At Tuskegee there are nearly two thousand students, and over one hundred
fifty teachers. There are two classes of students--"day-school" and
"night-school" students. The night-school students work all day at any
kind of task they are called upon to do. They receive their board,
clothing and a home--they pay no tuition, but are paid for their labor,
the amount being placed to their credit, so when fifty dollars is
accumulated they can enter as "day students."
The "day students" make up the bulk of the scholars. Each pays fifty
dollars a year. These all work every other day at manual labor or some
useful trade.
Tuskegee has fully twice as many applicants as it can accommodate; but
there is one kind of applicant who never receives any favor. This is the
man who says he has the money to pay his way, and wishes to take the
academic course only. The answer always is: "Please go elsewhere--there
are plenty of schools that want your money. The fact that you have money
will not exempt you here from useful labor."
This is exactly what every college in the world should say.
The Tuskegee farm consists of about three thousand acres. There are four
hundred head of cattle, about five hundred hogs, two hundred horses,
great flocks of chickens, geese, ducks and turkeys, and many swarms of
bees. It is the intention to raise all the food that is consumed on the
place, and to manufacture all supplies. There are wagon-shops, a
sawmill, a harness-shop, a shoe-shop, a tailor-shop, a printing-plant, a
model laundry, a canning establishment. Finer fruit and vegetables I
have never seen, and the thousands of peach, plum and apple trees, and
the vast acreage of berries that have been planted, will surely some day
be a goodly source of revenue.
The place is religious, but not dogmatically so--the religion being
merely the natural safety-valve for emotion. At Tuskegee there is no
lacrimose appeal to confess your sins--they do better--they forget them.
I never heard more inspiring congregational singing, and the use of the
piano, organ, orchestra and brass band are important factors in the
curriculum. In the chapel I spoke to an audience so attentive, so alert,
so receptive, so filled with animation, that the whole place looked like
a vast advertisement for Sozodont.
No prohibitive signs are seen at Tuskegee. All is affirmative, yet it is
understood that some things are tabu--tobacco, for instance, and strong
drink, of course.
We have all heard of Harvard Beer and Yale Mixture, but be it said in
sober justice, Harvard runs no brewery, and Yale has no official brand
of tobacco. Yet Harvard men consume much beer, and many men at Yale
smoke. And if you want to see the cigarette-fiend on his native heath,
you'll find him like the locust on the campus at Cambridge and New
Haven. But if you want to see the acme of all cigarette-bazaars, just
ride out of Boylston Street, Boston, any day at noon, and watch the boys
coming out of the Institute of Technology.
I once asked a Tech Professor if cigarette-smoking was compulsory in his
institution. "Yes," he replied; "but the rule is not strictly enforced,
as I know three students who do not smoke."
Tuskegee stands for order, system, cleanliness, industry, courtesy and
usefulness. There are no sink-holes around the place, no "back yards."
Everything is beautiful, wholesome and sanitary. All trades are
represented. The day is crammed so full of work from sunrise to sunset
that there is no time for complaining, misery or faultfinding--three
things that are usually born of idleness. At Tuskegee there are
no servants. All of the work is done by the students and
teachers--everybody works--everybody is a student, and all are teachers.
We are all teachers, whether we will it or not--we teach by example, and
all students who do good work are good teachers.
When the Negro is able to do skilled work, he ceases to be a problem--he
is a man. The fact that Alexandre Dumas was a Negro does not count
against him in the world's assize.
The old-time academic college, that cultivated the cerebrum and gave a
man his exercise in an indoor gymnasium, or not at all, has ruined its
tens of thousands. To have top--head and no lungs--is not wholly
desirable. The student was made exempt from every useful thing, just as
the freshly freed slave hoped and expected to be, and after four years
it was often impossible for him to take up the practical lessons of
life. He had gotten used to the idea of one set of men doing all the
work and another set of men having the culture. To a large degree he
came to regard culture as the aim of life. And when a man begins to
pride himself upon his culture, he hasn't any to speak of. Culture must
be merely incidental, and to clutch it is like capturing a butterfly:
you do not secure the butterfly at all--you get only a grub.
Let us say right here that there is only one way in which a Negro, or a
white man, can ever make himself respected. Statute law will not do it;
rights voted him by the State are of small avail; making demands will
not secure the desired sesame. If we ever gain the paradise of freedom
it will be because we have earned it--because we deserve it. A
make-believe education may suffice for a white man--especially if he has
a rich father, but a Negro who has to carve out his own destiny must be
taught order, system, and quiet, persistent, useful effort.
A college that has its students devote one-half their time to actual,
useful work is so in line with commonsense that we are amazed that the
idea had to be put into execution by the ex-slave as a life-saver for
his disenfranchised race. Our great discoveries are always accidents: we
work for one thing and get another. I expect that the day will come, and
erelong, when the great universities of the world will have to put the
Tuskegee Idea into execution in order to save themselves from being
distanced by the Colored Race.
