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BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
Builder of a Civilization
by
EMMETT J. SCOTT and LYMAN BEECHER STOWE
With a Preface by Theodore Roosevelt
[Illustration: logo]
Illustrated from Photographs
Garden City New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1918
Copyright, 1916, by
Doubleday, Page & Company
All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian
Copyright, 1916, by the Outlook Publishing Co.
[Illustration: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON]
FOREWORD
In the passing of a character so unique as Dr. Booker T. Washington,
many of us, his friends, were anxious that his biography should be
written by those best qualified to do so. It is therefore a source of
gratification to us of his own race to have an account of Dr.
Washington's career set forth in a form at once accurate and readable,
such as will inspire unborn generations of Negroes and others to love
and appreciate all mankind of whatever race or color. It is especially
gratifying that this biography has been prepared by the two people in
all America best fitted, by antecedents and by intimate acquaintance
and association with Dr. Washington, to undertake it. Mr. Lyman
Beecher Stowe is the grandson of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose "Uncle
Tom's Cabin" had a very direct influence on the abolition of slavery,
and Mr. Emmett J. Scott was Dr. Washington's loyal and trusted
secretary for eighteen years.
ROBERT R. MOTON.
Principal Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute.
_Tuskegee Institute, Alabama,_
_August 1, 1916._
AUTHORS' PREFACE
This is not a biography in the ordinary sense. The exhaustive "Life
and Letters of Booker T. Washington" remains still to be compiled. In
this more modest work we have simply sought to present and interpret
the chief phases of the life of this man who rose from a slave boy to
be the leader of ten millions of people and to take his place for all
time among America's great men. In fact, we have not even touched upon
his childhood, early training, and education, because we felt the
story of those early struggles and privations had been ultimately well
told in his own words in "Up from Slavery." This autobiography,
however, published as it was fifteen years before his death, brings
the story of his life only to the threshold of his greatest
achievements. In this book we seek to give the full fruition of his
life's work. Each chapter is complete in itself. Each presents a
complete, although by no means exhaustive, picture of some phase of
his life.
We take no small satisfaction in the fact that we were personally
selected by Booker Washington himself for this task. He considered us
qualified to produce what he wanted: namely, a record of his struggles
and achievements at once accurate and readable, put in permanent form
for the information of the public. He believed that such a record
could best be furnished by his confidential associate, working in
collaboration with a trained and experienced writer, sympathetically
interested in the welfare of the Negro race. This, then, is what we
have tried to do and the way we have tried to do it.
We completed the first four chapters before Mr. Washington's death,
but he never read them. In fact, it was our wish, to which he agreed,
that he should not read what we had written until its publication in
book form.
EMMETT J. SCOTT,
LYMAN BEECHER STOWE.
PREFACE
It is not hyperbole to say that Booker T. Washington was a great
American. For twenty years before his death he had been the most
useful, as well as the most distinguished, member of his race in the
world, and one of the most useful, as well as one of the most
distinguished, of American citizens of any race.
Eminent though his services were to the people of his own color, the
white men of our Republic were almost as much indebted to him, both
directly and indirectly. They were indebted to him directly, because
of the work he did on behalf of industrial education for the Negro,
thus giving impetus to the work for the industrial education of the
White Man, which is, at least, as necessary; and, moreover, every
successful effort to turn the thoughts of the natural leaders of the
Negro race into the fields of business endeavor, of agricultural
effort, of every species of success in private life, is not only to
their advantage, but to the advantage of the White Man, as tending to
remove the friction and trouble that inevitably come throughout the
South at this time in any Negro district where the Negroes turn for
their advancement primarily to political life.
The indirect indebtedness of the White Race to Booker T. Washington
is due to the simple fact that here in America we are all in the end
going up or down together; and therefore, in the long run, the man who
makes a substantial contribution toward uplifting any part of the
community has helped to uplift all of the community. Wherever in our
land the Negro remains uneducated, and liable to criminal suggestion,
it is absolutely certain that the whites will themselves tend to tread
the paths of barbarism; and wherever we find the colored people as a
whole engaged in successful work to better themselves, and respecting
both themselves and others, there we shall also find the tone of the
white community high.
The patriotic white man with an interest in the welfare of this
country is almost as heavily indebted to Booker T. Washington as the
colored men themselves.
