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IN 1895, fourteen years after the founding of Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington was selected to represent his race at the opening of the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. On this occasion he mounted the platform, to make the first address which any member of his race had ever made before any representative body of Southern men and women, as an obscure but worthy young colored man who had commended himself to a few thinking persons by building up an excellent industrial school for his people. He came off that platform amid scenes of almost hysterical enthusiasm and was thenceforth proclaimed as the leader of his race, the Moses of his people, and one of America's great men.

In this epoch-making speech Booker Washington had presented a solution of an apparently insoluble problem. He had offered a platform upon which, as Clark Howell said in the Atlanta Constitution, "both races, blacks and whites, could stand with full justice to each." In the course of the speech he told this story: "A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal: 'Water, water; we die of thirst!' The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back: 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' A second time the signal, 'Water, water, send us water!' ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered: 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River." He then appealed to his own people to "cast down their buckets where they were" by making friends with their white neighbors in every manly way, by training themselves where they were in agriculture, in mechanics, in commerce, instead of trying to better their condition by migration. And finally to the Southern white people he appealed "to cast down their buckets where they were" by using and training the Negroes whom they knew rather than seeking to import foreign laborers whom they did not know.

When he reached the crux and climax of the speech—the delicate matter of the relations between the races, socially—he held up his right hand with his fingers outstretched and said: "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." At this remark the audience went wild! Ladies stood on their chairs and waved their handkerchiefs, while men threw up their hats, danced, and catcalled. An old ante-bellum Negro, who had been sitting crosslegged in one of the aisles, wept tears of pride and joy as he swayed from side to side. By this statement, with what had led up to it, Booker Washington captured the allegiance of all really representative Southern whites, and by consistently adhering to this position he, in an ever-increasing degree, won and held their allegiance till the end.

Frederick Douglass, the great leader of his race during the closing days of slavery, during the War and the Reconstruction period, had died only a few months before. Everywhere, by leading whites, as well as blacks, Washington was acclaimed as the successor of Douglass—the new leader of the Negro race. One of the first colored men so to acclaim him was Emmett J. Scott, who was then editing a Negro newspaper in Houston, Texas, and little realized that he was to become the most intimate associate of the new leader. In an editorial Mr. Scott said of this address: "Without resort to exaggeration, it is but simple justice to call the address great. It was great! Great, in that it exhibited the speaker's qualities of head and heart; great in that he could and did discriminately recognize conditions as they affect his people, and greater still in the absolute modesty, self-respect, and dignity with which he presented a platform upon which, as Clark Howell, of the Atlanta Constitution says: 'both races, blacks and whites, can stand with full justice to each.'" Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Booker Washington's leadership was that from that time on he never deviated one hair's breadth in word or deed from the platform laid down in this brief address.

It was not to be expected, however, that such a radically new note in Negro leadership could be struck without some discord. As was perfectly natural, some more or less prominent Negroes, whose mental processes followed the lines of cleavage between the races engendered by the embittering experiences of the Reconstruction period, looked with suspicion upon a Negro leader who had won the approbation of the South, of leading white citizens, press, and public. In the days of slavery it was a frequent custom on large plantations to use one of the slaves as a kind of stool pigeon to spy upon the others and report their misdeeds. Naturally such persons were hated and despised and looked upon as traitors to their race. Hence, it came about that the praise of a white man was apt to throw suspicion upon the racial loyalty of a black man. This habit of mind, like all mental habits, long survived the system and circumstances which occasioned it. Therefore, it was inevitable that the fact that the white press throughout the South rang with his praises for days and weeks after the sensationally enthusiastic reception of his speech at the exposition should not be accepted as a desirable endorsement of the new leader by at least a few of his own people.

A more or less conspicuous colored preacher summed up this slight undertow of dissent when he said: "I want to pay my respects next to a colored man. He is a great man, too, but he isn't our Moses, as the white people are pleased to call him. I allude to Booker T. Washington. He has been with the white people so long that he has learned to throw sop with the rest. He made a speech at Atlanta the other day, and the newspapers of all the large cities praised it and called it the greatest speech ever delivered by a colored man. When I heard that, I said: 'There must be something wrong with it, or the white people would not be praising it so.' I got the speech and read it. Then I said, 'Ah, here it is,' and I read his words, 'the colored people do not want social equality.' (This man's interpretation of this sentence in the speech, "The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.") I tell you that is a lie. We do want social equality. Why, don't you want your manhood recognized? Then Mr. Washington said that our emancipation and enfranchisement were untimely and a mistake; that we were not ready for it. (Naturally, Mr. Washington said no such thing.) What did he say that for but to tickle the palates of the white people? Oh, yes, he was shrewd. He will get many hundreds of dollars for his school by it."

