The Elevator

The Elevator and the Pacific Coast Business Agency would advise all persons of color, both men and women, who are willing to work for good, fair wages, to come to 909 Seventh street, Oakland, or 622 Clay street, San Francisco. We can always supply good help with situations.

In your issue of August 25 is a communication from Good Hope, W. Va. I wish to reproduce the latter part of it, and show how nearly it applies to us:

"Our most dangerous enemies are among ourselves. There are, much to our sorrow, persons among us who will revile their own brothers, and at a midnight hour will plan and execute the destruction of their own brothers, to the infinite delight, and in accordance perhaps with a premeditation, of our brother in white."

"God speed the day when our short-sighted brothers may be awakened by education to a sense of their duty to aid the race in fully meriting the honor which they now merit only in part."

I wish to show the truth of the above by stating what happened here at home. For a time there was a white barber who shaved the colored boys, as none of the colored barbers had backbone enough to do it; but for some reason this barber stopped shaving the boys, and told them so in plain language. Then they had to go to San Francisco to get a hair-cut or shave. Just at this time, William Towne, Jr., a young man who was raised here in Oakland, threw open his doors to the public and freed the poor fellows from the necessity of going to San Francisco. The white barber, finding that he had lost a good thing, re-opened his place, and the ungrateful fellows left the man who did them the favor and returned to the man who insulted and turned them from his door. I hold that the colored men of Oakland are under as great an obligation to William Towne, Jr., as they are to the Republican party, and they claim to be under a lifelong obligation to it. When a black man wanted to get his hair cut he would have to lose a half day and spend seventy-five cents, and now these same men will go past the man's door who made it possible for them to be men at home.

W. F. D.