chance to say anything at all. Meanwhile the
White Caps or "Regulators" took charge of the neighboring counties,
terrifying the Negroes everywhere; and in the trials that resulted the
state courts broke down altogether, one judge in despair giving up the
holding of court as useless.

Meanwhile discrimination of all sorts went forward. On May 29, 1895,
moved by the situation at the Orange Park Academy, the state of Florida
approved "An Act to Prohibit White and Colored Youth from being Taught
in the same Schools." Said one section: "It shall be a penal offense
for any individual body of inhabitants, corporation, or association to
conduct within this State any school of any grade, public, private, or
parochial, wherein white persons and Negroes shall be instructed or
boarded within the same building, or taught in the same class or at the
same time by the same teacher." Religious organizations were not to be
left behind in such action; and when before the meeting of the Baptist
Young People's Union in Baltimore a letter was sent to the secretary of
the organization and the editor of the _Baptist Union_, in behalf of the
Negroes, who the year before had not been well treated at Toronto, he
sent back an evasive answer, saying that the policy of his society was
to encourage local unions to affiliate with their own churches.

More grave than anything else was the formal denial of the Negro's
political rights. As we have seen, South Carolina in 1895 followed
Mississippi in the disfranchising program and within the next fifteen
years most of the other Southern states did likewise. With the Negro
thus deprived of any genuine political voice, all sorts of social and
economic injustice found greater license.

2. _Industrial Education: Booker T. Washington_

Such were the tendencies of life in the South as affecting the Negro
thirty years after emancipation. In September, 1895, a rising educator
of the race attracted national attention by a remarkable speech that
he made at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta. Said Booker T.
Washington: "To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition
in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating
friendly relations with the Southern white man who is their next door
neighbor, I would say, 'Cast down your bucket where you are'--cast it
down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by
whom we are surrounded.... To those of the white race