rights and not upon their
duties. He has a hard road to travel anyhow. He is certain to be
treated with much injustice, and although he will encounter among
white men a number who wish to help him upward and onward, he will
encounter only too many who, if they do him no bodily harm, yet show a
brutal lack of consideration for him. Nevertheless his one safety lies
in steadily keeping in view that the law of service is the great law
of life, above all in this Republic, and that no man of color can
benefit either himself or the rest of his race, unless he proves by
his life his adherence to this law. Such a life is not easy for the
White Man, and it is very much less easy for the Black Man; but it is
even more important for the Black Man, and for the Black Man's people,
that he should lead it.

As nearly as any man I have ever met, Booker T. Washington lived up to
Micah's verse, "What more doth the Lord require of thee than to do
Justice and love Mercy and walk humbly with thy God." He did justice
to every man. He did justice to those to whom it was a hard thing to
do justice. He showed mercy; and this meant that he showed mercy not
only to the poor, and to those beneath him, but that he showed mercy
by an understanding of the shortcomings of those who failed to do him
justice, and failed to do his race justice. He always understood and
acted upon the belief that the Black Man could not rise if he so acted
as to incur the enmity and hatred of the White Man; that it was of
prime importance to the well-being of the Black Man to earn the good
will of his white neighbor, and that the bulk of the Black Men who
dwell in the Southern States must realize that the White Men who are
their immediate physical neighbors are beyond all others those whose
good will and respect it is of vital consequence that the Black Men of
the South should secure.

He was never led away, as the educated Negro so often is led away,
into the pursuit of fantastic visions; into the drawing up of plans
fit only for a world of two dimensions. He kept his high ideals,
always; but he never forgot for a moment that he was living in an
actual world of three dimensions, in a world of unpleasant facts,
where those unpleasant facts have to be faced; and he made the best
possible out of a bad situation from which there was no ideal best to
be obtained. And he walked humbly with his God.

To a very extraordinary degree he combined humility and dignity; and I
thi