Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/530

 upt him. … A great shout greeted him. He turned his head to avoid the blinding light, and moved about the platform for relief. Then he turned his wonderful countenance to the sun without a blink of the eyelids, and began to talk. …

The sinews stood out on his bronzed neck, and his muscular right arm swung high in the air, with a lead-pencil clasped in the clinched brown fist. His big feet were planted squarely, with the heels together and the toes turned out. His voice rang out clear and true, and he paused impressively as he made each point. Within ten minutes the multitude was in an uproar of enthusiasm—handkerchiefs were waved, canes were flourished, hats were tossed in the air. The fairest women of Georgia stood up and cheered. It was as if the orator had bewitched them.

And when he held his dusky hand high above his head, with the fingers stretched wide apart, and said to the white people of the South on behalf of his race, "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 great wave of sound dashed itself against the walls, and the whole audience was on its feet in a delirium of applause, and I thought at that moment of the night when Henry Grady stood among the curling wreaths of tobacco-smoke in Delmonico's banquet-hall and said, "I am a Cavalier among Roundheads."

I have heard the great orators of many countries, but not even Gladstone himself could have pleaded a cause with more consummate power than did this angular negro, standing in a nimbus of sunshine, surrounded by the men who once fought to keep his race in bondage. …

That speech made Booker Washington famous. It was copied and commented upon in papers all over the United States. It brought him showers of letters, invitations to speak—to write for the magazines. As he says in his recent work, My Larger Education, the sequel to his earlier autobiography, he found himself suddenly and unexpectedly hailed as "the successor to Frederick Douglass," the "Moses" of his race, and so forth. Almost everyone seemed to think that he would now give up his school and go into politics, devote himself, in short, to the profession of a "race leader."

If any such idea entered Booker Washington's head, he never seriously entertained it. He had other and different