If life were one thing and education another, it might be all right to
separate them. Culture of the head over a desk, and indoor gymnastics
for the body, are not the ideal, and that many succeed in spite of the
handicap is no proof of the excellence of the plan. Ships that go around
the world accumulate many barnacles, but barnacles as a help to the
navigator are an iridescent dream.
A little regular manual labor, rightly mixed with the mental, eliminates
draw-poker, highballs, brawls, broils, Harvard Beer, Yale Mixture,
Princeton Pinochle, Chippee dances, hazing, roistering, rowdyism and the
bulldog propensity. The Heidelberg article of cocked hat and insolent
ways is not produced at Tuskegee. At Tuskegee there is no place for
those who lie in wait for insults and regard scrapping as a fine art. As
for college athletics at the Orthodox Universities, only one man out of
ten ever does anything at it anyway--the college man who needs the
gymnasium most is practically debarred from everything in it and serves
as a laughing-stock whenever he strips. Coffee, cocaine, bromide,
tobacco and strong drink often serve in lieu of exercise and ozone, and
Princeton winks her woozy eye in innocency.
Freedom can not be bestowed--it must be achieved. Education can not be
given--it must be earned. Lincoln did not free the slaves--he only freed
himself. The Negroes did not know they were slaves, and so they had no
idea of what freedom meant. Until a man wants to be free, each kind of
freedom is only another form of slavery. Booker Washington is showing
the colored man how to secure a genuine freedom through useful
activity. To get freedom you must shoulder responsibility.
If college education were made compulsory by the State, and one-half of
the curriculum consisted of actual, useful manual labor, most of our
social ills would be solved, and we would be well out on the highway
towards the Ideal City.
Without animation, man is naught--nothing is accomplished, nothing done.
People who inspire other people have animation plus.
And animation plus is ecstasy. In ecstasy the spirit rushes out, runs
over and saturates all. Oratory is an ecstasy that inundates the hearer
and makes him ride upon the crest of another's ideas.
Art is born of ecstasy--art is ecstasy in the concrete. Beautiful music
is ecstasy expressed in sound, regulated into rhythm, cadence and form.
"Statuary is frozen music," said Heine.
A man who is not moved into ecstasy by ecstasy is hopeless. A people
that has not the surging, uplifting, onward power that ecstasy gives, is
decadent--dead.
The Negro is easily moved to ecstasy. Very little musical training makes
him a power in song. At Tuskegee the congregational singing is a feature
that, once heard, is never to be forgotten. Fifteen hundred people
lifting up their hearts in an outburst of emotion--song! Fifteen hundred
people of one mind, doing anything in unison--do you know what it means?
Ecstasy is essentially a matter of sex. In art and religion sex can not
be left out of the equation. The simple fact that in forty years the
Negro race in America has increased from four million to ten million
tells of their ecstasy as a people. "Only happy beings reproduce
themselves," says Darwin. Depress your animal and it ceases to breed; so
there are a whole round of animals that do not reproduce in captivity.
But in slavery or freedom the Negro sings, and reproduces--he is not
doomed nor depressed--his soul arises superior to circumstance.
Without animation, education is impossible. And the problem of the
educator is to direct this singing, flowing, moving spirit of the hive
into useful channels.
Education is simply the encouragement of right habits--the fixing of
good habits until they become a part of one's nature, and are exercised
automatically.
The man who is industrious by habit is the only man who wins. The man
who is not industrious except when driven to it, or when it occurs to
him, accomplishes little.
Man gets his happiness by doing: and work to a slave is always
distasteful. The power of mimicry and imitation is omitted--the owner
does not work--the strong man does not work. Ergo--to grow strong means
to cease work. To be strong means to be free--to be free means no work!
It has been a frightfully bad education that the Negro has had--work
distasteful, and work disgraceful! And the slave-owner suffered most of
all, for he came to regard work as debasing.
And now a Negro is teaching the Negro that work is beautiful--that work
is a privilege--that only through willing service can he ever win his
freedom. Architecture is fixed ecstasy, inspired always by a strong man
who gives a feeling of security. Athens was an ecstasy in marble.
Tuskegee is an ecstasy in brick and mortar.
Don't talk about the education of the Negro! The experiment has really
never been tried, except spasmodically, of educating either the whites
or the blacks in the South--or elsewhere.
A Negro is laying hold upon the natural ecstasy of the Negro, and
directing it into channels of usefulness and excellence. Can you
foretell where this will end--this formation of habits of industry,
sobriety and continued, persistent effort towards the right?
Booker Washington, child of a despised race, has done and is doing what
the combined pedagogic and priestly wisdom of ages has failed to do. He
is the Moses who by his example is leading the children of his former
oppressors out into the light of social, mental, moral and economic
freedom.
I am familiar in detail with every criticism brought against Tuskegee.
On examination these criticisms all reduce themselves down to three:
1. A vast sum of money has been collected by Booker Washington for his
own aggrandizement and benefit.
2. Tuskegee is a show-place where all the really good work is done by
picked men from the North.