s both North and South quoted all or
parts of the speech, and most of the newspapers carried appreciative
editorials. The Charleston News and Courier, for example said "His skin
is colored, but his head is sound, and his heart is in the right place."
Money poured in to finance the Tuskegee Institute. Overnight Washington
was skyrocketed to national fame.

However, there were those who did not appreciate their new leader's call
to conciliation. In view of the growing virulence of racism and the
spread of Jim Crow legislation, they believed that his refusal to demand
their rights was, in fact, a form of emasculation.

John Hope was one of those who had heard the Atlanta speech and did not
want to accept the compromise. He was a professor at Roger Williams
University in Nashville, Tennessee, and later was to become president of
Atlanta University. The following year, after carefully considering
Washington's speech, he made an address of his own to his colleagues in
Nashville. He bitterly attacked the compromise and said that he believed
it to be cowardly for a black man to admit that his people were not
striving for equality. If money, education, and honesty would not bring
the black man as much respect as they would to another American citizen,
they were a curse and not a blessing.

This was obviously an attack on Washington's statement that the right to
earn a dollar was worth more than anything else. He said that if he did
not have the right to spend a dollar in the opera house and to do those
things that other free men do, he was not free. Hope was not content with
demanding equality in vague terms. He insisted that what he wanted was
social equality. Instead of urging conciliation, he advocated that the
Afro-Americans should be restless and dissatisfied. When their
discontent broke through the wall of discrimination, then there would be
no need to plead for Justice. Then they would be men. A decade later,
those who opposed Washington's leadership decided that they needed to
organize and coordinate their activities.

John Hope, W. E. B. DuBois, Monroe Trotter, and several others wanted to
speak out more vigorously against racial discrimination, segregation, and
lynching. To do this, they created the Niagara Movement to challenge the
political domination of Washington's Tuskegee machine. Because he was the
recognized advisor to politicians and philanthropists, this was a
difficult task. Hope's criticism resulted i