The larger number of the negro farmers are tenants on shares or metayers.  They work the land on their own responsibility, and this degree of independence appeals to them.  They pay a stipulated portion of the crop as rent.  If they possess some capital and the rental is fair, this arrangement proves satisfactory.  But as very few negro metayers possess the needed capital, they resort to a system of crop-lienage under which a local retail merchant advances the necessary supplies and obtains a mortgage on the prospective crop.  Many negro farmers, however, have achieved the independence of cash renters, assuming complete control of their crops and the disposition of their time.  And finally, 241,000 negro farmers are landowners.[14] By 1910 nearly 900,000 negroes had achieved some degree of rural economic stability.

The negro has not been so fortunate in his attempts to make a place for himself in the industrial world.  The drift to the cities began soon after emancipation.  During the first decade, the dissatisfaction with the landlordism which then prevailed, seconded by the demand for unskilled labor in the rapidly growing cities, drew the negroes from the land in such considerable numbers that the landowners were induced to make more liberal terms to keep the laborers on their farms.  While there has been a large increase in the number of negroes engaged in agriculture, there has at the same time been a very marked current from the smaller communities to the new industrial cities of the South and to some of the manufacturing centers of the North.  In recent years there have been wholesale importations of negro laborers into many Northern cities and towns, sometimes as strike breakers but more frequently to supply the urgent demand for unskilled labor.  Many of the smaller manufacturing towns of New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Indiana are accumulating a negro population.

Very few of these industrial negroes, however, are skilled workers.  They toil rather as ordinary day laborers, porters, stevedores, teamsters, and domestics.  There has been a great deal written of the decline of the negro artisan.  Walter F. Willcox, the eminent statistician, after a careful study of the facts concludes that economically “the negro as a race is losing ground, is being confined more and more to the inferior and less remunerative occupations, and is not sharing proportionately to his numbers in the prosperity of the country as a whole or of the section in which he mainly lives.”

It appears, therefore, that the pathway of emancipation has not led the negro out of the ranks of humble toil and into racial equality.  In order to equip him more effectively for a place in the world, industrial schools have been established, among which the most noted is the Tuskegee Institute.  Its founder, Booker T. Washington, advised his fellow negroes to yield quietly to the political and social distinctions raised against them and to perfect themselves in handicrafts