her course will take from one half your citizens
interest in the State, and hope and ambition to become intelligent
producers and taxpayers--to become useful and virtuous citizens. Any
other course will tie the white citizens of Louisiana to a body of
death."

The New Orleans _Times-Democrat_, in its editorial accompanying the
publication of this letter, said: "We have seen the corrupting
influence in our politics and our elections of making fraud an element
of our suffrage system. We are certainly not going to get away from
fraud by encouraging it, or making it a part of the suffrage system we
place in our new constitution." The same editorial further states that
impartiality in the use of the ballot can be given Negro and white man
not only "with the utmost safety," but "it would have a beneficial
effect upon the politics of the State." In fact, the press of both
North and South, both of the whites and the blacks, published this
letter with practically unanimous editorial endorsement, but in spite
of all this the leaders of the convention remained obdurate, the
immediate object was lost, and Louisiana followed the example of
Mississippi and South Carolina. No one realized, however, better than
Booker Washington that the effort was by no means in vain. Owing to
the general awakening of intelligent public opinion the convention
leaders were forced into the position of driving through the
discriminatory amendment not only in the face of the condemnation of
the better element throughout the country but even with the
disapproval of the better and leading citizens of their own State.

Shortly afterward members of the Georgia Legislature, seeking
political preferment for themselves through the familiar means of
anti-Negro agitation, introduced a bill which aimed to discriminate
against the Negroes of Georgia by legislative enactment just as the
Negroes of Louisiana had been discriminated against by a
constitutional amendment. This time Mr. Washington went personally to
Atlanta and appealed directly to a number of the members of the
Legislature and to the editors of the leading papers in opposition to
this bill. In an interview published in the Atlanta _Constitution_ at
the time he said:

"I cannot think that there is any large number of white people in the
South who are so ignorant or so poor that they cannot get education
and property enough to enable them to stand the test by the side of
the Negro in these respects. I