The address was a revelation.

The whole speech is a platform upon which blacks and whites can stand with full justice to each other." The Boston Transcript said editorially: "The speech of Booker T.
Washington at the Atlanta Exposition, this week, seems to have dwarfed all the other proceedings and the Exposition itself.

The sensation that it has caused in the press has never been equalled." I very soon began receiving all kinds of propositions from lecture bureaus, and editors of magazines and papers, to take the lecture platform, and to write articles.

One lecture bureau offered me fifty thousand dollars, or two hundred dollars a night and expenses, if I would place my services at its disposal for a given period.

To all these communications I replied that my life-work was at Tuskegee; and that whenever I spoke it must be in the interests of Tuskegee school and my race, and that I would enter into no arrangements that seemed to place a mere commercial value upon my services.
Some days after its delivery I sent a copy of my address to the President of the United States, the Hon.