d the books and papers.

This acquaintance has now ripened and broadened, so that to-day there
are few people in that community more highly respected than this colored
family. What did it all? This object-lesson. No one could explain that
away. One such object-lesson in every community in the South is more
powerful than all the laws Congress can pass in the direction of
bringing about right relations between blacks and whites.

A few months ago an agricultural county fair, the first ever held in
that county, was organized and held at Calhoun, Alabama, by the teachers
in the Calhoun School, which is an offshoot of the Hampton Institute.
Both the colored people and numbers of white visitors were astonished at
the creditable exhibits made by the colored people. Most of these white
people saw the school work at Calhoun for the first time. Perhaps
no amount of abstract talk or advice could have brought them to this
school, but the best hog, the largest pumpkin, or the most valuable bale
of cotton possessed a common interest, and it has been a comparatively
easy thing to extend their interest from the best hog to the work
being done in the school-room. Further, this fair convinced these white
people, as almost nothing else could have done, that education was
making the negroes better citizens rather than worse; that the people
were not being educated away from themselves, but with their elevation
the conditions about them were being lifted in a manner that possessed
an interest and value for both races.

It was after speaking, not long ago, to the colored people at such a
county fair in North Carolina that I was asked the next morning to speak
to the white students at their college, who gave me as hearty a greeting
as I have ever received at Northern colleges.

But such forces as I have described--forces that are gradually
regenerating the entire South and will regenerate Cuba and Porto
Rico--are not started and kept in motion without a central plant--a
power-house, where the power is generated. I cannot describe all these
places of power. Perhaps the whole South and the whole country are
most indebted to the Hampton Institute in Virginia. Then there is Fisk
University at Nashville, Tennessee; Talladega College at Talladega,
Alabama; Spelman Seminary, Atlanta University, and Atlanta Baptist
College at Atlanta; Biddle University in North Carolina; Claflin
University at Orangeburg, South Carolina; and Knoxville College at
K