"For a hundred years since emancipation, Negroes had searched tor the elusive path to freedom. They knew that they had to fashion a body of tactics suitable for their unique and special conditions. The words of the Constitution had declared them free, but life had told them that they were a twice-burdened people—they lived in the lowest stratum of society, and within it they were additionally imprisoned by a caste of color. For decades the long and winding trails led to dead ends. Booker T. Washington, in the dark days that followed Reconstruction, advised them: “Let down your buckets where you are.” Be content, he said in effect, with doing well what the times permit you to do at all. However, this path, they soon felt, had too little freedom in its present and too little promise in its future."
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Political leadersAcademics from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesEducators from the United StatesOrators from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait (1963), pp. 24-25
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Booker_T._Washington
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Booker T. Washington
1880 – 1915
Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915) was an American political leader, educator and author of African ancestry, most famous for his tenure as President of Tuskegee University (1880–1915).
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