The late Booker T. Washington may be considered in four aspects. First there can be no doubt that his chief significance lies in the fact that he cannot be considered simply as an individual but that he is so inextricably woven into the national and even world movements of his day that his death becomes historic. Again, most Colored men in America are simply “Colored.” They are submerged in a great undifferentiated group; they are not considered as individuals but are lumped together as a “race.” Mr. Washington was more than “Colored.” He was an American, and the comments upon his career tend continually to emphasize the fact that such a struggle upward against terrific odds, such indomitable persistence and versatility of expedient was peculiarly American. After Frederick Douglass, Mr. Washington was the next great exemplification and revelation of problems of race and labor in America, so significant as to go to the very core of our democracy; and finally, there is to consider Mr. Washington's own personality: the silent, watchful, cautious man, rugged, nervous, popular but unsocial, slow but tireless.

One must always look upon Mr. Washington's career against that Second Reconstruction beginning late in the 1880s and known usually as the rise of the “New South.” The first attempt at Reconstruction was not a failure because it was impossible or illogical to make good voters of BlackFootnote ¹ men, but simply because the White Southerners would not accept a democracy that included Negroes, and the White North was not disposed to compel them to accept it. There ensued an oligarchy which, like all modern government, turned its attention to an economic solution of its political problem. This economic problem was complicated.

The South had its great staple of raw cotton and its industrial and manufacturing prospects. It needed large amounts of capital because of war's destruction and for new enterprises. It needed labor of two kinds: unskilled farm hands and skilled artisans and factory hands. If it was to attract capital by high profits it must avoid the new Northern labor legislation and keep wages down. But White labor with new political power could not be depended on not to make demands unless held in check by powerful motives. It was a delicate situation. It called first of all for Negroes “in their places”—education without intelligence as far as possible. It called secondly for the disfranchisement of laborers by laborers and this meant the making of the feeling of class difference (in this case race difference) between laborers greater than the feeling of solidarity among laborers—the keynote of the rising labor movement. Finally this class or race hatred of laborers must be held sufficiently in check to avoid lawlessness and bloodshed and thus frighten capital.

The men and measures which visualized the solution of these problems came to be called in the early 1880s the “New South” and they seemed to point a disirable [sic] solution to the impasse reached by North, South, and Negroes after the revolution of 1876.The South demanded the disfranchisement of the Negro; the Negro demanded political and civil rights and the North demanded peace and security for its investments. The North looked on rather helplessly; not the Old North but a New North—a New North which after the spiritual uplift of war and the inevitable reaction and poverty of the ensuing war debt and disorganization had now gathered itself for a tremendous forward industrial development. There was capital to invest and there were trained hands to be busied. There were keen minds to be used. Capital and skill looked toward the South as a place for future industrial development. Naturally the curse of war and slavery, the irritating race problem set [sic] in the way, as those who hurried first into the field soon learned.

The overture for understanding came from the New South and the New South said to the New North: Is it worth while that Colored folks should stand between the reconciliation of brothers or the investment of capital on good return? The New North quickly saw the point but they were held back by the war-born sentiment of justice or at least something that looked like justice toward the freedmen.

Here it was that out of the Negro race itself there came a voicing of the thing that was in the North's mind, namely: Let the Negro become the great efficient laboring force of the South. Let it cease asking for anything more than a fairly definite and protected caste system and let the White South be depended upon to see that this laboring class was not unduly oppressed.

Had this proposition come from the White South it would have had in the North the opposition of all the old abolitionists and all the new doctrinaires. If it had come from the North it would have been a volte-face which even the North itself could not have made with a straight countenance. But it came from a quarter least expected and it was received with enthusiasm. To the abolitionists it appeared as an appeal to the old homely virtues of work and thrift. To the South it appeared as a giving up of the more impossible results of emancipation. To the Northern captains of industry it appealed as the “business man's solution,” and to the laboring man North and South it did not appeal at all but was received in stolid indifference with no apparent dream that the race problem was connected with the labor problem.

