and I addressed him as "The Rev. Booker T.
Washington." In his reply there was no mention of my addressing him as a
clergyman. But when I had occasion to write to him again, and persisted
in making him a preacher, his second letter brought a postscript: "I
have no claim to 'Rev.'" I knew most of the coloured men who at that
time had become prominent as leaders of their race, but I had not then
known one who was neither a politician nor a preacher; and I had
not heard of the head of an important coloured school who was not
a preacher. "A new kind of man in the coloured world," I said to
myself--"a new kind of man surely if he looks upon his task as an
economic one instead of a theological one." I wrote him an apology for
mistaking him for a preacher.

The first time that I went to Tuskegee I was asked to make an address
to the school on Sunday evening. I sat upon the platform of the large
chapel and looked forth on a thousand coloured faces, and the choir of
a hundred or more behind me sang a familiar religious melody, and the
whole company joined in the chorus with unction. I was the only white
man under the roof, and the scene and the songs made an impression on me
that I shall never forget. Mr. Washington arose and asked them to sing
one after another of the old melodies that I had heard all my life;
but I had never before heard them sung by a thousand voices nor by the
voices of educated Negroes. I had associated them with the Negro of the
past, not with the Negro who was struggling upward. They brought to my
mind the plantation, the cabin, the slave, not the freedman in quest of
education. But on the plantation and in the cabin they had never been
sung as these thousand students sang them. I saw again all the old
plantations that I had ever seen; the whole history of the Negro
ran through my mind; and the inexpressible pathos of his life found
expression in these songs as I had never before felt it.

And the future? These were the ambitious youths of the race, at work
with an earnestness that put to shame the conventional student life of
most educational institutions. Another song rolled up along the
rafters. And as soon as silence came, I found myself in front of this
extraordinary mass of faces, thinking not of them, but of that long and
unhappy chapter in our country's history which followed the one great
structural mistake of the Fathers of the Republic; thinking of the one
continuous great problem that generat