delivered, as I have said, at Atlanta, in 1895. At Atlanta in 1906 an outbreak of popular frenzy, excited by one or two real and several imaginary outrages, led to the slaughter in the streets of an unknown number of negroes (probably thirty or forty), not one of whom was even suspected 53of any crime. It does not seem as though the Atlanta Compromise had as yet borne much fruit, at any rate on its native soil. 53 Even more significant than Mr. Washington’s “Up from Slavery” is a book called “Tuskegee and its People,” to which he contributes a general introduction. |Tuskegee Ideals.| Two-thirds of the book consist of “Autobiographies by Graduates of the School,” with such titles as “A College President’s Story,” “A Lawyer’s Story,” “The Story of a Blacksmith,” “The Story of a Farmer,” “A Druggist’s Story,“ “A Negro Community Builder.” These stories are all interesting, many of them heroic and touching, and all permeated with the Booker-Washington spirit of indomitable self-help, unresentful acceptance of outward conditions, and unquestioning measurement of success by material standards. And yet not wholly material. The formation and maintenance of the “home” are the aspiration and ideal everywhere proclaimed—the home connoting, to the negro mind, not only pecuniary well-being, but decency, morality, education, a certain standard of refinement. Here is a characteristic passage from “The Story of a Farmer”: |Tuskegee Ideals.| | | Rev. Robert C. Bedford, Secretary of the board of trustees, Tuskegee Institute, some time ago visited us.... He wrote the following much-appreciated compliment regarding our homes and ourselves: “The homes of the Reid brothers are very nicely furnished throughout. Everything is well kept and very orderly. The bedspreads 54are strikingly white, and the rooms—though I called when not expected—were in the best of order.” 54 To this subject of the “home” I shall return later. I have seen few things more touching than the negro’s pride in the whiteness of his bedspreads. Not less characteristic, however, is this further passage from the same “Story of a Farmer,” which follows, indeed, on the same page:— Under the guidance of the Tuskegee influences ... the importance of land-buying was early brought to our attention, but because of the crude and
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