The Negro Problem is a collection of seven essays by prominent Black American writers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by Booker T. Washington, and published in 1903. It covered such topics as law, education, disenfranchisement, and Black Americans' place in American society.

Like much of Washington's own work, the tone of the book was that Black Americans' status in the U.S. was a matter of personal responsibility, but it also confronted issues of legal and social racism. While this represented the point of view of the authors at the time, some - Du Bois, for example - would later revise their stance to consider the effects of systemic and institutional racism.[citation needed] Washington and Du Bois were again reunited in the 1907 collection, The Negro in the South.

The necessity for the race's learning the difference between being worked and working. He would not confine the Negro to industrial life, but believes that the very best service which any one can render to what is called the "higher education" is to teach the present generation to work and save. This will create the wealth from which alone can come leisure and the opportunity for higher education.

One of the most fundamental and far-reaching deeds that has been accomplished during the last quarter of a century has been that by which the Negro has been helped to find himself and to learn the secrets of civilization--to learn that there are a few simple, cardinal principles upon which a race must start its upward course, unless it would fail, and its last estate be worse than its first.

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