Let it not be thought that this attitude represented any large or important body of opinion among the Negroes. The great majority both of the leaders and the rank and file enthusiastically accepted both the new leader and his new kind of leadership. The small minority, however, holding the view of the preacher quoted, continued to cause Booker Washington some annoyance, which, although continuously lessening, persisted in some degree throughout his life. This numerically small and individually unimportant element of the Negroes in America would hardly warrant even passing mention except that the always carping and sometimes bitter criticisms of these persons are apt to confuse the well-wishers of the race who do not understand the situation.

The Negroes holding this point of view are sometimes pleased to refer to themselves as the Talented Tenth. They are largely city dwellers who have had more or less of what they term "higher education"—Latin, Greek, Theology, and the like. A number of these persons make all or a part of their living by publicly bewailing the wrongs and injustices of their race and demanding their redress by immediate means. Mr. Washington's emphasis upon the advantages of Negroes in America and the debt of gratitude which they owe to the whites, who have helped them to make more progress in fifty years than any other race ever made in a like period, is naturally very annoying to this type of person. In spite of their constant abuse of him Mr. Washington some years ago agreed to confer with the leaders of this faction to see if a program could not be devised through which all could work together instead of at cross purposes. In spite of the fact that the chief exponent of this group opened the first meeting with a bitter attack upon Mr. Washington, such a program was adopted, to which, before the conferences were over, all duly and amicably agreed to adhere. Some of the more restless spirits among the leaders of the Talented Tenth soon, however, broke their pledges, repudiated the whole arrangement, and started in as before to denounce Mr. Washington and those who thought and acted with him.

After the Atlanta speech Mr. Washington's task was a dual one. While the active head of his great and rapidly growing institution, he was also the generally accepted leader of his race. It is with his leadership of his race that we are concerned in this chapter. His duties in this capacity were vast and ill defined, and his responsibility exceedingly heavy. He said, himself, that when he first came to be talked of as the leader of his race he was somewhat at a loss to know what was expected of him in that capacity. His tasks in this direction, however, were thrust upon him so thick and fast that he had not long to remain in this state of mind. After the Atlanta speech he was in almost daily contact with what was befalling his people in all parts of the country and to some extent all over the world. Through his press clipping service, supplemented by myriads of letters and personal reports, practically every event of any significance to his race came to his notice. When he heard of rioting, lynching, or serious trouble in any community he sent a message of advice, encouragement, or warning to the leading Negroes of the locality and sometimes to the whites whom he knew to be interested in the welfare of the Negroes. When the trouble was sufficiently serious to warrant it he went in person to the scene. When he heard of a Negro winning a prize at a county fair, or being placed in some position of unusual trust and distinction, he wrote him a letter of congratulation and learned the circumstances so that he might cite the incident by way of encouragement to others.

After the riots in Atlanta, Georgia, some years ago, when infuriated white mobs foiled in their efforts to lynch a Negro murderer, burned, killed, and laid waste right and left in the Negro section of the town, Mr. Washington, who was in the North at the time, boarded the first train for the city, arrived just after the bloody scenes, gathered together his frightened people amid the smoking ruins of their homes, soothed, calmed, and cheered them. He then went to the leading city officials, secured from them a promise of succor for the stricken people and protection against further attack. Next he went to the Governor of the State, secured his sympathy and coöperation, and with him organized a conference of leading State and city officials and other representative men who there and then mapped out a program tending to prevent the recurrence of such race riots—a program which up to the present time has successfully fulfilled its purpose. It is characteristic of Mr. Washington's methods that he turned this disaster into an ultimate blessing for the very community that was afflicted.

