Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/531

 plans. As he began to realize the opportunities that this sudden accession of popularity gave him, he determined to use it to carry out the purpose that he had gradually come to regard as his mission: the moral and intellectual emancipation of his race. Lincoln and the war had freed his peoples' bodies, he said, and he wanted to do something that would free their minds.

Perhaps the finest and best comment upon the Atlanta speech was that of Clark Howell, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution who said: "That man's speech is the beginning of a moral revolution in America." But Booker T. Washington is about the last man in America who would deliberately set out to effect a "moral revolution." The expression is too large, too sounding, too abstract. He would not know just what the thing meant. He is too direct and practical. He does not think in those terms. In fact he is not a thinker, in the ordinary sense of the word: he is a worker, a doer, and the marvelous thing about it all is that he almost always does the right things. He has vision, the gift of seeing things clearly and seeing them whole.

And so Booker Washington would never speak of his task, his mission, as that of leading a "moral revolution." He would say that his work was education; that his mission was to change public opinion. He has said that he thinks that the most important achievement of the Tuskegee Institute consists in what it has done, first, to teach his own people the dignity of labor; to inspire them with the faith in themselves and in their future; to make them realize that in the long run their future depends upon what they make of themselves; second, to convince Southern white people that it pays to educate the negro; that, in the long run the health, the prosperity, and the moral welfare of the black man is bound up with that of the white; that it is a mistake to believe that one man's evil can ever be another man's good. As he puts it, "one race can not hold a man down in the gutter without staying down there with him."

On the other hand he has very little confidence in any reforms that are brought about by the mere passage of laws.