undertow of dissent when he said: "I want to pay my respects next to a
colored man. He is a great man, too, but he isn't our Moses, as the
white people are pleased to call him. I allude to Booker T.
Washington. He has been with the white people so long that he has
learned to throw sop with the rest. He made a speech at Atlanta the
other day, and the newspapers of all the large cities praised it and
called it the greatest speech ever delivered by a colored man. When I
heard that, I said: 'There must be something wrong with it, or the
white people would not be praising it so.' I got the speech and read
it. Then I said, 'Ah, here it is,' and I read his words, 'the colored
people do not want social equality.' (This man's interpretation of
this sentence in the speech, "The wisest among my race understand that
the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly,
and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will
come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather
than of artificial forcing.") I tell you that is a lie. We do want
social equality. Why, don't you want your manhood recognized? Then Mr.
Washington said that our emancipation and enfranchisement were
untimely and a mistake; that we were not ready for it. (Naturally, Mr.
Washington said no such thing.) What did he say that for but to tickle
the palates of the white people? Oh, yes, he was shrewd. He will get
many hundreds of dollars for his school by it."
Let it not be thought that this attitude represented any large or
important body of opinion among the Negroes. The great majority both
of the leaders and the rank and file enthusiastically accepted both
the new leader and his new kind of leadership. The small minority,
however, holding the view of the preacher quoted, continued to cause
Booker Washington some annoyance, which, although continuously
lessening, persisted in some degree throughout his life. This
numerically small and individually unimportant element of the Negroes
in America would hardly warrant even passing mention except that the
always carping and sometimes bitter criticisms of these persons are
apt to confuse the well-wishers of the race who do not understand the
situation.
The Negroes holding this point of view are sometimes pleased to refer
to themselves as the Talented Tenth. They are largely city dwellers
who have had more or less of what they term "higher education"--Latin,
Greek, Theology, and the like. A number of these persons make all or a
part of their living by publicly bewailing the wrongs and injustices
of their race and demanding their redress by immediate means. Mr.
Washington's emphasis upon the advantages of Negroes in America and
the debt of gratitude which they owe to the whites, who have helped
them to make more progress in fifty years than any other race ever
made in a like period, is naturally very annoying to this type of
person. In spite of their constant abuse of him Mr. Washington some
years ago agreed to confer with the leaders of this faction to see if
a program could not be devised through which all could work together
instead of at cross purposes. In spite of the fact that the chief
exponent of this group opened the first meeting with a bitter attack
upon Mr. Washington, such a program was adopted, to which, before the
conferences were over, all duly and amicably agreed to adhere. Some of
the more restless spirits among the leaders of the Talented Tenth
soon, however, broke their pledges, repudiated the whole arrangement,
and started in as before to denounce Mr. Washington and those who
thought and acted with him.
After the Atlanta speech Mr. Washington's task was a dual one. While
the active head of his great and rapidly growing institution, he was
also the generally accepted leader of his race. It is with his
leadership of his race that we are concerned in this chapter. His
duties in this capacity were vast and ill defined, and his
responsibility exceedingly heavy. He said, himself, that when he first
came to be talked of as the leader of his race he was somewhat at a
loss to know what was expected of him in that capacity. His tasks in
this direction, however, were thrust upon him so thick and fast that
he had not long to remain in this state of mind. After the Atlanta
speech he was in almost daily contact with what was befalling his
people in all parts of the country and to some extent all over the
world. Through his press clipping service, supplemented by myriads of
letters and personal reports, practically every event of any
significance to his race came to his notice. When he heard of rioting,
lynching, or serious trouble in any community he sent a message of
advice, encouragement, or warning to the leading Negroes of the
locality and sometimes to the whites whom he knew to be interested in
the welfare of the Negroes. When the trouble was sufficiently serious
to warrant it he went in person to the scene. When he heard of a Negro
winning a prize at a county fair, or being placed in some position of
unusual trust and distinction, he wrote him a letter of
congratulation and learned the circumstances so that he might cite
the incident by way of encouragement to others.
After the riots in Atlanta, Georgia, some years ago, when infuriated
white mobs foiled in their efforts to lynch a Negro murderer, burned,
killed, and laid waste right and left in the Negro section of the
town, Mr. Washington, who was in the North at the time, boarded the
first train for the city, arrived just after the bloody scenes,
gathered together his frightened people amid the smoking ruins of
their homes, soothed, calmed, and cheered them. He then went to the
leading city officials, secured from them a promise of succor for the
stricken people and protection against further attack. Next he went to
the Governor of the State, secured his sympathy and coöperation, and
with him organized a conference of leading State and city officials
and other representative men who there and then mapped out a program
tending to prevent the recurrence of such race riots--a program which
up to the present time has successfully fulfilled its purpose. It is
characteristic of Mr. Washington's methods that he turned this
disaster into an ultimate blessing for the very community that was
afflicted.
