it was scarcely surprising that the speech was generally accepted in the South as a renunciation of all hopes of social equality, and an acceptance of a position for the Negro very near to that which Calhoun had assigned to him—“the best substratum of population in the world” for it would be one—“upon which great and flourishing commonwealths could be most easily and safely reared.”
What fault then could the superficial Southern thinker find with such a policy? It certainly fitted very admirably with that which Senator Butler had declared some five years previously it was “not a common thing to hear men say,” viz., the Negroes make “a good peasant class.”
It is true the Senator had warned his fellow countrymen “that there is no such thing as a peasant class under our form of government”; but Washington’s remarks were so much more soothing to the South than Butler’s warning, that the average Southern man put away from his contemplation the possibilities dormant in the great mass of Negroes packed in the South.
And if the Southern man is willing to chance these possibilities, what reasonable being can blame the more sensibly sectional Northern man, for his cheerful readiness to finance the experiment?
That, in turning the attention of the race to manual and industrial training, Washington performed a great work is not to be denied. That, in influencing many of his people to follow him in such a program, he has raised the ambition of not a few to a much higher plane than the race had shown itself heretofore capable of, must be admitted, and these are great achievements. But it is an error to imagine that Washington ever made for himself or his race any renunciation of the aspiration for social equality. He condemned the agitation, not the aspiration for it. In the opinion of Dr. Washington, “color prejudice” was incompatible with true greatness of soul, and the highest praise he could bestow upon a man was that he was destitute of “color prejudice.”
Writing of President Cleveland, he said:
“Judging from my personal acquaintance with Mr. Cleveland, I do not believe he is conscious of possessing any color prejudice. He is too great for that. In my contact with people, I find that as a rule, it is only little, narrow people, who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open their souls in a way to permit them to come in contact with other souls—with the great outside world. No man whose vision is bounded by color can come in contact with what is highest and best in the world. In meeting men in many places, I have found that the happiest people are those who do the most for others; the most miserable are those who do the least. I have also found that few things, if any, are capable of making one so blind and narrow as race prejudice.”[254]
Although of very different temperaments, between the two colored men Booker T. Washington and T. Thomas Fortune, there seemed to be quite a sympathy. Washington in his autobiography avers it:
“In the summer of 1900, with the assistance of such prominent colored men as T. Thomas Fortune, who has always upheld my hands in every effort, I organized the National Negro Business League.”[255]
T. Thomas Fortune is a man of education and ability. As the editor for many years of the leading colored paper in the United States, its columns indicated that he certainly upheld the hands of Dr. Washington. Indeed he did not hesitate to belabor without stint the heads of such colored detractors of Dr. Washington as Monroe Trotter of Boston and others, even administering a rap or two to Professor W. E. Burghardt DuBois, when the latter failed to keep step with the Washington procession. But T. Thomas Fortune was of too independent a nature to be restrained from the expression of his own view, and shortly before his surrender of his position as editor of “The Age”, he published the following declaration: