Their art and stories are important for the American experience and maybe one day they can mold and blend into the American ideal. Of course, even those who are not in the same position as, say, the president of the United States of America itself, but in the complete opposite side, still found hope and wanted to believe in all America's hope, prosperity, and liberty it preached about having. During the turn of the century, Booker T. Washington, spoke to many men, both black and white, about what he idealistically believed to be the best way to mend the races in the south. He believed black men including himself should stick to farm work because "No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem" (450). He urged for the black community to, in a way, lay low and "aid in pulling the load upward, or they [white community] will pull against you the load downward]" (451). Washington understood that his speech, although meant to present the races "as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress" (451), also gave him a bit of backlash from his own community, while bringing prosper from the white community. In a way, he was almost able to shed, or bleach, inwardly the remnants that defined him as an African American and become that ideal just "American" that Theodore Roosevelt shouts about in his manifesto. On the other hand, he received heavy criticism his fellow race, including W. E. B. Du Bois, who claimed he "had not spoken out strongly enough for what they termed the 'rights' of the race" (454), an example that for someone who might find a way to immerse themselves into the American culture, can't find a way to escape what Du Bois would call the "two-ness" or "double consciousness" peopleof color have to face in American society or what Roosevelt essentially calls unassimilation or obstructions of the Old World.
