erected more and more stately edifices; and fraternal organizations constantly increased in membership and wealth.  By 1913 the Odd Fellows numbered very nearly half a million members and owned property worth two and a half million dollars; in 1920 the Dunbar Amusement Corporation of Philadelphia erected a theater costing $400,000; and the foremost business woman of the race in the decade, Mme. C.J.  Walker, on the simple business of toilet articles and hair preparations built up an enterprise of national scope and conducted in accordance with the principles regularly governing great American commercial organizations.  Fifty years after emancipation, moreover, very nearly one-fourth of all the Negroes in the Southern states were living in homes that they themselves owned; thus 430,449 of 1,917,391 houses occupied in these states were reported in 1910 as owned, and 314,340 were free of all encumbrance.  The percentage of illiteracy decreased from 70 in 1880 to 30.4 in 1910, and movements were under way for the still more rapid spread of elementary knowledge.  Excellent high schools, such as those in St. Louis, Washington, Kansas City (both cities of this name), Louisville, Baltimore, and other cities and towns in the border states and sometimes as far away as Texas, were setting a standard such as was in accord with the best in the country; and in one year, 1917, 455 young people of the race received the degree of bachelor of arts, while throughout the decade different ones received honors and took the highest graduate degrees at the foremost institutions of learning in the country.  Early in the decade the General Education Board began actively to assist in the work of the higher educational institutions, and an outstanding gift was that of half a million dollars to Fisk University in 1920.  Meanwhile, through the National Urban League and hundreds of local clubs and welfare organizations, social betterment went forward, much impetus being given to the work by the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs organized in 1896.

Along with its progress, throughout the decade the race had to meet increasing bitterness and opposition, and this was intensified by the motion picture, “The Birth of a Nation,” built on lines similar to those of The Clansman.  Negro men standing high on civil service lists were sometimes set aside; in 1913 the white railway mail clerks of the South began an open campaign against Negroes in the service in direct violation of the rules; and a little later in the same year segregation in the different departments became notorious.  In 1911 the American Bar Association raised the question of the color-line; and efforts for the restriction of Negroes to certain neighborhoods in different prominent cities sometimes resulted in violence, as in the dynamiting of the homes of Negroes in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1911.  When the Progressive party was organized in 1912 the Negro was given to understand that his support was not sought, and in 1911 a strike of firemen on the Queen and Crescent Railroad was in its main outlines similar to the trouble on the Georgia Railroad two years before.  Meanwhile in the South the race received only 18 per cent of the total expenditures for education, although it constituted more than 30 per cent of the population.