More grave than anything else was the formal denial of the Negro’s political rights.  As we have seen, South Carolina in 1895 followed Mississippi in the disfranchising program and within the next fifteen years most of the other Southern states did likewise.  With the Negro thus deprived of any genuine political voice, all sorts of social and economic injustice found greater license.

2. Industrial Education:  Booker T. Washington

Such were the tendencies of life in the South as affecting the Negro thirty years after emancipation.  In September, 1895, a rising educator of the race attracted national attention by a remarkable speech that he made at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta.  Said Booker T. Washington:  “To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man who is their next door neighbor, I would say, ’Cast down your bucket where you are’—­cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded....  To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’  Cast it down among 8,000,000 Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your fire-sides....  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.”

The message that Dr. Washington thus enunciated he had already given in substance the previous spring in an address at Fisk University, and even before then his work at Tuskegee Institute had attracted attention.[1] The Atlanta Exposition simply gave him the great occasion that he needed; and he was now to proclaim the new word throughout the length and breadth of the land.  Among the hundreds of addresses that he afterwards delivered, especially important were those at Harvard University in 1896, at the Chicago Peace Jubilee in 1898, and before the National Education Association in St. Louis in 1904.  Again and again in these speeches one comes upon such striking sentences as the following:  “Freedom can never be given.  It must be purchased."[2] “The race, like the individual, that makes itself indispensable, has solved most of its problems."[3] “As a race there are two things we must learn to do—­one is to put brains into the common occupations of life, and the other is to dignify common labor."[4] “Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the State Legislature was worth more than real estate or industrial skill."[5] “The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than