Washington and Scott, however, were directly if secretly involved

54 Booker T. Washington

through Washington's personal lawyer, Wilford H. Smith, in an effort to further punish Trotter by a libel suit filed by William Pickens. An ambitious southern black, born in South Carolina and educated at Talladega College, an attendant at the Tuskegee Negro Conference in 1902, Pickens had asked Washington for help in the spring of 1902 when he learned that he had won a scholarship to Yale. "You see, I am wholly self-depent [sic], and will have to earn all my support and at the same time do the work of the college," he wrote. Pickens did not directly ask for money, but apologized for interrupting a man busy with "matter of far more consequence than the education of one Negro boy—but can you offer a suggestion or a bit of advice?" 79 Pickens was somehow enabled to attend Yale, and in 1903 he won the Yale oratory prize for a speech on Haiti that raised questions about its capacity for self-government, an echo of Washington's own graduation speech on Cuba a quarter-century earlier. Trotter was so outraged on hearing of the speech that he not only chided Pickens for "surrendering his self-respect" but attacked his personal appearance as "the little black freak student at Yale . . . with his enormous lips, huge mouth, and a monkey grin co-extensive with his ears." 80 When Washington himself had been the butt of similar racial stereotyping in the Guardian, he had remained silent, 81 but he was on the lookout for a Guardian libel not involving himself.

Since February 1903 Washington, Scott, and Wilford Smith had been scanning the Guardian. "I have taken out my subscription to the Guardian, and am examining the criminal statutes of Massachusetts," Smith wrote Scott under an assumed name. 82 A month later he expressed disappointment that the Guardian had been silent on Robert W. Taylor, the Tuskegee financial agent in Boston. "They seem so circumspect here of late I am beginning to fear that they suspect something," Smith complained. 83 When the Pickens libel appeared, it seemed made to order. Washington and Smith approached Pickens with an offer to help him sue. "Pickens hesitates about matter," Smith telegraphed Scott under a pseudonym. "Have written again urging him." 84 Washington pressed Smith to persuade Pickens. 85 Washington himself wrote Pickens on the day before the Boston Riot suggesting a meeting. With his eye on the future, Pickens answered: "Thanking you for yours of 29th July, I am glad to reply that it is my one unaltered and unalterable purpose to engage in some form of educational work. Doubtless you remember my writing you just before

Black Intellectuals and the Boston Riot 55

coming to Yale; and acting upon your kindly suggestion, I chose among my courses one in 'Systematic Pedagogy,' which I have pursued with pleasure and profit." 86

The Boston Riot caused a speed-up in the timetable of the Pickens case. "By all means Trotter and Forbes must be muzzled, and at once," Smith wrote Washington. "Just as early as possible, I shall go to New Haven and exert my best endeavors to bring it about through the matter there." 87 Washington urged him to go there immediately and to telegraph the results of his meeting with Pickens, adding: "Both white and colored opinion now ripe for action." 88 A few days later Smith reported that Pickens had taken the bait: "Pickens was in today and he consents to do what we wish." 89

Smith enlisted a white Boston lawyer in September 1903 for the prosecution of Trotter and Forbes for libel of William Pickens. Pickens meanwhile bound himself further to Washington's ideas and faction by a speech at a black church in Hartford. He said: "There can be no possible reason for doubt that the vast majority of our race must devote themselves to intelligent and useful manual work. This is Booker Washington's opinion, an opinion sadly misunderstood by many of his own people. He has been accused and assailed as if he had said that no negro, however capable, should lift his aspiration above the plow and the anvil; whereas his sayings from beginning to end disclose no excuse for the accusation." 90 Pickens said he would be willing to drop the suit if the Guardian apologized. From jail, where he was still serving his Boston Riot sentence, Trotter refused. He wrote his friend George Towns that his partner Forbes "is badly scared in this and wants me to join him in an abject apology, which I should almost rather die than agree to." 91 Forbes published an apology and retraction in the Guardian while Trotter was in jail, however, and Trotter was helpless to stop it.

Washington wrote Pickens that he had been wise "in permitting these men to make an apology and thus teaching them a lesson which I hope will be a benefit to them in the future." He denied even the slightest feeling of resentment of the continued attacks of the Guardian editors, having only pity for them. 92 A clearer glimpse into Washington's heart, however, is his letter to Smith after the apology: "I note, however, that nothing is signed on the part of Trotter. What about that side of the case?" 93 And he privately crowed to R. W. Thompson over "the apology made by Trotter and Forbes so as to

56 Booker T. Washington

prevent wearing stripes." The apology had been written by Smith and inserted without change in the Guardian. "I send this information as you may care to use sometime as rebuttal of their story that they have been glad to make the apology because Pickens has recanted or some such drivel as that." 94 As a reward for his suit, Washington offered Pickens a place in Tuskegee upon his graduation from Yale. Pickens was undecided for a month, insisted that "I have preferred your work to all others," but finally decided "that there is a greater need at my own College, Talladega." 95 In later years Pickens became an outspoken critic of Booker T. Washington and eventually a field secretary of the NAACP. 96

T. Thomas Fortune, observing the success of the Pickens lawsuit, considered a libel suit of his own, but Scott quickly warned him against it. Trotter and his coterie were eager to have the public believe that they were being hounded, he said. "You may of course expect the cry to be set up that you are being influenced by the Wizard to bring this suit," he wrote Fortune, "and while I believe the dirty gang needs to be thoroughly repressed, I think just now an inopportune time for the suit to be brought." 97 Fortune responded that his suggestion had simply been a tease, but a month later Washington himself warned Fortune to say no more in the New York Age on the subject. 98

Washington had other methods for harassment of the Guardian, including attempted purchase of a share of the paper, espionage on Trotter and his associates, and the founding of a rival newspaper. News soon came to Washington, after Forbes had apologized to Pickens, that the two editors of the Guardian had had a falling out. Forbes put his half of the Guardian stock in the hands of William H. Lewis to be disposed of without Trotter's knowledge. 99 Word came from Boston that a half-interest in the paper could be had for $100 down and $300 in notes. 100 "It would certainly be very interesting for Trotter to wake up some morning and find that the other half interest is in the hands of some special ones of our friends," Scott wrote his chief. 101 Trotter discovered and publicized, however, that Washington's lawyer Wilford Smith was trying to make the purchase, and this spurred Trotter's friends into raising the money to keep the Guardian under his control. 102

Even before the Boston Riot, Washington had considered espionage as a weapon against Trotter, and the riot settled for him the issue of its appropriateness. In May 1903 a friend of Scott from his

Black Intellectuals and the Boston Riot 57

Texas days, Melvin Jack Chisum, arrived in New York and began publishing a shortlived monthly, The Impending Crisis, in partnership with John E. Bruce. Passing a copy of the magazine's prospectus on to Washington, Scott wrote: "I know Chisum well. He will be amenable. . . ." 103 "I do not think Chisum is a very brainy man, but I do know he is resourceful and I think at the same time honorable," Scott further commented. "Our New York friend [Wilford H. Smith] can use Chisum in any way that we desire. Chisum formerly lived in Texas and I know him very well." 104 At a meeting in Trotter's house on September 1, 1903, some two months after the Boston Riot, "M. J. Chisholm [Chisum] of New York" was in attendance to help form the Boston Suffrage League, no doubt worming his way into the Boston radical's confidence by the extremeness of his rhetoric. One of the resolutions stated:

Inasmuch, therefore, as Booker T. Washington has glorified the revised constitutions of the south, has minimized the Jim Crow car outrage, has attacked the wisdom of the 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution, has deprecated the primary importance of the ballot, has preached to the colored people the silent submission to intolerable conditions, and makes his people a by-word and laughing stock before the world, he is not a fit leader for the colored race and no President who recognizes him as a political leader should receive the colored vote of the north.

The body urged Roosevelt to "dispense with Booker Washington as our political spokesman." 105

More significantly, Chisum was also present at a secret gathering at Trotter's house later that month. If Chisum may be believed, the Trotterites planned to go beyond the methods of the Boston Riot in a conspiracy for "disorder and possibly murder" at a meeting where Washington was to speak in a Cambridge black church. Chisum's report disappeared from Washington's office files at Tuskegee in 1906, but it is possible to partially reconstruct it through Emmett Scott's account of the meeting two years later:

... it was finally decided in Trotter's home that when the meeting should be in full sway one of their number would light a bonfire in a near-by vacant lot, that another in the church should yell 'fire' and that a third should cut the electric wire, thereby throwing the church into darkness and confusion. This program of wrath, disorder and possibly murder, which Trotter and his gang had planned came near succeeding. At their

58 Booker T. Washington

final meeting to perfect their arrangements a colored attorney of Boston, who had learned of their scheme, threw open the door, walked into the midst of the band and gave them to understand in no Sunday-school language that he had the names of every man and knew all the details of their plans. He further told them that if a single one of them attempted to carry out the plan, he would have them all in jail in a few hours. At this revelation the little gang was thunderstruck and scattered in every direction; not one of them dared to show his face at the meeting. 106

On learning of this conspiracy, Washington said he was "most anxious that the last dastardly attempt on the part of that Boston crowd to disgrace the race be made public in some way." 107 But William H. Lewis, the Boston lawyer who had burst into the meeting, advised against it, saying: "I rather prefer to hold it as a club over their heads." He warned that Chisum's unsupported affidavit would be insufficient safeguard against a libel suit, which Trotter and his friends would be only too anxious to file in retaliation for the Pickens suit. "Besides," Lewis wrote, "I am not inclined to believe absolutely the story of our confidential friend. I think he has overdrawn it somewhat, and I am not sure that he did not himself make some of the propositions purporting to have been made by others." 108 Fortune independently reached a similar conclusion. 109 And the Trotterites denied the existence of such a plan. "I talked it over with Grimke but he knew nothing of it," Lewis reported. "I afterwards talked with [Clement] Morgan, who claimed that our man Chisholm set up his own man of straw and there was nothing in his story at all." 110

Even as he tried to silence or intimidate Trotter, Washington was also attempting to put him out of business by sponsoring a rival newspaper that would share the small black readership and advertising clientele of the Guardian. Two members of the Boston branch of the National Negro Business League, William H. Moss and Peter J. Smith, began publishing the Boston Advocate in 1902. When it failed in 1903, they founded another at Washington's suggestion, the Enterprise. 111 Smith was among the lowliest of Washington's errand runners. At various times a job printer, government clerk, and podiatrist, Smith at this time made his living principally by providing a janitorial service for several downtown office buildings. Smith and Moss dedicated their paper to Washington's cause. "I should have it thoroughly Booker T. Washington,' and 'Theodore Roosevelt,' " wrote Smith. 112 When the

Black Intellectuals and the Boston Riot 59

Enterprise collapsed two weeks before the Boston Riot, 113 Washington as a temporary expedient paid the editor of the Washington Colored American to send his paper to a list of Bostonians for three months. 114 In the fall of 1903, however, Washington subsidized Smith and J. Will Cole in establishing a third pro-Washington weekly, the Boston Colored Citizen.

"From time to time when anyone in the office has time to do it, I wish you would have editorial and other notes written out for the paper to be published in Boston by Mr. Peter J. Smith," Washington wrote Scott. 115 He also bought subscriptions for the entire Tuskegee faculty. 116 Smith was an inept journalist, however, no match for Trotter. He pleaded with Washington for a direct subsidy, saying: "all the editor wants is the kind of encouragement that greases the wheels of the machinery in a substantial way so as to have them run along smoothly." 117 Washington's response was that no black man in the country had been so well started off in the newspaper business. Smith replied, pleading the special circumstance that liberal Boston was a poor field for a conservative black newspaper. 118 For a loan of $300, Smith gave as security his half-interest in the newspaper. 119 In 1904 Scott began sending Smith regularly $65 a week. 120 When Smith said he needed even more, Scott answered indignantly: "You know there are no inexhaustible stores from which to draw these checks." 121

Meanwhile, Washington and Scott made plans to replace Smith with someone more competent. Charles Alexander, a Tuskegee graduate and former employee in its print shop, was then teaching printing at Wilberforce University. He had once lived in Boston, and he agreed to take over the Boston Colored Citizen with the promise of a Tuskegee subsidy. 122 "Of course this arrangement is strictly between you and Mr. Washington," Scott explained, "and he expects that his name will not be used by you even in private conversation with any one." 123 Washington wrote Alexander that Smith would be too expensive to retain in any capacity and must gradually be let go. 124 Washington wanted to hold the reins of the Colored Citizen, but at the same time he was obsessed by the fear that Alexander would slip up and make certain what was already a suspicion in the Guardian office. He was alarmed to learn that Alexander had given his name as a reference to a type foundry company. 125 "I hope that you will let my name appear in the paper just as little as possible," he wrote, and later: "You will

60 Booker T. Washington

note that my name is mentioned twice in the correspondence and I hope you will see that it does not appear anywhere else in your paper this week." 126

Washington had explained to Smith that he was making the change to Alexander because he could not afford to subsidize a paper from week to week. 127 But Alexander, though a more competent journalist, found it impossible to operate without a subsidy, and he soon applied for the $65 a week that Smith had received. "I am sure, Mr. Washington," he wrote, "that if you will have a little chat with some of your generous friends, and explain to them the necessity of having a strong colored neivspaper in Boston that will advocate your cause with dignity and decency, I am convinced that you will be able to get the money necessary to run the paper in the way it ought to be run." 128

Alexander asked for a capital investment of $5000, but Washington carefully limited his involvement to a weekly subsidy. "He feels and I feel," Scott explained, "that there is a great opportunity for the planting of a newspaper there, and where moral support can be given, and financial support to the extent already indicated, you will find him willing, but I do not think his disposition is at all in the direction of being led to go beyond the understanding already reached." 129 Trotter charged on the circumstantial evidence that Washington had "virtual ownership" of the Colored Citizen, 1 * 0 and even the friendly Francis J. Garrison, one of Washington's chief white defenders in Boston, inquired about his relationship with the paper. Washington replied with literal accuracy but with something less than candor: "The fact is, I do not own a dollar's worth of interest in a single Negro publication in this country." 131 The fact also was that without Washington's money there would have been no Boston Colored Citizen.

