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Hale for the most part dismisses any serious challenge to the segregated system by Washington, arguing that despite his efforts to build a black middle class and “his staggering accomplishments [that] rebuked whites’ illusions of absolute racial difference and black inferiority[,] . . . his accommodationist stance, moralism, and program of industrial education offered no resistance to the expansion of segregation” (25). Not all whites from the period agreed with Hale’s assessment. That many whites in fact believed Tuskegee and Washington’s program of industrial education posed a serious threat to the southern system, in spite of Washington’s public disavowals, can perhaps best be seen in an article by Thomas Dixon, “Booker T. Washington and the Negro: Some Dangerous Aspects of the Work of Tuskegee,” which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1905. Dixon here savagely attacks Washington’s leadership at Tuskegee because he was training blacks “all to be masters of men, to be independent, to own and operate their own industries, plant their own fields, buy and sell their own goods, and in every shape and form destroy the last vestige of dependence on the white man for anything” (qtd. in Norrell 71). To the question of what would southern white man do if the Negro threatened his livelihood, Dixon gives the simple answer: “Kill him!” (qtd. in Norrell 71). Dixon had a few years before he voiced this conclusion in The Leopard Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, when one of the novel’s heroes (a preacher, no less) makes this observation: “Industrial training gives power. If the Negro ever becomes a serious competitor of the white labourer in the industries of the South, the white man will kill him” (335).