The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.6, page 386, Jan. 1902, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Papers The white men would respect you more. The way they have called you rigger, said you wasn't fit to sit at a white man's table, said that Roosevelt disgraced himself etc. shows how much respect they have for you. You have been casting pearls before swine. For myself, a man who thinks I am not good enough to sit at his table can be damned and go to Hell. God dam Pres. McIlwaine. Very truly Yours Wm. H. Ferris P.S. I believe that Tuskegee is a monument to your genius & tact Sc executive ability; but ~ speak so frankly because ~ respect & esteem you so highly. ALS Con. ~7 BTW Papers DLC. On stationery of the Hart Farm School and Junior Republic for Dependent Colored Boys, Washington, D.C., of which Ferris was traveling agent. ~ William H. Ferris (~873-~94~) was a black intellectual of erratic personality who was at different times a Trotterite, a BTW supporter, and a Garveyite. He earned a B.A. and an M.A. from Yale. Then he attended Harvard Divinity School for three years, receiving an M.A. degree. After teaching for a year in Florida, he became field agent of the Hart Farm School in Washington, D.C., in egos. The following year he was a correspondent for the Boston Guardian and the Washington Colored American. Early in 1903 he rendered a verbal attack on BTW, ''The Boston Negroes' Idea of Booker T. Washington,'' before the Bethel Literary and Historical Association. (Washington Colored American, Jan. lo, 1903, 7.) At the Louisville meeting of the Afro-Ameriean Council, Ferris joined with Trotter, George W. Forbes, and other militants to attack BTW's ideas. They were a distinct minority, however, and Ferris caused an uproar when he demanded that a huge picture of BTW at the meeting hall be taken down. In 1907 he got into a personal quarrel with Trotter, a man almost impossible to get along with, and sought to ingratiate himself with BTW. The race needed, he wrote to BTW, both ''the men who bring things to pass & also the men who see a vision 8c dream of the ideal. We don't need though such a fiery, fire-eating firebrand as Trotter.'' (Dee. 9, 1907, Con. 348, BTW Papers, DLC; Fox, Guardian of Boston, 47-48, ~o8 g.) In 19~3, when he sought Julius Rosenwald's help in publishing his two-volume work, The African Abroad, BTW advised the Chicago philanthropist against aiding Ferris. In later years Ferris taught at the Berean Manual Training and Industrial School in Philadelphia. In the Ages he was active in the Universal Negro Improvement Association and was editor and writer for several black publications, including the Negro World. 386