Along with their subsidy, Washington and Scott bedeviled Alexander with advice and direction, telling him that "a two and one-half column editorial would kill any paper in the world," that he should lift news of interest to blacks from the Boston dailies, that he should employ men to conduct a house-to-house canvass for subscriptions. They paid him for job printing of pamphlets and leaflets and wrote him letters of introduction to Boston business firms that might advertise in his paper. 132 Despite further business difficulties, Alexander found favor with Washington as a journalist. "Under all the circumstances," Washington wrote Scott, "I cannot see how he could have done better than he has." 133 Alexander was now part of the Tuskegee

Black Intellectuals and the Boston Riot 61

Machine. "I think the idea of making Alexander president of the local [Business] League a very good one," Washington confided to the still-loyal Peter Smith. 134 Alexander became, instead, its secretary, a fact in which Trotter quickly saw sinister implications. 135 When the Colored Citizen collapsed in spite of its subsidies in about a year, Alexander converted it into the monthly Alexander's Magazine, which struggled along until 1909, drifting gradually toward an independence from Washington that ended in Alexander's last-ditch offer of the magazine to the newly formed NAACP.

Meanwhile, Boston became to a large extent Trotter territory. The next time Washington's friends in the area sought to honor him, in Cambridge in the fall of 1904, they chose to do so at a banquet for which tickets had to be purchased rather than in an open meeting. Not to be thwarted so easily, Trotter and his group schemed to hold an anti-Washington indignation meeting on the same night. They hired a hall and secretly printed circulars advertising their rally. Once again, however, they had an unsuspected Washington spy in their midst. This time it was Clifford H. Plummer, who had been the defense lawyer for Bernard Charles in the Boston Riot trial, and even that early had been negotiating with Washington. 136 Forewarned by Plummer, Washington's friends went to the owner of the hall and persuaded him to cancel their enemies' reservation. Meanwhile Plummer quiedy gathered up and destroyed their circulars. He even succeeded in concealing his clandestine partnership with Washington. "I informed 'the gang' that I do not expect to attend the dinner," he wrote Washington, "which declaration by me made me eligible to any office within their gift, from the presidency of the United States, to a member of the common council from any ward in Boston or Cambridge." 137

After this fiasco, Trotter went briefly into eclipse. Late in 1904 he was on his good behavior when Oswald Garrison Villard came to address the Boston Literary and Historical Association. Villard was the grandson of the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, the son of a railroad baron, and a power in his own right as editor of the New York Evening Post and the Nation. He supported both Tuskegee and the civil rights cause, and both black factions hoped to capture him exclusively. Plummer, who was at the meeting, reported to Washington: "In all the history of this association we have never had a paper to equal it. No one there could help indorsing all that was said by him, other than a few who were there who must have felt a pang

62 Booker T. Washington

when he made reference to you several times in glowing terms, using words of this kind: 'That able and noble statesman, Booker T. Washington'; 'That courageous man of your race, Booker T. Washington'; and terms of this kind he brought in at intervals when he had made some most striking point." 138 Trotter made no attempt to reply, and Washington was amused to tell his friends "that the persons having in charge the Literary Society, have forbidden Mr. Trotter to use my name." 139 He knew too much of human nature, however, to believe that would last.

Washington's hope was to minimize in the eyes of others the importance of his Boston critics and to confine the revolt against him as far as possible to Boston. He insisted that the rank and file of black people in the country and even in Boston were behind him and his program, and his critics were only a dozen, or even a half-dozen soreheads. "What their ground of opposition is, is hard for me to understand," he wrote a white sympathizer. "I think it is largely jealousy or personal ill-will." 140 His critics were simply spoiled young men who had been educated beyond their intelligence, he explained to President Roosevelt. "In most cases, someone has taken these men up and coddled them by paying their way through college. At Tuskegee a man works for everything that he gets, hence we turn out real men instead of artificial ones." The appeal of his critics he explained partly by circumstances. "When a people are smarting under wrongs and injustices inflicted from many quarters," he wrote Roosevelt, "it is but natural that they should look about for some individual on whom to lay the blame for their seeming misfortunes, and in this case I seem to be the one." 141

Despite his seeming complacency, Washington recognized that the Boston Riot and the whole Trotter campaign had weakened his claim to be the sole racial spokesman and leader. To combat this, he needed first of all to separate Du Bois, with all his distinction and dignity, from the Boston mischief-maker.

CHAPTER 3

Conference at Carnegie Hall

I am quite sure that several of the members, perhaps the majority of those who have been in opposition, are either silenced or won over to see the error of their way.*

btw, 1904

AS HE saw black opposition to his leadership and his policy of com-il promise mount toward the Boston Riot, Washington knew that his best hope was not the leadership of a faction but spokesmanship for a unified black community. He understood the problem, but he did not know how to deal with it. Instead of meeting his critics halfway, he invited only some of them to a summit conference, and then packed the meeting to overshadow them with his numbers. His use of the methods of a political boss rendered his effort at black unity, or at least the isolation of Trotter, abortive. The New York Conference, held in secret in Carnegie Hall, January 6-8, 1904, is nevertheless instructive because it reveals that Washington's whole purpose was not to persuade or treat with his critics but to outmaneuver and overwhelm them.

As early as 1900 Washington had vaguely considered calling a gathering of twelve to fifteen prominent black men to discuss concerted action for racial advancement. 1 In early 1903, while he had Du Bois at Tuskegee to discuss a position he had offered him as director of

*BTW to William H. Baldwin, Jr., Jan. 22, 1904.

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research, the two men disagreed about the job offer but agreed on the desirability of a jointly sponsored conference of leading Afro-Americans. Washington delayed action, however, until he could consult T. Thomas Fortune, then on a government mission in the Philippines. He wrote Du Bois: "I am very anxious that the meeting be not confined to those who may agree with my own views regarding education and the position which the race shall assume in public affairs, but that it shall in every respect represent all the interests of the race." Washington found Clement G. Morgan of Boston, a Trotterite whom Du Bois proposed, acceptable as a substitute for Trotter. He asked Du Bois to write Morgan the letter of invitation, however, saying, "I do not know him very well and then besides I rather have the idea that he has some feeling against me and would not perhaps under the circumstances be inclined to consider favorably anything that I might say." 2 Next he asked Fortune's opinion of "a two or three days private and quiet conference concerning the present condition and future of the race." 3

Similar letters went to nineteen other prominent black men, most of them thoroughly committed to Washington's outlook and his leadership. "It is important that this matter be kept entirely private at present," stated each of the letters. 4 Washington himself broke security, however, in a speech. He referred to a possible gathering of a "group of representative southern white men, and northern white men, and Negroes" to "meet and consider with the greatest calmness and business sagacity the whole subject [of voting rights] as viewed from every standpoint." Trotter, knowing or sensing something of the plans for a conference, asked editorially: "What Does Booker Want With a Conference?" The black suffrage question had already been decided by constitutional amendments thirty years earlier, said Trotter, and needed no review by a self-appointed conference. 5

Du Bois wrote confidentially to Kelly Miller, a mathematics professor of Howard University, that his own "judicious pressure and insistence led to your invitation and that of Morgan of Cambridge." He said he thought this conference would afford a good chance for "a heart to heart talk with Mr. Washington," and proposed a platform:

Full political rights on the same terms as other Americans Higher education of selected Negro youth Industrial education for the masses

Conference at Carnegie Hall 65

Common school training for every Negro child

A stoppage to the campaign of self-deprecation

A careful study of the real conditions of the Negro

A National Negro periodical

A thorough and efficient federation of Negro societies and activities

The raising of a defense fund

A judicious fight in the courts for civil rights 6

After a month or so, when Du Bois inquired again about the plans for the conference, Washington pleaded the difficulty of choosing a date when so many busy people could meet. 7 In the fall o f 1903, after Andrew Carnegie had assured him of a subsidy to pay the expenses of the conference, Washington revived the plan and set the date at January 6-8, 1904, in the meeting rooms of Carnegie Hall in New York. He modified the original plan to include an invitation to some of his white philanthropist friends to meet with the black participants during one afternoon. It is not clear that Du Bois was consulted about these modifications, but he apparently drifted into acceptance of Washington's unilateral planning of the conference.

Washington tried to limit the number of black participants to twenty, but the number gradually grew to twenty-eight, most of whom accepted the invitation. In the last few days, the Reverend Francis J. Grimke decided not to go and suggested his brother Archibald as a substitute. Washington accepted this after some argument about geographical and occupational balance. The prospect of the conference evoked enthusiasm, particularly in the Booker Washington faction. Blacks faced "troublous and stormy times," said the Reverend Isaiah B. Scott of New Orleans, and resistance to the tide of white aggression should begin without delay. "God bless you in all your efforts for the race and for humanity." 8 Kelly Miller as usual found his place somewhere between the two factions of the black leadership dispute. "We have invited two worlds (white and black) to come and reason together," he wrote a friend at Tuskegee. "It is indeed a momentous undertaking, and I am almost overawed at the audacity of it. The effort, however, must not prove abortive, if so, it will serve to estop future movements of like character." 9

Friction and cross-purposes appeared among the black delegates. "I

66 Booker T. Washington

have not told you before," Washington wrote Fortune, "but some of the parties who have been asked to meet in the conference have made a special fight against your being invited. . . . For you not to be present would place me in rather an awkward position." 10 The Georgia politician Judson W. Lyons, register of the United States Treasury, also at first declined to come, on the ground that it would do some unspecified harm to the Republican Party. Washington pleaded with him to change his mind. "I cannot understand how a private conference, composed of a few of our leading men, could in any way endanger party success," he wrote Lyons. "Practically every man who will be present is a worshipper and supporter of Mr. Roosevelt, and none more so than myself." Washington said he was sure the President would approve of the conference if he knew of it. 11 This invitation was some months before Washington learned that Lyons had expressed sympathy for Trotter after the Boston Riot and Trotter's trial. Both Fortune and Lyons consented to attend.

Events arising after the first proposal of the conference were giving Du Bois pause, however. He had declined a job at Tuskegee. The Souls of Black Folk, trenchantly criticizing Washington, had been published. The Afro-American Council imbroglio in the spring and the Boston Riot in July had brought Du Bois to the decision to join the radical dissenters against Washington's compromises. Du Bois at first failed to reply in November 1903 when Washington wrote him for advice in reactivating the plans for a conference. "Of course the main object of the New York Conference," Washington wrote, "is to try to agree upon certain fundamental principles and to see in what way we understand or misunderstand each other and correct mistakes as far as possible." 12 Du Bois was waiting to see the final list of those invited before he would agree to participate. 13 Washington telegraphed Du Bois six days later asking for a reply at once. 14 The next day Scott informed Washington: "DuBois in letter today, testily refuses further advice in conference matter." 15 What Du Bois wrote was: "I do not think it will be profitable for me to give further advice which will not be followed. The conference is yours and you will naturally constitute it as you choose." 16

Faced with the possible collapse or irrelevance of the conference if Du Bois refused to attend, Washington urged William H. Lewis to second the invitation to Clement Morgan, to tell him: "If he really wants to help the race, this is his opportunity." 17 Morgan responded

Conference at Carnegie Hall 67

with some cogent questions, possibly on prompting from Du Bois: "I should be glad to know who will make up the conference, what the scope of it, and what, if any, the plan of procedure." 18 Procedure, Washington replied, would be decided when they met. He sent a list of those invited. "I should think, however," he wrote, "that all the subjects we would want to take up might be comprehended under the following heads: Educational, political, moral and religious, and sociological, but that will be a matter for the conference to determine." 19 The breadth of Washington's agenda for the conference suggested his consensus view of its purpose. What Du Bois feared was that it would amount to nothing more than a "BTW ratification meeting." 20 Washington's concern, on the other hand, was that if many of Du Bois's sympathizers in the North were invited, "we should be ve/y sure that there is a large element in the conference who actually know Southern conditions by experience and who can speak with authority, and we should not have to depend too much on mere theory and untried schemes of Northern colored people." 21

Washington made a special plea to Edward H. Morris, a Chicago lawyer thoroughly alienated from his leadership. Washington offered to pay "all your expenses of travel and board" and urged Morris to keep the whole matter "absolutely confidential" and to "speak on the subject to no one else." He emphasized what he believed to be the importance of the conference to the future of the race, saying: "I do not believe that there has ever been a meeting so fraught with value and seriousness." 22 Washington also urged S. Laing Williams of his own faction in Chicago to urge Morris to accept. Williams promised to see Morris and remarked shrewdly: "It is a good stroke of policy to put him in a position where he must 'either fish or cut bait.' " 23

The personnel problems continued to plague Washington. Lewis suggested that, if Morgan should decline, George Forbes be invited. Forbes had recently quarreled with Trotter and resigned from the Guardian, but Washington vetoed inviting him. "Du Bois is very sensitive on the question as to who shall be invited," he wrote Lewis, "in fact I very much fear he is trying to find an excuse to absent himself, and I have the feeling rather strongly that if Forbes is invited since he has made a break with Trotter that Du Bois will object, for he does not object to saying that we are trying to pack the conference with people who are thinking in a certain direction." 24 When Francis Grimke, who was not even going to attend the conference, proposed

68 Booker T. Washington

several persons to be invited, perhaps at Du Bois's instigation, Washington wrote to Du Bois objecting that this would make the conference too large to accomplish its objects. 25 The only one Washington singled out for special objection was Grimke's brother Archibald. Two others had already been invited from Boston, Washington pointed out, and said, "in politics I understand that he is a Democrat, and you will note that we have already invited one prominent Democrat from the West." 26 Meanwhile, Washington himself made sure that his own faction in Boston would have a representative. He arranged that, if W. H. Lewis had to be absent on official duties during part of the conference, Samuel E. Courtney would be his alternate. 27 Francis Grimke meanwhile demolished the objection to his brother by saying, "my brother is not a democrat and never has been. He is what is known as a Mugwump or Independent in politics." 28

All through December 1903 Washington worked to weave the web of his conference without losing his control of its membership. He wrote Morris a second letter and also asked his Philadelphia friend John S. Durham to urge Morris to attend, "and explaining some of my views." 29 He wrote second letters to Judson Lyons, Clement Morgan, and Fredrick L. McGhee. 30 One by one the members of the anti-Washington faction accepted. Two weeks before the conference, Morgan was the only hold-out. He asked that "the enclosed names" be added to the list, "that I may disarm some criticism, already brewing and sure to increase." 31 The list is no longer attached to his letter. It probably included Archibald Grimke, however, for in an eleventh-hour meeting with Francis Grimke, Whitefield McKinlay speaking for Washington persuaded him to accept P. B. S. Pinchback as a substitute for his brother, or actually for himself. 32 Washington then "yielded to the earnest solicitation of various parties" and invited Archibald Grimke. 33

Privately, Washington was thoroughly out of sorts over this family politics and the necessity of inviting Archibald Grimke. He sent his friend McKinlay a copy of his telegram of invitation and said: "I confess to you I have sent this telegram very much against my own personal wishes and sense of what is right and proper, because I do not feel that Archibald Grimke has ever done anything to entitle him to membership in such a body. In the second place, he represents a noisy, turbulent and unscrupulous set of men to such an extent that I cannot feel that he would enter into the serious and far-sighted deliber-

Conference at Carnegie Hall 6g

ations of such a conference in the way that we plan to enter into it. I wish, however, directly or indirectly, you would say to Mr. Grimke that the conference is called for a serious purpose and not for the purpose of airing personal grievances or entering into a scramble, and that if he attempts to have the same kind of 'nigger meeting' that was had in Washington a few days ago, it will be much wiser for him not to go to New York." 34 That was certainly not a warm invitation, but it covered up the fact that in general it was the Washington and not the Du Bois faction that got its way in the choice of conferees.

