have given very much impulse
to farm operations, but even this has not reached all the farmers in
ways to stimulate them to their greatest efforts. We lack time, money
and authority that ought to come directly from the state. It has
been demonstrated in other counties that nothing is so valuable in
stimulating the farmers as a real, live, wide-a-wake farm demonstration
agent who lives and works among the farmers every day. A farm not half
developed and not improved is not an asset to the state nor to the
owner. It ought to come into the highest state of production, then only
does it become wealth.

The school population of this county is about 7,000 children with
an enrollment of about 5,000 children, whose average attendance is
about 3,000 under the compulsory law. The county has a colored school
supervisor who gives the work all of her time. Mrs. Carrie Battle has
revolutionized the school work under her charge. She is insistent and
tireless. Every one knows her and respects her. Her office is in the
courthouse at Tarboro. The white county officials hold her in the
highest esteem. The teachers and schoolhouses rank among the best in
the state for colored people.

I do not know anything that affects public improvements and progress
more than good roads. The farmers are generally slow to vote for good
roads, but no class of people appreciate them more than the farmer
when they are built. The area of the county is 515 square miles, and
yet I have traveled over every part of the county and over some of the
best roads in the state. The local papers tell us that a cement road
leading across the county is now in process of construction. This road
will eventually lead into Raleigh, some fifty miles away.

Halifax County has an area of 681 square miles, with a colored
population of nearly 30,000 souls. They own 70,000 acres of land.
Their school population is around 10,000, with an enrollment of about
7,000, and an average attendance of about 3,000 children. This county
has a colored school supervisor who has done a very fine work among
the colored people. The colored people meet every condition set by the
state and county for the erection of colored schoolhouses. A few months
ago they had raised their part for twelve Rosenwald schoolhouses,
and had to wait on the county and state to recoupe their part. They
will meet any condition set for them. The colored population is not
congested in any one part of the county. They are located in every
section of the county and about evenly distributed. Their homes, for
the most part, are clean, and their houses are well constructed and
show signs of thrift and happiness. Very few colored farmers have
migrated from this section of the state. Those who have gone from
Halifax County can hardly be missed. This in itself shows that the
racial equilibrium is not much disturbed.

Nash County, which joins us on the west, is one of our best farming
communities. The fifteen thousand Negroes in the county own more than
25,000 acres of land and more than 2,000 farms. They are a progressive
lot of colored people. They have a number of independent schools aside
from the public schools. They have excellent churches, and their homes
are being built on modern lines. This county has twelve miles of
cement road running from Rocky Mount to Nashville, the county seat.
The contour of the county is rolling and red clay. The important towns
are Nashville, Spring Hope, Middlesex, and let us say a part of Rocky
Mount. There is a great deal of the land in this county uncultivated
and developed. It waits only for the man who has the brain and the
energy. The county has no county farm demonstration agent nor colored
school supervisor. I do not know what can be more advantageous to
the success of the colored farmer than the addition of a colored
farm demonstration agent and a colored school supervisor. While the
preachers are ministering to the spiritual needs of our folks and the
teachers are directing their intellectual life, and the state and
county health offices are looking after the health of the masses, the
farm demonstration agents and the colored school supervisors are daily
giving inspiration and purpose to rural life everywhere. The state and
county are the direct beneficiaries of the work of these two agents.
Having five children go to school every day from one family where
formerly only three went means very much for the literacy of the state.

Teaching boys how to grow forty bushels of corn on the same acreage
where their fathers could grow only ten is adding very much to the
wealth of the state. The community which does not appreciate and
recognize this truth is impervious to eternal values. Every farmers’
conference tells how much increase there has been in corn, peas,
cotton, peanuts, oats, rye, tobacco, and other things under the
direction of our farm demonstration agents.

