DR. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON AN EXAMPLE OF HIGHER CULTURE.
Doctor Booker T. Washington, note the title, is the most influential Negro that the race under freedom has produced. He is the great apostle of industrial training. His great success is but the legitimate outcome of his earnestness and enthusiasm. And yet there is no more striking illustration of the necessity of wise, judicious and cultivated leadership as a means of stimulating the dormant activity of the masses than he who hails from Tuskegee. His success is due wholly to his intellectual and moral faculties. His personal opportunities of association and contact have been equivalent to a liberal education. Two of America’s greatest institutions of learning have fittingly recognized his moral and intellectual worth by decorating him with their highest literary honors. Mr. Washington possesses an enlightened mind to discover the needs of the masses, executive tact to put his plans in effective operation, and persuasive ability to convince others as to the expediency of his policies. He possesses no trade or handicraft, if so he has never let the American people into the secret. Nor can it be easily seen what possible benefit such trade or handicraft would be to him in the work which has fallen to his lot. Tuskegee has been built on intellect and oratory. If Mr. Washington had been born with palsied hands, but endowed with the same intellectual gifts and powers of persuasive speech, Tuskegee would not have suffered one iota by reason of his manual affliction. But, on the other hand, had he come into the world with a sluggish brain and a heavy tongue, whatever cunning and skill his hands might have acquired, he never could have developed the institution which has made him justly famous throughout the civilized world.