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 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