"The Rev. Booker T. Washington." In his reply there was no
mention of my addressing him as a clergyman. But when I had
occasion to write to him again, and persisted in making him a
preacher, his second letter brought a postscript: "I have no
claim to 'Rev.'" I knew most of the coloured men who at that time
had become prominent as leaders of their race, but I had not then
known one who was neither a politician nor a preacher; and I had
not heard of the head of an important coloured school who was not
a preacher. "A new kind of man in the coloured world," I said to
myself--"a new kind of man surely if he looks upon his task as an
economic one instead of a theological one." I wrote him an
apology for mistaking him for a preacher.

The first time that I went to Tuskegee I was asked to make an
address to the school on Sunday evening. I sat upon the platform
of the large chapel and looked forth on a thousand coloured
faces, and the choir of a hundred or more behind me sang a
familiar religious melody, and the whole company joined in the
chorus with unction. I was the only white man under the roof, and
the scene and the songs made an impression on me that I shall
never forget. Mr. Washington arose and asked them to sing one
after another of the old melodies that I had heard all my life;
but I had never before heard them sung by a thousand voices nor
by the voices of educated Negroes. I had associated them with the
Negro of the past, not with the Negro who was struggling upward.
They brought to my mind the plantation, the cabin, the slave, not
the freedman in quest of education. But on the plantation and in
the cabin they had never been sung as these thousand students
sang them. I saw again all the old plantations that I had ever
seen; the whole history of the Negro ran through my mind; and the