The personalities that emerged in this curious and fateful new reviving of thoughts and forces were of great and pressing interest. We may name four as typical: Booker T. Washington, W. H. Baldwin, Jr., Henry Grady and Benjamin Tillman. They were widely separated men, for the most part not acquainted with each other. They perhaps hardly thought of themselves as working at the same great problem, but they were.

In the first place, the very emergence of Mr. Washington as a personality was epoch-making. We think in terms of personality; we rise with great difficulty to group conceptions; what we call our conceptions of race and nationality are in most cases mere heresay, convention, and prejudice. When, therefore, we refuse to know individuals and adopt a convention as typifying a race we are on the most unsubstantial ground. With the Negro race in America it is almost as though we shut all these millions in a box and marked them “Exhibit 1.” We are striving to allow no emergence, no exceptions. They are “Negroes;” they are “The Problem.” We instinctively feel that knowledge of the individuals among them may make our problem so hard to settle and grasp that our ready-made solution will not fit. Yet the essential part of the Negro problem is the beating of wearied spirits against this barrier—this conventionalism of race.

Despite everything then, personalities now and then emerge. This is not an easy thing. How did we get to know men like Roosevelt and Edison? To some extent we actually meet and talk to them, to a still larger extent we talk about them and hear them talked about. We read about them. We get side-lights and anecdotes and gradually there emerges the personality that we know. But seldom if ever do we meet Black folk. Black folk are not pictured in papers and they are not talked about except in bulk. The emergence of personality, therefore, of the Negro race is an unlikely thing attended with great difficulty and often is almost an accident.

Frederick Douglass emerged by the sheer logic of circumstance: He was “the noblest slave that ever God set free.” He was a living example of the evil of slavery, so unanswerable that he caught the imagination of the world. Then came a lull, a sort of troubled lifting of the darkened waters here and there, but so far as the White world was concerned, [there was] no real emergence of a definitely grasped individuality in the Colored race until Mr. Washington came.

Mr. Washington was the man of this group that voiced the compromise offered by the Colored race. He was met more than halfway by the group of Northern people represented by W. H. Baldwin, Jr. Mr. Baldwin knew the South because he had worked there. He knew a certain class of Negro labor for he had “bossed” it. He was an abolitionist by descent and he was firmly convinced that the solution of the problems of the South was to put the White South in power and make the Negro stop complaining and become a docile, laboring class while the White North furnished capital and philanthropic effort.

Henry O. Grady was a leader who preceded both Washington and Baldwin and perhaps knew neither of them; but he was the one who voiced the position of the White South so logically to the new commercial North that they listened to him with increasing pleasure. Especially after Mr. Grady's unusually persuasive speech in Boston before the Merchants' Association in December, 1889, the North was more and more disposed to let the South have its way with the Negro; but it was difficult for the North to say this without appearing to repudiate the Civil War and its results. It was at this critical junction that Mr. Booker T. Washington began to be heard from.

To add Ben Tillman to this quartette may seem illogical but it is not. He is insolubly bound up with them. He is the voice of the militant, protesting White Southern laborer filled with the idea that the only salvation of that class lies in the absolute degradation of their Black competitors. He was uncouth, wild, intemperate and thus served as a counterpoise to the more suave and pleasant and also more far-reaching designs of the White Southern employers. Yet he became the tool, he and his, by which the White South secured a new oligarchy and the disfranchisement and partial peonage of half its laboring force.

We now come to the facts themselves: Here was Booker T. Washington born in that curious and undiscussed Southern way; the unacknowledged son of a prominent White man, allied to the first families of Virginia. His White relatives, it is said, occupied and still occupy high positions; yet this dark waif was left uncared for, unattended, unthought of, to the helpless tutelage of his poor, Black mother. Just as in slavery days White men without thought or twinge sold their own children into slavery so Booker Washington was set adrift into poverty, hunger, ignorance, and suffering. He was eventually fed and educated by that very philanthropy of Northern abolitionists which the South so long reviled and hated.

