We do not want the men of another color for our brothers-in-law, but we do want them for our brothers.

Washington draws a sharp line between social intimacy (especially interracial marriage, implied by “brothers-in-law”) and civic or moral fraternity (“brothers”). The formulation reflects a common late‑19th/early‑20th‑century accommodationist strategy: urging white audiences to accept Black Americans as fellow citizens and partners in national progress while reassuring them that such acceptance need not entail social mixing or intermarriage. The quote thus illuminates both Washington’s pragmatic rhetoric—seeking incremental gains under Jim Crow conditions—and the constraints of the era’s racial ideology, in which appeals to “brotherhood” were often made palatable by explicitly disavowing challenges to the color line in private life.