We pass through Franklin County into Wake. Every one knows that Raleigh
is in Wake County. As soon as you arrive in Wakefield or Zebulon, both
small country hamlets, you know that you must be about fifteen miles
from the capital city. Hard-surfaced roads present such a temptation
to touch the accelerator just a little, and little, and again a little
more, and again, if you do not happen to see any motorcycles lurking
about. The colored population of this county is less than 30,000, and
they own less than 6,000 farms. They own about 60,000 acres of land.
Their school population is about 10,000, with an enrollment of about
7,000, and an average daily attendance of about 4,000 children. We
ought to expect the school average to be higher, of course, being
adjacent to the seat of state authority. Wake County has had for a
number of years two colored agents, in the person of Miss Delany for
the schools, and Professor Roberts for the farmers. They have gone in
and out of the farm homes daily carrying inspiration and encouragement
and inspiring hope. The daily contact with these personalities has
been the leavening power in the county. We have seen for a number of
years the finest products that could be produced on exhibition in our
colored State Fair. In the city market in Raleigh every day in the year
one will see these same fine farm products. They will do justice to
any racial group. Here one will see what the agents are doing to help
the farmers to conserve and preserve their products. The homes of the
farmers show neatness and cleanliness. We have been greatly surprised
to see how far some of our farmers have gone in beautifying their homes
and premises. _This is as it should be._

The excellent public schools of Raleigh, the fine institutions
represented by St. Augustine School and Shaw University have given the
colored rural population a great inspiration. The well ordered homes of
some of their city cousins have also been an inspiration to the colored
rural population.

There are so many opportunities, educational and inspirational, about
the state capitol, that it is almost like living under the shadows
of a great university. Then the main thoroughfares are so fine that
those living in the most remote parts of the county ought to have no
difficulty or count it no hardship to go to the city for lectures,
recitals, conventions, conferences, and for general consultation with
those under state authority. These opportunities are the best sort of
unearned increment.

We pass from Wake County to Chatham County. There are no less than
8,000 colored people in Chatham County. They own about 2,000 farms and
homes, and about 30,000 acres of land. The two small towns, Moncure
and Haywood, have quite a settlement of colored people. At Haywood
they seem rather isolated and some of the homes had a progressive
appearance. The disadvantages under which we started, the social,
industrial, business and educational status, in which we find ourselves
should not be allowed to differentiate from other people who live in
the same community and in the same environment.

If other racial groups living in the same community have their homes
painted, flowers in their gardens and other ornaments that add to
home life and beauty, it is perfectly right that we should catch the
inspiration. If we cannot be leaders in these matters, we ought to
be good followers. We have the labor, and a gallon of paint and a
paint brush will work wonders in a few hours. If we cannot keep the
yard fence looking decent and in repair let us move it. We must take
personal pride in the community in which we live. It is the best sort
of civic pride. In this community we ought to prove our best selves.
Chatham County has disgraced itself recently with a lynching bee.

Crossing the river into Lee County we were very much impressed with
the sign, “You are welcome to Lee County.” This large sign was in a
most conspicuous place and we interpreted it to mean what it said, and
that we were included in the invitation. We stopped to ponder and to
contrast the difference. We have been in parts of our country where
the overhead signs read, “Nigers and dogs not wanted.” We have seen in
other parts where land was advertised for sale and the biggest asset in
the advertisement was the absence of Negroes from the community.

There are less than 4,000 colored people in Lee County. They own about
700 farms and about 8,000 acres of land. The area of the county is very
small, and the entire population less than 15,000.

I have been for several years on a local inter-racial committee. Since
the world war it has been necessary to have such a committee in the
South on inter-racial relations. I am also on the state inter-racial
committee. That means that I am always looking out for the small things
and the larger things, too, as we make our daily rounds, that count for
good will and peace between the two racial groups. At Sanford we saw
a large number of colored men at work as carpenters and bricklayers
on some of the finest buildings going up in the city. I was shown
others and advised that they were the work of colored carpenters, under
colored contractors. A former Brick School boy was foreman on one of
the jobs. These contractors and workmen were personal friends of mine,
and later I had the pleasure of seeing some of their own homes and
business. They were among the best in the community. Broadway, Cumnock,
and Jonesboro are progressive communities in which the colored people
are doing well. I was advised that only a few of the colored people had
migrated from this part of the state. It means that they are happy and
that they can buy homes in communities that are compatible. After all,
we must have compatibility in our homes and in our neighborhood, in our
community, in our relations with the outside world. I would not live a
week in a community that was not compatible. To receive a gibe and a
thrust every time one steps on the street, or into a corner grocery,
or on the public highway, by other racial groups is contemptible, and
especially so when one knows that there is absolutely no redress for
that sort of contempt. One wonders what the preachers are preaching or
what the schools are teaching. Patriotism, love of community, social
and personal progress are of slow growth in such communities where
there is so much incompatibility.