It proved impossible to keep secret the fact that the New York Conference was occurring. Even before the meeting the Boston Guardian and the Chicago Conservator both carried editorials that could only-have been written with inside knowledge. Fortune called this "a rank betrayal of confidence on the part of some one of the invited," and suspected Du Bois and Morris. "Neither of them is above such conduct," he charged. 35 Washington himself wrote to Theodore Roosevelt telling him confidentially of the conference, "composed of those who agree as well as those who disagree on important matters." He said he would call on Roosevelt on his way to New York "with the hope that you may have some suggestion to put before the conference." 36 Washington also informed his philanthropic friends, particularly Carnegie and William H. Baldwin, Jr., whom he planned to invite into the conference at the appropriate moment. He thus applied a double standard of secrecy, one applying to the other delegates and another applying to himself.

When Washington first consulted his white associates prior to the conference, their reaction was so negative that apparently something like a quarrel took place over the telephone. "I think that I owe you an apology for the manner in which I spoke to Mr. Baldwin over the telephone concerning the conference," Washington wrote Wallace Buttrick, secretary of the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board. "Judging from what Mr. Baldwin said, I thought that objection was made to the conference on the ground that it would be displeasing to the Southern white people. If this had been the cause of the objection, I should feel, (and I am sure that you would share the feeling with me) that we have already gone as far as decency permits in our attempt to avoid stirring up Southern feeling." He said he was glad to hear that the objections were on other grounds. 37 Whatever their initial objections, however, Baldwin and several northern mem-

70 Booker T. Washington

bers of the Southern Education Board agreed to visit the conference, which, incidentally, would strengthen Washington's hand there by showing what powerful white allies he had. Fortune suggested that Washington further control events by making Emmett Scott the secretary of the conference. "You would then be sure of the accuracy of the report of the proceedings for future reference," wrote Fortune. 38 Scott did attend, but the conference chose, instead, the compromiser Kelly Miller as secretary.

Du Bois must have realized as soon as he saw the list of those invited that Washington had outmaneuvered him. While he had been considering the issues to be discussed, Washington had been gathering the manpower. Du Bois estimated the factional division of delegates at sixteen to nine in Washington's favor. In a confidential memorandum to his faction on the eve of the conference, he divided the conferees into six classes: "Unscrupulously for Washington"; for Washington "without enthusiasm or with scruples" (Robert R. Moton and others); "Uncertain, leaning to Washington" (Bishop Walters and others); "Uncertain, possibly against Washington"; "Anti-Washington"; and "Uncompromisingly Anti-Washington." He warned:

The tactics of the pro-Washington men will take one or more of the following forms—a. Conciliation and compromise, b. Irritation and browbeating, c. Silent shutting off of discussion by closure methods. Come prepared therefore in case of a. to be firm and hammer at the principles and Washington's record, b. to keep good temper and insist on free speech, c. to protest against closure or underhand methods even to the extent of leaving the meeting. Bring every speech or letter or record of Washington men you can lay hands on so that he can face his record in print. The main issue of this meeting is Washington, refuse to be sidetracked. 39

Trotter, doubtless irked at being excluded from this gathering of black leaders, publicized every rumor or leak he could get wind of. "But why not let us know who are to be invited?" asked the Guardian. "Why have it a secret? And above all, let both sides be equally represented. No tricks, Mr. Washington." 40 This editorial a week before the conference gave Washington reason to distrust the good faith of the Du Bois faction and he wrote to Du Bois at once: "I find that some of the men invited have such a low sense of honor that one or two have deliberately given out to the press the substance of the cor-

Conference at Carnegie Hall 71

respondence which I have had with them. It is impossible for one to feel at ease when in conference with men who have no sense of honor." 41 Trotter went so far as to go to New York and try to crash the conference, but he was not allowed inside. 42 Nevertheless, he was there in spirit, for Morgan at Du Bois's request brought to the conference the nine questions Trotter had tried to get Washington to answer at the Boston Riot. 43

In such an atmosphere of mutual distrust, it is surprising that the conference met at all, and even more surprising that it ran its full course. Few details survive, for the conferees were enjoined, in the interest of secrecy, against even taking notes. According to Du Bois's memory three years later, the Du Bois faction told Washington "frankly behind closed doors with the other men present, the things we objected to in his program. We did not object to industrial education, we did not object to his enthusiasm for its advancement, we did object to his attacks upon higher training and his general attitude of belittling the race and not putting enough stress upon voting and things of that sort." 44

What Du Bois remembered best and longest was the chilling presence of Washington's white friends near the end of the conference, just when it could have been expected to begin resolving the factional conflicts among the blacks. The white delegation included Andrew Carnegie and three members of the Southern Education Board, William H. Baldwin, Jr., Robert C. Ogden, and George Foster Peabody. Also on hand were three of Washington's white journalist allies, Oswald Garrison Villard of the Nation and New York Evening Post, Lyman Abbott of the Outlook, and William Hayes Ward of the Independent. That the whites acted on Washington's cue is suggested by a letter Baldwin wrote Washington during the conference: "If you have any special points that you want me to refer to, send them to me." 45 "There was considerable speaking," Du Bois remembered years later, "but the whole purpose of the conference seemed revealed by the invited white guests and the tone of their message. . . . Their words were lyric, almost fulsome in praise of Mr. Washington and his work, and in support of his ideas. Even if all they said had been true, it was a wrong note to strike in a conference of conciliation." 46

After the white visitors had left, tempers grew short and the disagreements became more personal. Lewis at one point noticed Morgan writing and accused him of taking notes of the meeting, contrary

72 Booker T. Washington

to agreement. Morgan angrily replied that he was writing a letter to his wife. 47 The conference ended with speeches by Washington and Du Bois and the passage of resolutions. While the Du Bois faction later recalled most vividly how they had talked up to Washington, his own faction remembered Washington's "wonderful speech" at the end that sent the delegates home "knowing you better and appreciating you more for your great work for the race and mankind." A few days after the conference Courtney sent to Tuskegee his impression of Archibald Grimke's conversion as a result of the persuasiveness of Washington's final speech: "Wish you might have heard him tell how he and Morgan were completely overcome by your frank and most convincing address. He admits that they had never measured you correctly, and he tells me how Morgan told him that he could scarcely refrain from weeping when you gave your experiences after that 'White House Dinner.' " Courtney believed that Washington's critics present were "completely overwhelmed by your big heartedness and wonderful calmness and modesty." 48

Courtney, however, was a blind partisan, incapable of judging the extent of remaining disagreement. Washington had anticipated and possibly hoped that Du Bois and his faction would decide at the last minute not to attend the conference and thus expose themselves to criticism for fearing to confront Washington. Du Bois sensed that possibility and urged his faction to attend, but Washington's candor and reasonableness in the face of criticism may have caused Du Bois to regret his participation in the meeting.

The "Summary of Proceedings" that Kelly Miller prepared contained "the sense of this conference" rather than the exchange of views. The conferees agreed that the bulk of the black people should remain in the South and struggle there for political and civil equality, but at the same time individuals might properly be encouraged to pursue opportunities by migration to the North or West. Second, there was a Du Bois point: "that in a democratic republic the right to vote is of paramount importance to every class of citizens and is preservative of all other rights and interests." Third, the conference opposed all restrictions of civil rights in travel and public accommodations and urged court suits to enforce these rights, and stood for "no compromise, or equivocal statement, respecting our civil rights." This was an indirect reference to Washington's frequent equivocations on civil rights, the subject of Trotter's shrill questions during the Boston Riot six months

earlier. The resolution on education endorsed all its forms, elementary, industrial, and collegiate. The conferees denounced lynching; and while they condemned rape they were certain that "skillfully exaggerated reports of rapeful assault" were being used to discredit blacks. The conference agreed that blacks should cooperate with southern whites whenever they could "without compromise of manhood." A future conference of northern whites, southern whites, and blacks to consider means of solving the race problem was endorsed. Finally, it was the "sense of the conference" that an effort should be made "to disseminate a knowledge of the truth in regard to all matters affecting our race."

By unanimous vote the New York Conference approved the establishment of a "Committee of Safety with twelve members" to be a bureau of information and to "seek to unify and bring into cooperation the action of the various organizations" and sections of the country. Washington, Du Bois, and Hugh M. Browne, head of a state industrial school for blacks in Pennsylvania, were made members of this committee and authorized to select the other nine members. Why Du Bois acquiesced in this arrangement is not clear, but it may have been because he mistakenly regarded Browne as an uncommitted delegate rather than a Washington partisan. A final resolution expressed gratitude to Booker T. Washington for his "thoughtful initiative" in calling the conference and his "helpful address delivered before the closing session of the conference." 49

Rumors began to fly even before the conference disbanded—some of them wild and without foundation. At Tuskegee, because of the unusual absence of both Washington and Scott, Washington's brother John reported: "For the last two days there have been numerous rumors on the school grounds, in town, and inquiries iiave come from Montgomery and other places in the State." Among the rumors were that Scott had been shot in Washington, that Scott was confined to his room there very sick, and that Booker T. Washington himself had been shot. 50 Washington quickly put these rumors to rest, but there were others that contained more truth. Two days after the conference Washington wrote Courtney in Boston: "It is persistendy repeated that Trotter has a plan for giving out later on, either in his own paper, or in some white paper, the entire proceedings, real or imaginary, of our conference." Since Archibald Grimke had promised to prevent this, Washington asked Courtney to "see that Mr. Grimke keeps his hand

74 Booker T. Washington

on Trotter." He added: "Do not use my name." 51 Washington's telegram found Courtney out of town, but his wife immediately called Lewis on the telephone and he took care of the matter. By the time Courtney reached the office of the Associated Press, they had already agreed to suppress Trotter's revelations. Courtney also spoke to Grimke, who renewed his promise to see that Trotter dropped the matter and promised to call a conference of all factions in Boston to try to moderate their differences. 52

Despite these efforts, Trotter tried to get a pretended account of the New York Conference into the New York Sun, and nearly succeeded. Hearing of it, Charles W. Anderson and Emmett Scott "repaired to the Sun office . . . and going directly to the managing editor succeeded in holding it out." Washington apparently knew the contents of Trotter's manuscript, for he described it as one that anyone could have written and "not based on information directly given respecting the conference." 53 An editorial in the Guardian, however, showed that Trotter had somehow gained direct information from a participant. He referred, for example, to Baldwin's offer to finance a suit that Du Bois and Washington discussed at the conference, to be undertaken against Pullman car segregation. This "must have been the result of information given by some one who was a member of the Carnegie Hall Conference," said Anderson. 54

Anderson and Scott did not succeed in getting a copy of Trotter's manuscript article sent to the New York Sun, but Trotter apparently thought they did. He angrily accused the editor of the Sun of handing it over to his "most inveterate enemy in New York." Anderson was delighted that Trotter was "laboring under the impression that it is carefully tucked away in the pockets of my old gray gaberdine." 55 Washington asked Anderson to continue to try to secure a copy for future use against Trotter. Meanwhile, Scott said: "I think it would be well to have Trotter feel that we have this copy, or rather think it well not to disabuse his mind of the thought that it is in our possession." 56 Finding the Sun reporter who had written a story on the manuscript, Anderson told him that he "would gladly pay him for the copy if he would secure it for us. He looked high and low at the office, but could not find it, and thinks it must have been destroyed." The editor also promised to search for the manuscript and give it to Anderson if found, but it apparently had vanished. 57

In the aftermath of the New York Conference other Bookerites, as

Conference at Carnegie Hall 75

Washington's faction was coming to be called, had more encouraging news. Robert R. Moton, who was more clearly in Washington's camp than Du Bois believed, wrote that Archibald Grimke had said to him that "Washington's speech is unanswerable and he is undoubtedly working for the best interests of the Negro," and that "there is simply a difference in method and lack of understanding." Moton wrote that he also planned to invite Du Bois to spend a few days at Hampton on his way south, in order to soften the impact of Hollis B. Frissell's harsh review of The Souls of Black Folk in the Southern Workman. Moton wrote Washington: "I think we can, in a quiet way, change the whole front of that band of Negroes who seem to be opposing everything that does not coincide with their narrow and I fear in many cases selfish ideas." 58 Washington, however, persuaded Moton not to issue the invitation to Du Bois. He said that some months earlier Baldwin had invited Du Bois to his house for "a frank conference," and Du Bois "afterwards said that it was the purpose of Mr. Baldwin to try to bribe him or change his opinion regarding Hampton and Tuskegee and myself." In fact, Du Bois had vaguely referred to this at the New York Conference. Washington warned Moton that his own invitation might be interpreted by the hypersensitive Du Bois as a bribe. 59

