To return to Memphis. I had gone there, not exactly to attend the annual “Conference for Education in the South,” but to see several people who were attending it. |Educators in Council.| However, I did go to one or two meetings, and notably to one which was to be addressed by the British Ambassador, Mr. James Bryce. It was in the Lyceum Theatre, and I sat on the platform (the stage) and looked out over the crowded house, where a dozen electric fans were 42keeping the sultry air in motion. It seemed to me odd that, while the floor of the house and the first and second circle were overcrowded, there were only one or two people in the gallery. Presently I looked up again; there were now about twenty people in the upper regions, and I had a curious difficulty in distinguishing their features. A light burst upon me—they were negroes. In a “Conference for Education in the South” the whites did all the conferring and the blacks, if they were so minded, might listen from the gallery. |Educators in Council.| | | 42 Next day my black, or rather olive-coloured, friend said: “I could have whipped myself this morning when I opened the paper and saw that I’d missed hearing Bryce. I was bent upon hearing him, but somehow I forgot that yesterday was the evening.” I wondered whether he realized that he would have had to sit in the gallery. But I did not ask him. Every now and then, in this country, one turns tail and flees from the haunting colour question. It is the skeleton at the feast of Southern life. In New York I had met President Booker T. Washington, of Tuskegee, one of the most notable men in America, an accomplished speaker, and an authority, if ever there was one, on the education of the negro. “No doubt I shall see you at Memphis,” I said, in an off-hand way. He answered, rather drily, “No;” and some time afterwards he said, “You asked me if I would be 43at Memphis—I am not at all sure that I should be welcome there. I received a printed circular notifying me of the meeting, but no invitation to attend it. You will find friends of the negro there, and of negro education—oh yes, plenty. But they will not be of my colour.” 43 I did, as a matter of fact, hear one friend of negro education hold forth—Bishop Bratton, of Mississippi. |A Bishop on
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