Mr. Washington was the kind of leader who kept very close to the plain
people. He knew their every-day lives, their weaknesses, their
temptations. To use a slang phrase, he knew exactly what they "were up
against" whether they lived in country or city. Within a comparatively
short period before his death he addressed two audiences as widely
separated by distance and environment as the farmers gathered
together for the first Negro Fair of southwestern Georgia at Albany,
Georgia, and five thousand Negro residents of New York City assembled
in the Harlem Casino. He told those Georgia farmers how much land they
owned and to what extent it was mortgaged, how much land they leased,
how much cotton they raised, and how much of other crops they raised,
or, rather, did not raise; how many mules and hogs they owned, and how
they could with profit increase their ownership in mules and hogs; he
told them how many drug stores, grocery stores, and banks in the State
and county were owned by Negroes; and then, switching from the general
to the particular, he described the daily life of the ordinary,
easy-going tenant farmer of the locality. He pictured what he saw when
he came out of his unpainted house in the morning: that gate off the
hinges, that broken window-pane with an old coat stuck into it, that
cotton planted right up to the doors with no room left for a garden,
and no garden; and, worse than all, the uncomfortable knowledge of
debts concealed from the hard-working wife and mother. Then he
pictured what that same man's place might be and should become.
It was once said of a certain eminent preacher that his logic was on
fire. It might be said of Booker Washington that his statistics were
on fire. He marshalled them in such a way that they were dynamic and
stirring instead of static and paralyzing, as we all know them to our
sorrow. It so happened that Mr. Washington had never before been in
southwestern Georgia. After his speech one old farmer was heard to
say as he shook his head: "I don't understan' it! Booker T. Washington
he ain't never ben here befo', yit he knows mo' 'bout dese parts an'
mo' 'bout us den what eny of us knows ourselves." This old man did not
know that one of Mr. Washington's most painstaking and efficient
assistants, Mr. Monroe N. Work, the editor of the _Negro Year Book_,
devoted much of his time to keeping his chief provided with this
startlingly accurate information about his people in every section of
the United States.
On this occasion there were on the platform with Mr. Washington and
the officials of the fair the Mayor of Albany and members of the City
Council, while in the audience were several hundred whites on one side
of the centre aisle and twice as many blacks on the other. And Mr.
Washington would alternately address himself to his white and black
audience. He would, for instance, turn to the white men and tell them
that he had never known a particularly successful black man who could
not trace his original success to the aid or encouragement he had
received in one form or another from a white friend. He would tell
them that without their assistance his race could never have made more
progress in the last fifty years in this country than any similar
group of people had ever made in a like period of time. After he had
raised the white section of his audience to a high degree of
self-congratulatory complaisance he would suddenly shift the tenor of
his remarks and ask them why they should mar this splendid record by
discriminating against the weaker race in matters of education, by
destroying their confidence in the justice of the courts through mob
violence, and by the numerous small, mean ways in which race prejudice
shows itself and retards and discourages the upward struggle of a
weaker people. As he proceeded along these lines one could see the
self-congratulatory expression fade from the faces of his white
listeners.
He would next turn to his own people and tell them of their phenomenal
progress since emancipation and of the great and essential part they
had played in the upbuilding of the South--left prostrate by the Civil
War. One could see their eager, upturned faces glow with pride and
self-satisfaction. But suddenly he would shift the tone of his
comments and tell them how sadly those of them who were indolent and
shiftless and unreliable and vicious were retarding the upward
struggles of the industrious and self-respecting majority and how they
were perpetuating the prejudice against the whole race. And as he
pictured this seamy side of the situation one could see the glow of
pride gradually wilt from the myriads of swarthy upturned faces.
Hardly less successful than his use of statistics was his use of the
much-abused funny story. He never told a story, however good, for its
own sake. He told it only when it would most effectively drive home
whatever point he happened to be making. In this same speech he was
saying that a Negro who is lazy and unreliable and does nothing to
accumulate property or improve his earning capacity deserves no
consideration from whites or blacks and has no right to say that the
color line is drawn against him. By way of illustration he told this
story: "A shiftless Southern poor white asked a self-respecting old
black man for three cents with which to pay his ferry fare across a
river. The old black man replied: I's sorry not to commerdate yer,
boss, but der fac' is dat a man what ain't got three cents is jest as
bad off on one side ob der ribber as der udder.'"
At another point in this speech he was telling his people not to be
discouraged because their race has less to point to than other races
in the way of past achievements. He said that after all it was the
future that was of vital concern and not the past, and that the future
was theirs to a peculiar degree because they were a young race. And to
illustrate their situation he told of meeting old Aunt Caroline one
evening striding along with a basket on her head. He said, "Where are
you going, Aunt Caroline?" And she replied: "Lor' bless yer, Mister
Washin'ton, I dun bin where I's er goin'." "And so," he concluded,
"some of the races of the earth have dun bin where dey was er goin'!"
but fortunately the Negro race was not among them.