If there is any lesson, more essential than any other, for this
country to learn, it is the lesson that the enjoyment of rights should
be made conditional upon the performance of duty. For one failure in
the history of our country which is due to the people not asserting
their rights, there are hundreds due to their not performing their
duties. This is just as true of the White Man as it is of the Colored
Man. But it is a lesson even more important to be taught the Colored
Man, because the Negro starts at the bottom of the ladder and will
never develop the strength to climb even a single rung if he follow
the lead of those who dwell only upon their rights and not upon their
duties. He has a hard road to travel anyhow. He is certain to be
treated with much injustice, and although he will encounter among
white men a number who wish to help him upward and onward, he will
encounter only too many who, if they do him no bodily harm, yet show a
brutal lack of consideration for him. Nevertheless his one safety lies
in steadily keeping in view that the law of service is the great law
of life, above all in this Republic, and that no man of color can
benefit either himself or the rest of his race, unless he proves by
his life his adherence to this law. Such a life is not easy for the
White Man, and it is very much less easy for the Black Man; but it is
even more important for the Black Man, and for the Black Man's people,
that he should lead it.
As nearly as any man I have ever met, Booker T. Washington lived up to
Micah's verse, "What more doth the Lord require of thee than to do
Justice and love Mercy and walk humbly with thy God." He did justice
to every man. He did justice to those to whom it was a hard thing to
do justice. He showed mercy; and this meant that he showed mercy not
only to the poor, and to those beneath him, but that he showed mercy
by an understanding of the shortcomings of those who failed to do him
justice, and failed to do his race justice. He always understood and
acted upon the belief that the Black Man could not rise if he so acted
as to incur the enmity and hatred of the White Man; that it was of
prime importance to the well-being of the Black Man to earn the good
will of his white neighbor, and that the bulk of the Black Men who
dwell in the Southern States must realize that the White Men who are
their immediate physical neighbors are beyond all others those whose
good will and respect it is of vital consequence that the Black Men of
the South should secure.
He was never led away, as the educated Negro so often is led away,
into the pursuit of fantastic visions; into the drawing up of plans
fit only for a world of two dimensions. He kept his high ideals,
always; but he never forgot for a moment that he was living in an
actual world of three dimensions, in a world of unpleasant facts,
where those unpleasant facts have to be faced; and he made the best
possible out of a bad situation from which there was no ideal best to
be obtained. And he walked humbly with his God.
To a very extraordinary degree he combined humility and dignity; and I
think that the explanation of this extraordinary degree of success in
a very difficult combination was due to the fact that at the bottom
his humility was really the outward expression, not of a servile
attitude toward any man, but of the spiritual fact that in very truth
he walked humbly with his God.
Nowhere was Booker T. Washington's wisdom shown better than in the
mixture of moderation and firmness with which he took precisely the
right position as to the part the Black Man should try to take in
politics. He put the whole case in a nutshell in the following
sentences:
"In my opinion it is a fatal mistake to teach the young black man and
the young white man that the dominance of the white race in the South
rests upon any other basis than absolute justice to the weaker man. It
is a mistake to cultivate in the mind of any individual or group of
individuals the feeling and belief that their happiness rests upon the
misery of some one else, or their wealth upon the poverty of some one
else. I do not advocate that the Negro make politics or the holding of
office an important thing in his life. I do urge, in the interests of
fair play for everybody, that a Negro who prepares himself in
property, in intelligence, and in character to cast a ballot, and
desires to do so, should have the opportunity."
In other words, while he did not believe that political activity
should play an important part among Negroes as a whole, he did believe
that in the interests of the White, as well as in the interests of the
Colored race, the upright, honest, intelligent Black Man or Colored
Man should be given the right to cast a ballot if he possessed the
qualities which, if possessed by a White Man, would make that White
Man a valuable addition to the suffrage-exercising class.
No man, White or Black, was more keenly alive than Booker T.
Washington to the threat of the South, and to the whole country, and
especially to the Black Man himself, contained in the mass of
ignorant, propertyless, semi-vicious Black voters, wholly lacking in
the character which alone fits a race for self-government, who
nevertheless have been given the ballot in certain Southern States.
In my many conversations and consultations with him it is, I believe,
not an exaggeration to say that one-half the time we were discussing
methods for keeping out of office, and out of all political power, the
ignorant, semi-criminal, shiftless Black Man who, when manipulated by
the able and unscrupulous politician, Black or White, is so dreadful a
menace to our political institutions. But he felt very strongly, and I
felt no less strongly, that one of the most efficient ways of warring
against this evil type was to show the Negro that, if he turned his
back on that type, and fitted himself to be a self-respecting citizen,
doing his part in sustaining the common burdens of good citizenship,
he would be freely accorded by his White neighbors the privileges and
rights of good citizenship. Surely there can be no objection to this.
Surely there can be no serious objection thus to keep open the door of
hope for the thoroughly decent, upright, self-respecting man, no
matter what his color.