Mr. Washington started out from Hampton and was soon in the Black Belt to upbuild a school. He had almost no funds from city or state but must secure his money by begging in the North. His path of advance was strait and thorny. He must conciliate his White Southern neighbors or his school could not last. He must appeal to the rich White North or again his school would die. His predecessors in this field had conceived this situation as a complete dilemma and chose sides accordingly. But Mr. Washington, shrewd and watchful, a student of human nature such as the world has seldom seen, saw signs of a change. Understanding was coming between North and South. The North was tiring of its traditional attitude toward the South and it had a strong economic motive for change. Quickly Mr. Washington grasped the new line of advance. Other Colored men before him had seen the way but had not been able to follow it. They had either flattered the South too grossly or yielded too little.

In 1889 (he was then thirty-one years of age) Mr. Washington spoke before the National Education Association at Madison, Wisconsin, and a number of White Southern people present were surprised and interested. They did not have to sit through that uncomfortable quarter of an hour which had usually been their portion when a Colored speaker was and stating his case. On the contrary they felt a certain tinge of shame and self-accusation because they were commended not so much directly as by many most tactful omissions. They began to watch this young man.

In 1893 at the meeting of Christian Workers in Atlanta, Georgia, Mr. Washington made a still stronger impression upon the South. Finally with some misgivings and opposition he was selected by the officials of the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition to represent the Negro race at the opening exercises.

He spoke September 18,1895 before a distinguished, critical, and somewhat uneasy audience. The South had heard many Negro speakers many times but occasion had usually been unofficial or religious. They had listened de haut en bas to apology and evident flattery or passionate denunciation. In a sense for the first time since emancipation the Negro race was officially addressing the South at the South's own invitation. To the surprise of the world Mr. Washington said what the South wanted to hear, but said it with rare tact. Mr. Washington began by thanking the people of the South for what they had done for the Negro in this exposition. He then touched the keynote not only of the exposition but of the growing American thought on the Negro problem: he reminded his listeners of the great service which the Colored people as a working class could do for the South. He said that the Colored race stood willing to do this and he followed with the sentence which made his speech famous: “In all things purely social we can be as separate as the fingers and yet one as the hand in all things essential for mutual progress.”

The sentence seized the imagination of the nation. I was, I remember, at that time, a teacher at Wilberforce University in Ohio and I wrote to the New York AGE, then the leading Colored weekly, commending Mr. Washington's stand and saying, “Have we not here the basis of honorable compromise with the South?” The editor of the AGE, T. Thomas Fortune, said emphatically, “No.” He afterward changed his mind and so did I. I recognized, even then, that the phrase was capable of serious differences of interpretation; but what mere phrase is not? The Colored people could and would say as I said: the fingers of the hand are in pretty close touch with each other and equal in general esteem if not in ability and prominence. Their separation, moreover, while real, is not great enough to preclude them from being one hand.

The South on the other hand could and did put an interpretation on the speech which came seriously to alarm me and all Colored people. The Negro, it said, has come to his senses. He is willing to surrender political and civil rights; he is going uncomplainingly to work and going to give up agitation for impossible things.

The interpretation on the part of the North was even more distressing. The abolitionists grew silent. How could they ask for a people things which the people did not ask for themselves? Moreover, of how much value was the ballot anyway? What had the right to vote accomplished for the masses in New York City and in Boston? The speech agreed with that cold reaction against democracy and its pretentions which swept over us in the 1880s and 1890s. It met that detached, critical attitude which said: in view of the plainly perceptible differences between men what is all this pother about Rights and Law and Uplift? Finally, beneath all this articulate thought swept the great ground-swell of the world-making middle class, looking for investments, looking for industrial peace and seeing in Mr. Washington's speech the shadow of a splendid solution: a docile, laboring class estranged from politics, ready and willing to replace recalcitrant White laborers and a powerful engine against the arrogance of trade unions. Mr. Washington, they said, is a veritable Godsend. We must strengthen his hands, spread his propaganda and build up his school.

