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March the tenth,
Fineteen hundred-thirteen.

To His Excellency,
The President,
Woodrow Wilson,
White House,
Washington, D.C.

Dear Sir:

Allow me first to congratulate you on your election
to the highest office within the gift of the people of the
United States and to congratulate even more strongly, the people
of the United States on your election.

What I am addressing you for particularly at this
time is to call your attention to the fact that there are
pending before the Congress of the United States two great
educational measures---one, the Page Bill of the Senate, and
the other, the Lever Bill of the House. The effect of these
bills is to inaugurate what will be practically a national
system of industrial education for the United States; and I
am writing you as a negro citizen and a negro democrat who
was and is a supporter of yourself and your administration,
to urge that in any compromise that may hereafter be adopted
between the Page and Lever Bills some definite and clearly
expressed provision should be made to insure that the negro
people of the United States shall participate in the benefits
of the funds to be appropriated by the compromise bill for
industrial education in the United States. When you recall,
Sir, that for several generations or more than two centuries
the people of my race were the physical and industrial backbone
of this Nation; when you recall that it was negro labor
in the cotton, cane, and rice fields of the South which laid
the foundation in a physical sense not only of Southern prosperity
but of Northern conmerce and manufacture as well, I
believe you will agree with me that, when, for the first time
in its history, the Nation seems about to inaugurate a national
system of industrial education, some recognition should be made
in the system to be adopted of the tremendous need on part of
the negro people of industrial training and industrial efficiency.
For, Sir, what wisdom, what philanthrophy, what statesmanship
could there be in denying to my race the form of
training which all agree they so sorely need; in denying them the
advantages of the only form of training which will insure their
usefulness as a race to all the industrial enterprises of the
white man and their perpetuity as a branch of the human family
thrust by some mystery of Providence into the body politic of
these United States.

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