In the same way, while Booker T. Washington firmly believed that the
attention of the Colored race should be riveted, not on political
life, but on success sought in the fields of honest business endeavor,
he also felt, and I agreed with him, that it was to the interest of
both races that there should be appointments to office of Black Men
whose characters and abilities were such that if they were White Men
their appointments would be hailed as being well above the average,
and creditable from every standpoint. He also felt, and I agreed with
him, that it was essential that these appointments should be made
relatively most numerous in the North--for it is worse than useless to
preach virtue to others, unless the preachers themselves practise it;
which means that the Northern communities, which pride themselves on
possessing the proper attitude toward the Negro, should show this
attitude by their own acts within their own borders.
I profited very much by my association with Booker T. Washington. I
owed him much along many different lines. I valued greatly his
friendship and respect; and when he died I mourned his loss as a
patriot and an American.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
_Sagamore Hill,_
_August 28, 1916._
CONTENTS
PAGE
FOREWORD BY ROBERT R. MOTON v
AUTHORS' PREFACE vii
PREFACE BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT ix
CHAPTER
I. THE MAN AND HIS SCHOOL IN THE MAKING 3
II. LEADER OF HIS RACE 19
III. WASHINGTON: THE EDUCATOR 57
IV. THE RIGHTS OF THE NEGRO 82
V. MEETING RACE PREJUDICE 107
VI. GETTING CLOSE TO THE PEOPLE 135
VII. BOOKER WASHINGTON AND THE NEGRO FARMER 164
VIII. BOOKER WASHINGTON AND THE NEGRO BUSINESS MAN 185
IX. BOOKER WASHINGTON AMONG HIS STUDENTS 222
X. RAISING HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS A YEAR 248
XI. MANAGING A GREAT INSTITUTION 272
XII. WASHINGTON: THE MAN 300
ILLUSTRATIONS
Booker T. Washington _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
Tuskegee in the making. Nothing delighted Mr.
Washington more than to see his students doing
the actual work of erecting the Tuskegee
Institute buildings 12
Tuskegee Institute students laying the foundation
for one of the four Emery buildings 14
"His influence, like that of his school, was at first
community wide, then county wide, then State
wide, and finally nation wide" 16
A study in black. Note the tensity of expression
with which the group is following his each and
every word 32
Showing some of the teams of farmers attending the
Annual Tuskegee Negro Conference 58
An academic class. A problem in brick masonry 62
Mr. Washington in characteristic pose addressing
an audience 136
Mr. Washington silhouetted against the crowd upon
one of his educational tours 136
Mr. Washington in typical pose speaking to an
audience 136
A party of friends who accompanied Dr. Washington
on one of his educational tours 138
This old woman was a regular attendant at the
Tuskegee Negro Conference 170
The cosmopolitan character of the Tuskegee student
body is shown by the fact that during the
past year students have come from the foreign
countries or colonies of foreign countries indicated
by the various flags shown in this picture 238
In 1906 the Tuskegee Institute celebrated its 25th
Anniversary. A group of well-known American
characters attended 248
Some of Mr. Washington's humble friends 274
Soil analysis. The students are required to work
out in the laboratory the problems of the field
and the shop 274
Mr. Washington was a great believer in the sweet
potato 280
Mr. Washington had this picture especially posed
to show off to the best advantage a part of the
Tuskegee dairy herd 290
Mr. Washington feeding his chickens with green
stuffs raised in his own garden 306
Mr. Washington in his onion patch 306
Mr. Washington sorting in his lettuce bed 306
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
BUILDER OF A CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER ONE
THE MAN AND HIS SCHOOL IN THE MAKING
It came about that in the year 1880, in Macon County, Alabama, a
certain ex-Confederate colonel conceived the idea that if he could
secure the Negro vote he could beat his rival and win the seat he
coveted in the State Legislature. Accordingly, the colonel went to the
leading Negro in the town of Tuskegee and asked him what he could do
to secure the Negro vote, for Negroes then voted in Alabama without
restriction. This man, Lewis Adams by name, himself an ex-slave,
promptly replied that what his race most wanted was education and what
they most needed was industrial education, and that if he (the
colonel) would agree to work for the passage of a bill appropriating
money for the maintenance of an industrial school for Negroes, he
(Adams) would help to get for him the Negro vote and the election.
This bargain between an ex-slaveholder and an ex-slave was made and
faithfully observed on both sides, with the result that the following
year the Legislature of Alabama appropriated $2,000 a year for the
establishment of a normal and industrial school for Negroes in the
town of Tuskegee. On the recommendation of General Armstrong of
Hampton Institute a young colored man, Booker T. Washington, a recent
graduate of and teacher at the Institute, was called from there to
take charge of this landless, buildingless, teacherless, and
studentless institution of learning.