What happened? We have only to look at the statute books and court decisions. Before 1890 Negroes were largely disfranchised in the South, often forced to travel in smoking cars and exercised limited civil rights in many other ways. But this caste system was illegal; it was not fixed in custom and varied in time and place. Beginning with 1890 the South attempted to make caste legal—a hard fast and permanent fact. Between 1890 and 1900 “Jim-Crow” railway car laws were passed in six states (Ala., Ky., Ark., Ga., S.C., and N.C.). Disfranchisement laws were passed in three states (Miss., S.C., and La.); restrictions on private Negro schools were laid in Florida and the principal of discrimination in public school facilities was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. In the next decade, 1900 to 1910, not only was nothing accomplished in the courts to stem this tide but more drastic restrictions on Negroes in private schools were made possible by the Supreme Court decision in the Berea College v. Kentucky case, while Kentucky began to separate school funds by race; “Jim-Crow” cars in the South were made universal by the passage of laws in Virginia and Maryland and a new movement put “Jim-Crow” street cars in ten states while disfranchisement laws were passed in four more states (N. C., Ala., Va., and Ga.).

Mr. Washington was not, of course, responsible for this legislation but while it was passing he was industriously preaching to a wider and wider audience the following thesis:

First, he insisted that Negro education had begun at the wrong end, that is, with the college instead of with the industrial school. Secondly, that the Negro should not complain at grievances but should face his opportunities. Thirdly, that the right to vote was of little present importance to the Negro. Fourthly, that even in the matter of “Jim-Crow” legislation it was more important that the Negro should be worthy than that he should complain at the injustice.

This program without doubt clinched Mr. Washington's chances for being leader of the race and this was brought about not by the will or desire of the Colored people but by the overwhelming determination of the White people of the country North and South. With almost unanimous voice the nation said: This is the first man who has voiced a workable program for the coexistence of the White and Black in the South. He must be listened to and followed. Extraordinary opportunities were given to Mr. Washington. Occasions for wide publicity were made. Men of national renown honored him and deferred to him and he became, from 1900 to 1905, perhaps the most widely known single man in America.

During the years from 1895 to 1900 the Negro race sat silent and astonished. Few of the leading Negroes of that time agreed with the “Atlanta Compromise.” They regarded it as a fatal surrender; but on the other hand, they could not help being impressed and profoundly impressed by the sight of a Colored man held in such unprecedented esteem by the mass of the nation; his picture in every paper, his articles in every magazine, his books on every library shelf. Those then who disagreed must become broodingly silent and there came forward a number of newer leaders who either voiced Mr. Washington's doctrine or at least did not publicly oppose it.

Nevertheless, opposition and bitter opposition began to develop among the Northern Negroes who had long been used to outspoken insistence upon their rights as American citizens. The result was that this opposition gradually centered around a group of young Boston college men who started a paper called the Guardian and began to attack Mr. Washington's doctrines fiercely about 1900. The Guardian voiced uncompromising opposition to Mr. Washington's proposals. The editors accused him of cowardice, they declared that he was selling the birth right of a race for a mess of pottage and that for the sake of advantage to a few students of Tuskegee the greater dues of millions of Colored Americans were being sacrificed. Most Colored people, myself included, thought at first that the stand of the Guardian was too extreme. We believed in the moral earnestness of Mr. Washington and his essential honesty of purpose. We thought he was making a great mistake, but we expected him to retrieve that mistake as soon as he saw whither things were tending. Directly and indirectly we brought to his attention the fact that inaction, silence, and acquiescence on the part of the Colored race in this struggle for citizenship rights was a chance for the worst elements of the South to write caste on the statute books.