Looking back on the conference, Washington decided that it had on the whole been a success. He wrote to William H. Baldwin, Jr.: "I am quite sure that several of the members, perhaps the majority of those who have been in opposition, are either silenced or won over to see the error of their way. There were others of whom this cannot be said, but will have to be watched in the future in order to determine how they should be classed. All of them, however, I am sure, were overwhelmed by the general sentiment of the conference and by the high character of the men present. I feel that it was a very helpful meeting from every point of view and among the most important efforts that I have ever had part in." 60

Acting in the spirit of the conference, J. C. Asbury, editor of the Odd Fellows' Journal, urged his fellow-conferee James H. Hayes to diminish his criticisms of the Republican Party, on the ground that "the man who attempts to secure [his] rights by 'menacing' the only friend he has ever had is a very poor tactician." He urged Hayes also to try to understand Washington better. "I regard him as thoroughly sound upon every question affecting the progress of the Race. He is just a little more diplomatic than the rest of us and consequently more sue-

76 Booker T. Washington

cessful; and as you know in times of peace diplomacy rules the world. As Lewis of Boston wrote me a couple of years ago 'he is trying to get the wooden horse inside the walls of Troy.' " 61

Many of Washington's contemporaries doubted his Trojan horse role, however, because his self-help and solidarity preachment seemed an uncertain remedy for white persecution, and because his compromises and humility seemed to encourage further humiliation by arrogant whites. The factional fighting continued unabated. At the Bethel Literary and Historical Association in Washington, D.C., only a few days after the New York Conference, one of the conference participants, Edward H. Morris, gave a lecture on "Shams," a scathing attack on Washington as though the uneasy truce of the conference had never been agreed on. The attack was especially exasperating after Washington had so carefully maneuvered Morris into attending the conference. Morris's bitter tone shocked Moton, who had just talked with Morris at a banquet in Morris's honor before the lecture, where "he took as liberal views on the situation and Mr. Washington as one could wish." Moton concluded that Morris had "prepared his paper before leaving Chicago and felt obliged to get it off." 62 That may have been the case, but Washington's feeling was that Morris was simply "a hard and difficult creature without any sense of honor." As usual, Washington saw only a personal attack in what was essentially an ideological criticism. "If he wanted to attack me he had an opportunity during the three days we were together face to face in a manly, straightforward way," Washington complained, "but he was too big a coward for that, but waited until he got an opportunity to do so behind my back." 63

Washington took this criticism more seriously than it deserved, and arranged for accounts to be gathered in order to answer them at some appropriate time without calling Morris's name. Roscoe Conkling Bruce reported that, by adroitly quoting from Washington's writings and speeches, Morris "built up a proposition made up of half truths, as would any small lawyer, in order to win his case." Another witness wrote: "His speech was, all in all, about the cleverest piece of sophistry I've ever heard. He made skillful use of extracts from your books and speeches, which, taken out of their original settings, were twisted and construed to make you a sham and a traitor to the best interests of the Negro." 64 Bruce illustrated this style of presentation: "His case was simply this—quoting from Dr. Washington he said, 'I recently saw

Conference at Carnegie Hall 77

a young colored man reading or studying a French grammar' and very adroitly failed to finish the sentence which described the squalor and dirt by which he was surrounded and which to any intelligent reader would say that before we take up the books of classic culture, let us have clean homes." Bruce gave several other examples of quoting out of context. 65

Cyrus Field Adams in his report to Washington paraphrased Morris as saying: "It is generally believed that Booker Washington believes in the natural inferiority of the Negro, that he should have a special place in American civilization, separate and distinct from other peoples and that he should consider the suffrage as of secondary importance." Morris also allegedly objected to Washington's "funny stories showing up the weaknesses of the race," and even his standard "gospel of the toothbrush" in that it gave whites a wrong idea of blacks. 66 One Bookerite even charged that Morris in a church pulpit "three times declared his non-belief in Christianity preferring nature and her wonderful teachings." 67 Actually, this naturalistic view was probably the one point at which Washington's and Morris's ideas may have joined, but Washington carefully kept his liberal theology quiet.

There was some disagreement as to how Morris's audience responded to his speech. One estimate was that the audience of about 1500 persons was about evenly divided, but another said four-fifths supported Morris. So forceful was the speaker that at first only a lowly government clerk, John Ewing, would speak in defense of Washington. Soon, however, Judge Robert H. Terrell, J. C. Napier, and P. B. S. Pinchback gathered courage to speak. "Pinchback's was such a slobber that it probably did more harm than good," Bruce Evans reported. He himself claimed to have "made two efforts for recognition but soon found that the preference of the President was for anti-Bookerites." S. Laing Williams also defended Washington, but the presiding officer called time on him after three minutes. 68 John C. Dancy lamely explained afterwards: "I declined to speak lest my remarks should have taken a course which would have appeared personal, which I always try to avoid." 69 Having the last word and "being skilled in coarse sarcasm by long practice," Morris held up to ridicule those who had defended Washington's leadership and his race program. 70 The currently anti-Washington local editor, W. Calvin Chase, challenged Terrell's claim that nine-tenths of blacks in the nation's capital favored the Tuskegean's leadership, and Chase proposed a

78 Booker T. Washington

resolution that Morris's speech expressed the sentiments of District blacks. "For God's sake don't let it pass," shouted Pinchback. The chair ruled the resolution out of order, but Chase was sure it would have passed by four to one. 71 Even Washington's strongest advocates conceded that Morris's speech had inflamed the already hotly debated question of the wisdom of Washington's methods of race leadership. 72

"Although the Doctor does not intend to categorically dignify the small fry by directly referring to them," Scott wrote confidentially, "I think he will clean up the ground rather effectively with the whole batch before he is through with them. You will remember how he whipped them in his speech at the New York conference, and I have [no] doubt that he will go after them in much the same way at Washington." 73

In short, the New York Conference had not succeeded at all in its main objective of laying factional differences to rest and unifying the leadership of the race. Washington himself was soon referring to "smoking out the opposition" as a legitimate activity. 74 Charles Anderson thoroughly approved of a return to aggressive methods. "A good thrashing would convince these young upstarts," he wrote the Wizard. "My experience in politics is, that he is whipped oftenest who is whipped easiest, and I long ago made up my mind to give my opponent the best I have in my shop, when he sets himself the task of fighting me." 75 On the other hand, this return to factionalism as usual was an admission that Washington's conference had failed.

Carrying out the mandate of the New York Conference, Washington, Du Bois, and Hugh M. Browne undertook to organize the standing Committee of Twelve for the Advancement of the Negro Race. "Even before our committee is formed," Washington wrote Du Bois, "I think there are one or two matters that we might attend to effectively. He suggested that they ask his lawyer, Wilford H. Smith, to prepare a leaflet of instructions to blacks on how to qualify for jury service. "If the facts and proper instruction as to methods of procedure are put before the colored people and they do not secure representation upon juries they will have no one to blame but themselves," Washington wrote. He suggested also a pamphlet on requirements for voting in the various southern states. Surely many blacks would be able to vote if they would remember to pay their poll taxes by the deadline. 76 That last remark could not have been very

Conference at Carnegie Hall 79

persuasive to Du Bois, who refused on principle to pay his own poll tax.

A conference resolution also authorized the committee to reprint and distribute an article on the Negro and the South which the white veteran libertarian Carl Schurz had recently published in McClure's. 77 Du Bois agreed with Washington that "both the matters you suggest are important and should be attended to immediately." 78 It was harder, however, to arrange for an organizational meeting of a committee of three that was to choose the Committee of Twelve. They decided on a meeting in New York in March 1904, two months after the conference. Meanwhile, Washington and Du Bois collected from their friends suggestions for members of the expanded committee and proposals for the structure and functions of the committee. Washington proposed simply a secretary and a "working committee of five" to act between meetings. He proposed "Turning the attention of the race to the importance of constructive, progressive effort," calling attention to examples of black success, emphasis on "the points upon which the race agrees," campaigns for voter registration, and the correcting of errors and misstatements about the race in white publications. As Washington saw it, the aim of the committee should be, above all, "the unification of the race in the near future." 79

Du Bois proposed a more elaborate, even grandiose program that in many features foreshadowed his later Niagara Movement. He proposed that a "Committee of Safety" of twelve meet quarterly, a "General Committee" of 120 meet annually, and "Committees of Correspondence" be organized in every black community. Du Bois proposed an annual "relief fund" of $12,000. The Committee of Safety he wanted further divided into six sub-committees of two members each to keep watch on the various concerns of the race—political action, defense and information, legal redress, social reform, economic cooperation, and organization and finance. Du Bois would have "the Committee of Safety," as he insisted on calling it, concern itself with matters ranging as widely as political action, petitions for kindergartens, consumers' leagues, and a crusade against tuberculosis among blacks. 80

"I think the plan of Dr. Du Bois has some good points in it toward which we should work," Washington privately confided to Browne, "but I have the feeling that it is rather large and complicated for our

80 Booker T. Washington

present purposes." Washington's own greater political experience led him to "the feeling that the smaller the number, the more effectively one can work." He wrote Du Bois and Hugh Browne that perhaps if they could succeed with a simple committee of twelve members for a year or two, then perhaps they could enlarge the structure. 81

The committee of three, following its parent body, met in secret without minutes, but clearly the voting was consistently two to one against Du Bois. He, Archibald Grimke, and Charles E. Bentley of Chicago were the only ones chosen to represent the anti-Washington faction. All the others were moderates leaning toward Washington or unambiguously Washington men. Though these proportions did probably reflect the relative power relationship between the factions and was about the same ratio as the New York Conference membership itself, that was small comfort to Du Bois. He might believe that the ratio did not represent proportionally the brainpower of the two factions, but Washington in this situation had again shown himself the master politician who had outmaneuvered the black intellectual once again. Even Bentley, one of Du Bois's choices for the Committee of Twelve, had some obligation to Washington, for he was a substitute at Washington's insistence for Edward H. Morris, who had been Du Bois's first choice. Anderson told Bentley and then reported it to Washington that "/ thought you regarded him as a man, who, while not altogether approving of your course, was at the same time willing to endorse the large part of your work, and a man who was not an insane and irrational opponent." Anderson also learned that Bentley already knew what had gone on at the meeting. "Du Bois has evidently told his cohorts all," Anderson wrote Washington. "/ was careful to remind him that you had not done so with yours." 82

Washington scheduled the first meeting of the Committee of Twelve to be in St. Louis at a black church on July 1, 1904, when he was to be in town for a speech at the St. Louis Exposition. Du Bois did not respond to this call, however. At a late date, his wife wired Washington: "Du Bois ill, probably cannot attend St. Louis meeting." 83 Washington postponed the meeting until a week later in New York. Again Du Bois absented himself. He had apparently decided that the committee was so thoroughly in Washington's control that it would not accomplish any of his own ends. He was also disturbed that its funds came from an undisclosed source through Washington, and correctly surmised that the money came from Andrew Carnegie. For about a

Conference at Carnegie Hall 81

decade Carnegie gave the Committee of Twelve the same amount he gave the National Negro Business League, $2700 a year. 84 "For my part," remarked Emmett Scott, "I am all but glad that Du Bois was not present. To my mind he has all but decided to flock by himself. I think he will be practically harmless from now on." 85

Lacking Du Bois's counterpoint, the Committee of Twelve unanimously adopted all of the recommendations that Washington presented. Scott, whose loyalty often outran his judgment, declared it "the only sane program that has been offered during the whole of the conferences and meetings of these various men." 86 Its moderation in the face of the worsening race problem probably confirmed Du Bois's suspicions. Washington's suggestions were that the committee's work should be mainly directed in certain channels: "Turning tiie attention of the race to the importance of constructive, progressive effort, and the attention of the country to Negro successes. Emphasizing and keeping before the public, points of agreement rather than points of difference amongst us. . . . Correcting errors and misstatements concerning the progress and activities of the race, as well as making known the truth regarding the acts of the white race affecting us." 87

Washington must have realized that he had driven away the very men he had hoped to encompass through his conference, by his immoderate use of power and his overly moderate goals. He wrote to Archibald Grimke soon after the meeting: "I have been thinking a good deal of your suggestion that we ought to have in our general directions to the secretary something bearing more directly upon the franchise, and the more I think of it the more I agree with your view." He proposed the following additional suggestion: "And to keep constantly before the people through the medium of the press, pulpit and platform the importance of registering and voting at all elections, both state and national, and the prompt and regular payment of all taxes, especially that class of taxes that are a condition for voting." 88 Grimke, following Du Bois's lead, had already sent in his resignation from the Committee of Twelve, 89 but he now changed his mind, withdrew his resignation, and even in time wrote a pamphlet for the Committee of Twelve series. Du Bois, however, stood by his own resignation, and his departure rendered the committee insignificant as an institution for bridging the growing rift in the leadership class of the black minority group.

The Committee of Twelve for the Advancement of the Negro Race

82 Booker T. Washington

became largely a paper organization, conducted from the office of Hugh M. Browne, its secretary. Its members corresponded with Browne or with Washington and Scott rather than meeting as a body, and their work consisted almost entirely of a succession of pamphlets. Some of these were original writings, others were reprints of speeches or magazine articles by Washington, Carl Schurz, Archibald Grimke, and one even by the committee's angel, Andrew Carnegie, who relied on Emmett Scott for his parade of statistical evidence to prove the steady progress of the Afro-American.

