At the turn of the century, HBCUs increasingly laid out the red carpet for trustees, state and federal politicians, and philanthropists to court their political and economic favor in grand spectacles that bordered on minstrelsy. The artistic, moral, aesthetic, and manual talents of the students and the college were displayed with more pomp than intellectual substance. Usually, African American students were ordered by HBCU presidents to sing spirituals, which to the benefactors harkened back to the good ole days of slavery. Some singers of spirituals resented the ritual but went along out of adoration for the president or the benefactors’ money or fear of punishment. In the 1920s, some students refused to demean themselves and sing, including Howard University students and future civil rights organizer Ella Baker of present-day Shaw University. But the slavery shows went on and the money poured in to pacify the Talented Tenth. Many HBCUs resembled plantations, with White and Black slave drivers for presidents, powerless faculty as slaves, students as cotton, and White political and economic power as enslavers. In April 1906, Booker T. Washington welcomed a host of powerful figures, from Secretary of War William H. Taft to steel mogul Andrew Carnegie to Harvard president Charles William Eliot. They were celebrating Tuskegee’s four-day “silver jubilee,” which intermixed speeches with spirituals sung by a student choir and flowing donations.