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 to General J.F.B. Marshall,
treasurer of Hampton Institute, placing the matter before him and asking
for the loan of two hundred and fifty dollar