enjoyed before or since. No president or governmental appointments involving Black people during the Roosevelt and Taft administration were made without his approval. Another example of his influence is that he was the first African American whose face appeared on a United States postage stamp, thus honored a quarter century after his death. Again in 1946 he became the first black with his image on a coin, a 50-cent piece. His ten-cent stamp went on sale in 1940 at Tuskegee Institute, which Washington had founded when he was only twenty-five years old. The educator's monument on its campus shows him lifting a symbolic veil from the head of a freed slave. His endless preaching about Black self-help and self-discipline was also good advice, provided, of coarse, that the white power structure would help in the psychological rehabilitation of the Black man. Throughout all of his days Booker T Washington scorned the value of Black office holding and never openly fought for a restoration of the ballot. There is now some evidence to indicate that he did give substantial but surreptitious financial support to the Black man's fight for the franchise in Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama. Nevertheless, Washington chose to be politic rather than political. Washington was not agonized by what Du Bois called the Black man's sense of double consciousness, the sense of being both a Black man and an American. Booker T Washington was singularly free of inner conflicts about his dedication to America with its worship of property and material substance. However controversial his methods and objectives, few can doubt that Washington worked hard to achieve them. Certainly the high point in his career was his famous speech at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895, in which he accepted social and legal segregation but promised racial friendship and cooperation. Although W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T Washington were very differen...
