Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/523

 slave, is now counted among twenty or thirty of the world's most valued citizens.

This is the more remarkable and the more significant because, starting thus at the bottom, at the very lowest round of the ladder, he has reached this eminence simply as a private citizen. Booker Washington never held a public office, never was a soldier, and never led a forlorn hope to glorious victory. He has, on the contrary, been all his life merely a negro schoolmaster, the eloquent preacher of what was for many years an unpopular educational doctrine; and he is to-day the most conspicuous member and leader of a struggling and unpopular race.

This is the day of the schoolmaster. At no time in the history of the world has the school held a more important place in society; nevertheless it is safe to say that few single institutions have been more important than the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, the school founded by Booker T. Washington some thirty years ago, in the Black Belt of Alabama, a region in which black people outnumber the whites five to one. Tuskegee, however, has had the advantage of beginning its work soon after the rise of a great social problem which has given practical aim and effect to all that it has done or attempted to do.

Some years ago I had an opportunity to hear Booker Washington tell his own story under circumstances of exceptional interest. He had been invited to speak at the Virginia State Fair at Roanoke, Va. Hale's Ford, where he was born, is about thirty miles away. The day following the address, we started with a party of friends to visit the old plantation, which Dr. Washington had not seen since, shortly after the War, he crossed the mountains with his mother, and went into West Virginia to join his step-father who had found work at the Salt Works at Maiden, near Charleston, West Virginia.

The visit to the old Burroughs homestead meant a long and tedious journey across the mountains, through what before the Civil War had been a region of flourishing plantations, now long since deserted. The negroes had left the country