Booker T. Washington

No enterprise seeking the material, civil, or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success.

As I remember it now, the thing that was uppermost in my mind was the desire to say something that would cement the friendship of the races and bring about hearty cooperation between them.

When I am speaking to an audience, I care little for how what I am saying is going to sound in the newspapers, or to another audience, or to an individual.

It is my aim to reach and talk to the heart of each individual audience, taking it into my confidence very much as I would a person.

I felt a good deal as I suppose a man feels when he is on his way to the gallows.

I was equally determined to be true to the North, as well as to the best element of the white South, in what I had to say.

I was also painfully conscious of the fact that, while I must be true to my own race in my utterances, I had it in my power to make such an ill-timed address as would result in preventing any similar invitation being extended to a black…

I was determined to say nothing that I did not feel from the bottom of my heart to be true and right.

I pity him because I know that he is trying to stop the progress of the world, and because I know that in time the development and the ceaseless advance of humanity will make him ashamed of his weak and narrow position.

I know that the one who makes this mistake does so because of his own lack of opportunity for the highest kind of growth.

Now, whenever I hear any one advocating measures that are meant to curtail the development of another, I pity the individual who would do this.

In this address I said that the whole future of the Negro rested largely upon the question as to whether or not he should make himself, through his skill, intelligence, and character, of such undeniable value to the community in which he…