The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.6, page 78, Mar. 1901, U. of Illinois Press

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The 1300KER T. WASHINGTON Papers and by its students and teachers instead of, as is too often the case, by those who are in the penitentiaries and idle on the street corners. Other races are judged by their best. Why not the negro? Unless one has given some consideration to the subject he will be surprised to learn how widely the colored people have gone into business. There were present at the meeting in Boston the representative of a colored cotton factory, a bank president, the president of a negro coal mine, grocers, real-estate dealers, the owner of a fourstory brick storage warehouse and the proprietor of a trucking business operating forty teams, dry-goods dealers, druggists, tailors, butchers, barbers, undertakers, the owner of a steam carpetcleaning business, manufacturers of brooms, tinware and metal goods, hair goods, etc., a florist, printers and publishers, insurance agents, caterers, restaurant keepers, general merchants, contractors and builders, the owner and proprietor of a brick yard (in North Carolina) which turns out several million bricks a year, and in fact representatives of almost every industry which can be suggested. Two men who were present at the conference were the mayor of negro towns which they have built up in the South. Orate of these men, Mr. Isaiah T. Montgomery, was once a slave of Jefferson Davis.t Fifteen years ago he began to colonize a tract of land in the valley of the Yazoo River, in Mississippi. Colored people.now own ~~,ooo acres there. In the town of Mound Bayou, which is the nucleus of the settlement, Mr. Montgomery said there are ten stores and shops owned by colored people, doing a business of at least $~o,ooo a year. Mr. 3. C. Leftwich, of Alabama, owns over a thousand acres of land not far from Montgomery, where he is building up a town which he has named ''Klondike.'' All the business is in the hands of colored people, even the postmaster being a colored man. Three of the best addresses were made by women, one of them, Mrs. A. M. Smith,2 the president of a colored business woman's club and employment agency in Chicago; one by Mrs. A. Thornton,3 a dermatologist, of Cincinnati, and one by Mrs. A. A. Casneau,4 a dressmaker, of Boston. The last named woman is the author of a book upon dressmaking which has been quite widely used. She told of an interesting experience with a white woman who came to Boston to take some additional lessons from her, suggested from the book, and who did not know that the woman she 78