This move turned out to be a fatal mistake in the political career of
the colonel. The appellation of "nigger lover" kept him ever after
firmly wedged in his political grave. Thus, by the same stroke, was
the career of an ex-slaveholder wrecked and that of an ex-slave made.
This political blunder of a local office-seeker gave to education one
of its great formative institutions, to the Negro race its greatest
leader, and to America one of its greatest citizens.
One is tempted to feel that Booker T. Washington was always popular
and successful. On the contrary, for many years he had to fight his
way inch by inch against the bitterest opposition, not only of the
whites, but of his own race. At that time there was scarcely a Negro
leader of any prominence who was not either a politician or a
preacher. In the introduction to "Up from Slavery," Mr. Walter H. Page
says of his first experience many years ago with Booker Washington: "I
had occasion to write to him, and I addressed him as 'The Rev. Booker
T. Washington.' In his reply there was no mention of my addressing him
as a clergyman. But when I had occasion to write to him again, and
persisted in making him a preacher, his second letter brought a
postscript: 'I have no claim to Rev.' I knew most of the colored men
who at that time had become prominent as leaders of their race, but I
had not then known one who was neither a politician nor a preacher;
and I had not heard of the head of an important colored school who
was not a preacher. 'A new kind of man in the colored world,' I said
to myself--'a new kind of man surely if he looks upon his task as an
economic one instead of a theological one."
And just because Booker Washington did look "upon his task as an
economic one instead of a theological one" he was at first regarded
with suspicion by most of the preachers of his race and by some openly
denounced as irreligious and the founder of an irreligious school.
Like so many men of greater opportunity in all ages and places, many
of these Negro ministers confounded theology and religion. Finding no
theology about Booker Washington or his school, they assumed there was
no religion. Some of them even went so far as to warn their
congregations from the pulpit to keep away from this Godless man and
his Godless school. To this formidable and at first almost universal
opposition from the leaders among his own people was added the more
natural opposition of the neighboring white men who assumed that he
was "spoiling the niggers" by education. A youth with a high collar,
loud necktie, checked suit, and patent-leather shoes, dangling a cane,
smoking a cigarette, and loitering impudently on a street corner was
their mental picture of an educated Negro.
Among the original group of thirty students with whom Mr. Washington
started Tuskegee Institute on an old plantation equipped with a
kitchen, a stable, and a hen-house, was a now elderly man who to-day
has charge of the spacious and beautiful grounds of the Institute. He
was approaching middle age when he entered this original Tuskegee
class. The following is a paraphrase of his account of the early days
of the school: "After we'd been out on the plantation three or four
weeks Mr. Washington came into the schoolroom and said: 'To-morrow
we're going to have a chopping bee. All of you that have an axe, or
can borrow one, must bring it. I will try and provide those of you who
cannot furnish an axe. We will dismiss school early to-morrow
afternoon and start for the chopping bee.' So we came to school next
day with the axes, all of us that could get them; we were all excited
and eager for that chopping bee, and we were all discussing what it
would be like, because we had never been to one before. So in the
afternoon Mr. Washington said it was time for that chopping bee, so he
put his axe over his shoulder and led us to the woods and put us to
work cutting the trees and clearing the land. He went right in and
worked harder and faster and handled his axe better than any of us.
After a while we found that a chopping bee, as he called it, was no
different from just plain cutting down trees and clearing the land.
There wasn't anything new about that--we all had had all we wanted of
it. Some of the boys said they didn't come to school to cut down trees
and clear land, but they couldn't say they were too good for that kind
of work when Mr. Washington himself was at it harder than any of them.
So he kept with us for some days till everybody had his idea. Then he
went off to do something more important.
"Now, in those days he used to go off every Saturday morning and he
wouldn't come back till Monday morning. He'd travel all round the
country drumming up students for the school and telling the people to
send their children. And on Sunday he'd get the preachers to let him
get up in their pulpits and tell the people about the school after
they had finished preaching. And the preachers would warn their people
against him and his school, because they said it wasn't Methodist, and
it wasn't Baptist, and it wasn't Presbyterian, and it wasn't
Episcopalian, and it wasn't Christian. And they told the people to
keep their children away from that Godless man and his school. But
when he came along and asked to speak to the people they had to leave
him, just as everybody always did--let him do just what he wanted to
do. And when they heard him, the people, they didn't pay no attention
to the preachers, they just sent their children as fast as ever they
could contrive it.
