The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.2, page 262, 16 July 1884, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Papers perity will only come in proportion as the hand, head, and heart of both races are educated and Christianized. E. Davidson Washington, ea., Selected Speeches of Booker T. Washington (Garden City, 193~), -. The speech was also published in the fournc~l of Proceedings and Addresses of the National Educational Association, Session of the Year 1884, at Madison, Wis. (Boston, 1885 ), pt. c, pp. ~ ~5-30. That version differed in wording and punctuation from the E. Davidson Washington text used here. It did not capitalize ''Negro'' as BTW made a point of doing, arid omitted the salutation. ~ At this gathering of more than ~ o,ooo educators there were many Alabamians, even some from Tuskegee itself. An ugly racial situation almost developed after the president, Thomas W. Bicknell, made Negro and Indian education a prominent feature of the program and invited BTW and several other black speakers. Many black teachers came, and some were denied the rooms they had reserved in the headquarters hotel weeks earlier. When the N.E.A. threatened to sue the hotel, however, the Negroes secured their promised rooms. In the tense atmosphere that followed such a confrontation, the situation demanded the instinctive tact for which BTW later became famous. In the audience of some 4,ooo who heard him, there were several from Tuskegee who expected him to criticize the white South and even their home town. The speech, however, contained not a word of abuse, and BTW even strained to find grounds for praising the South. A teacher at the Alabama Conference Female College in Tuskegee wrote back to her girls: ''He spoke well. I have heard nothing better as to manner, matter and spirit. He represented things as they are at the South, and said some nice things of the Tuskegee citizens.'' (Interview of Thomas W. Bicknell, in Boston Advertiser, July 7, 1903, clipping, Con. Doe, BTW Papers, DLC; letter of M. A. O. in Tuskegee Macon Mail, July 2 3, ~ 884. 2 R. R. Varner. 3 John Massey (~834-~9~), born in Choctaw County, Ala., was president of the Alabama Conference Female College in Tuskegee (which later moved to Montgomery as Judson College) from :876 to 1909. He graduated from the University of Alabama in 1862 and served as an officer in the Confederate Army until a wound forced his resignation in 1864. After briefly teaching military tactics at the University of Alabama' he was principal of a boys' school in Summerfield, Ala., from 1866 to 1874. Massey was a Democrat. He held important lay positions in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was a member of the Southern Education Association, the National Educational Association, and the Alabama Education Association, of which he was president in 1894-95. He and BTW cooperated closely to preserve good will between the schools, though the black school quickly eclipsed the girls' school. BTW persuaded some of the philanthropists who aided Tuskegee to make small gifts to Massey's college. 4 Cornelius Nathaniel Dorsette. 5 Lewis Adams. 262.