  Cooper offers an array of statistics on Black schools (including early childhood developments, colleges, and universities), teachers, ministers, and other professionals (e.g. doctors and lawyers) to make the case for the “unassisted effort of the colored people for self-development” (VAJC, 169). She also provides statistics on the high mortality rates, the economic disempowerment of share cropping systems, and the limited housing opportunities among Black Americans. Cooper describes the white labor unions of the North as tyrannical insofar as their working conditions are far more preferable to those of Black men working for fifty cents per day in the fields and “the pinched and down-trodden colored women bending over wash-tubs and ironing boards—with children to feed and house rent to pay, wood to buy, soap and starch to  furnish—lugging home weekly great baskets of clothes for  families who pay them for a month’s laundrying barely enough to purchase a substantial pair of shoes” (VAJC, 173). Cooper critiques labor unions when she describes “foreigners” and “immigrant laborers, who cannot even speak English” threatening to “cut off the nerve and paralyze the progress of an industry that gives work to an American-born citizen” (VAJC, 173–174).