The Speaker Booker T. Washington Chose: Isaiah T. Montgomery at Lincoln's Birthplace, 1909

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In 1909, the Lincoln Farm Association was preparing to lay the cornerstone of the memorial building at Abraham Lincoln's birthplace, just outside Hodgenville, Kentucky. President Theodore Roosevelt was among the dignitaries coming. On January 7, 1909, Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute, wrote to its member Richard Lloyd Jones with a recommendation: Isaiah T. Montgomery. "My impression," Washington wrote, "is that from every point of view, Mr. Montgomery will be the ideal man."

Washington's letter of January 7, 1909, to Richard Lloyd Jones, page one

Washington's influence

Washington was a hugely skilled and well-known political figure — he had dined with Roosevelt at the White House in 1901. Many other civil rights leaders disagreed with him: he called for progress through education and entrepreneurship rather than a direct challenge to Jim Crow segregation and the suppression of Black voters. On his advice, the association invited Montgomery.

The letter, page two

Who was Isaiah T. Montgomery?

He had also served as a cabin boy in Admiral Porter's fleet during the Civil War.

At that convention, with the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups threatening his town, Montgomery — hoping to protect Mound Bayou and its people — voted for legal disenfranchisement, which would affect more than 123,000 people. The vote was deeply controversial; Frederick Douglass was among the civil rights leaders who spoke out against it, and called it treason. Washington, though, admired Montgomery's views, and was influenced by them. Montgomery, he told the association, "had the confidence of the best people of both races in Mississippi."

The speech

At the ceremony, Montgomery spoke of slavery and of the wealth he had since built, and of his tie to Lincoln:

I served indirectly under President Lincoln when I was a cabin-boy on Admiral Porter's fleet, and of course constituted one of those many whom the Great Emancipator set free.

He was just what the Lincoln Farm Association wanted: a speaker whose politics would not draw attention to the injustices many Americans still faced.

A Saturday Courier-Journal article about the speaker at the birthplace

Sources

Based on "January 7, 1909 – Selecting a Speaker," Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.