"Now, in those days Mr. Washington didn't have a horse, nor a mule,
nor a wagon, and he wanted to cover more country on those trips than
he could afoot, so he'd just go out in the middle of the road and when
some old black man would come along driving his mule wagon he'd stop
him and talk with him, and tell him about the school and what it was
going to do for the black folks, and then he'd say: 'Now, Uncle, you
can help by bringing your wagon and mule round at nine o'clock
Saturday morning for me to go off round the country telling the people
about the school. Now, remember, Uncle Jake, please be here promptly
at nine,' and the old man would say, 'Yes, boss, I sure will be
here!' That was how he did it--when he needed anything he'd go out and
put his hand on it. First, he could put his hand on anything he wanted
round the town; then, he could put his hand on anything he wanted all
over the county; then he could put his hand on anything he wanted all
over the State; and then finally they do tell me he could put his hand
on anything he wanted away up to New York.
"In those days, after we came to live here on the 'plantation,' I used
to take the wheelbarrow and go round to the office when Mr. Washington
opened up the mail in the morning, and if there was money in the mail
then I could go along to the town with the wheelbarrow and get
provisions, and if there was no money then there was no occasion to go
to town, and we'd just eat what we had left. Most of the white
storekeepers wouldn't give us credit, and they didn't want a 'nigger
school' here anyhow. Times have changed. Now those storekeepers get a
large proportion of their trade here at the Institute, and if there
should be any talk of moving, they'd just get up and fight to the last
to keep us here and keep our trade.
"And in those days the Negro preachers, or the most of them, and the
white folks, or the most of them, were always trying to dispute with
Mr. Washington and quarrel with him, but he just kept his mouth shut
and went ahead. He kept pleasant and he wouldn't dispute with them,
nor argue with them, nor quarrel with them. When the white folks would
come round and tell him he was 'spoiling good niggers by education,'
he would just ask them to wait patiently and give him time to show
them what the right kind of education would do. And when the colored
preachers would come round and tell him he was no Christian, and his
school had no religion, he would ask them to just wait and see if the
boys and girls were any less Christian because of the education they
were getting. But whoever came along and whatever happened Mr.
Washington just kept his mouth shut and went ahead.
"After two years of school I went out and rented some land and planted
cotton, and just about time to harvest my crop Mr. Washington sent for
me one Saturday and said: 'I need you. I want you to come back and
work for the school on the farm. I want you to start in Monday
morning.' When I told him about my cotton crop just ready to be picked
he said: 'Can't help that, we need you. You'll have to arrange with
your neighbors to harvest your crop for you.'"
To the inquiry, "Well, did you come?" the old man replied, "Of course
I did. When Mr. Washington said come I came same as everybody did what
he told them. I got a neighbor to harvest my crop and I lost money on
it, but I came to work that Monday morning more than thirty years ago,
and I've been here ever since."
The idea of not doing what Mr. Washington wanted him to do, or even
arguing the matter, was evidently inconceivable to this old man. He
had always obeyed Mr. Washington just as he had obeyed the laws of
nature by sleeping and eating. That is the kind of control which
Booker Washington always exercised over his fellow-workers. He
accepted their implicit obedience as naturally and simply as they gave
it.
As Mr. Page also points out in the introduction to "Up from Slavery,"
however humble Mr. Washington's origin may have been, what might be
termed his intellectual pedigree was of the highest and finest. He may
be called, in fact, the spiritual grandson of the great Dr. Mark
Hopkins of Williams College. Just as Samuel Armstrong was perhaps the
most receptive of Mark Hopkins' pupils, so Booker Washington became
the most receptive pupil of Samuel Armstrong. As says Mr. Page: "To
the formation of Mr. Washington's character, then, went the missionary
zeal of New England, influenced by one of the strongest personalities
in modern education, and the wide-reaching moral earnestness of
General Armstrong himself." In his autobiography Mr. Washington thus
describes General Armstrong's influence and the impression he made
upon him: "It has been my fortune to meet personally many of what are
called great characters, both in Europe and America, but I do not
hesitate to say that I never met any man who, in my estimation, was
the equal of General Armstrong. Fresh from the degrading influences of
the slave plantation and the coal mines, it was a rare privilege for
me to be permitted to come into direct contact with such a character
as General Armstrong. I shall always remember that the first time I
went into his presence he made the impression upon me of being a
perfect man; I was made to feel that there was something about him
that was superhuman. It was my privilege to know the General
personally from the time I entered Hampton till he died, and the more
I saw of him the greater he grew in my estimation. One might have
removed from Hampton all the buildings, classrooms, teachers, and
industries, and given the men and women there the opportunity of
coming into daily contact with General Armstrong, and that alone would
have been a liberal education. (This recalls President Garfield's
definition of a university when he said, 'my idea of a university is a
log with Mark Hopkins on one end and a boy on the other.') The older I
grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can
get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be
gotten from contact with great men and women. Instead of studying
books so constantly, how I wish that our schools and colleges might
learn to study men and things!"
