The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.13, page xxii, in Introduction, U. of Illinois Press

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l-the BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Papers nesses serving the needs of black customers in the growing urban ghettos. In his encouragement of the founding of the National Urban League, which shared many of his values but also some of those of the NAACP leadership, Washington made his adjustment to the urban age. He became an Urban League board member In aged. Essentially, however, he remained a rural-based leader out of harmony or sympathy with urban life. The more he stayed the same, nonetheless, the more he changed in minor ways. Either because of the challenge of the NAACP or because of a sense of his impending death, he began to speak more forthrightly in his last years, both privately to white philanthropists and well-wishers and publicly in magazine articles and speeches, against violations of human rights such as residential segregation, lynching, and public school discnmination. Residential segregation ordinances swept rapidly through the southern cities in 19~4-~5, and Washington finally took a straightforward public stand against them in an article that appeared posthumously In The New Republic. On another civil rights issue, that of the Jim Crow railroad cars, Washington employed a more character~sticaDy moderate method. In Aged he planned and orchestrated throughout the South what he called Railroad Days, a two-day campaign of black community leaders to urge railroad officials to provide equal accommodations both on the trains and in the depots. He also continued his annual letter on lynching, declaring it an unjustifiable crime whatever the provocation. He gave unequivocal support, after many years of hedging, to woman suffrage. When The Birth of a Nation, the first great motion picture, opened in Boston in 19~5, Washington joined with his militant black critics in condemning the pejorative stereotypes of blacks in the film and urging that it be banned. After the ban failed in Boston, Washington supported similar unsuccessful efforts in other cities, though he had some misgivings about the publicity that black protests and picketing gave the film. Emmett Scott took the lead in promoting the idea of a black film that would counteract the negative racial imagery of The Birth of a Nation. However much Washington responded ideolog~ca~y to the challenge of the NAACP, his quarrel with its leaders did not abate. When Oswald Garrison VilIard as an NAACP officer undertook to organize the Association of Negro Rural and Industrial Schools at a meeting In the NAACP headquarters, Washington took heated issue with VilEard and discouraged his followers from attending. He considered the new ·— XX11