“The propriety of inviting a representative of the Negro race to participate in the opening exercises was fully discussed a month ago, when the opening program was being arranged. Some opposition was manifested on account of the fear that public sentiment was not prepared for such an advanced step. The invitation, however, was extended by a vote of the Board of Directors, and the cordial greeting which the audience gave Washington’s address shows that the board made no mistake. There was not a line in the address which would have been changed by the most sensitive of those who thought the invitation to be imprudent. The whole speech is a platform on which the whites and the blacks can stand with full justice to each race.
“The speech is a full vindication from the mouth of a representative Negro of the doctrine so eloquently advanced by Grady and those who have agreed with him that it is to the South that the Negro must turn for his best friend, and that his welfare is so closely identified with the progress of the white people of the South that each race is mutually dependent upon the other, and that the so-called ‘race problem’ must be solved in the development of the natural relations growing out of the association between the whites and blacks of the South.
“The question of social equality is eliminated as a factor in the development of the problem, and the situation is aptly expressed by Washington in the statement that ‘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 speech will do good, and the unanimous approval with which it has been received demonstrates the fact that it has already done good.
Clark Howell,
Editor of the ‘Constitution.’”
The Boston Transcript’s editorial was as follows:
“The speech of Mr. Washington at the Atlanta Exposition this week seems to have dwarfed all the other proceedings and the exhibition itself. The crowd that listened to it were carried away with enthusiasm, and the sensation it has caused in the press has rarely been equaled. The Southern papers themselves pronounce it epoch-making, and call it the beginning of the end of the war between the races. All this is no great surprise to those who have kept themselves informed upon the development of industrial and other education for Negroes in the Negro-populated districts of the country. Intelligent and sympathetic observers have long been aware that it was through the silent and serious and steady work of the school for the Negroes that the solution of the race problem was coming, and not through the passions of politics, stirred and kept hot by tricky professional party managers for use in presidential elections. Mr. Washington is no different from what he has been: he is saying no more than he and his backers have been saying for years. But he is a great revelation to those who have hitherto regarded the Negro question as one simply calling for slang-whanging partisan and sectional abuse instead of philosophy, patience and study.”
The editor of the Texas Freeman wrote as follows:
“The address made by Booker T. Washington, Principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, at the formal opening of the Cotton States and International Exposition, stamps him as a most worthy representative of a large part of the country’s citizenship. Without resort to hyperbolic exaggeration, it is but simple justice to call the address great. It was great. Great, in that it exhibited the speaker’s qualities of head and heart; great, that he could and did discriminatingly recognize conditions as they affected his people, and greater still in the absolute modesty, self-respect and dignity with which he presented a platform upon which Clark Howell, of the Atlanta Constitution, says, ‘both races, blacks and whites, can stand with full justice to each.’ No better selection, among the whole number of the race’s most prominent men, could have been made than Prof. Washington.”
The Richmond Planet delivered itself as follows: