Booker T. Washington on Jamestown, Christianity, and Black America

There are special reasons why we [the Negro people] should have a part in the Jamestown Exposition. It was near this spot, nearly three hundred years ago, that the first representatives of our race were brought into America. It is especially fitting, therefore, that since here we entered slavery that on the same spot we should show results both in slavery and in freedom. When our first representatives landed here, we were only 20 in number, now there are nearly ten million; when our first representatives landed here we had no uniform language, now we speak the English tongue. For the most part, we were pagan, now, we profess Christianity.

Excerpted from “Booker T. Washington, Jamestown Tercentennial Speech, August 3, 1907,” as recorded in The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol. 9 (Champaign, IL: The University of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 321-322.