When the young man imbued with these ideas and fresh from these
influences found himself responsible for the destinies of a
studentless, teacherless, buildingless, and landless school it is
significant how he went to work to supply these manifold deficiencies.
First, he found a place in which to open the school--a dilapidated
shanty church, the A.M.E. Zion Church for Negroes, in the town of
Tuskegee. Next he went about the surrounding countryside, found out
exactly under what conditions the people were living and what their
needs were, and advertised the school among the class of people whom
he wanted to have attend it. After returning from these experiences
he said: "I saw more clearly than ever the wisdom of the system which
General Armstrong had inaugurated at Hampton. To take the children of
such people as I had been among for a month, and each day give them a
few hours of mere book education, I felt would be almost a waste of
time."
Six weeks after the school was opened, on July 4, 1881, in the shanty
Methodist Church with thirty students, Miss Olivia A. Davidson entered
the school, the enrollment of which had already grown to fifty, as
assistant teacher. She subsequently became Mrs. Washington. The school
then had students, a teacher, and a building such as it was, but it
had no land. It was succeeding in so far as teaching these eager and
knowledge hungry young people what could be learned from books, but
little more. Mr. Washington found that about 85 per cent. of the
Negroes of the Gulf States lived on the land and were dependent upon
agriculture for their livelihood. Hence, he reasoned that it was of
supreme importance to teach them how to live on the land to the best
advantage. In order to teach the students how to live on the land the
school itself must have land. About this time an old plantation near
the town of Tuskegee came upon the market. The school had no money.
Mr. Washington had no money, and the $2,000 a year from the State
Treasury could be used only for the payment of teachers. Accordingly
Mr. Washington personally borrowed the $250, from a personal friend,
necessary to secure title to the land, and moved the school from the
shanty church to the comparative comfort of four aged cabins
formerly used as the dining-room, kitchen, stable, and hen-house of
the plantation.
[Illustration: Tuskegee in the making. Nothing delighted Mr.
Washington more than to see his students doing the actual work of
erecting the Tuskegee Institute buildings. A group of students raising
the roof on one of the buildings.]
And as soon as they were established in their new quarters he
organized the "chopping bee" already described and cleared some of the
land so that it could be used for crops. He did not clear and plant
this land to give his students agricultural training. He did it for
the purpose that all land was originally cleared and planted--to get
food. He, of course, realized that the educational content of this
work was great--greater than any possible textbook exercises in the
classroom. He then and there began the long and difficult task of
teaching his people that physical work, and particularly farm work, if
rightly done was education, and that education was work. To secure the
acceptance of this truth by a race only recently emancipated from over
two hundred years of unrequited toil--a race that had always regarded
freedom from the necessity for work as an indication of
superiority--was not a hopeful task. To them education was the
antithesis of work. It was the magic elixir which emancipated all
those fortunate enough to drink of it from the necessity for work.
He also began to emphasize at this time his familiar dictum that
learning to do the common things of life in an uncommon way was an
essential part of real education. Probably the reverse of this dictum,
namely, learning to do the uncommon things of life in a common
way--would have more nearly corresponded to the popular conception of
education among most Negroes and many whites.
Mr. Washington later developed a brickyard where, after a series of
failures sufficient to convince any ordinary man of the hopelessness
of the enterprise, they finally succeeded in baking creditable bricks
which were used by the students in the construction of buildings for
the school. He did not start this brickyard for the purpose of
vocational training any more than he started the farm for agricultural
training. He started it because they needed bricks with which to
build buildings in which to live, just as he started the farm to raise
food upon which to live. He saw to it, however, that the brickyard was
used as an instrument of education and was never allowed to degenerate
into a mere brickyard and nothing more, just as he saw to it that the
farm was used as a means of education and was not allowed to
degenerate into a mere farm and nothing more. It was even more
difficult to persuade the students that the hard, heavy, dirty work of
the brickyard was education than it had been to persuade them that
farm work was education. Mr. Washington wasted no time in arguing this
point, however, but merely insisted that without bricks they could not
put up proper buildings, and that without buildings they could not
have such a school as they must have not only for themselves but for
their race.
[Illustration: Tuskegee Institute students laying the foundation for
one of the four Emery buildings--boys' dormitories.]
So this originally landless, buildingless, studentless, and
teacherless school came eventually to have all four of these obvious
requisites, but it still lacked a fundamental requirement for the
effective fulfillment of its purpose. It lacked a boarding department
where the students might learn to live. In his tours among the people
Mr. Washington had found the great majority in the plantation
districts living on fat pork and corn bread, and sleeping in
one-room cabins. They planted nothing but cotton, bought their food at
the nearest village or town market instead of raising it, and lived
under conditions where the fundamental laws of hygiene and decent
social intercourse were both unknown and impossible of application.
