le drew their living directly
from the soil. He never ceased to impress upon the business and
professional men of his race that their success was dependent upon the
success of the farmers; and upon the farmers that unless they
succeeded the business and professional men could not succeed. In
short, he made Tuskegee first and foremost an agricultural school
because the Negro race is first and foremost an agricultural race.

CHAPTER EIGHT

BOOKER WASHINGTON AND THE NEGRO BUSINESS MAN

In 1900 Booker Washington founded the National Negro Business League.
He was president of this league from its foundation until his death.

During the winter of 1900, after reviewing the situation at length
with his friend T. Thomas Fortune, the Nestor of Negro journalism, and
at that time the dominant influence in the New York _Age_, who was
spending the winter at Tuskegee, with Mr. Scott and others of his
friends, he came to the conclusion that the time had come to bring the
business men and women of his race together in a great national
organization, with local branches throughout the country. He decided
that such an organization might be a powerful agency in creating the
race consciousness and race pride for which he was ever striving. All
the then-existing organizations, other than the sick and death benefit
societies and the purely social organizations, had as their main
purpose the assertion of the civil and political rights of the Negro.
There was no organization calculated to focus the attention of the
Negroes on what they were doing and could do for themselves in
distinction from what was being done for them and to them. All the
existing associations laid their chief emphasis upon the rights of
the Negro rather than his duties. Mr. Washington held that without in
any degree sacrificing their just demands for civil and political
rights a more wholesome and constructive attitude could be developed
by stressing the duties and the opportunities of the race. He believed
it would be helpful to emphasize in an organized way what they had
done and could do in the way of business achievement in spite of race
prejudice rather than what they had not done and could not do because
of racial discrimination. He believed they needed to have brought home
to them not how many of them had been held down, but how many of them
had come up and surmounted obstacles and difficulties. He believed
that they should have it impressed upon them tha