Mr.Washington arose and asked them to sing one after another of the old melodies that I had heard all my life; but I had never before heard them sung by a thousand voices nor by the voices of educated Negroes.

I had associated them with the Negro of the past, not with the Negro who was struggling upward.

They brought to my mind the plantation, the cabin, the slave, not the freedman in quest of education.

But on the plantation and in the cabin they had never been sung as these thousand students sang them.

I saw again all the old plantations that I had ever seen; the whole history of the Negro ran through my mind; and the inexpressible pathos of his life found expression in these songs as I had never before felt it.
And the future?
These were the ambitious youths of the race, at work with an earnestness that put to shame the conventional student life of most educational institutions.