All the world has heard of Moore County. It is an area of 798 square
miles. The main line of the Seaboard railroad crosses it from north to
south. It is crossed and recrossed by Page’s railroad. Here is Southern
Pines, Pinehurst, Jackson Springs, Carthage, and scores of other
smaller towns. The names are common to the resorter and tourist. It has
a population of less than 6,000 Negroes, who own about 16,000 acres of
land. Excluding the villages and towns, twenty-five years ago I would
not have paid the taxes for all the rest of the land. Twenty-five
years ago I went all over the county, and one could scarcely get
anywhere for the sand and roads were practically unknown. Sand, sand,
sand—everywhere sand.

Moore County is now the veritable garden spot of the state. The local
intersecting railroads have changed hands. Fine public highways have
been built in every direction. The tourist and capitalist, making
their annual visits to this section, have discovered in that vast land
undiscovered possibilities of wealth. Thousands and thousands of acres
of this waste have been converted into peach orchards. Peach packing
stations have been built all along the track for the convenience of
the peach shippers. I was told that several trains of peaches were
shipped daily to the Northern market. Where the land was not already
planted I saw the Fordson tractors getting it ready for fall planting.
Most of this undeveloped land was what is called cut-over land. It
is absolutely barren except for a lot of shrubby pines, shrubby oaks
and some native tough grasses and wild composite flowers. Tupelle and
poplar may be found in the swamps and lowlands.

I wondered as I passed along to get a bit of information here and
there, if our colored people were learning to do by doing. I wondered
if they were getting the inspiration. Sixteen thousand acres of land
ought to be the nucleus of an industry. A hundred acres ought to make a
good peach farm. What an opportunity for the colored man who has brain
and industry and some little money and a great ambition. We have not
the faintest idea of the wonderful opportunities in the millions of
acres of the waste lands of our southern country. These lands are just
begging the capitalist to come and invest in the undeveloped resources
of its bosom. It is there, but it just needs the brain and some
little money. The brawn is there, too; it just needs the intelligent
direction. Compatible conditions will keep it there.

The land in Moore County will never again sell for one dollar an acre
while peaches are selling for three dollars a bushel at the tree. Most
of the trees bear from two to five bushels of peaches. They are planted
about fifteen feet apart. It takes about 150 trees to the acre. Any
one can figure the income at that rate. These peaches ought to begin
bearing in three years. There is nothing so fabulous as the income per
acre from such an investment. There is nothing so sure. Some of the
rows as we viewed them seemed endless. Greensboro, sixty miles away,
was sending trucks to the peach area daily for loads of peaches for the
local market, in Greensboro. A little while back one of these peach
orchards sold for $85,000.

The business of supervision has become so important that many of the
growers combine and employ an expert from the State Department of
Agriculture. They can pay more than the state can pay for such expert
supervision. The work is as yet in its infancy. We are advising our
Negro boys to go to our best agricultural schools and specialize in
this department of fruit cultivation so that they can manage such
enterprises as these large fruit farms. They do not seem to get the
vision. As long as our folks are buying farms, and they are increasing
their holdings every year, there are vast opportunities for their
services as horticulturists. Ten Negro farmers in Moore County, North
Carolina, ought to be able to get together and make peach-growing worth
while to the group. Their traditions and the local environment have
taken away their inspiration. They also lack knowledge. They have not
been schooled in initiative of this sort. Coöperation with most of us
has been a doubtful experiment. We must learn and grow more before we
can take hold of the larger industries that require large coöperation.
Experience and knowledge are vital to the success of any enterprise.
The great enterprises of the North have been growing coöperatively
since the country was discovered. The South has been giving its time
to matters of social adjustments. The adjustment of its racial groups
has been its nightmare by day as well as by night. Hatreds, jealousies,
prejudices, have entered too much into our daily contact and relations
to allow us to grow nationally. The conditions of all progress are in
education, industry, compatibility.

