In 1895, fourteen years after the founding of Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington was selected to represent his race at the opening of the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. On this occasion he mounted the platform, to make the first address which any member of his race had ever made before any representative body of Southern men and women, as an obscure but worthy young colored man who had commended himself to a few thinking persons by building up an excellent industrial school for his people. He came off that platform amid scenes of almost hysterical enthusiasm and was thenceforth proclaimed as the leader of his race, the Moses of his people, and one of America's great men. In this epoch-making speech Booker Washington had presented a solution of an apparently insoluble problem. He had offered a platform upon which, as Clark Howell said in the Atlanta _Constitution_, "both races, blacks and whites, could stand with full justice to each." In the course of the speech he told this story: "A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal: 'Water, water; we die of thirst!' The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back: 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' A second time the signal, 'Water, water, send us water!' ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered: 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River." He then appealed to his own people to "cast down their buckets where they were" by making friends with their white neighbors in every manly way, by training themselves where they were in agriculture, in mechanics, in commerce, instead of trying to better their condition by migration. And finally to the Southern white people he appealed "to cast down their buckets where they were" by using and training the Negroes whom they knew rather than seeking to import foreign laborers whom they did not know.