Mr. Washington was the kind of leader who kept very close to the plain people. He knew their every-day lives, their weaknesses, their temptations. To use a slang phrase, he knew exactly what they "were up against" whether they lived in country or city. Within a comparatively short period before his death he addressed two audiences as widely separated by distance and environment as the farmers gathered together for the first Negro Fair of southwestern Georgia at Albany, Georgia, and five thousand Negro residents of New York City assembled in the Harlem Casino. He told those Georgia farmers how much land they owned and to what extent it was mortgaged, how much land they leased, how much cotton they raised, and how much of other crops they raised, or, rather, did not raise; how many mules and hogs they owned, and how they could with profit increase their ownership in mules and hogs; he told them how many drug stores, grocery stores, and banks in the State and county were owned by Negroes; and then, switching from the general to the particular, he described the daily life of the ordinary, easy-going tenant farmer of the locality. He pictured what he saw when he came out of his unpainted house in the morning: that gate off the hinges, that broken window-pane with an old coat stuck into it, that cotton planted right up to the doors with no room left for a garden, and no garden; and, worse than all, the uncomfortable knowledge of debts concealed from the hard-working wife and mother. Then he pictured what that same man's place might be and should become.

It was once said of a certain eminent preacher that his logic was on fire. It might be said of Booker Washington that his statistics were on fire. He marshalled them in such a way that they were dynamic and stirring instead of static and paralyzing, as we all know them to our sorrow. It so happened that Mr. Washington had never before been in southwestern Georgia. After his speech one old farmer was heard to say as he shook his head: "I don't understan' it! Booker T. Washington he ain't never ben here befo', yit he knows mo' 'bout dese parts an' mo' 'bout us den what eny of us knows ourselves." This old man did not know that one of Mr. Washington's most painstaking and efficient assistants, Mr. Monroe N. Work, the editor of the Negro Year Book, devoted much of his time to keeping his chief provided with this startlingly accurate information about his people in every section of the United States.

On this occasion there were on the platform with Mr. Washington and the officials of the fair the Mayor of Albany and members of the City Council, while in the audience were several hundred whites on one side of the centre aisle and twice as many blacks on the other. And Mr. Washington would alternately address himself to his white and black audience. He would, for instance, turn to the white men and tell them that he had never known a particularly successful black man who could not trace his original success to the aid or encouragement he had received in one form or another from a white friend. He would tell them that without their assistance his race could never have made more progress in the last fifty years in this country than any similar group of people had ever made in a like period of time. After he had raised the white section of his audience to a high degree of self-congratulatory complaisance he would suddenly shift the tenor of his remarks and ask them why they should mar this splendid record by discriminating against the weaker race in matters of education, by destroying their confidence in the justice of the courts through mob violence, and by the numerous small, mean ways in which race prejudice shows itself and retards and discourages the upward struggle of a weaker people. As he proceeded along these lines one could see the self-congratulatory expression fade from the faces of his white listeners.

He would next turn to his own people and tell them of their phenomenal progress since emancipation and of the great and essential part they had played in the upbuilding of the South—left prostrate by the Civil War. One could see their eager, upturned faces glow with pride and self-satisfaction. But suddenly he would shift the tone of his comments and tell them how sadly those of them who were indolent and shiftless and unreliable and vicious were retarding the upward struggles of the industrious and self-respecting majority and how they were perpetuating the prejudice against the whole race. And as he pictured this seamy side of the situation one could see the glow of pride gradually wilt from the myriads of swarthy upturned faces.

Hardly less successful than his use of statistics was his use of the much-abused funny story. He never told a story, however good, for its own sake. He told it only when it would most effectively drive home whatever point he happened to be making. In this same speech he was saying that a Negro who is lazy and unreliable and does nothing to accumulate property or improve his earning capacity deserves no consideration from whites or blacks and has no right to say that the color line is drawn against him. By way of illustration he told this story: "A shiftless Southern poor white asked a self-respecting old black man for three cents with which to pay his ferry fare across a river. The old black man replied: I's sorry not to commerdate yer, boss, but der fac' is dat a man what ain't got three cents is jest as bad off on one side ob der ribber as der udder.'"

At another point in this speech he was telling his people not to be discouraged because their race has less to point to than other races in the way of past achievements. He said that after all it was the future that was of vital concern and not the past, and that the future was theirs to a peculiar degree because they were a young race. And to illustrate their situation he told of meeting old Aunt Caroline one evening striding along with a basket on her head. He said, "Where are you going, Aunt Caroline?" And she replied: "Lor' bless yer, Mister Washin'ton, I dun bin where I's er goin'." "And so," he concluded, "some of the races of the earth have dun bin where dey was er goin'!" but fortunately the Negro race was not among them.