"We find that as every year we put into southern community colored men who can start a brickyard, a sawmill, a tin shop, or a printing office, men who produce something that makes the white man partly dependent upon the Negro, instead of all the dependence being on the other side, a change takes place in race relations. Let us go on for a few more years knitting our business and industrial relations into those of the white man, til a black man gets a mortgage on a white man’s house that he can foreclose at will. The white man on whose house that mortgage rests will not try to prevent that Negro from voting when he goes to the polls…. Whether he will or not, a white man respects a Negro who owns a two-story brick house."

Booker T. Washington in The Atlantic Monthly in 1896

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