I read somewhere that the conscious mind may not get a true perspective
and may error. Still it is conscious. When I read in the papers every
day and note all the deviltries perpetrated here and there all over
the South, I wonder that we have all gotten along as well as we have,
and especially do I wonder how the Negro has made such progress. Then
I hear that the subconscious mind never errors. The conscious mind
would have me riled and leaving the country, boot and baggage, when I
read what is happening somewhere else outside of North Carolina. The
subconscious mind comes in and says to me, when I am quiet and alone
and perhaps when I am half asleep, “No, do not get discouraged.” The
South is the garden spot of the world. It has the prettiest moons, the
brightest days, its florescence on a thousand hills and in as many
vales scatters its fragrance and beauty three hundred and sixty-five
days in the year. Its cataracts, rills, and springs sparkle with
diamonds of beauty and health. The woods and swamps are filled with
every sort of game, her rivers and lakes abound with every known fish
for the sportsmen, her climate is the most equitable in the world,
the rainfall the most evenly distributed, the storms not so awfully
destructive, the exotic population the least of that of any other
similar area, with an adapted vegetation from the highest altitudes to
the equator. The contour of the surface is high or low as one likes
it. Smooth or rough. The Blue Ridge Mountains afford a retreat from
the Northern winters as well as a retreat from the Southern sun. Her
altitude, pine forest and splendid waters are an asset that no other
country in the world can equal. In the next few years more than fifty
millions of dollars will be spent in North Carolina alone for public
roads. Steam roads and electric cars will soon intersect every nook
and corner of the state. The most inaccessible parts of the state and
the South will become the public highways. Automobiles and trucks will
bring the most remote farms to the city markets daily. The telephone
and radio are already available in our country homes.

In the next two years North Carolina will spend four millions of
dollars for Negro health and education. This has already been passed by
state Legislature. This amount of money put into health and education
in any community will make a change. It shows an enlightenment of
public sentiment and a change of attitude on the part of the citizens
of the state. Progress cannot and will not be thwarted. Education,
enlightenment, Christianity—this trio is the saving grace of any
community. I do not know of any place better than North Carolina. _This
is my subconscious mind._ It never errors.

We leave Moore County and cross into Montgomery County. This is what
we call a hickory country. The land is rocky and red with hills almost
precipitous. We could not visit many of the colored people because of
the inaccessibility of most of the rural homes. The colored population
is about 4,000, and they pay taxes on about 8,000 acres of land. They
are engaged in general agriculture, corn, tobacco and cotton being
their prevailing crops. They have a few cotton factories in the town
of Troy and more in the county, and many lumber mills. The Pedee River
and its tributaries furnish a large part of the power for the factory
work. The county has a real gold mine which was profitably worked a few
years ago. It was my pleasure to visit it some years ago when it was in
operation. It has been abandoned, and the machinery and buildings show
signs of a past prosperity.

The town of Troy has one of the two wooden courthouses left in the
state. It was being replaced by a modern stone structure. It will
cost when finished about $200,000. I am told that the stone in the
construction of this building was taken from the site on which the
building stands. It rather reminds one of our Northern centers in that
it stands at the juncture of a number of the public roads leading into
the town.

The Peabody School, under the auspices of the American Missionary
Association of New York, is the only institution in all of that part of
the country giving anything like a high school education to the colored
people in all of that section of the country. The school is beautiful
for its location just out of the city. It fronts a public road and is
on high ground with splendid drainage. Several of their buildings are
new and up-to-date for school purposes.

A hard-surfaced road is in construction from Charlotte to Raleigh. The
distance is nearly two hundred miles. It will probably pass through
nine counties. It will open up a country of immense possibilities. A
cement bridge connecting up this road is already in construction across
the Yadkin River. This bridge will be nearly or quite 2,000 feet long.
It would ornament the approach to any Northern city.

From Troy we went to Biscoe, Star and Ashboro in Randolph County. This
is also an oak and hickory county. The roads took us through a very
fine section of the country. The country looks very undeveloped. The
roads were very fine. The rural homes appeared rather small. Many of
the women along the roads were seen bottoming chairs. Chair-making
seemed to be one of the main industries in that section. The frames of
the chairs were made at the factories and sent out to the country women
to have the bottoms put in them. These bottoms were made of white oak
splits. The absence of colored people engaged in this business seemed
very noticeable.