In only one instance did the Committee of Twelve act in a way that promised the advancement of blacks. This was in the Maryland disfranchisement contest in 1905. Black men were effectively barred from voting by one means or another in the ex-Confederate states, and the Maryland case raised the question whether the movement would spread to the border states that had remained in the Union. The Poe Amendment to the state constitution, designed to disfranchise blacks, passed the legislature and was submitted to the people. 90 Harry S. Cummings, a black attorney and Baltimore councilman who had seconded Roosevelt's nomination in 1904, organized the Colored Voters Suffrage League in 1905 to fight the Poe Amendment, and appealed to Washington and the Committee of Twelve for help. 91 The committee met with the Maryland leaders, gave them some money, counseled them on political strategy, and published and distributed copies of a pamphlet on the right of suffrage that Archibald Grimke prepared. 92 Washington also invited the Constitution League to assist in the Maryland campaign. 93 The Poe Amendment was defeated by nearly 25,000 votes, and Cummings gave considerable credit to the Committee of Twelve for stopping the wave of southern disfranchisement at the Potomac. "I cannot thank you too much for your interest in us and your practical assistance," Cummings wrote Washington. 94 Four years later, however, history began repeating itself, and Cummings wrote: "I know what you did in our last fight and it was confidential. Can you in anyway help us in this struggle? Whatever you may do will be as you know 'within the Lodge.' " 95 Washington girded up his committee for another effort of advice, encouragement, and perhaps direct assistance in 1909 and 1910; but this time it was mainly local campaigning with Washington's quiet enlistment of support from President Taft and Cardinal James Gibbons that kept the disfranchises at bay. 96

Conference at Carnegie Hall 83

The Committee of Twelve was really a still-born racial organization, but it made a feeble effort to come to life at one point, when it proposed in 1906 a private conference between southern blacks and whites to work for a change in harsh southern practices of racial discrimination. The southern members of the Southern Education Board vetoed it. 97 The Committee of Twelve for the Advancement of the Negro Race moved offstage toward oblivion, dropping a few pamphlets in its wake.

CHAPTER 4

Damming Niagara

I am, Your obedient humble servant, Chisum, to use as your Eminence desires, absolutely.

THE summit conference of black leaders at Carnegie Hall in January 1904 was not only a logical response to the fragmentation of Afro-American leadership symbolized by the Boston Riot, but its failure to achieve any unity or even truce among the factions pointed inevitably toward the Niagara Movement a year later. The times themselves contributed to this polarization, as white aggression took the extreme forms of lynching and race riot, and the slower but continuous forms of segregation, disfranchisement, and exclusion from one avenue after another of black advancement. Black dissatisfaction took the form not only of protest against white oppression but disillusionment with the compromising, temporizing leadership of Booker T. Washington.

The Niagara Movement reflected the personality of W. E. B. Du Bois rather than Monroe Trotter, for Trotter's talents lay in stirring controversy, whereas Du Bois was an intellectual system-builder. He fashioned a black self-advancement movement that in every feature was a contrast to the Tuskegee Machine. Where Washington proposed to improve the racial climate through conciliation, the Niagara Movement proposed to clear the air by frank protest of injustice. Where the Tuskegee Machine stood for the up-and-coming black

Damming Niagara 85

businessman and farmer and such professional allies as these classes could attract, the Niagara Movement centered on the college-graduate professional class and spoke of its membership as the Talented Tenth. Where Washington emphasized economic means and self-help, the Niagara Movement depended on universal suffrage, civil rights, and an intellectual elite to bring about the promise of black opportunity in America. The Niagarites saw Washington as the greatest obstacle in their path, and one more vulnerable to their protest than the white majority. Washington saw in his critics a collection of impractical visionaries and personal failures who lacked the capacity to lead and were jealous of his own constructive achievements and legitimate leadership. Naturally, seeing one another in this extravagant light, the two factions spent their energies fighting each other, leaving only a small part of themselves free to bring about the noble ideals and meliorative goals that each professed.

The Niagara Movement was clearly the brainchild of Du Bois, but it is harder to fix the moment of its genesis. Perhaps it began with Washington's easy success in controlling the membership, structure, and functions of the Committee of Twelve. Du Bois had by that time become convinced that protest against the loss of civil and political rights was the first order of race business, and he would insist on a membership of ideological purity in the pursuit of these rights. His organizational plan for the Committee of Twelve, which Washington found hilariously grandiose, became the structure for the Niagara Movement. But the Niagara Movement was also born of frustration and humiliation, as Du Bois found it harder than ever to influence the cause of racial justice or even to bastinado Booker T. Washington from his ivory tower.

In the January 1905 issue of The Voice of the Negro, summing up the "Credits and Debits" of the past year in race relations, Du Bois placed in the debit column the charge that "$3,000 of 'hush money'" had been spent "to subsidize the Negro press in five leading cities." 1 No mention of Washington's name was necessary; the meaning was clear. Emmett Scott retaliated by persuading a black businessman to withdraw his advertising from the magazine. 2 More significantly, however, Du Bois was challenged to prove his case by Oswald Garrison Villard. Du Bois labored hard to assemble the evidence, and came forward with an elaboration of his charges, much circumstantial evidence, and twelve "exhibits" appended to his letter. 3 Although, as we shall see,

86 Booker T. Washington

Du Bois was essentially correct in his charge, Villard replied: "I must say frankly that it will take a great deal more than the evidence you have presented to shake my faith in Mr. Washington's purity of purpose, and absolute freedom from selfishness and personal ambition." All he would concede was that Scott's "literary bureau" at Tuskegee had been "extremely injudicious." 4

If even the most liberal white Americans refused to find Washington at fault, Du Bois thought the times called for an all-black organization as close-knit as a cabal to champion black liberty. So he secretly gathered a band of brothers to meet in Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 1905. Washington somehow heard advance rumors of it, however, and he unhesitatingly used the same tactics of espionage and repression he had employed against the Boston Guardian and its editor. In response to Washington's telegram, S. Laing Williams sent the names of ten Chicagoans invited to Buffalo and of three others from farther west observed at the Chicago train station on their way through to Buffalo. He could learn nothing, however, about the character of the meeting. 5 Washington sent a member of his secretarial staff, Julius R. Cox, on a sudden vacation to Niagara Falls. "I assure you I have enjoyed my outing up to this time and I know I shall enjoy the rest," Cox wrote back to Tuskegee. 6 Apparently Cox had arrived at the meeting place a week early, and he returned to his regular work in Boston. Washington telegraphed him there: "See Plummer at once. Give him fifty dollars. Tell him to go to Buffalo tonight or tomorrow morning ostensibly to attend Elks convention but to report fully what goes on at meeting to be held there Wednesday and Thursday. Get into meeting, if possible but be sure name of all who attend and what they do. Answer when you have completed this matter." 7 Cox replied: "All arranged. Drew personal check for fifty. Plum leaves this morning. Will look after all also press reports. Most of crowd to leave here financially unable." 8

Clifford Plummer, the lawyer who had spied for Washington in the Boston troubles, reported from Buffalo that there were few delegates to the secret meeting, "Nothing serious so far. Will try to stop their declaration of principles from appearing." Plummer went to the Associated Press office in Buffalo to arrange as far as possible for the newspapers of the country to ignore the meeting. 9 This maneuver was so successful that of all the white daily papers outside of Buffalo, only the Boston Transcript carried a detailed report. It was sent in by Trot-

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ter immediately on his return from the meeting. 10 The Transcript quoted in full the declaration of principles, listed the twenty-seven participants, and announced the group's ambitious plans for propaganda and lobbying for civil rights.

Plummer at first called the Boston Transcript report a pack of lies, for he had completely missed the real meeting of the Niagara Movement, which had moved from Buffalo to Niagara Falls, Canada, after discriminatory treatment in the Buffalo hotel. Plummer insisted that there had been no conference. "I was located near 521 Michigan Avenue from Wednesday morning until Friday," he wrote his chief, "and I can state positively that none of the men named in the report were present except Du Bois. Notwithstanding the fact that the conference amounted to nothing, the local editors informed me that some colored man did bring in a report such as appeared in the Boston papers; but no reporter was assigned to the seat of the conference." 11

Washington decided to extend to the black press the silent treatment he had been able to manage with the white newspapers. He wired Scott: "Telegraph [Richard W.] Thompson and other newspaper men that you can absolutely trust to ignore Niagara movement." 12 Scott did so. "The best of the white newspapers in the North have absolutely ignored it and have taken no account of its meetings or its protestations," he wrote Thompson. "I think, then, as I have intimated, if we shall consistently refuse to take the slightest notice of them that the whole thing will die aborning." He named several newspapers Thompson should influence. 13 Scott's telegram reached Thompson too late, however, to prevent a reference to the Niagara Movement in his newsletter— "In sarcastic vein, however, which will do no harm," he reassured Scott. He agreed in the near future, however, to a strategy of silence. "To advertise the movement by opposition even, would be to magnify it." 14

Washington's strategy was largely successful. Surveying the entire black newspaper coverage of the Niagara Movement's inaugural meeting, Scott wrote Washington complacently that aside from the Atlanta Age, which straddled, he did not find "that any papers that have been heretofore favorable will be deflected from support of the great principles for which you have been laboring." 15 But Washington could not tolerate even one defection. "On your way North," he instructed his secretary, "I wish that you would stop and have a conference with the Atlanta Age man, I forget his name, and show him the

88 Booker T. Washington

true inwardness of Du Bois. Perhaps it would be better to have him come to Tuskegee, at our expense, for a conference, without you letting him know the exact reason. I am very anxious that we lose not one of our friends on the account of this new movement." 16

The black journalist George W. Cable of the Indianapolis Freeman also balked. He wrote Thompson: "I see no reason why The Freeman should become a party to any petty jealousies and it is quite impossible for me to conceive of Mr. Washington's being vindictive to the point of wishing that this or any other matter be treated otherwise than on its merits." 17 Washington had to accept this response with a shake of the head. "Mr. Cable's views are all right when dealing with gentlemen," he commented to Scott, "but not scoundrels, whose purposes are wholly known." 18 But who were the gentlemen and who the scoundrels in this instance of attempted repression of free speech and assembly?

Scott was ever ready at Washington's elbow to stir his chief into baleful suspicion, and to pass on to friendly black editors any derogatory information or turn of phrase about the Niagarites that came his way. 19 Each faction increasingly regarded the other as "the enemy," against whom any tactics that worked were justified. Washington's chief concern was to keep the Niagara Movement weak and small. As Scott explained Washington's view of the Niagarites to a black college president: "In communities where they do not think it prudent to do so they conceal its position toward him in every way they can. Whenever they think it prudent to do so they openly state their position to him and their intention to 'destroy him.' My frank opinion is that the movement exists for the sole purpose of opposing Mr. Washington and the work he is trying to do, since its declared principles represent the already declared principles of the Afro-American Council and other organizations of that character." 20

The Niagara Movement was only a trickle at the end of its first year, so successful had been the silent treatment of Washington and his Tuskegee Machine. There were only 170 members, and most of its activities were in cooperation with other, larger organizations. Its second annual meeting was at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, a place rich in symbolism for a people recently out of slavery. The meeting celebrated the centennial of the birth of John Brown, the white man who attempted almost singlehandedly at that spot to begin a slave rebellion and end the institution of slavery. 21 The meeting place was also well

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located for drawing a crowd, for the round-trip railroad fare from Washington was only a dollar. This meeting received more publicity than the one at Niagara Falls the preceding year, and many daily newspapers carried its address to the country.

Washington had his spy at the Harper's Ferry meeting also. Richard T. Greener, the first black graduate of Harvard and once professor of law at the University of South Carolina, was down on his luck and in need of Washington's help. During the McKinley era he had secured a consular post with Washington's help. The State Department sent him to Bombay, but when he complained of the heat there, they reassigned him to Vladivostok, Siberia. Suddenly in 1906 he was removed under circumstances that involved racial discrimination. 22 He wrote, while visiting at Storer College in Harper's Ferry, asking for Washington's help in getting him reinstated. "Here is a good chance to get a good friend into the inner portals of the Niagara meeting," Scott wrote on the margin. 23

Washington tried to arrange a meeting with Greener before the Harper's Ferry convention, but Greener wired: "Think best not to see you before the meeting." 24 "There are some facts which I wanted to put before you before that meeting," Washington explained. The circumstances forced him to put them in writing: "You will find, in the last analysis, that the whole object of the Niag[a]ra Movement is to defeat and oppose every thing I do. I have done all I could to work in harmony with Du Bois, but he has permitted Trotter and others to fool him into the idea that he was some sort of a leader, consequently he has fritt[er]ed away his time in agitation when he could succeed as a scientist or Sociologist." Washington urged Greener to "spare no pains to get on the inside of everything" at Harper's Ferry. 25

To Greener's credit, it is not certain that he actually passed on any information to Washington, though it is obvious that Washington was ready to exploit Greener's personal troubles and need for his influence. Greener was to attend the National Negro Business League meeting in Atlanta soon after the Niagara Movement meeting, and he wrote Washington: "The details, as well as some points of mutual interest, I hope to have a chance to go over with you either at Atlanta, or while en route there." 26 Washington invited Greener to Tuskegee after the league meeting, and the two went on a Sunday train excursion in New York two months later. 27 On one of these occasions, Greener may have passed on information of the Niagara Movement

90 Booker T. Washington

meeting. Washington, however, did little to help Greener, who was eventually exonerated of charges against him, but Secretary Elihu Root decided Greener was not in the class of officers who had the right to have cause given for dismissal. 28 At Greener's request Washington arranged, or thought he did, for Greener to see President Roosevelt on the matter. 29 When Greener appeared for his appointment, however, he found that the President was on vacation. 30 Years later, a Washington spy reported that Greener was "about on the fence. He is just a litde irritated at Dr. Booker T. Washington because he did not take him up and give him a job in or since 1906, during which year Mr. Greener lost his political post." 31

Washington employed other spies also against the Niagara Movement's leaders. "Let me know ... by Saturday in what way the wife of William Monroe Trotter ... is employed," he wired a white detective agency in Boston. "If in domestic service, state the nature of it and for whom she is working. Don't say for whom information is wanted." 32 Washington was probably disappointed to learn that Trotter's wife worked every day at the Guardian office. 33 Washington abandoned use of this detective agency when one of its agents was exposed as a Washington spy by the man he was shadowing. 34

Washington had better success with black agents. His most active spy was Melvin J. Chisum, whose success in infiltrating Trotter's inner group after the Boston Riot in 1903 brought him to Washington's mind again in 1905 when the Niagara Movement presented a threat. "Could you not secure a man in New York," Washington wrote his friend Charles Anderson, "who would get right into the inner circles of the Niagara movement through the Brooklyn crowd and keep us informed as [to] their operations and plans?" 35 Chisum's first important assignment, however, was in Washington, D.C., where the Tus-kegean felt badly the need for a sympathetic local newspaper. The Colored American, which had been pro-Washington to a fault, had collapsed in 1905, and Washington's efforts to launch a new paper in the District had failed. 36 He decided, therefore, to use Chisum in a scheme to capture the Bee.