Mr. Washington paid no attention to the early opposition in the Colored race. The reason was easy to see. He was talking to White people, not to Negroes. He was receiving large and larger backing from the monied people of the North. He was receiving unusual attention and commendation in the South. Embarked upon his chosen line of action it was practically impossible for him to turn back. Nevertheless the protest of the Negroes began to reach such men as the late William H. Baldwin. They tried to reassure the Colored people and tell them that the whole movement was a strategic one in the ultimate favor of Negroes and that their role at present was to keep quiet and accept the inevitable. I remember being called from Atlanta by Mr. Baldwin ostensibly to address a conference on the condition of Negroes in New York but in reality to sit up over half the night discussing the Tuskegee plan. Mr. Baldwin was very anxious that I should go to Tuskegee and help Mr. Washington organize the school. Before this I had been called in consultation by the authorities at Hampton and in conjunction with the present ambassador of England, the late Bishop of Rhode Island, and several other men, discussed a race magazine. Doubts, however, eventually arose in the minds of these persons as to how far I was going to follow the Hampton attitude and I very soon put their doubts to rest. Mr. Washington joined Mr. Baldwin in urging me to come to Tuskegee. I was, however, by this time convinced that things were going wrong and that it was my duty to join in protest. I therefore, included in my book, the Souls of Black Folk, published early in 1903, a criticism of Mr. Washington's attitude and work. Read today that protest seems exceedingly mild and in good temper. One can hardly realize how much indignation it aroused when published. But when this mild protest aroused indignation, what was the attitude of the country when a few months later Mr. Washington was the center of such an uproar of protest in a Colored Boston church that the incident has been denominated the “Boston Riot!” This disturbance was in reality an attempt led by the editors of the Guardian to make Mr. Washington state his position on several moot questions. Mr. Washington was in a peculiar sense the responsible minister of the American Negro at the court of White public opinion. The Boston group demanded the right to interpellate him, to insist that he state unequivocably his attitude toward disfranchisement and “Jim-Crow” cars.

The attempt was irregular and extra-legal but it was not unjust or unreasonable. Mr. Washington, however, either entirely mistook the nature of the demand or determined to ignore it. His friends had policemen on hand and no sooner had the hecklers risen to their feet than they were arrested. A great uproar ensued and the incident gained wide publicity.

I was not present at this meeting, had not the slightest knowledge that it was going to occur, and only knew of it from the newspapers. Nevertheless, as was natural under the circumstances, I came in for a great deal of blame and responsibility as being the one who had already criticized Mr. Washington. What Mr. Trotter and his colleagues in the so-called “Boston Riot” were trying to do was to make a responsible minister, in the English sense of the term, answer his constituents from the Front Bench. What they were accused of doing was creating a riot and trying to do bodily injury to the foremost man of their race. The anger of White America blazed against them and Mr. Trotter was unceremoniously thrown into jail and made to serve a thirty days' sentence.

Nevertheless Mr. Trotter's object was curiously accomplished. The American people were violently awakened to the fact that all Colored America did not agree with Mr. Washington, that there was another side. New too within the ranks of the Colored race there was a feeling that Mr. Trotter was suffering martyrdom and that the principle of reasonable speech on the part of Colored men was being unfairly attacked. I myself felt this very strongly. I did not agree with Mr. Trotter at the time and would not have joined him in his attempt to make Mr. Washington answer. But after it was done I recognized that his motives were high and his object correct, and that in some way the Colored people must arise and assert their just indignation against the program which the White people were demanding that the Colored people assent to.

The “Boston Riot” awoke Mr. Washington's White friends to action. They determined that he must persuade the mass of conservative Colored opinion to accept his program. Efforts were immediately made to seek to get hold of a number of the more conservative Colored leaders and keep them from falling into the hands of the radicals. With a little more thoughtfulness and diplomacy this movement might have succeeded; but American White men, in dealing with Colored men, are not usually thoughtful and do not take into account natural and human feelings. Thus while pleasant words were being passed the “Ogden Movement” about this time was yielding to the South, laying less stress upon Negro schools and practically accepting the dictum “Educate the Whites first.” Many were withdrawing from the support of Negro colleges and Colored men of influence were being asked rather peremptorily to support Mr. Washington. I was soon invited by Mr. Washington to help him select about fifty Colored men throughout the United States who should meet together and come to an understanding. The Boston radicals were left out but otherwise there have probably been few meetings in modern times which so well represented the Colored race as the meeting at Carnegie Hall, New York in 1904.

