The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.7, page 456, Mar. 1904, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Papers contention you should make of the kind mentioned in yours of some days ago. I would suggest securing some such man as C. O. Harrisi of Montgomery, who, I understand, has been refused registration and who has been practically conducting the Montgomery Post Office for many years. A case based upon the refusal to allow an unregistered Negro to vote for a Member of Congress, or for Presidential electors seems to me to offer another opportunity and one which I think it well for us to follow up. Very truly yours, Booker T. Washington TLpS Con. BTW Papers DLC. ~ Charles 0. Harris, born in Alabama in 185s, was a clerk in the Montgomery Post Office, according to the Loo census. From William Lloyd Garrison, fir. Lexington, iMass.] March 3, 1909 My dear Mr. Washington: I am indebted to you for many favors which deserved acknowledgment but they have not been unappreciated because I have been remiss. I read with avidity everything from and about you, watching with anxious solicitude the increas ingly bitter struggle and wishing for channels of expression. I have long feared the acute stage of the Negro's steady upward progress, seeing no other possibility than increased friction when intelligence and character gathered force among the downtrodden race. You cannot educate men, even in manual skill, and fit them to occupy the menial position that a caste community (like the South) decrees. Revolt is inevitable and the caste system has to be shattered in the nature of things. So instead of a betterment of conditions in the near future I do not see anything but increased strain, precedent to the final grapple. It is not the brutality of the southern whites that discourages, but the letting down of northern protest and the bending of weak-kneed friends of the negro who are intimidated by the revival of southern autocracy. There were never more trim456