The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.5, page 400, Jan. 1900, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Papers From William Denison McCrackant New York ~an. 4th Loo Mr. Booker T. Washington, dear sir I am in receipt of a letter from you setting forth the needs of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. Allow me to tell you how much I admire the noble spirit which animates your enterprise and to wish you a successful New Year. Mr. Edwin D. Meads and others of my friends have repeatedly called my attention to your work, so that I am more or less familiar with it. I regret that I have no funds available from which I could send you a contribution, but, if I may, I should like to send you a thought in regard to this whole question of education. Unfortunately it can never become a fundamental cure for the persistence of poverty in the midst of advancing wealth. What you are doing is noble work, fine work. It is saving individuals but do not allow yourself to believe that you can save your race thereby. Chattel slavery is now abolished, but industrial slavery remains for both black and white, and education cannot abolish that. Poverty and suffering among the masses are not due to lack of education, but to land monopoly, to the locking up of natural opportun~ties. Wealth can only be produced by the access of labor to land in its various forms, such as building sites, agricultural lands, . forests, mines etc. Education can avail the individual only in so far as it makes him superior to his fellows, but if you succeed in raising the educational standard of your whole race, wages will not rise, because wages do not depend upon the real earnings of labor, but upon what is left to labor after rent is taken out. In other words the more intelligently your race works, the harder they strain, the higher will their rents rise. I cannot attempt to do justice to this thought in a short letter and therefore, I send you a book under another cover. With the best of good wishes I remain yours truly ALS Con. ~58 BTW Papers DLC. W. D. McCrackan William Denison McCrackan of New York was born in Germany in 1864. He coo