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[stamp: MAR 11, 1913]

[stamp: THE WHITE HOUSE Mar. 1913 Received]

President Woodrow Wilson,
1251 South 18th Street

White House,
PHILADELPHIA PA, March 10, 1913.
Washington, D.C.

Dear President Wilson:

I am sending you under separate cover a marked cooy of
The Congregationalist of Boston, containing a brief article by me on
what I designated as "Growing Antipathy and Antagonism between the
White and Negro Races-The Effect Cause and Cure", but which was in-
appropriately changed by the editor to read "Race Prejudice in La-
bor-The Effect, Cause and Cure", which I beg of you to read with ex-
treme care. The article also was greatly condensed by the editor,
and much of its original scope and force therefore destroyed. But
the methods there briefly suggested for adjusting certain vital re-
lations betwen the races(which methods for nearly two decades I
have expended every energy in an effort to induce the public to
pause long enough in their precipitate rush toward chaos and con-
fusion on this question to soberly consider) are based almost whol-
1y on the proposition that it is within the province of the Church,
as a collective body, to, by precept and example, fix and maintain
those standards of relations between the races, especially along
economic lines, regarding the justice and expediency of which the
various churches are already a virtual unit in sentiment. In other
words, I have ever maintained that the standards for certain impera-
tive relations between the races should be dictated and controiled
by concurrent agreement among the various churches, recognized
as
our highest exponents of civilization, rather than by the erratic
and controversial contentions of the irresponsible demagogues
of
either race.

But my efforts to seriously turn the attention of the
public to this most simple and immediately effective of all methods
for adjusting adjustable relations between theraces have been more
and more hampered and discouraged by a disposition on the part of
the public, responding to the preachings of certain well-meaning but
strangely narrow-visioned leaders of thought among both races, to
group themselves into one of two "schools of thought" on this quest-
ion. One of these "schools", with optimism, in season and out of
season, as its keynote, insists that, through the spread of certain
kinds of education, the problens of the Negro are even now in pro-
cess of steady and satisfactory solution. Any adverse manifesta-
tions which at times may appear against the Negro are, according to
this "school", but natural sequences in the process of mutual ad-
justment between two dissimilar races, which can have no other per-
manent results than to spur the Negro to renewed and higher efforts.

The other "school" frankly admits that there is an appall-
ing retrograde movement of the race situation; but contends that the
remedy lay in sweeping protests against every form of injustice, and
in uncompromising demands for certain "manhood rights" of a civil
and political nature. It may be said that Mr Booker T. Washington

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