Up from Slavery: An AutobiographyWashington, Booker T.
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Up from Slavery: An Autobiography
Washington, Booker T.
African Americans -- Biography; Educators -- United States -- Biography; Tuskegee Institute; Washington, Booker T., 1856-1915
I thank you with much enthusiasm for making the address. I have read it
with intense interest, and I think the Exposition would be fully
justified if it did not do more than furnish the opportunity for its
delivery. Your words cannot fail to delight and encourage all who wish
well for your race; and if our coloured fellow-citizens do not from
your utterances gather new hope and form new determinations to gain
every valuable advantage offered them by their citizenship, it will be
strange indeed.
Yours very truly,
Grover Cleveland.
Later I met Mr. Cleveland, for the first time, when, as President, he
visited the Atlanta Exposition. At the request of myself and others he
consented to spend an hour in the Negro Building, for the purpose of
inspecting the Negro exhibit and of giving the coloured people in
attendance an opportunity to shake hands with him. As soon as I met Mr.
Cleveland I became impressed with his simplicity, greatness, and rugged
honesty. I have met him many times since then, both at public functions
and at his private residence in Princeton, and the more I see of him
the more I admire him. When he visited the Negro Building in Atlanta he
seemed to give himself up wholly, for that hour, to the coloured
people. He seemed to be as careful to shake hands with some old
coloured “auntie” clad partially in rags, and to take as much pleasure
in doing so, as if he were greeting some millionaire. Many of the
coloured people took advantage of the occasion to get him to write his
name in a book or on a slip of paper. He was as careful and patient in
doing this as if he were putting his signature to some great state
document.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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