The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.5, page 196, Sept. 1899, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Papers blacks should be educated in the same way as whites. ''Instead of educating the negro in the lines which were open to him,'' Baldwin said, ''he was educated out of his natural environment and the opportunities which lay immediately about him.'' Baldwin praised the work of Samuel Chapman Armstrong at Hampton and added that BTW was carrying out Armstrong's work and was ''the Moses; Tuskegee, his creation, his life, and the hope of the race.'' Probably the parts of the speech that upset Fortune most were Baldwin's capsule pronouncements on several controversial subjects. Baldwin said: ''Social recognition of the negro by the white is a simple impossibility, and is entirely dismissed from the minds of the white and by the intelligent negroes. There is no need of social recognition.'' He accused those who advocated social equality of being ''sentimental theorists.'' On the issue of civil rights Baldwin urged that blacks and whites alike should be disfranchised if they were not qualified to vote. He attacked lynching as an evil but went on to say: ''Lynching, however, indicates progress. No progress is made without friction.'' In the discussion that followed the address Fortune gained the floor and said: ''I am thoroughly convinced that it is impossible to pin down the Afro-American people entirely to industrial education or to higher education, for the simple reason that they are just like any other race.'' Fortune praised BTW as ''the greatest man we have to-day,'' then went on to say that ''I have always considered, in the main, that the Tuskegee idea was correct; but the principle is wrong that a man should first learn to work and then develop his head.'' Baldwin rejoined that he was all for higher education for some blacks but that his address referred to the ''great black mass of poor, poverty-stricken negroes who are at the bottom.'' (Journal of social science, 37 [Dec. ~ g], 52-68.) To Josephine Beall Wilson Bruce [Tuskegee, Ala.] Sept. 6, 1899 My dear Mrs. Bruce: Please excuse me for my long delay in answering your letter of August esth; I did not reach home until early this week and have scarcely had a minute to write since coming home. Mrs. Washington, however, tells me that she wrote you several days ago. I have just sent you a telegram saying that we expect you next week. Anticipating newspaper announcements in regard to your coming here I have prepared a short reference to the matter which I have sent out to some of the leading white and colored papers. I have placed it in a form which I feel quite sure will not be objectionable to you. Had the matter been left for the newspapers to get hold of the best way they could to make their own announcements I fear the announcements would not have been so satisfactory. 196