s issued in conviction. The severer
utterances at this conference may have been more or less biased; still,
if, allowing for this, one considered the data available for forming a
judgment, one was forced to feel that calm Southerners had apprehended
the case better than Northern enthusiasts. Colored people as a class
lacked devotion to principle, also initiative and endurance, whether
mental or physical. Colored deputies, of whom there were many in various
parts of the South, so long as they acted under white chiefs, were, like
most colored soldiers, marvels of bravery, defying revolvers, bowie
knives, and wounds, and fighting to the last gasp with no sign of
flinching; but the black men who could be trusted as sheriffs-in-chief
were extremely rare.

Whether the faults named were strictly hereditary or resulted rather
from the long-continued ill education and environment of the race, none
could certainly tell. As a matter of fact, however, few even among
friendly critics longer regarded these faults as entirely eliminable. A
well qualified and wholly unbiased judge of negro character gave it as
emphatically his opinion that any autonomous community of colored
people, no matter how highly educated or civilized, would relapse into
barbarism in the course of two generations. This view was not rendered
absurd by the existence of fairly well administered municipalities here
and there with negro mayors. Many negroes were extremely bright and apt
in imitation, also in all memoriter and linguistic work. The New
Orleans Cotton Centennial and the Nashville Exposition each had its
negro department. But it was distinctive of the Atlanta Fair that one of
its buildings was entirely devoted to exhibits of negro handicraft. At
once in range and in the quality of the objects which it embraced, the
display was creditable to the race. Here and there, moreover, the race
had produced a grand character. The most notable of the opening
addresses at the Atlanta Fair was made by the colored educator, Booker
T. Washington, President of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute
for negro youth.

[Illustration: Portrait.]
Booker T. Washington.

His oration on this occasion directed attention to Mr. Washington not
only as a remarkable negro, but as a remarkable man. Born poor as could
be and fighting his way to an education against every conceivable
obstacle, he had at the age of forty distinguished himself as a business
organizer, as an