The plan was for Chisum to seek employment on the Bee, worm his way into the confidence of its editor, W. Calvin Chase, and persuade him to take actions that would transform him from a Trotterite into a Bookerite. It was just the sort of challenge that appealed to a man of Chisum's temperament. "Most of the day has been spent with my

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newly made cantankerous friend," Chisum reported to Washington soon after arrival. "The cat got clearly out of the bag today. He is 'busted.' " Chisum undertook to convince Chase that, though they both hated Washington as any upstanding lover of the race should, the best way out of the Bee's financial crisis was to accept some of Washington's money. At the strategic moment Robert H. Terrell and John C. Dancy, Washington's lieutenants, proffered money for the Bee's extensive news coverage and favorable editorial treatment of several Washington speeches. "But, rest perfectly sure, that my plan is so surely carefully lain that he will not see," Chisum wrote Washington. "The 'Guardian crowd' to the contrary notwithstanding, I have him Doctor, I have him." Chisum ended on a further reassurance: "But will in no way connect your Excellence with my plans. For I do not trust a soul with any real fact that touches my visit here." 37

A few days later Chisum reported his best day's work on this assignment. Editor Chase was going to print two of Washington's speeches, a favorable editorial, and an endorsement of Washington's candidate for register of the Treasury who would oust a Niagarite. The editorial, wrote Chisum, would be "such an one as will bring the break we want." This was the break with Trotter; for the cream of the jest was that Chase had such a pugnacious temper that when his militant friends criticized him for his editorial, he would cantankerously defend himself by attacking them. Chisum wrote his Excellence, as he called Washington: "Now! The Bee will be a surprise to everybody that knows it the forthcoming week and the war is on between his highness bub Trotter and bub Chase. Are you willing that I remain here for a couple of weeks and make shure [sic] of Chase's broadsides being properly directed so as to put them beyond the point of repair, or reconnection? I know Trotter will fire on the Bee, and I think I ought to be in the con[n]ing tower with Chase when he does." Chisum confided that he considered Chase "at heart, a vile, malicious, jealous—heartless 'cuss,' " but he was careful not to reveal his true feelings to Chase. "To him I am constantly pounding you," Chisum wrote Washington, "but always with the added 'confidential,' 'Mr Chase, I would let no one but you hear me say this.' " 38

Chisum's scheme worked perfectly. Trotter and the other Niagar-ites read Chase out of their organization and drove him into dependence on Booker T. Washington. "Chisum seems to be doing good work in Washington," commented Anderson. "He has his valuable

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points." 39 Washington let Chisum know that he was "most grateful to you for what you have done." 40 Washington now had a major newspaper in the nation's capital in his pocket. The only problem was that Editor Chase, whose impulses were on the other side, was loyal to Washington only when recently paid. 41

Chisum returned to New York, where he ran a Harlem realty business largely as a front. "Relative to our man Chisum," Charles Anderson complained to Washington, "I want to advise you that you have left an awful load on my hands." Chisum had asked Anderson five times for money, and had got it four times. There was a faint suggestion of blackmail in Chisum's importunities. "The trouble with him," said Anderson, "is that he has made up his mind not to work, and expects to live by borrowing." He warned that he might break with Chisum before Washington returned to New York. 42 "I hope you will not worry about Brother Chisum," Washington replied. "I hope that he will be fat and with a full purse by the time I reach New York City." 43

Chisum took obvious delight in his role as the genie in Washington's bottle. "I am, Your obedient humble servant, Chisum, to use as your Eminence desires, absolutely," he roguishly ended one letter. Again: "From one who will always deem it a very great honor to serve you in the ways that please your Eminence most." 44 If it ever seemed to Washington incongruous for himself, the conventional and conservative black leader, the Baptist layman, the public purveyor of conventional morality, to be in league with this plump little rogue in a bullet-proof vest who made his living by invading the privacy of others, he never committed such an attitude to writing. His resort to his humble servant Chisum is a measure of a certain moral insensitivity in Washington that one does not find in the private lives of his opponents such as Du Bois or even Trotter. Those Harvard graduates started near the top. Washington, having started in slavery and poverty, would gag at almost nothing that promised dominance.

Chisum offered to "do the Chicago work," whatever that was to have been, under an assumed name while working part-time as a waiter. "No one would have any interest in Jack Cameron a waiter, just doing what he could to move in decent society and keep soul and body together with the aid of the pan," he wrote. 45 Washington decided, however, that Chisum would be more useful to him spying on the Brooklyn branch of the Niagara Movement. It was Chisum who

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learned in advance the date and place of the second annual Niagara meeting at Harper's Ferry. "I attended a meeting last night in Brooklyn where I learned this," he informed Washington. "That much and that much only is settled. Another meeting Wednesday night next. . . . I am almost sure I will be able to attend the secret conference at the Convention, if you desire me to go please notify me." 46 Apparently the Niagarites were aware of leakages of information that they could not locate, and were increasingly secretive.

Chisum shuttled nightly between his Harlem residence and the Niagara meetings in Brooklyn Heights, often getting home long after midnight. His reports to Washington were usually oral, the letters between them recording only the times and places of meeting, usually on a park bench in Manhattan. "I sat in the park today from 12:45 to now," Chisum wrote Washington one day at 3:30 p.m., "and will be there near where we sat again tomorrow Friday at 1 sharp." 47 A few weeks later Washington wrote him, "I plan to be in New York about the 13th and shall hope to see you at the usual place at that time." 48 Sometimes the messages were too cryptic for an outsider to understand. Chisum wrote, for example, just before Washington gave a New York speech: "I have Chase in leash. Questions are to be asked you tonight. I will, I think, succeed in stopping them. I shall see Mr. [Fred R.] Moore and get him to talk to the Captain of the Police and get plain clothes men." 49

After 1906 Washington found less use for Chisum, who became involved in a series of small business enterprises in real estate, banking, and journalism in several states, and his spying for Washington ceased. He stood ready to be again Washington's "obedient, humble servant," but the master no longer rubbed the lamp. Not long before Washington's death, Chisum sent his former employer a copy of the Baltimore Afro-American and of his own paper, The Colored Man, inviting comparison of the rival paper's compromise with the NAACP with "how religiously I am hewing to the Tuskegee line." Chisum added: "Please don't become impatient because of my asking that I be not forgotten when the 'pie' is to be passed around." 50

Though Washington dropped him, Chisum continued spying for the rest of his life. During World War I he was a labor agent for northern manufacturers seeking cheap black labor and strikebreakers from the southern farms. In the 1920s he served Robert R. Moton, Washington's successor at Tuskegee, as an undercover man at the time

94 Booker T. Washington

of the Ku Klux Klan march beside the campus to threaten black control of the Tuskegee Veterans Hospital. In the 1930s he worked secretly for the railroads and the Pullman Company against the organizing efforts of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. 51

The Tuskegee Machine's most effective means of struggle against the Niagara Movement, however, was the informal organizational work of Washington's lieutenants in every major northern city. These were a varied lot—businessmen, lawyers, editors, physicians, and officeholders. They did not have in common even an ideology. Some of them championed Washington's social philosophy of economic self-help and undertook to put it into action in their own lives. Others, however, never really subscribed to the Tuskegee gospel. The one thing that tied the lieutenants to each other was that they were all beholden to Washington for favors past or in prospect. They were aboard the same ship, and he was the captain, who ruled by mutual interest rather than by an abstract code of ideology.

Washington, D. C, as the nation's capital, gradually became a strong Bookerite center. It was a city where possession of a white collar and a minor government clerkship conveyed instant middle-class status and the possession of a presidential appointment gave its holder an elite status that even followed him out of office and clung as an aura to his descendants. The Tuskegean pointedly did not disturb the chief black officeholders who had gained their appointments during the Mc-Kinley administration, such as Judson W. Lyons in the most prestigious black post of register of the Treasury, but he put the old-line politicians subtly on notice that they served on good behavior, and he waited until their four-year terms expired.

One by one the Booker T. Washington men found places in the federal bureaucracy. Robert H. Terrell secured with Washington's help a municipal judgeship in the District of Columbia in 1902. In the same year Washington made his loyal but none-too-courageous friend John C. Dancy of North Carolina the recorder of deeds of the District of Columbia.

A large cluster of pro-Washington notables formed in the District of Columbia during Theodore Roosevelt's presidency. No one of them could claim to be the Tuskegean's chief lieutenant in the capital city, but they generally worked together as a coterie. Some were longtime residents of the area, such as the realtor Whitefield McKinlay, originally from South Carolina, and P. B. S. Pinchback, formerly lieutenant-

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governor of Louisiana, who had spent decades of exile in Washington. Somewhat below these men in rank and distinction were Richard W. Thompson, holder of a succession of clerkships and on Booker Washington's payroll as a syndicated columnist for black newspapers; former Tuskegeans such as the realtor Thomas J. Calloway, who had been on the faculty, and W. Sidney Pittman, a Tuskegee graduate, an architect trained at Drexel Institute who had married Washington's daughter Portia. On the periphery of the Bookerites were some fence-straddlers, such as the Grimke brothers, at a certain stage of the in-traracial struggle; Professor Kelly Miller of Howard, who could not make up his mind into which camp to jump; and Mary Church Terrell, wife of the judge but a strong-minded woman whose inclination and background as an Oberlin graduate prompted her to run with the opposition, the civil rights protesters such as Trotter and Du Bois.

Mary Church Terrell was, in fact, suspected in 1906 of spying for Washington's enemies. Anderson learned of a leak of some sort through a white informant and warned Washington: "I am quite confident that our Washington 'judicial friend' passed the story along to his wife, and she passed it on to the gentleman here. One never knows how to deal with families when one member poses as a friend, and another member trains with the opposition." 52 This continued to worry Anderson, who said a few days later that somehow or other "everything that they know about our program, has already reached the enemy." 53 Washington promised to be more careful what he said around either of the Terrells. 54 Anderson's suspicions were heightened late in 1906 by a report that in a lecture in New York "she devoted considerable time to drastic criticisms of that sort of race leadership, which holds up the seamy side of the race, tells dialect stories at the expense of the race, advises the race not to retaliate, but to seek the approval of those who approve of negroes, only as subordinates and inferiors, and counsels the race to acquire only an inferior sort of education." It was clear whom she meant, and Anderson's informant said: "why, she did everything but call his name. She told me she was going to unshirt him, and she did." 55 Washington nevertheless kept his amicable relations with both the Terrells for the rest of his life, and even prevented an editorial attacking her from appearing in the New York Age. 56

Washington never really liked the city of Washington, but at least he could people it with his lieutenants in positions of influence. The

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Bookerites were stronger there than in Baltimore and Philadelphia, where Washington had friends but never a faction. His closest Baltimore friend was Ernest Lyon, who spent the crucial years of black factional struggle as minister to Liberia. Washington exchanged occasional favors with the lawyer and politician Harry S. Cummings, Episcopal clergyman George F. Bragg, and the principal of the city's black high school, J. H. N. Waring, but not always his liberally educated faculty. The Baltimore Afro-American Ledger and its editor, John H. Murphy, generally supported Washington, but with occasional assertions of independence.

Similarly in Philadelphia the Tuskegee Machine had talented professional men but no mass following. John S. Durham, an economist of many practical talents, spent years away from Philadelphia as an official of the U. S. Spanish Claims Commission, as manager of a Cuban sugar plantation, and in self-exile in Europe where it was more comfortable to live with his white wife. Two superior black journals were on Washington's side, the Odd Fellows Journal edited by J. C. Asbury and the A. M. E. Church Review edited by H. T. Kealing. But Washington had no weekly newspaper there.

Black New York was a Booker T. Washington town. It was in transition, as the scattered blacks of lower Manhattan moved uptown and the population pressure of southern migrants and the entrepreneur-ship of black realtors such as Scott's and Washington's friend Philip Payton began to create black Harlem. 57 The Harlem of the future Renaissance was only in the bud, and the businessmen and politicians held sway. Over in Brooklyn was another sizable black enclave that leaned toward the Niagara Movement. In Harlem the spirit of business enterprise was more congenial to Washington's social philosophy, and the arrival of southern migrants to Harlem tempered its urban attitudes with first-generation rural ones. And many blacks, like Washington himself, found self-help and a strong insistence on civil rights compatible with each other rather than mutually exclusive.

Though Washington gradually discarded Fortune as his "man in New York" in the early years of the century, his machine dominance of black New York was closely involved in his control of the New York Age. For many years Fortune had employed his newspaper to defend Washington against the vitriol of Trotter and the rapier thrusts of Du Bois. But Washington was too conservative and materialistic to satisfy all the needs of the ambivalent Fortune. Fortune showed signs of

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wanting to be a protest leader again, decrying the loss of civil rights and the indifference of Republican Party leaders. Occasionally he yielded to impulse, threatened black retaliation against the white South, attacked the Roosevelt administration, and earned a reputation for undependability. 58 Washington, the pragmatic and phlegmatic and often enigmatic leader, found an unevenness in being yoked with the passionate Fortune. He turned gradually for advice and help between 1904 and 1906 to Charles Anderson. Anderson was reliable without surrendering his independent judgment. He did not seem to feel the grand passions of Fortune, but kept a cool head in a crisis and turned away wrath with humor or wry sarcasm. When Fortune, as editor and publisher, in a weak moment offered to sell the Age, Washington unhesitatingly bought it. He kept his ownership secret, Emmett Scott and other agents holding the stock, and he installed the more tractable Fred R. Moore as the new editor.

Also in New York were Washington's personal lawyer, Wilford H. Smith, and a number of sympathetic black businessmen such as Philip A. Payton; John B. Nail, the restaurateur, saloonkeeper, and father-in-law of James Weldon Johnson; and in Brooklyn, Samuel R. Scot-tron and others. Among the clergymen who backed Washington in New York were the Reverend Charles S. Morris of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and his successor in that church, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. Though Washington never felt completely at home in any city, his Tuskegee Machine dominated New York City black politics, and he felt as comfortable there as in any other city.

