Booker T. Washington, Builder o - African American History

Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization. 72
24.03.2006
you close the ballot-box against the ignorant, that you open the schoolhouse. . . .
Let the very best educational opportunities be provided for both races: and add
to this the enactment of an election law that shall be incapable of unjust
discrimination, at the same time providing that in proportion as the ignorant
secure education, property, and character, they will be given the right of
citizenship. Any other course will take from one half your citizens interest in the
State, and hope and ambition to become intelligent producers and tax-payers--to
become useful and virtuous citizens. Any other course will tie the white citizens
of Louisiana to a body of death."
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The New Orleans Times-Democrat, in its editorial accompanying the
publication of this letter, said: "We have seen the corrupting influence in our
politics and our elections of making fraud an element of our suffrage system.
We are certainly not going to get away from fraud by encouraging it, or making
it a part of the suffrage system we place in our new constitution." The same
editorial further states that impartiality in the use of the ballot can be given
Negro and white man not only "with the utmost safety," but "it would have a
beneficial effect upon the politics of the State." In fact, the press of both North
and South, both of the whites and the blacks, published this letter with
practically unanimous editorial endorsement, but in spite of all this the leaders
of the convention remained obdurate, the immediate object was lost, and
Louisiana followed the example of Mississippi and South Carolina. No one
realized, however, better than Booker Washington that the effort was by no
means in vain. Owing to the general awakening of intelligent public opinion the
convention leaders were forced into the position of driving through the
discriminatory amendment not only in the face of the condemnation of the better
element throughout the country but even with the disapproval of the better and
leading citizens of their own State.
Shortly afterward members of the Georgia Legislature, seeking political
preferment for themselves through the familiar means of anti-Negro agitation,
introduced a bill which aimed to discriminate against the Negroes of
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Georgia by legislative enactment just as the Negroes of Louisiana had been
discriminated against by a constitutional amendment. This time Mr. Washington
went personally to Atlanta and appealed directly to a number of the members of