The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.4, page 224, Oct. 1896, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WAS HINGTON Papers color line, as among the Portuguese, some friction and antagonism is inevitable, and the negro naturally is the greatest sufferer. While I sat listening to the debate at the last Hampton Conference of graduates, ~ was continually struck with the fact that the condition of things in our South is in many respects the same as that of large sections of the African continent; that what I had realized to be needed in Africa is also needed here, and that Hampton and Tuskegee are, to say the least, on the right track. The mistakes! made here are also made, with very good intentions, in Africa. It was really the discovery of the good that I might do in the South that revealed to me the good that institutions like Hampton & Tuskegee may do for Africa. Practical as you are, you probably wish some hints concerning the concrete things you may do, at no distant date for the cause represented by the League. ~ ~ ~ Snatch now and then a moment, to read: the literature which we will supply on African slavery. The mere fact that there are at least 50,000,000 slaves in Africa, and that the slave-trade claims, according to the- computation of the British & Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, an annual tribute of 500,000 lives, should interest one like you in a responsible effort to organize American (and Negro) participation in a movement for the removal of that colossal evil. Evidently, the emancipation of the s,ooo,ooo of American negro slaves is but a stepping stone to the liberation of the 50,000,000 of African slaves. (2) In private conversation and in public addresses impress when it fits in, the fact that ''slavery is not yet dead.'' ~ 3 ~ Interest your students in this cause. Solid facts about Africa, and about the great events that are taking place there, will do them more good than all the rubbish that is talked and written about Liberia. (4) ~ hope that, when the time comes, you will help us to get, perhaps from among your graduates, well-trained and hard working colored mechanics and farmers able to, teach their hand craft to their African brethren. Is it too much to hope that as you, branching off from Hampton created Tuskegee, so one branching off from Tuskegee may become the founder of a similar institution in some part of Africa? If you have not yet got ''Africa and the American Negro'' (Gammon Theol. Seminary) I advise you to get it. In my paper on African slavery, therein published, you will find a general view of the principal aspects of the world's open sore. It is probably not necessary for me to develop the main points of 224