Compromise and soothing were in the air but I did not believe in further compromise. Andrew Carnegie, Lyman Abbot, Carl Schurs and other distinguished men addressed us and praised Mr. Washington and his program without stint. The more they talked the more we of the more radical group felt that we were being pushed willy-nilly in the support of Mr. Washington. My own speech was unbending. Straight to Mr. Washington's face I told him the indictment against him, the things that we would accept and the things that we would not accept.

I proposed finally a Committee of Twelve as a sort of steering committee for the Colored race in America, to be elected and financed by the Negroes. Mr. Washington and his friends apparently assented. The committee was to be nominated by Mr. Washington, Mr. Hugh Brown and myself. When, a month later, I reached New York to help in the naming of the committee I found that Mr. Washington and Mr. Brown had already practically appointed it; that it was to be supported from funds from some unknown source in Mr. Washington's hands; that Mr. Washington had been made chairman of a small executive committee of five which he absolutely dominated. I immediately resigned. Evidently Mr. Washington's friends had no notion of allowing the Colored people to have any real voice in the conduct of Negro propaganda. They wished the Negroes passively to follow a prepared program of which Mr. Washington was to be more and more the mouthpiece and personification.

Thus by 1905, to upwards of 90,000,000 people and largely to the rest of the world, Mr. Washington was the one person to be consulted concerning the Negro problems in America and race problems everywhere. He was a sort of clearing house for information, speaking to the White people concerning Colored folk and speaking to Colored people concerning White folk. From 1905 to 1911 he was the chief political advisor on racial appointments to Presidents of the United States and to state officials. He was the recognized leader in Negro industrial development. He was the treasurer of funds, temporary and permanent, set aside by philanthropists for the help of the Negro race; he was the voice and visible representative of the Colored people.

This was an impossible assumption of power. No one voice ever did or ever can speak for ten million. This is not democracy, it is tyranny and even granted a large measure of right in the tyrants' dicta, the situation is intolerable and full of danger. With such thoughts before me I sent out letters to a number of Colored friends. In 1905 twenty-nine of us met at Niagara Falls and formed the “Niagara Movement.”

We set forth a strong perhaps even bitter indictment of what we called the policy of compromise and surrender and began a campaign of agitation. Mr. Washington's friends became equally bitter. The Whites conceived that we were a set of jealous sore heads envious of a great man and that no understanding with us was possible. They proceeded to organize a campaign completely to crush us. We were pictured as agitators and jail birds ashamed of our race and anxious to marry White women. By various methods, some legitimate and some not, the support of the great majority of the Colored weeklies was secured. Mr. Washington's wide personal acquaintance and influence enabled him to put serious pressure to bear upon Colored men in all parts of the country. For a while it became a serious matter for any Colored man to criticize Mr. Washington in any way. To this from 1905 to 1911 was added additional influence which Mr. Washington gained from being the political referee, so far as Colored appointments was concerned, and even White appointments in the South, through three presidential administrations. It was one of the most critical periods in the history of the Negro race and probably never before has that race in America seen so much personal bitterness and dissension within its ranks.

About 1910 there came a change. First of all Mr. Washington must have realized where his propaganda was failing. Evidently the South was using his words to forward its anti-Negro bias. Having accomplished the disfranchisement program it was sweeping on to demand the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment and other extravagances.

The opposition to Mr. Washington within his race, furnished with this fuel, gathered strength. Mr. Washington and his White advisors saw that some concession to Colored opinion must be made. Mr. Washington began to address Colored audiences more frequently and to explain himself at length. He accepted positions on the trustee boards of two Colored colleges and openly declared his advocacy of higher education with some limitations. He admitted that attention could not be wholly withdrawn from the right of suffrage and civil rights and he began gradually to voice the just grounds of complaint which the Colored people have against Whites for their treatment.

On the other hand Mr. Washington's opponents also began to see light. They realized that his strong insistence upon work and saving was bearing fruit in the keeping up of the courage of the race, the rapid accumulation of Negro property and the turning of Colored men towards the trades and business. Of course, it would be too much to say that any final agreement was reached between the two parties. To the last Mr. Washington's opponents maintained that he never adequately explained or withdrew his very damaging attacks upon the Negro colleges or his slurring of the right to vote. Mr. Washington's friends too always felt in a certain sense of personal injury and dissatisfaction at the severe attacks long made on their leader.

