The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.6, page xxiv, in Introduction, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Papers climate. In September egos, on the very clay that President McKinIey died of an assassin's bullet and Theodore Roosevelt became President, the latter telegraphed Washington inviting him to a conference on southern appointments. On Washington's advice, Roosevelt appointed as an Alabama district judge not a white Republican but a conservative Gold Democrat who had befriended black voting rights in Alabama. Soon afterward, also on Washington's advice, the President appointed one of Washington's Tuskegee neighbors, Joseph O. Thompson, the postmaster, as collector of internal revenue for Alabama and the principal referee for political appointments in the state. Soon afterward he extended the referee system to Mississippi, where Washington's white Gold Democrat friend Edgar S. Wilson became the President's kingpin for the state. Washington also secured appointment or retention in office of his black friends throughout the South, usually on the ground that they were men who had succeeded at some business or profession rather than being the allegedly venal professional black politicians of the past. This course of action reached its climax with the noncontroversial appointment of Robert H. Terrell as a judge in the District of Columbia and the highly controversial appointment of the black physician William D. Crum as collector of the port of Charleston. On October ~6, egos, Washington dined at the White House with President Roosevelt, his family, and an old friend from Colorado. This was the first time in history—and the last time for many years that a black man had dined at the White House, though in past administrations blacks had attended receptions there. The southern press and political leaders seized the opportunity to denounce the action in hysterical language; and the white South never again completely trusted Washington, though he soon took the edge off their anger by conservative words and actions. Neither Washington nor Roosevelt publicly commented on the dinner for almost a decade. The occasion had little importance for Roosevelt, who never repeated the indiscretion and omitted mention of it in his autobiography. For Washington, and for all the blacks who would never be invited to the White House, the dinner had great symbolic importance as a sign of his arrival at the heart of power in America. The vicarious experience of the dinner incident bound xxv