Note (return) — Chapter XV

The message that Dr. Washington thus enunciated he had already given in substance the previous spring in an address at Fisk University, and even before then his work at Tuskegee Institute had attracted attention.207 The Atlanta Exposition simply gave him the great occasion that he needed; and he was now to proclaim the new word throughout the length and breadth of the land. Among the hundreds of addresses that he afterwards delivered, especially important were those at Harvard University in 1896, at the Chicago Peace Jubilee in 1898, and before the National Education Association in St. Louis in 1904. Again and again in these speeches one comes upon such striking sentences as the following: "Freedom can never be given. It must be purchased."208 "The race, like the individual, that makes itself indispensable, has solved most of its problems."209 "As a race there are two things we must learn to do—one is to put brains into the common occupations of life, and the other is to dignify common labor."210 "Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the State Legislature was worth more than real estate or industrial skill."211 "The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house."212 "One of the most vital questions that touch our American life is how to bring the strong, wealthy, and learned into helpful contact with the poorest, most ignorant, and humblest, and at the same time make the one appreciate the vitalizing, strengthening influence of the other."213 "There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all."214