The major black centers of the Midwest all had black communities divided in sentiment between Washington and his critics, though in many an isolated city the blacks were more deeply involved in the rivalries and activities of the churches and fraternal lodges. In Cleveland the editor of the leading black newspaper, Harry C. Smith of the Gazette, was a Niagarite, but like his friend Charles W. Chesnutt the lawyer and novelist, he did not personalize his racial politics. A wealthy barber with a white clientele, George A. Myers, the local Republican boss, favored Washington. Kenneth Kusmer has shown for Cleveland what was probably true in many other black communities, that the old leadership of Smith, Chesnutt, and Myers "began to be challenged by a new group of black businessmen and politicians who relied primarily upon Negro patronage for their success." This new elite, less educated and articulate, were self-made men with an implicit faith in

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Washington's doctrines of self-help, economic means, and racial solidarity. 59

In the substantial black community of Indianapolis was one of the most influential black newspapers in the country, the Freeman, which was next to the New York Age in overall importance. Controlled at various times by George E. Knox, A. E. Manning, and George W. Cable, it generally followed a pragmatic, self-help philosophy similar to Washington's, and never crusaded against him. Other influential friends of the Tuskegean there were Seymour A. Furniss, who with aid from Bishop Abraham Grant and Washington, himself, tried in 1905 to purchase the Freeman from the Knoxes. 60 The plan was unsuccessful, but it would have made little change anyhow. As a Washington lieutenant reported: "There is much silent ill-feeling between the Knoxes and the Furnisses, and Manning is not enamored of either crowd, while Cable is a rank outsider —new man—as they look at it. . . . All are loyal to the Wizard, but simply jealous of each other." 61

Even before the Great Migration from the South began in 1915, Chicago had a large black population, mostly of the inarticulate, the unskilled working and servant class. But it also had substantial elites of professional and business men, large churches, hospitals, newspapers, and other black institutions. The Chicago branch of the National Negro Business League was a source of strength to the Tuskegee Machine, and Washington's alliances also invaded the professions. He had friends in several Chicago pulpits. His personal physician, George Cleveland Hall, was the head of the black Provident Hospital in Chicago, and he also maintained a private collaboration with Hall's bitterest rival and the most distinguished of black physicians, Daniel Hale Williams. Though D. H. Williams did many private errands for Washington, the chief Tuskegee Machine lieutenant in Chicago was S. Laing Williams, a lawyer. He and his journalist wife, Fannie Barrier Williams, however, were overmatched by another couple in the militant faction, Ferdinand L. Barnett, a lawyer and legislator, and his wife Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the antilynching crusader. The black press in Chicago also was more militant than anywhere else except Boston, perhaps because Chicago blacks had had a longer taste of freedom than most northern blacks, including seats in the legislature and in the councils of the state Republican Party. 62

In Chicago as in other large black centers, Washington felt strongly the need of a black newspaper to sing his praise and support his ac-

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commodationist racial strategy. The city's leading black paper, the Conservator, edited by D. Robert Wilkins, was aligned if not identified with the Niagara Movement. To compete with it, Washington and Scott subsidized the Leader, a small weekly run by the veteran journalist W. Allison Sweeney. 63 In return for his repeated rescue from bankruptcy, Washington asked Sweeney to publish an unsigned editorial saying of the Niagara Movement newspapers in Chicago: "Never an issue of one of these papers comes from the press without the most vile slanders and abuse of Mr. Washington and his work." Though the Niagara Movement claimed to represent freedom of expression, said the editorial, its leader Trotter had been in jail "for attempting to break up a meeting in Boston in order to prevent free speech, the very thing for which the leaders of this 'movement' say it was brought into existence." 64

When Sweeney published the editorial, the Conservator denounced Washington for buying up "crippled Negro newspapers" to use against the Niagara Movement. 65 This led Sweeney to plead for further subsidies to keep his paper alive. Washington finally, after many entreaties, sent Sweeney an almost insulting $50 payment for an advertisement of Tuskegee, but the Chicago Leader soon suspended publication. 66

Meanwhile a rumor reached Washington that the Conservator itself was up for sale. In February 1906 Washington had a friend wire S. Laing Williams: "If possible be in New York Sunday morning to confer with friends Stevens House. All expenses paid. Get full information where stock Conservator is and what can buy it." 67 Two weeks later Williams wrote Washington that he had met with the stockholders twice and that they were anxious to sell the paper for about $2500. "They dislike Wilkins," he reported, "opposed to his policy in reference to you and your work, but they have no backbone." Wilkins, it turned out, owned only one-fourth of the stock. 68

For some reason now obscure, the purchase of the Conservator held fire, perhaps because it was Washington's plan to install his friend H. T. Kealing in the editorship, and Kealing would not be free for a year. 69 Suddenly, in April 1907, to the surprise of many in Chicago, Wilkins carried an editorial favorable to Booker T. Washington and his policies. Washington hastened to invite him to Tuskegee, hoping that he had found at last his journalistic voice in Chicago. "As a matter of fact, there is no difference between your position and mine,"

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Washington wrote Wilkins. "The only difference being that you are working to secure certain ends by traveling perhaps a different route. Since we all are aiming at the same thing, there is no earthly reason why there should be bickerings, jealousies and cursings. . . ." Washington described his critics, to a man who had lately been numbered among them, as members of the "upper ten" who "very seldom mingle with the masses, who in fact think themselves and their families too good to even touch the hem of the garment of the ordinary man and woman." 70 Wilkins came in for some bitter criticism by his former friends. As Dr. Daniel Hale Williams reported to Washington after a visit to Wilkins's office: "He said that his office had been stormed by the enemy but asserted that he was firm in the conviction that he had done the right thing." 71

Wilkins wanted Washington to meet him in Chicago, but Washington was wary. Instead, he and Scott arranged for D. H. Williams to be their middleman, receiving and passing on to Wilkins weekly items of news and editorials from the Tuskegee news factory, and possibly money. Williams was careful to persuade Wilkins not to overdo the conversion of the Conservator into a pro-Washington paper, and when "fool friends" submitted several Tuskegee news items within a week, Williams quietly "pencilled them all." 72 Scott commended this good judgment, saying that "Quiet effort is much more satisfactory in every way than that which carries around a 'brass band' to accomplish its results." 73

After a few months passed, however, Wilkins was ousted as editor in January 1908 and J. Max Barber, a refugee from the Atlanta Riot and a member of the Niagara Movement, became the editor of the Conservator. 74 Barber had been the chief editor of the influential magazine, the Voice of the Negro, 1904-7. When Washington felt alarm over this development, he was reassured by the largest stockholder in the paper, Sandy W. Trice, department store owner and member of the National Negro Business League. Trice wrote Washington that "I will see to it that it will not be antagonistic to you." 75 Barber soon afterwards took his first opportunity to publish an anti-Washington editorial, but Trice reported to Washington that "I had this gentleman understand that if anything like that happened again he could no longer hold that position." 76 Washington replied that Trice had Barber completely at his mercy, that he was "wholly dependent upon the position which he now holds. I happen to have information that

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he was to the point of nearly starving when you gave him something to do." 77 Soon afterward, as if in response to Washington's unspoken wish, Trice telegraphed: "Barber no longer editor Conservator." 78 When Barber then sued Trice for damages, he appealed to Washington for "some immediate financial assistance." 79 Washington apparently helped Trice. "I have already wired to party who saw you last, and asked him to see what he could do for you," he wrote cryptically to Trice. 80 Trice secured as the new editor a Washington supporter. 81 Washington then arranged for Republican party funds to go to the Conservator during William Howard Taft's election campaign in 1908. 82 Just as Washington seemed to finally have a favorable Chicago newspaper without having to buy one, the Conservator failed—this time for good—in 1909. 83

Besides building local bastions of strength in the various urban black communities in the North, Washington also worked to influence as many of the nationwide black institutions as possible. He had, of course, the unquestioning allegiance of the members of the National Negro Business League that he had founded in 1900, but the league itself did little beyond meeting once a year, and in many cities there were bitter factional struggles in the local branches. There was also the Committee of Twelve, founded in 1904, but of course it was little more than a paper organization.

Washington found further allies in the secret black fraternal orders. This was largely through Emmett Scott's knowledge and suggestion, for Washington was too rationalistic to have an interest in the hocus-pocus aspect of the secret orders that figured largely in black middle-class life. But Washington was aware that the fraternal orders were open to the majority of black strivers rather than just the college-educated elite. He also recognized that the fraternal orders sustained black group life and racial solidarity. They could be valuable allies in his struggle for power.

Washington's machine lieutenant J. C. Asbury came up in 1906 for reelection as editor of the Odd Fellows Journal. A fellow Odd Fellow of Chicago, Edward H. Morris of the Niagara Movement, challenged Asbury for the post. Needing Washington's help, Asbury asked him to say to John C. Dancy, currently recorder of deeds of the District of Columbia and "a big Odd Fellow in North Carolina," that Asbury was Washington's friend and that "you would regard it as a favour if he would work with me." 84 It was Scott rather than Washington who

102 Booker T. Washington

wrote to Dancy in that vein. Dancy replied that "my friendship for our friend and his interests will always find in me a certain and ready champion. I will not submit to J. C. A.'s undoing on that account. There must be something more far reaching as we must inculcate the teaching of 'Love' as well as the other links in the mighty chain." 85 Whatever else that meant in the rhetoric of odd-fellowship, it clearly signified that Washington could count on his lieutenants to carry his racial politics even into the inner sancta of the secret orders. In further support of Asbury, Washington also enlisted a prominent Georgia Odd Fellow, Benjamin J. Davis. In an editorial in the Atlanta Independent, Davis predicted that at the Richmond skating rink where the nation's Odd Fellows would hold their 1906 meeting, "It will be a fight to the finish between the friends of Mr. Washington inside the Order and his enemies for the mastery. At Richmond Booker T. will be the issue and his friends have accepted the challenge and will whip the enemy on his own platform." 86

Davis was so confident of victory that he told Washington there was no urgent necessity for urging friends to be on the ground, "to cause them to feel that any interest or desire of yours was so much at stake as to make their visit to Richmond the basis of favors expected." 87 As the 1906 convention approached, however, Washington and Scott became nervous about the outcome and sent telegrams to as many of their friends as possible to "strain a point, if necessary, and attend the meeting at Richmond." 88 At the convention, however, Dancy in a surprise move joined forces with Morris. "Wire him to quit, not mentioning my name," Asbury wired Washington. 89 Washington did as requested, reminding Dancy of his many obligations to him. "Morris of Chicago has been our bitterest enemy," he reminded Dancy, "opposing everything I have tried to do for you and others. Would be deep disappointment to me if you give him any comfort. Have done all I could to serve you and expect to continue to do so and in this crisis hope you will stand by my friends. If Jones or Asbury are defeated Morris will claim it as defeat of myself and friends." 90 Washington asked lieutenants to send similar telegrams to Dancy. 91 Asbury was reelected. In congratulating him, Washington said he was less interested in the details of the contest than in the results. "You and Mr. Davis were editors of papers which have been generous toward this work and toward myself (that was known to every member of the organization) and yet, notwithstanding that fact, you were both elected

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to important positions, almost without opposition. That kind of thing, it seems to me, is the important thing." 92

When Asbury came up for reelection again in 1908, Dancy again pledged support, and the pro-Washington Odd Fellows were so well organized that they not only reelected Asbury but raised his salary. Asbury wrote, however, that "Dancy left before the fight came off; whether [because] he believed there would be no fight or to dodge the issue purposely, I cannot say." 93 In 1910, however, the convention met in Baltimore near several anti-Washington cities, and "the Steam Roller" of Edward H. Morris crushed Asbury's bid to become Grand Master of the order. 94

In other secret orders also, Washington sought support or tried to neutralize opposition to his race leadership. Perhaps the reason why Washington had refused earlier invitations to membership in the secret orders was because his teachers at Hampton had disapproved or because of his own no-nonsense personal philosophy. When the opportunity presented itself to join the oldest and most prestigious of them all, the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Masons in Boston, Scott persuaded him to become a member in order to deliver its centennial oration in the home of his bitterest enemies. 95 Several months before he was scheduled to speak, however, the lodge had a bitter internal dispute. At a special meeting it voted: "That Dr. Washington be officially notified by the Grand Secretary, in a courteous and fraternal letter, that his selection as Centennial Orator has created such serious discord in this and other jurisdictions, that the M. W. [Most Worthy?] Prince Hall Grand Lodge finds it imperatively necessary in the interests of harmony to withdraw the invitation extended to him by the Executive Committee."