The young men and women from such homes must be taught how to live in
houses with more than one room, how to keep their persons and their
surroundings clean, how to sleep in a bed between sheets, how not only
to raise but to prepare, serve, and eat a healthful variety of proper
food at regular and stated intervals, to say nothing of a trade by
which to maintain themselves both during their course and after
graduation as well as the usual book learning of the ordinary school.
Obviously they could not be taught these things unless they lived day
and night on the school grounds instead of boarding about with people
whose standards of living were very little if at all higher than those
of their homes. Accordingly volunteers were called for, and the
students made an excavation under their new brick building which was
made into a basement kitchen and dining-room. As Mr. Washington says
in "Up from Slavery," "We had nothing but the students and their
appetites with which to begin a boarding department." As soon as this
boarding department was established it became possible to influence
directly the lives of the students during the entire twenty-four hours
of the day. From then on each student was required to have and to use
a toothbrush. Mr. Washington has since remarked that, in his opinion,
the toothbrush is the most potent single instrument of civilization.
Then, too, it was possible for him to begin to enforce this injunction
taken from one of his now well-known Sunday night talks, "Make a study
of the preparation of food. See to it that a certain ceremony, a
certain importance, be attached to the partaking of the food----" This
exhortation sounds so commonplace as to be scarcely noticed by the
average reader, but just put yourself in the place of one of these
boys or girls who came from a one-room cabin and realize what a
profoundly revolutionary, even sensational, injunction it is! To the
boy or girl who had snatched a morsel of food here, there, or anywhere
when prompted by the gnawings of hunger, who had never sat down to a
regular meal, who had never partaken of a meal placed upon a table
with or without ceremony--imagine what it meant to such a boy or girl
"to see to it that a certain ceremony, a certain importance, be
attached to the partaking of the food"--not on special occasions but
at each one of the three meals of each day!
Finally it came about that this school which had started with a paltry
$2,000 a year, a great need, and the invincible determination of one
man, came to have land, buildings, teachers, students, and even a
boarding department. But in Mr. Washington's view there was still a
great fundamental lack in their work. They were doing nothing directly
to help those less fortunate than themselves--those about them who
could not come and enjoy the advantages of the school. Mr. Washington
held that as soon as an individual got hold of anything as useful
and desirable as education he should take immediate means to hand
it on to the greatest possible number of those who needed it. He had
no patience with those persons who would climb the tree of knowledge
and then pull the ladder up after them.
[Illustration: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
"His influence, like that of his school, was at first community wide,
then county wide, then state wide, and finally nation wide."]
He and his teachers then began to go out on Sundays and give the
people homely talks on how to improve their living conditions. They
encouraged the farmers to come to the school farm and learn how to
grow a variety of crops to supplement the cotton crop which was their
sole reliance. They relieved the distress of individual families. Mrs.
Washington gathered together in an old loft the farmers' wives and
daughters who were in the habit of loafing about the village of
Tuskegee on Saturday afternoons and formed them into a woman's club
for the improvement of the living conditions in their homes and
communities. Mr. Washington and his teachers went right on to the
farms and into the homes, and into the churches and the schools, and
everywhere showed, for the most part by concrete object-lessons, how
they could make their farms more productive, their homes more
comfortable, their schools more useful, and their church services more
inspiring. All this was done not with an idea of starting an extension
department or a social service department, but merely because these
people needed help, and Mr. Washington knew that both teachers and
students would help themselves in helping them. Finally, chiefly
through the efforts of Mrs. Washington, a model country school was
established in the district adjoining the Institute's property. This
school is a farm home where the young teacher and his wife, both
graduates of Tuskegee, teach the boys and girls who come to them each
day how to live on a farm--teach them by practice and object-lesson as
well as by precept. They follow the ordinary country school
curriculum, but that is a small and relatively unimportant part of
what this school gives its pupils. Then, too, the teachers of Tuskegee
early started campaigns looking to the extending of the school terms
throughout Macon County and the adjoining counties from three to five
months, as was customary, to nine months.
And this work of Tuskegee beyond its own borders grew as constantly in
volume and extent as the work within its borders, so that Tuskegee
soon became the vital force--the yeast that was raising the level of
life and well-being throughout, first, the town and neighborhood of
Tuskegee, then the County of Macon, then the surrounding counties and
the State of Alabama; and finally, in conjunction with its mother,
Hampton, and its children situated at strategic points throughout the
South, the entire Negro people of the South, and indirectly the whole
nation.
