I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him

The chapter is not about the school’s building years; it is about visits from the people who had made the school possible. General J.F.B. Marshall, Hampton’s treasurer, who had lent Tuskegee the first two hundred and fifty dollars; Miss Mary F. Mackie, who had given Washington the “sweeping” examination when he arrived at Hampton; and finally General Armstrong himself.

What Washington takes from that visit is a surprise. He had assumed a man who had fought the Southern white man must cherish some bitterness toward the white South; instead he found him “as anxious about the prosperity and the happiness of the white race as the black”, and never once heard him speak a bitter word against him. “From his example in this respect,” Washington writes, “I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.” The sentence people quote is the next one but one — and readers have taken its claim, that he had rid himself entirely of ill feeling toward the Southern white man, at face value or not for more than a century.