Thus matters stood when Booker T. Washington died. The personal bitterness within the race had died down considerably but still smoldered. The Black world joined the White in acknowledging the great work which this man did in establishing a great school, spreading counsels of thrift and establishing a channel of communication between White and Black in the South. Through this channel there has without doubt come a new figure on the field—a Third Southerner as distinguished from the old master class, and the Tillman-Vardaman type of radical: He asks for justice to Negroes; not complete and ungrudging in all cases but so far beyond anything heretofore heard in the White South that he is being viewedFootnote ² with both jealous suspicion and lively hope.

Looking back over these twenty years of controversy what can either side point to in justification of its contentions? First of all both sides must grant each other essential honesty of purpose. The Washington propaganda was not all compromise and cowardice, the opposition was not all envy and moonshine. On the other hand both sides could not be wholly right and supplementary in their efforts. The Tuskegee plan has given peace with lynchings, and dividends with caste. It has allowed oligarchy and rotten boroughs to become firmly established in the South; but at the same time it has enabled Negroes to find steady employment, accumulate property rapidly, and be fairly well contented as a mass. The opposition can be blamed for bitterness, friction, and cross purposes within and without the Negro group, but it has kept the ideal of a real democracy in America which should include Black men, before the country; and held it there so persistently that not even the most optimistic Bourbon believes that the American Negro is ever going permanently to accept caste. The real question is then this: Would a firmer attitude on the part of Mr. Washington and his friends have held back the excesses of Southern caste legislation, or would larger acquiescence and silence on the part of the Negro have brought his real emancipation nearer? The answer to the latter question must be No; can the answer to the former be less than Yes? For remember that the cost of caste is the deep hatred of the Black and White laboring group in the South. This hatred means child labor, low wage, the exploitation of girlhood and motherhood, the hindering of uplift work, and the choking of democracy as a means of giving the poor and oppressed a chance to have their voice heard in government, and—lynching. This is a heavy cost—how heavy this generation may never know, but the next will.

Meantime, the thinking mass of American Negroes suffer no illusions. Despite the most optimistic judgment of Mr. Washington's work they are disfranchised, insulted by caste, and facing a more implacable race hatred than ever before in this land. Out of this slough of despond they must fight their weary way. One star of hope guides them: their upward path is the path of all civilization. They stand for Peace, Democracy among races as well as nations and individuals, the economic Equality of the Sexes and the abolition of Poverty through the stopping of the ruthless exploitation of undeveloped darker races by rapacious Whites. Unless human culture turns permanently backward this program must eventually win.

It was not more than two months before the end. Booker T. Washington was already beneath the shadow of death. He had hired his Pullman berth from Chicago to Montgomery and was riding during the day alone in his section. A White man and his wife entered. They had seats for a day ride and the seats were in Mr. Washington's section. The man glared at him. He announced to the conductor and to the public that he did not propose “to sit with a nigger.” The conductor shrugged his shoulders and made off. It was the only space left. Mr. Washington got up slowly and went forward to the empty dining car and out there among the dishevelled tables, at mealtime he went out and stood in the vestibule.

I can see the shadow of a certain fineness in this action. To us Black folk it is a common experience. If there is a Colored man in America who has not more than once thus crawled that his children might walk I have yet to know him. Certainly I have. And yet this method has limits and distinct limits. Beyond a certain point it is not Sacrifice. It is Injustice. It is injustice to humanity. It is injustice to the American people. It is double injustice to the poor, misguided American who was trying to be “White” by insulting a “nigger.” If the Colored world is going to make a practise [sic] of supinely letting the White world walk thus on its face, all the world White and Black must suffer and suffer horribly. There is a point where such a sacrifice becomes cowardice; where meek submission becomes crime; and while no man may idly and easily draw metes and bounds for other souls, yet this incident throws curious and revealing light on the controversy which may always envelope the meaning of Booker T. Washington to America.