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.