The town of Ashboro had all the appearances of being a hustling town.
More than a half dozen buildings were going up. We saw no colored
carpenters or bricklayers on the job anywhere. We were advised that
no colored men were allowed to work at their trade in the town. We
saw several colored mechanics with their kit of tools packed, leaving
the town. Some of them we knew to be the equal of any mechanics in
any other group of workers. Still their mechanical efficiency counted
nothing. It was their unfortunate tradition, and their black faces
which counted them out. Here my conscious mind came up again. We did
not have the feeling that we had when we left Lee County. A man ought
to be passed on his merits and not on his color. They wanted mechanics,
but not black mechanics. These men would do well to migrate. Wherever
they went I know they were in the frame of mind to swear vengeance
against any community that would tolerate that sort of condition. That
is what makes socialists, bolsheviks, and Catholics out of us.

We soon find ourselves in Guilford County. We arrive in High Point and
remain long enough to see friends and inquire about the conditions of
our farmers.

I think it true that there are more manufacturers of furniture in
this county than in any other county in the state. The Brick School
has bought furniture in New York only to await shipment from High
Point. Later we have gone to High Point and seen this furniture in
the making. These two cities are in the oak and hickory section of
the state. I have seen its street cars in Philadelphia, New York,
Baltimore, Washington, Asheville, Atlanta, Ga., Birmingham, Ala. Of
course a business of this size will give work of one sort or another to
a great many of our colored laborers. There are 15,000 of our people
in Guilford County. They own 3,000 homes and farms. They are paying
taxes on 17,000 acres of land. The Negroes in Guilford County have
the inspiration of one of the best state colleges for Negroes to be
found in the South. The college ought to be the center of all the best
influence for farming in a hundred miles about it. If they are found
to be using poor farming methods they ought to be fined. Alamance,
Orange and Durham counties are rather small counties, but they have
some of the best farms and form some of the best farming and industrial
communities to be found in the state. Durham is really the emporium
for Negro enterprise and thrift. Tobacco, cotton and corn, and some
wheat are the leading farm products in this section of the state.
Gibsonville, Burlington, Graham and Hillsboro are thriving towns. They
are centers of cotton and furniture manufacturing interests.

This study took us through about fifteen counties. We were not
investigating the town and city conditions, but the farming interests.
In counties where they had rural supervisors there was a marked
difference in the attitude and progress of the farmers. Their outward
appearance was different from what we saw several years ago. The
farmers were better clad; their work animals were in better condition;
their teams were not all dilapidated; many of them are using improved
machinery; their barns and houses were more orderly built and better
maintained; the houses in which they live are a decided improvement
over the old houses we usually see along the railroad. They are giving
more care to their wells and pumps. They are learning to screen their
windows. The ancestral waste barrel in many cases are being removed
from their kitchen windows. They are using more paint not only to save
their houses, but because it adds beauty to their premises. They are
planting flowers. They are putting out fruit trees and investing in
thoroughbred chickens, hogs and cows. These are all good signs. They
are really coming. Some have had to come from so far down the road that
it may appear that they have not made any progress. They are coming
nevertheless. At no place where we stopped did we have to confine our
diet to sweet potatoes and boiled eggs in order to preserve our health
by the osmosis process.

We saw in many places attempts made to improve the soil. We found
alfalfa, red clover and crimson clover in the red clay sections. Peas
were grown generally. The farm demonstration agents and the farmers’
conferences have been an inspiration to the farmers to grow legumes to
help the land to bring forth its fruit. They are learning that they
cannot use up the fertility of the soil and still have it. They are
learning that an investment in legumes is one of the best they can make
for crop productions.

The papers have been saying that one man in four in the American army
is uneducated. If that is true it is a sad comment on the conditions
of this country. There is no power in the world to equal that of
education. We cannot exaggerate its power and its importance. A trained
mind, a trained hand and a trained heart are indomitable. An unlettered
man lives in isolation. He cannot appreciate the creation of nature.
There is no progress in isolation and a static mind atrophies. Whatever
be the proportion of illiteracy, those of us who move about among
the masses know that notwithstanding our private schools and public
schools, ignorance and superstition are simply appalling. It is not
only appalling, but it is dangerous to any environment. It is a menace
to the state and government.




BRICK SCHOOL IN PERSPECTIVE


Work began at the Brick School in 1895 under the auspices of the
American Missionary Association. The “Estes Farm,” named after the
owner, General Estes of the Civil War, came into the possession of Mrs.
Julia E. Brewster Brick, of Brooklyn, New York, who found it a burden
on her hands. Mrs. Brick had visited the community, and her heart had
been made sad by the sights which greeted her on every side. The sad
faces and depressed spirits in a large environment of Negro congestion
appealed to her heart. She was responsive to this appeal. It was the
voice of God which she did not mistake.

Her life and thoughts and heart had been attuned to this appeal, and so
she sought how best she might help the situation. The advice of General
Oliver O. Howard was sought. He introduced Secretary A. F. Beard and
Mr. H. W. Hubbard, at the time Treasurer of the American Missionary
Association. The result of this counsel was that a large farm of 1,129½
acres of land in North Carolina three miles from the town of Enfield
was given to the American Missionary Association for Negro education.
With the gift came also from the same source $5,000 for the first
building.

There followed other gifts from Mrs. Brick and from the American
Missionary Association, so that the farm was soon stocked with hogs,
horses, mules, cows and farm implements. Houses of various sorts,
including school buildings, dormitories, teachers’ cottages, tenant
houses and barns have been put up, valued at several hundred thousand
dollars. This beautiful munificence has been our saving grace during
the last twenty-seven years of stress and strain in the financial world.

We began work with the modest number of five teachers. We now have
about twenty teachers and a few less than 400 students. The students
come from a dozen states and from nearly all the counties in North
Carolina. The larger number of them comes from a radius of fifty miles.

The purpose of the institution is to teach the students to do the
things the best way in the community where they may live. Being rurally
situated, the first and greatest appeal must be made along the line of
an agricultural education. The knowledge of how to extract from the
soil the largest and best products which the community may need for
its consumption is an asset in which any group of people may well take
pride. Most town and city boys coming to us have an aversion to this
form of education, and especially to the strenuousness necessary to an
efficient application of the most vital principles of agriculture.

Horses have to be shod, and farmers have to have houses in which to
live and under which to shelter their stock. So we have to teach the
boys to work in iron and wood. Along with this goes some drawing and
planning. Tools and wagons must be kept in repair. Boys going back to
their communities ought to be later the real leaders in the community.
In many instances they are the leaders.

While the boys are investing their time in the farm crafts and the shop
crafts the girls are learning to do needlework and house cleaning,
washing and sewing. They learn the home life by getting some of the
conventionalities of it here in the classroom under teachers who get
from Pratt and Columbia and other good schools the best they have
to offer. These teachers are themselves largely the products of our
American Missionary Association Schools. They have not been satisfied
to “graduate and quit,” but they have continued to study. In addition
to giving the boys work on the farm and in the shop, and the girls work
in the kitchen, laundry, dining-room and sewing-room, and general house
cleaning, all are offered a first-class high school course covering six
years, preceded by six years of elementary education.

The writer of these notes is himself a product of Oberlin and Fisk
University. He knows how to do a great many things, including
typesetting, printing, farming, plumbing, some work in wood,
poultry-raising and agriculture, stock husbandry. He lectures, preaches
sometimes, and writes for newspapers. He counts himself a fair judge of
artistic values wherever they are on exhibition. He knows how utterly
impossible it is to try to do any one of the above things with any
degree of efficiency or even ordinary skill without mental training.
The mind is the master, and unless that has training and poise the hand
fails. The academic course is to meet this condition. Many of the boys
and girls stay to finish it, but the bulk never finish. Many of them
do not stay for the full course—not that they do not have the money
in many cases—but because education among the masses it not popular.
They have had a propaganda for many years that a little learning is a
dangerous thing. They have been advised that they belong to a subject
group, and that they need only the rudimentary necessaries of life. A
fine horse and buggy or a car and nice clothes make an appeal above any
sacrifice for study. It is the appeal for the glitter and the glare.
This false notion comes to the half grown youth because they got a
bad start. They were neglected in the public schools—parents ignorant
of the necessity of education on the one hand, and poorly prepared
teachers on the other hand, and poorly furnished and constructed
schoolhouses. The whole school environment has not been psychological.
It has rather been repulsive.

Some who return to their homes are making good farmers, as evidenced by
their better crops, better fertility of their soil, better kept work
animals, better kept machinery, better homes, yards, and community life.

Many of those who finish the high school course attend other schools
and later enter the ministry, dentistry, or become physicians,
teachers, Y. M. C. A. or Y. W. C. A. workers, or instructors in
agriculture either in our schools or as county farm demonstration
agents. The best examples are Isaac Bunn, farmer, and owns his own
farm of 250 acres bought and paid for in Halifax County; Benjamin
Bullock, under the Smith-Lever Fund, in charge of agriculture in the
colored state college in Texas; Rev. A. S. Croom, Baptist minister,
Salisbury, N. C.; Dr. Joseph Harrison, physician, Kinston, N. C.;
Dr. Willie Sessoms, dentist, Rocky Mount, N. C.; Dr. R. R. Robinson,
physician, Los Angeles, Cal.; Miss Hattie Green, Miss Lucy Richmond
McCoy, Miss Susie Adams, Young Women’s Christian Association work,
New York; Miss Annie Rhodes, teacher in the city schools of Chicago;
Miss Lula Bullock, teacher in city schools, Louisville, Ky.; George
Bullock, manual training in city schools of Louisville, Ky.; Joseph
Bullock, a captain in the army, and now a student of dentistry. More
than a hundred have gone out as graduates, and all are a leavening in
the community in which they live. The influence of the Brick School
has counted in the community life of the masses more than any other
agency in operation. We mean by “Community” the area of a circle of
which the school is the center and whose radius is twenty-five miles.
We have three counties virtually inside of this circle whose Negro
population is more than 60,000. The circle cuts into six other counties
whose combined population is more than 148,000 Negroes. The nearest
institution under private auspices doing anything like high school work
is exactly sixty-three miles away. We have a field all our own. The
area in this circle is “our community.”

We have sought all these years to better the community life by reaching
the farmers directly. To this end we have annually and semi-annually
farmers’ meetings. They come and spend one or two days at our expense
for entertainment, where they have contact with our teachers and with
men and women sent by the State Department of Agriculture at Raleigh,
who lecture on the best methods of farm and home life.

We must do more than talk. We must help them. We have here a local
Federal Farm Loan Organization, and this organization in the last three
years has put into Negro farms more than $130,000. This money is let by
the United States government and on conditions that can be met without
hardship to the borrower. Titles are investigated, deeds are properly
made, and a new spirit is put into the farmers of the community. We
are encouraging our colored men to buy small farms of twenty-five and
fifty acres and build for themselves modest homes near their public
schools as far as they can, and not too far from their local churches.
We advise them to patronize these institutions freely and to build up
their community life.

The vision has been a long ways off, like the rainbow, but they
have begun to catch it. In these three counties they are paying
taxes on more than 100,000 acres of land. Their homes are very much
improved. Their churches are excellent for rural communities. They
are contributing largely for the Rosenwald schools. In Halifax County
they have twelve, and more are now in construction, the colored people
paying one-third of the cost.

They have helped us generously to erect several teachers’ cottages here
at Bricks, and $5,000 is now pledged for further improvements, which
will be paid as soon as farming conditions and prices enable them to do
so.

Righteous public sentiment is of slow growth, and one cannot expect to
change traditions quickly whose roots have penetrated every strata of
society. It takes sympathy, patience, years, work, and some money.

  T. S. INBORDEN.

May 17, 18, 1922.


_The_ JOSEPH K. BRICK SCHOOL

BRICKS, N. C.


was organized twenty-seven years ago under the general supervision
of the American Missionary Association. It offers a first-class High
School Course, including Domestic Science, Domestic Art, Agriculture,
Work in Iron and Steel, Mechanical Drawing, Instrumental and Vocal
Music.

Board, lodging, light, heat, and laundering cost per calendar month,
$14.00. Tuition $2.00 and $2.50. Poor boys over sixteen years of age
may work out a part or all of this amount.

The School Farm contains 1,129½ acres.

There are 23 school buildings and cottages.

The postoffice handles four mails each day, giving money order,
registered mail, parcel post service.

The telegraph and telephone connections are through Enfield, N. C.

