Let me plead with the friends of the negro.  Please continue to give him higher ideals of a better life and stand by him in the struggle.  He has done well with the opportunities given him and is doing something along all the walks of life to help himself, which is gratitude of the best sort.  What he needs to-day is moral sympathy, which in his condition years ago he could hardly appreciate.  The sympathy must be moral, not necessarily social.  It must be the sympathy of a soul set on fire for righteousness and fair play in a republic like ours.  A sympathy which will see to it that every man shall have a man’s chance in all the affairs of this great nation which boasts of being the land of the free and the home of the brave for which the black man has suffered and done so much in every sense of the word.

Let this great Christian nation of eighty millions of people do justice to the Black Battalion, and seeing President Roosevelt acknowledges that he overstepped the bounds of his power in discharging and renouncing them before they had a fair trial, and now that they are vindicated before the world, to take back what he called them, Cutthroats, Brutal Murderers, Black Midnight Assassins, and Cowards.  This and this alone will to some extent atone for the wrong he has done and help him to regain the respect and confidence of the world.

Now in order to change the condition of things, I would suggest:  First, that an international, industrial association be formed to help Afro-Americans to engage in manufacturing and commercial pursuits, assist them to buy farms, erect factories, open shops in which their young men and women can enter and produce what the world requires every day for its inhabitants.

If they were able to-day to produce the articles in common use as boots, shoes, hats, cotton and woolen goods, made-up clothing and enterprises such as farming, mining, forging, carpentering, etc., negroes would find a ready sale in preference to all others, because of its being a race enterprise, doing what no other corporation does, giving employment to members of the race as tradesmen, and teaching others to become skilled workers.  These enterprises should be started in the southern, northern and western states, where the negro population will warrant such an undertaking.

I would suggest “A School History of the Negro Race” to be placed in our public schools as a text book.  The general tone of all the histories taught in our public schools points to the inferiority of the negro and the superiority of the white.  It must be indeed a stimulus to any people to be able to refer to their ancestry as distinguished in deeds of valor, and particularly so to the colored people.  With what eyes can the white child look upon the colored child and the colored child look upon himself, when they have completed the assigned course of United States history, and in it found not one word of credit, not one word of favorable comment for even one among