The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-10-28
BOOKER WASHINGTON
On the Link Between the Black and
 White Man.

I 1 through Chicago some months ago 1 talked In an animated way for an hour or more to a representative of the Rec ord-Herald about the subject that Is 1 now exercising the minds of some of the extremists In the south-the social relations between the white man and the negro. It is safe to say that if | these men could meet and talk with MT. | Washington and were prepared to sum | up the result without the bitter slave
 day bias that characterizes them now
 they would see in the future better era for the colored man, and might
 gather, too, some little leaven of hu-
 man sympathy from the contact.
 The famous president of Tuskegee is
 so earnest in his speech and Las so
 much of genuine honesty about every thing he does that nobody who talks with him can ever fail to become inn
 pressed . He says nothing at random.
 You feel while you are listening that every word has been carefully weighed,
 and Is based on a bitter up hill experi-
 ence such as has fallen to the lot of very few among us.
 You want me to put my finger on
 the great vital point in all this contro-
 versy? Very we'll it Is this" he said.
 We must see to it that we teach the negro to make himself part of the community where he lives, and that in every straightforward, honorable man. ner he makes friends with the white man who is his next-door neighbor."
 But" I asked him, do not the southerners who are most bitter against you believe that they draw the reasons for their enmity from what goes on in their midst?"
 In his answer there was no trace of anger or resentment. Tt Is to be re- gretted, he said, that those who pre- sume to speak with authority on the advancement of the negro do not in more cases actually visit him, where they can see his better life. Few of the people who make discouraging statements regarding him have ever taken the trouble to inspect his home life his school life, his church life, or his business or industrial life. It Is all ways misleading to judge any race or community by its worst. The negro race should, like other races, be Judged by its best types rather than by its worst"
 But would it be fair to judge even by that standard?"
 No" he answered, Tit would not. Judgment must not be passed upon the race too soon, For more than twenty years after we became a free people there was uncertain gropng In the will derness. The policy of both north and south, as we'll as that of the central government, was both halting and un- certain. The problem was without parallel in the history of the world, No path had been hewn through the wilderness which any one left absolute ly safe In following. It was to be an- ticipated, in the first generation at least, that the tendency among q large number would be to seek the shadow instead of the substance to grasp after the mere signs of the highest civiliza- tion instead of the reality; to be led into the temptation of believing that they could secure In a few years that which 1t has taken other races thou sands of years to attain,
 When you consider all these condi- tions it Is plain that instead of thirty five or forty years of growth the negro has had only about twenty in which to demonstrate to the world what he Is capable of becoming. The negro has hardly had time yet to collect the broken, shattered fragment of his fam fly, buy home and settle down to regular family life.'
 These Is no harder critic of the faults of his people than MT Washington himself, though he, more than any oth- CT can realize the tremendous task that all the right thinking men and wo- men of his race have set out to accom- plish.
 within the last twelve months" he went on, "I have seen them in their homes on their farms, in the shop, in the factory, in the mines, in the peni- tentiary, and I have talked with the white people who were once their mas ters, and now their neighbors. After this inspection, combined with my ex- perience and observation in the heart of the black belt" of the south, cover ing period of nine teen years, I have llO utSltdllOIl III dSSeI llliS tlidt lhclV io constant progress-progress that Is tan gible, visible, indlsputable.
 Any one who has had daily opportu- nlty of studying my race at first hand cannot fail to gain the impression that there are indisputable evidences that the race os settling down to hard, earnest. common-sense view of life that Is fast learning that e race like an in dividual, must pay for everything that 1t gets, the price of beginning at the bottom of the social scale and working up gradually, naturally, to the highest civilization. The exaggerated impress sions that the first years of freedom naturally brought are giving way to an earnest, practical view of life and it's 
 Then, coming to the feeling that ought to exist between the races, he grew eloquent. 'I want to try to teach the negro youth" he said Ito take a high and impregnable position. Let us teach him in his syn1pathies, his &C., tions. to excel if possible even the white man. Let us teach him to dwell away above race hatred and race antagonim. Let us teach him that love Is better than hatred, that mercy is better than cruelty, that it is more courageous to receive an insult and endure wrong than to give an insult and inflict a