Atlantic Coast Line Trains 33 and 34 stop at Bricks on signal.

Prepaid freight may be sent direct to Bricks, N. C. Express may be sent
to Enfield, N. C.

The enrollment for last year was 385 students, under the leadership of
22 teachers and officers.

The students maintain religious, musical, and athletic organizations.

There is a student brass band to enliven outdoor sports.

For Catalogue and other information, write


T. S. INBORDEN, _Principal_

MITCHELL PRINTING CO., RALEIGH




  Transcriber’s Notes

  pg 3 Changed: Mojave Desert into Death Valley and to Sanfenando
            To: Mojave Desert into Death Valley and to San Fernando

  pg 3 Changed: Santa Barbarbara, Ventura, Gaudaloupe, San Lois Obispo
            To: Santa Barbara, Ventura, Guadaloupe, San Luis Obispo

  pg 6 Changed: Minnesota is the synonym for “Gold Metal”
            To: Minnesota is the synonym for “Gold Medal”

  pg 6 Changed: To the unitiated it might seem
            To: To the uninitiated it might seem

  pg 12 Changed: the towering snow-capped mountins
             To: the towering snow-capped mountains

  pg 14 Changed: try the water as it somes fresh
             To: try the water as it comes fresh

  pg 15 Changed: southern part of the valley, and also Bakerfield.
             To: southern part of the valley, and also Bakersfield.

  pg 16 Changed: largest ferry boat in the forld
             To: largest ferry boat in the world

  pg 16 Changed: We crossed the Sierra Madre over the Tehachepi
             To: We crossed the Sierra Madre over the Tehachapi

  pg 17 Changed: known as the Tehachepi Mountains
             To: known as the Tehachapi Mountains

  pg 17 Changed: fruits and nuts, hay and forage, dairy prducts
             To: fruits and nuts, hay and forage, dairy products

  pg 17 Changed: daily tours to many of the surburban towns
             To: daily tours to many of the suburban towns

  pg 18 Changed: When we were crossing the Techachepi Mountains
             To: When we were crossing the Tehachapi Mountains

  pg 19 Changed: Rodrigeez, Cabrillo, Don Gasper de protola
             To: Rodriguez, Cabrillo, Don Gasper de Portola

  pg 19 Changed: said to have four hundred squire miles
             To: said to have four hundred square miles

  pg 20 Changed: We also pass Stamford University.
             To: We also pass Stanford University.

  pg 21 Changed: public roads in Los Angeles and San Barnardino
             To: public roads in Los Angeles and San Bernardino

  pg 24 Changed: We are in Humbolt County
             To: We are in Humboldt County

  pg 24 Changed: several hundred miles through this tortious
             To: several hundred miles through this tortuous

  pg 26 Changed: The road is tortious,
             To: The road is tortuous,

  pg 27 Changed: Passing Council Bull in Iowa
             To: Passing Council Bluffs in Iowa

  pg 28 Changed: from Spokane to Seattle to San Barnardino
             To: from Spokane to Seattle to San Bernardino

  pg 30 Changed: Dr. Burton is a product of Taladega College
             To: Dr. Burton is a product of Talladega College

  pg 32 Changed: I never say anything finer.
             To: I never saw anything finer.

  pg 32 Changed: has lost one the greatest stars
             To: has lost one of the greatest stars

  pg 32 Changed: but whereever they have had the opportunity
             To: but wherever they have had the opportunity

  pg 33 Changed: After the world war he went to Tusla, Oklahoma
             To: After the world war he went to Tulsa, Oklahoma

  pg 35 Changed: average farmer to take into his parnership
             To: average farmer to take into his partnership

  pg 42 Changed: school poulation is around 10,000
             To: school population is around 10,000

  pg 43 Changed: the main thoroughfares ars so fine
             To: the main thoroughfares are so fine

  pg 48 Changed: there are more manfacturers of furniture
             To: there are more manufacturers of furniture

  pg 48 Changed: college ought to be the certer of all
             To: college ought to be the center of all

  pg 48 Changed: preserve our health by the osmos process
             To: preserve our health by the osmosis process

  pg 50 Changed: school buildings, domitories, teachers’ cottages
             To: school buildings, dormitories, teachers’ cottages

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78199 ***