And as the school grew, so grew the man whose life was its embodiment.
It is impossible to think of Booker Washington and Tuskegee
separately. Just as he typified Tuskegee, so Tuskegee typified him.
Just as he made the school, so the school made him. His influence,
like that of his school, was at first community wide, then county
wide, then State wide, and finally nation wide.
CHAPTER TWO
LEADER OF HIS RACE
In 1895, fourteen years after the founding of Tuskegee Institute,
Booker T. Washington was selected to represent his race at the opening
of the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia.
On this occasion he mounted the platform, to make the first address
which any member of his race had ever made before any representative
body of Southern men and women, as an obscure but worthy young colored
man who had commended himself to a few thinking persons by building up
an excellent industrial school for his people. He came off that
platform amid scenes of almost hysterical enthusiasm and was
thenceforth proclaimed as the leader of his race, the Moses of his
people, and one of America's great men.
In this epoch-making speech Booker Washington had presented a solution
of an apparently insoluble problem. He had offered a platform upon
which, as Clark Howell said in the Atlanta _Constitution_, "both
races, blacks and whites, could stand with full justice to each." In
the course of the speech he told this story: "A ship lost at sea for
many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the
unfortunate vessel was seen a signal: 'Water, water; we die of
thirst!' The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back: 'Cast
down your bucket where you are.' A second time the signal, 'Water,
water, send us water!' ran up from the distressed vessel, and was
answered: 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' And a third and
fourth signal for water was answered, 'Cast down your bucket where you
are.' The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the
injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh,
sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River." He then appealed
to his own people to "cast down their buckets where they were" by
making friends with their white neighbors in every manly way, by
training themselves where they were in agriculture, in mechanics, in
commerce, instead of trying to better their condition by migration.
And finally to the Southern white people he appealed "to cast down
their buckets where they were" by using and training the Negroes whom
they knew rather than seeking to import foreign laborers whom they did
not know.
When he reached the crux and climax of the speech--the delicate matter
of the relations between the races, socially--he held up his right
hand with his fingers outstretched and said: "In all things that are
purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the
hand in all things essential to mutual progress." At this remark the
audience went wild! Ladies stood on their chairs and waved their
handkerchiefs, while men threw up their hats, danced, and catcalled.
An old ante-bellum Negro, who had been sitting crosslegged in one of
the aisles, wept tears of pride and joy as he swayed from side to
side. By this statement, with what had led up to it, Booker Washington
captured the allegiance of all really representative Southern whites,
and by consistently adhering to this position he, in an
ever-increasing degree, won and held their allegiance till the end.
Frederick Douglass, the great leader of his race during the closing
days of slavery, during the War and the Reconstruction period, had
died only a few months before. Everywhere, by leading whites, as well
as blacks, Washington was acclaimed as the successor of Douglass--the
new leader of the Negro race. One of the first colored men so to
acclaim him was Emmett J. Scott, who was then editing a Negro
newspaper in Houston, Texas, and little realized that he was to become
the most intimate associate of the new leader. In an editorial Mr.
Scott said of this address: "Without resort to exaggeration, it is but
simple justice to call the address great. It was great! Great, in that
it exhibited the speaker's qualities of head and heart; great in that
he could and did discriminately recognize conditions as they affect
his people, and greater still in the absolute modesty, self-respect,
and dignity with which he presented a platform upon which, as Clark
Howell, of the Atlanta _Constitution_ says: 'both races, blacks and
whites, can stand with full justice to each.'" Perhaps the most
remarkable feature of Booker Washington's leadership was that from
that time on he never deviated one hair's breadth in word or deed from
the platform laid down in this brief address.
It was not to be expected, however, that such a radically new note in
Negro leadership could be struck without some discord. As was
perfectly natural, some more or less prominent Negroes, whose mental
processes followed the lines of cleavage between the races engendered
by the embittering experiences of the Reconstruction period, looked
with suspicion upon a Negro leader who had won the approbation of the
South, of leading white citizens, press, and public. In the days of
slavery it was a frequent custom on large plantations to use one of
the slaves as a kind of stool pigeon to spy upon the others and report
their misdeeds. Naturally such persons were hated and despised and
looked upon as traitors to their race. Hence, it came about that the
praise of a white man was apt to throw suspicion upon the racial
loyalty of a black man. This habit of mind, like all mental habits,
long survived the system and circumstances which occasioned it.
Therefore, it was inevitable that the fact that the white press
throughout the South rang with his praises for days and weeks after
the sensationally enthusiastic reception of his speech at the
exposition should not be accepted as a desirable endorsement of the
new leader by at least a few of his own people.