The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.4, page 196, July 1896, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WAS HINGTON Papers in education, politics, and economics, for citizenship, four millions of their former slaves. That the South staggered under the burden, made mistakes; that disappointment in a measure has been the result need surprise no one. This country has never yet realized, has never yet comprehended, its duties to, the millions of people in the South known as the poor white people. It needs no prophet to tell the condition of the future when the poor white boy in the country districts of the South is in school but three months a year, and your boy is ire school nine or ten months; when. the poor white boy in these country districts often has but one dollar's worth of education and your boy To worth; when in the south he enters a reading room or library perhaps two or three times a year, while your boy finds a reading room or library in every hamlet, almost every house. The poor white boy of the south hears a lecture not moire than once in two or three months, while your boy can hear a lecture or sermon every day of the year. My friends, there is no escape from it, you must help us raise the character of our civilization or else you wig be lowered with it. NO! member of your race, in any part of this country, can harm the weakest or meanest member of my race without the proudest and best blood in the AngloSaxon race being degraded. When the South is poor you are poor. When the South is ignorant, you are ignorant. When the South commits crime, you commit crime. Mere abuse will not bring a remedy. It seems to me the time has come when we should arise ire this matter above party or race or section into the atmosphere of the duty of man to man, Christian to Christian, citizen to citizen; and if the negro who has been oppressed and denied rights in a Christian land can help you, North or South, to rise into this better atmosphere of ur~selfishness and Christian brotherhood, he will have indeed a sufficient recompense for all that he has suffered at your hands. So long as there is ignorance among the poor white people of the South, so long there - will be crime against the negro and crime against our boasted civilization. In considering this matter I thank God that I have grown to the point through the opportunity which your generosity has given me and those like me; I have grown. to the point where I can sympathize with the white man as much as I can sympathize with the black man. I always tell our students when they go out into the world to work, never to' feel themselves above the white man. I thank God that I have 196