The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.4, page 111, Feb. 1896, U. of Illinois Press

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F E B R U ARY · ~ 8 g 6 put colored men in any high or responsible office. Under my ow limitations in the Post Office Department I was able to appoint over eleven hundred of your race as postmasters, route agents, letter carriers, etc., and I was also able to influence the appointment of many of them in the revenue service. The only office of high class that ~ was able to induce President Harrison to give to your people was that of Collector of the Port of Galveston, Texas, and it took four months of effort to induce him to appoint Mr. Cuney,3 whose record there, fine and faithful in every respect, approved my judgment fully. I had two motives in standing for this sort of fidelity to your people. First, our party is pledged to it in fellowship and brotherhood and conviction; second, it was due to your people to be given the chance to demonstrate their capacity for citizenship and sharing equally in the honors and burdens of the Republic. I feel it the highest duty of the Republican party toward your struggling race, which has made such remarkable advancement in the last thirty years the most rapid of any race in history both to encourage it as it is moving forward into higher civilization, and still more to demonstrate to the whole Republic and to the world the competency of your people for intelligent citizenship and capacity for office holding. In your address at Atlanta, which analyzed this problem with as much of philosophy as power, you made clear to your people that the negro problem is a different one since the close of the war and that it is constantly changing and must be met constantly from different standpoints of view. To a President the problem is to be dealt with as one of circumstance and opportunity. More, for instance, can be done for your race in one State than in another, or in one community in a certain State than another. More can be done for certain men in your membership than for others which is a truism for your race as well as my own. You were the first of the leaders among your people to emphasize these changing phases of this great problem, and the truths must have sunk deep in the hearts of all who follow you. As I said to you at Atlanta, as this problem is now largely a new one, and as such very strong men have been developed under its new conditions, it seems to me an absolute necessity that the strongest men you have developed under these new features ought to be in the convention at St. Louis—men like yourself and Professor Wright, and others I could mention. A Republican National Convention is an