Just as it was clear that the invitation had come to Washington through the friendship of Samuel E. Courtney, it was also clear that the enmity of Monroe Trotter's friends was behind the withdrawal of the invitation. The Grand Secretary so worded the withdrawal letter, however, as to claim that the dissension was not personal to Washington but was simply an expression of a deeply rooted feeling of the brethren that they should be represented on this important occasion by a Massachusetts Mason, identified by years of association with the Grand Lodge. 96 The Grand Secretary, who was a well-known Trotter-ite, suggested that Washington withdraw his acceptance of the invitation, but Washington refused. One of the things the "grand order"

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stood for, Washington wrote, was truth, and to make it appear that he was withdrawing something which in fact was withdrawn from him would be a deception. "For a number of years I have been a teacher of youth," he wrote, "and have always taught that short cuts and pretenses never pay, but in the long run it pays to be square, frank and open, even though by so doing one may seem to meet with momentary defeat and embarrassment." 97

Washington's most devastating action against the Niagara Movement was his repression and then suppression of a black magazine, The Voice of the Negro, after it became increasingly the voice of the Niagara Movement. Washington had encouraged the founding of the journal in January 1904. He saw to it that the publishers, who also published several of his own books, put Emmett Scott on the staff as an associate editor and made his longtime friend J. W. E. Bowen a sort of senior editor. But J. Max Barber, a recent graduate of Virginia Union University, was the real editor. He was an idealistic hater of injustice, a champion of civil rights, and brash enough to take on the old minotaur Booker T. Washington himself if he thought him wrong. 98

The first number of The Voice of the Negro showed a split personality, with Bowen promising in one editorial to "steer clear of the prophets, seers and visionaries" and Barber writing in another that "There may be times when literature we publish will rip open the conventional veil of optimism and drag into view conditions that shock." 99 Scott and Barber soon quarreled bitterly over editorial policy, and Scott resigned in protest against criticisms of Washington and Tuskegee. 100 Barber fell increasingly under the spell of Du Bois's thought and personality. In January 1905 he published Du Bois's charge of Washington's "hush money" to the black press. 101 Washington and Scott retaliated not only by persuading advertisers that the magazine was unfriendly to the National Negro Business League, but by complaining to the publishers. 102

In the spring of 1905 Barber attended the founding meeting of the Niagara Movement, and after that threw off all restraint in publicizing the movement and praising Du Bois. He also featured a cartoon satirizing Washington's opposition to the reduction of southern representation as a means of combatting disfranchisement. In a lengthy account of Tuskegee's twenty-fifth anniversary, Barber scathingly criticized the speakers and recommended Washington's retirement as a

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race leader. Washington wrote the Voice's publisher warning that "they will attempt to use your magazine as a propaganda, and if permitted, you will find that Barbour will show his hand more fully in the September number." 103 The publisher promised that he would "keep an eye on the magazine," that he would do everything short of censorship and would "be on the alert and endeavor to put in the proper word at the proper time." 104 Nevertheless, The Voice of the Negro became not only the best edited black magazine of its brief time but increasingly the unofficial journal of the Niagara Movement. While Barber continued to solicit articles from Washington, Scott, and others of the Tuskegee faction in an effort to make his magazine a forum of all viewpoints, his editorials clearly reflected his own commitment to the militant protest of the Niagara Movement.

It was the Atlanta Riot in 1906 rather than Booker Washington directly that brought Barber down, but his own nature and Washington's contributed to making his fall a permanent one. Barber telegraphed from Atlanta to a New York newspaper an accurate anonymous report of the riot that blamed white leaders and newspapers. A telegraph operator leaked to the whites the authorship of the telegram, and they frightened Barber into fleeing to Chicago, where he stutteringly tried to continue his Voice. Either Washington or Scott anonymously wrote for the New York Age that other black Atlantans who stood their ground were "disappointed in Mr. Barber's bravery and sense of loyalty to the race if he deserts us in this trying hour." 105 They published it under a bogus Atlanta dateline. Scott justified such tactics by saying privately that "there was no reason whatever for Barbour to get scared and leave Atlanta as he did." 106

Barber in Chicago in late 1906 and 1907 made frantic efforts to revive the Voice, and Washington privately considered purchasing it. Barber used T. Thomas Fortune's money to get out a few numbers of his magazine before it failed. After briefly editing the Chicago Conservator until Washington found out about it, and after another newspaper effort with help from Du Bois had failed, Barber moved to Philadelphia to teach in a manual labor school. Then a trustee of the school asked Washington about Barber, and Washington declared him a failure, a troublemaker "teaching colored people to hate white people," and "about as unfitted for such work as is needed to be done in Dr. Anderson's school, as any man that I can think of." 107 Barber lost the position. In desperation, he worked his way through dental school

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and set up practice in Philadelphia. He had found a profession in which he had only to satisfy his patients and was safe at last from Washington's baleful influence. 108 It was he, not Washington, who retired from race leadership.

Barber's decline as a voice of black aspirations and Washington's relentless pursuit of him to the dental office door is the story in exaggerated form of the failure of the Niagara Movement. The Niagara Movement was part of a black protest movement that went back to the black abolitionists and Reconstruction leaders, but its disdain of alliance with whites, its exclusiveness within the professional class of blacks, and its secrecy and rigorous ideological tests for membership made it inevitably small and powerless. Washington's Tuskegee Machine, by contrast, was broadly based throughout the black middle class, had powerful white allies and many recruits even from the Talented Tenth, made rewards and punishments a central feature of its recruitment and retention of its followers. So the Tuskegee Machine flourished and the Niagara Movement barely survived until new events in 1908 and 1909 brought them new allies among the whites.

CHAPTER 5

Family Matters

God setteth the solitary in families. . . .

psalm 68:6

BOOKER T. Washington in his prime had a tremendously active public life, which went with his role as the most famous Negro in the world. He also had a multichambered secret life, full of spies, whispered confidences, false datelines, and "personal and confidential" correspondence. But he never had much of a private life. Living his adult life far away from the places of his birth and youth, he maintained close touch with only one friend of his youth, Dr. Samuel E. Courtney of Boston. His co-workers all called him Mister or Doctor. Even his third wife, Margaret, had a hard time saying his first name, and so virtually the only persons who used it were his former teachers at Hampton Institute and some of his enemies. Just as in his youth he had never had leisure and knew no childish games, in his adulthood he was too busy meeting the demands of public life to have time for a private life. The only exception was his family, and particularly his three motherless children on whom he and their stepmother lavished care and warmth, in spite of the press of his public affairs and her duties as head of Women's Industries at Tuskegee Institute.

Washington's relationship with Margaret presents the student of his life with a mystery because, for one reason or another, there is no intimate correspondence with her, or with his earlier wives, for that

108 Booker T. Washington

matter. Perhaps such letters were removed from his files after his death, but perhaps not. While he was away from Tuskegee for about half of every year, Margaret was busy at her headquarters in Dorothy Hall and as hostess at "The Oaks" to a steady stream of white and black guests from afar. She played a central role in extending the educational and home economics role of the institute into the surrounding region, holding mothers' meetings in the town and doing missionary work at the black schools and plantation settlements of rural Macon County. She made women's club work an important part of her life, heading the local black woman's club, serving as president of the state federation, and twice as president of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. She usually spent summers with her husband at his northern fund-raising headquarters, first in Massachusetts and later in New York, but she seldom traveled with him on his busy lecture tours and hard all-night train rides. There is no evidence in the written record that she played a major role in Washington's decisions in public affairs. At Tuskegee, however, she was a power. As one of the school's chief divisional officers and member of the executive council, she had a moderating influence on the ultra-strict code of personal conduct that many of the faculty tried to impose. She also tried in the fullest sense to be the mother of Booker T. Washington, Jr., and Ernest Davidson Washington, and did her best with the willful eldest child, Portia.

Portia M. Washington had found it difficult to share her father with her stepmother after his marriage in 1892, and she spent three years in Framingham, Massachusetts, living and studying with a classmate of her first stepmother, Olivia. She returned to enroll at Tuskegee Institute, graduating in 1900. After teaching music and reading at Tuskegee for a year, she went North again to study music and prepare herself for college. 1 She entered Wellesley College in the fall of 1901, but as a special rather than regular student because of the haphazard nature of her preparatory education. She had planned to live in a dormitory, but either because some southern students objected, as some newspapers reported, or because she was a special student, as officially reported, she moved into a boarding house near the campus and took her meals nearby with three of the professors. In an interview in the Boston Globe, Portia said her reason for going to Wellesley was to make herself more useful to her father and to Tuskegee as a teacher. "Besides," she said, "my father has been very anxious to have

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me attend college. He believes in the college education of girls where it is possible for them to have it, and my mother, you know, is a graduate of Fisk University. But for most of the girls at Tuskegee father sees that the industrial education and that which emphasizes the household arts is most needed. None the less, he encourages further study whenever it is possible for the student to get it. One Tuskegee girl, whose father is a rich Jew in Mobile, Ala., has just entered Columbia university, and is doing very well there. Another is at the German conservatory in New York City." 2

A letter from one of her instructors, Alicia Keyes, provides an insight into Portia's experience at Wellesley. She wrote that the year had been a hard one for Portia because of loneliness and homesickness. The teachers were more cordial than the students, and Professor Keyes hoped that Washington would send his daughter to "some more musical place. It is too lonely for her here, living as a special student must, in the village. She sees too little of the people of her own age. She's been spending this evening with me, but my interests are so much older ones that I feel I cannot give her the gayety that she needs with her temperament." 3 Katherine Coman, another professor with whom Portia took her meals, wrote the concerned father as mid-year examinations approached: "Portia's status in college will depend upon her passing in harmony and Bible. I hope that she may pass both, but in case she does not, what am I to do for her? I think it would be a mistake for her to remain in College even if the authorities could be induced to make an exception in her case. If she fails after all the help that has been given her, she is evidently not prepared for work of college grade." 4

Wellesley College did not permit Portia Washington to continue beyond the first year, a decision that must have been particularly galling to her because it disappointed her father's expectations of her. She idolized him. She did not stand in awe of him, however. As she said in a newspaper interview, "We joke at home about father's silence. I suppose he is thinking always of the work when he is at home. But the public sees him at his best. When he loses himself in his subject he is much more animated than in the family circle." 5

The official reason Wellesley gave was "deficiency in music," but the skeptical Montgomery Advertiser said that was "merely an excuse, not a reason," and that it was "mainly, it seems, because the numerous young Southern white women there refused absolutely to associate

no Booker T. Washington

with her," and this antagonism was increased by her writing signed articles for publication about Wellesley. Because northern students took her side, the school divided into two hostile camps. 6 There was so much newspaper comment that Caroline Hazard, the president of Wellesley, sought to set the record straight. Portia Washington, she said, was treated exactly as other special students were treated, and "left entirely of her own accord, having never intended to pursue a regular college course." Wellesley had always admitted qualified black students, and two had graduated. 7

Many northern as well as southern newspapers took an inordinate interest in the matter. "He has always warned the negroes in the South against the folly of forcing themselves into the company of the whites," said the New York American. "That is good advice for others and is really good counsel for Booker Washington." 8 The Boston Guardian, a year before its editor, Monroe Trotter, clashed head-on with Washington in the Boston Riot, took Portia's misfortune as an opportunity to needle her father, remarking that his children "are not taking to higher education like a duck to water, and while their defect in this line is doubtless somewhat inherited, they justify to some extent their father's well known antipathy to anything higher than the three Rs for his 'people.' " 9 Washington was livid with rage that the Guardian would stoop to attacking him through his daughter. "For over a year," he wrote privately, "they have been trying in all kinds of ways to force me to note the mean things that they have said, but thus far I have been silent and that has hurt them worse than anything I could say." 10

T. Thomas Fortune came to Washington's defense against "the Boston skunk," saying that Trotter had his facts wrong, that Portia had told him that she had never intended to return to Wellesley but hoped to enter the Boston Conservatory of Music instead because at Wellesley "restrictions imposed on her in the matter of domiciliation were objectionable." 11 The whole truth probably did include Portia's inadequate preparation for work at one of the nation's elite colleges. At any rate, Washington asked Fortune not to prolong the controversy, saying, "I dislike exceedingly to discuss private affairs in the pa-pers. 1Z

Portia found a less challenging, more congenial atmosphere at Bradford Academy, in the Boston suburbs, a secondary girls' school headed by Laura A. Knott, a longtime friend of Washington and of Tuskegee. "Miss Knott is very kind to me and has me up in her room

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so often to play to her," Portia wrote her father. "One night she asked me to play her to sleep." The students at Bradford were friendly and interested in Tuskegee; they collected small donations to provide a scholarship for one female student. "I like Bradford more and more and the girls too," she wrote home. "I have some very good friends among the best girls here." 13 Laura Knott promised to do her best to protect Portia from newspaper reporters, and did so by invoking the school rule that no person from outside could see any student without a teacher's permission. 14

When the New York Times persisted in keeping the Wellesley dismissal in the public eye by questioning Washington's judgment in sending his daughter to a college in the first place, since he believed in industrial rather than higher education, Washington could not resist replying to this distortion of his position. "I sent my daughter north to take some special studies after she had finished two regular industrial courses at the Tuskegee Institute," he wrote, "in the same way that I have sent at least a dozen of our students to other institutions in order to better prepare them for work at the Tuskegee institute. I never lose sight, and never intend to, of the fundamental ideas of our institution, and they are always kept in view." 15 The Boston Guardian crowed: "Thus is our 'greatest' man compelled to excuse the education of his children." 16 When William H. Baldwin, Jr., the Tuskegee trustee, first learned of the controversy, he asked Washington for an explanation. It was all started by the scurrilous Guardian, said Washington. "I have never attempted to set any limit upon the development of our race and shall never attempt to do so. The only thing I insist upon, and shall continue to insist upon, is that they lay the foundation in the more fundamental things and grow in a natural rather than an artificial manner, and just in proportion as they do this their children will be given advantages which the first generation did not possess. I confess that the editorial in the Times seems to me very contemptible." 17

When Portia decided she was happy enough at Bradford to become a regular student there, Emmett Scott sent a transcript of her Tuskegee courses to Miss Knott. 18 She hoped that another black student would attend, and at her suggestion Washington made arrangements for admission of the daughter of George H. White of North Carolina, the last southern black congressman for many decades. 19 Meanwhile Portia felt isolated and lonely, though her grades were good and she

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was popular enough to be elected an officer in the student government. 20 She was particularly lonely during vacations, and Tuskegee was too far for her to visit before summer. During the spring vacation in 1904 she proposed that she board at Wellesley, near where her brother Booker was in Wellesley School. 21 Her father persuaded her instead to visit his friend Fred R. Moore and his family in Brooklyn. 22 Washington himself saw her briefly on his way through New York on a business trip. 23 She remained rather lonely and uncomfortable, however, and wrote her parents that "while I really love Bradford I shall not be sorry when I graduate because of the nervous strain I feel nearly all the time." 24 She wrote wistfully of the weekend some other girls were to spend in the White Mountains. Her report to her father on her course of study in her final year indicates the college preparatory character of Bradford. It included "Ethics with Miss Knott, History of Art with Dr Von March of Harvard, Eng Lit. studying such poets as Milton, Browning, Tennyson, Burns, Byron and Shelley, Composition, Bible, taking up the History of the early Christian Church, Hist of Christianity, Economics and Sociology." She wished her brothers well in their own boarding schools and reassured her parents, "I am in splendid health now—never felt better. I sleep better than ever before." 25 A highlight of her last year was when her father gave a lecture at Bradford in the spring of 1905. 26 She graduated that June a few days after turning twenty-two.