For the present, however, the question of the Negro's attitude toward the problem was one of surpassing moment. Suddenly, in 1895, arose a new and genuine leader, Booker T. Washington, who offered a very definite program. In a remarkable speech at the Atlanta Exposition he said to the white South: "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.... Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the State Legislature was worth more than real estate or industrial skill." What seemed the common sense and the sweet reasonableness of this program at once commanded attention; and the South, in the first flush of a new era of industrial development, and the North, perfectly ready to accept any program that promised to make Southern investments secure, both approved the new leader, who along the lines of thrift and self-reliance certainly gave tremendous inspiration to thousands of his brother-laborers in the South.
From the very first, however, there was a distinct group of Negro men that honestly questioned the wisdom of the platform offered by Mr. Washington. They felt that in seeming to be willing temporarily to accept segregation and to waive political rights he had given up altogether too much. As the opposition, however, they were not at first unitedly constructive, and in their utterance they sometimes offended by harshness of tone. Some years ago they were sneered at as the "intellectuals," "the idealists," etc. It is significant that to-day the sneers are few, and that a constructive program has more and more commanded attention. The recognized leader who has risen from the group is W.E. Burghardt DuBois, editor of the _Crisis_, the voice of an organization formed in 1910 and known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This organization frankly "proposes to make 11,000,000 Americans physically free from peonage, mentally free from ignorance, politically free from disfranchisement, and socially free from insult." To this end it is waging a fight for justice in every way, whether at the polls, in the courts, in public conveyances, in schools, in chances for earning a living, and it has widened the door of hope not only for the college man or woman, but for the agricultural laborer as well.