the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house."[6] “One of the most vital questions that touch our American life is how to bring the strong, wealthy, and learned into helpful contact with the poorest, most ignorant, and humblest, and at the same time make the one appreciate the vitalizing, strengthening influence of the other."[7] “There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all."[8]

[Footnote 1:  See article by Albert Shaw, “Negro Progress on the Tuskegee Plan,” in Review of Reviews, April, 1894.]

[Footnote 2,3:  Speech before N.E.A., in St. Louis, June 30, 1904.]

[Footnote 4:  Speech at Fisk University, 1805.]

[Footnote 5,6,8:  Speech at Atlanta Exposition, September 18, 1895.]

[Footnote 7:  Speech at Harvard University, June 24, 1896.]

The time was ripe for a new leader.  Frederick Douglass had died in February, 1895.  In his later years he had more than once lost hold on the heart of his people, as when he opposed the Negro Exodus or seemed not fully in sympathy with the religious convictions of those who looked to him.  At his passing, however, the race remembered only his early service and his old magnificence, and to a striving people his death seemed to make still darker the gathering gloom.  Coming when he did, Booker T. Washington was thoroughly in line with the materialism of his age; he answered both an economic and an educational crisis.  He also satisfied the South of the new day by what he had to say about social equality.

The story of his work reads like a romance, and he himself has told it better than any one else ever can.  He did not claim the credit for the original idea of industrial education; that he gave to General Armstrong, and it was at Hampton that he himself had been nurtured.  What was needed, however, was for some one to take the Hampton idea down to the cotton belt, interpret the lesson for the men and women digging in the ground, and generally to put the race in line with the country’s industrial development.  This was what Booker T. Washington undertook to do.

He reached Tuskegee early in June, 1881.  July 4 was the date set for the opening of the school in the little shanty and church which had been secured for its accommodation.  On the morning of this day thirty students reported for admission.  The greater number were school-teachers and some were nearly forty years of age.  Just about three months after the opening of the school there was offered for sale an old and abandoned plantation a mile from Tuskegee on which the mansion had been burned.  All told the place seemed to be just the location needed to make the work effective and permanent.  The price asked was five hundred dollars, the owner requiring the immediate payment of two hundred and fifty dollars, the remaining two hundred and fifty to be paid within a year.  In his difficulty Mr. Washington wrote