used in giving the people a thorough, up-to-date
system of common school, agricultural, and industrial education. Here
is an excellent opportunity for some of the young colored men and
women of the United States who have been educated in the best methods
of education in this country to go to Haiti and help their fellows.
Here is an opportunity for some of the most promising Haitian boys
and girls to be sent to schools in the United States. Here is an
opportunity for us to use our influence and power in giving the
Haitians something they have never had, and that is education, real
education. At least 95 per cent. of the people, as I have said, are
unlettered and ignorant so far as books are concerned."

Booker Washington's self-control was never more needed than on an
occasion at Tuskegee described by T. Thomas Fortune, the Negro author
and publicist. A Confederate veteran who had lost an arm fighting for
the Confederacy and who had served for a number of years in Congress
was on the program to speak at a Tuskegee meeting. This Confederate
veteran had a great liking for Mr. Washington and believed in his
ideas on the importance of industrial education for the colored
people. Mr. Fortune says:

"John C. Dancy, a colored man, at that time Collector of Customs at
Wilmington, N.C., was to speak first, the Confederate veteran second,
and I was to follow the latter. Mr. Dancy is an unusually bright and
eloquent man. Mr. Dancy paid a glowing tribute to the New England men
and women who had built up the educational interest among the colored
people after the war, of which Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes are
lasting monuments. Mr. Dancy had plenty of applause from the great
concourse of countrymen, but his address made the white speaker
furious. When the former Congressman was called upon to speak he
showed plainly that he was agitated out of his self-restraint.
Without any introductory remarks whatever, he said, as I remember it:

"'I have written this address for you,' waving it at the audience,
'but I will not deliver it. I want to give you niggers a few words of
plain talk and advice. No such address as you have just listened to is
going to do you any good; it's going to spoil you. You had better not
listen to such speeches. You might just as well understand that this
is a white man's country, as far as the South is concerned, and we are
going to make you keep your place. Understand that. I have nothing
more to say to you.