The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.5, page 123, June 1899, U. of Illinois Press

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JUNE 1 899 Pledger is preparing to give you a big send off in Atlanta when you return and wants me to be there. We shall see. My Chicago trip had to be postponed for the present because of my sickness. Arld I am a bit afraid to go, as the whole West is yelling for me to speak for it from Indianapolis to Omaha, and I don't want to talk. ~ am fighting your battles as the occasion requires. You will see that I have plugged Smiths of the Gazette by the clipping enclosed. Dancy4 wants to make friends, but he is too small to bother with seriously. The Country seems sorter empty without you. McKinley is still playing the sneak and ingrate. With kind regards for you and Mrs. Washington, Yours truly T. Thomas Fortune ALS Con. ~4 BTW Papers DLC. ~ The article lauded BTW as the successor to Frederick Douglass. In defending BTW against W. Calvin Chase's charges that the Tuskegean was raised to his position by whites, Fortune wrote that BTW attained leadership through his own merits ''by supreme devotion to his race, by persuasible eloquence, by a wisdom tempered with studied conservatism.'' (Boston Transcript, May 18, 1899, 8.) ~ Alexander Walters (~858-~9~7) was born in Bardstown, Ky. At the age of twelve he joined the A.M.E. Zion Church and was licensed to preach five years later. During the next twenty years Walters's service took him to San Francisco, Chattanooga, Knoxville, and then to New York City, where he led one of the largest A.M.E. Zion congregations. In 18 he received a D.D. degree from Livingstone College, and the following year he was elected bishop of his church. In 1898 Walters urged T. Thomas Fortune, whom he had helped to found the defunct Afro-American League, to revive their former organization in protest against the resurgence of lynchings and other outrages against blacks. Together they helped found the National AfroAmerican Council, which elected Walters its first president in 1898. Walters was also president of the Pan-African Association, which was organized in London in Moo. Walters and BTW maintained harmonious relations except for a brief time after the former sided with Fortune against BTW in the Brownsville affair. 3 Harry C. Smith (~863-~94~) of Cleveland, Ohio, was a leading black journalist, state legislator, and militant champion of civil rights. Born in Clarksburg, W.Va., he was taken by his widowed mother to Cleveland, where by her and his sister's efforts he secured a high school education in the cites public schools. While still in high school, Smith secured employment as a cornetist, and after graduation in 1882 he pursued a musical career, directing several vocal groups and bands and composing popular music. In 1883 Smith founded the Cleveland Gazette, a black weekly, with the aid of John F. Lightfoot, John Holmes, and James H. Jackson. Within a few years Smith became sole owner. From its beginning the Gazette was a forthright opponent of the color line both locally and nationally. 123