separate
address. No two audiences are exactly alike. It is my aim to reach
and talk to the heart of each individual audience, taking it into my
confidence very much as I would a person. When I am speaking to an
audience, I care little for how what I am saying is going to sound in
the newspapers, or to another audience, or to an individual. At the
time, the audience before me absorbs all my sympathy, thought, and
energy.

Early in the morning a committee called to escort me to my place in
the procession which was to march to the Exposition grounds. In this
procession were prominent coloured citizens in carriages, as well
as several Negro military organizations. I noted that the Exposition
officials seemed to go out of their way to see that all of the coloured
people in the procession were properly placed and properly treated. The
procession was about three hours in reaching the Exposition grounds, and
during all of this time the sun was shining down upon us disagreeably
hot. When we reached the grounds, the heat, together with my nervous
anxiety, made me feel as if I were about ready to collapse, and to
feel that my address was not going to be a success. When I entered the
audience-room, I found it packed with humanity from bottom to top, and
there were thousands outside who could not get in.

The room was very large, and well suited to public speaking. When I
entered the room, there were vigorous cheers from the coloured portion
of the audience, and faint cheers from some of the white people. I had
been told, while I had been in Atlanta, that while many white people
were going to be present to hear me speak, simply out of curiosity,
and that others who would be present would be in full sympathy with me,
there was a still larger element of the audience which would consist of
those who were going to be present for the purpose of hearing me make
a fool of myself, or, at least, of hearing me say some foolish thing
so that they could say to the officials who had invited me to speak, "I
told you so!"

One of the trustees of the Tuskegee Institute, as well as my personal
friend, Mr. William H. Baldwin, Jr. was at the time General Manager of
the Southern Railroad, and happened to be in Atlanta on that day. He was
so nervous about the kind of reception that I would have, and the effect
that my speech would produce, that he could not persuade himself to
go into the building, but walked back and forth in the grounds outside