In making the point that, in spite of race prejudice, the handicaps to
which his people were subjected in the South were after all
superficial and did not interfere with their chance to work and earn a
living, he told the experience of an old Negro who was accompanying
him on one of his Southern educational tours. At a certain city they
were obliged to wait several hours between trains, so this old man
took advantage of the opportunity to stroll about and see the sights
of the place. After a while he pulled out his watch and found he had
barely time to get back to the station before the train was due to
leave. Accordingly he rushed to a hack stand and called out to the
first driver he came to, who happened to be a white man: "Hurry up an'
take me to the station, I's gotta get the 4:32 train!" To which the
white hack driver replied: "I ain't never drove a nigger in my hack
yit an' I ain't goin' ter begin now. You can git a nigger driver ter
take ye down!"
To this the old colored man replied with perfect good nature: "All
right, my frien', we won't have no misunderstanding or trouble; I'll
tell you how we'll settle it: you jest hop in on der back seat an' do
der ridin' and I'll set in front an' do der drivin'." In this way they
reached the station amicably and the old man caught his train. Like
this old Negro, Mr. Washington always devoted his energies to catching
the train, and it made little difference to him whether he sat on the
front or the back seat.
A few months later, to the five thousand people of his own race in the
Harlem Casino in New York City, he described their daily lives, their
problems, perplexities, and temptations in terms as homely, as
picturesque, and as vivid as he used in talking to the Georgia
farmers. He urged them, just as he did the farmers, to stop moving
about and to settle down--"to stop _staying_ here and there and
everywhere and begin to _live_ somewhere." He urged them to leave the
little mechanical job of window washing, or what not, and go into
business for themselves, even if they could only afford a few
newspapers or peanuts to start with. He told of a certain New York
street where he had found all the people on one side of a row of push
carts were selling something, while all the people on the other side
were buying something. Those that were selling were white people,
while those that were buying were colored people. That, he said, was a
color line they had drawn themselves. He reminded them of the high
cost of living, and by way of example he commented upon the expense of
having to buy so many shoes. He said: "Up here you not only have to
have good, expensive shoes, but you have to wear them all the time."
And then he reminded them how back in the country down South, before
they came to the city, they would buy a pair of shoes at Christmas and
after Christmas put them away in the "chist" and not take them out
again until "big meeting day," and then wear them only in the meeting
and not walking to and from the church. And as he concluded with the
words, "Under those conditions shoes last a long time," people all
over the audience were chuckling and nudging and winking at one
another as people will when characteristic incidents in their past
lives are graphically recalled to them.
Then he described the almost innumerable temptations to spend money
which the city offers. Some of the store windows are so enticing that,
as he said, "the dollars almost jump out of your pockets as you go by
on the sidewalk." "Then you men working for rich men here in the city
smell the smoke of so many twenty-five-cent cigars that after a while
you feel as though you must smoke twenty-five-cent cigars. You don't
stop to think that when the grandfathers of those very men first came
from the country a hundred years ago they smoked two-for-five
cigars." Then he told of a family he had found living on the tenth
story of an electric-lighted, steam-heated apartment house with
elevator service, and this very family only two years before was
living in a two-room cabin in the Yazoo Valley on the Mississippi
bottoms. And he commented: "Now, that family's in danger. No people
can change as much and as fast as that without great danger!"
[Illustration: A study in black. Note the tensity of expression with
which the group is following his each and every word.]
Next he touched on the high rents and said: "You mothers know that
sooner or later you have to take in roomers to help pay that rent, and
after a while you take in Tom, Dick, or Harry, or anybody who's got
the money regardless of who or what they are, and you mothers know the
danger that spells for your daughters." (At this point he was
interrupted by a chorus of "amens" from women all over the great
hall.) He continued: "Now, you take the 'old man' aside an' tell him
straight, you're not going to have any more roomers hanging round your
house--that he's got to hustle for a better job or go into some little
business for himself, or move out into some little cottage in the
country, or do something to get rid of those Tom, Dick, and Harry
roomers."
In short, in this speech Mr. Washington showed that he knew just as
intimately the lives of his people in the flats of Greater New York as
on the farms of southwestern Georgia.
In spite of his grasp of details Mr. Washington never became so
immersed in them as to lose sight of his ultimate goal, and conversely
he never became so blinded by the vision of his ultimate goal as to
overlook details. The solution of the so-called Negro problem in
America, he felt, is to be found along these lines: As his people have
more and more opportunity for training and become better and better
trained they become more and more self-sufficient. They are developing
their own carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, farmers, merchants, and
bankers as well as lawyers, teachers, preachers, and physicians. These
trained people naturally, for the most part, serve their own race, and
to them the members of the race naturally turn for the service that
each is equipped to render. As they acquire wealth, education, and
cultivation, the persons possessing these advantages naturally
intermingle socially and build up a society from which the rough,
ignorant, and uncouth of their own race are as inevitably excluded as
are such persons from all polite social intercourse of whatever
people. These Negroes of education and cultivation no more desire to
force themselves into the society of the other race than do any
persons of real education and cultivation desire to go where they are
not wanted. As the race increases in wealth and culture it becomes
more and more easy and natural for its successful members to satisfy
their social desires and ambitions in their own society. Already in
the centres of Negro prosperity and culture it would be almost, if not
quite, as impossible for a white man to be received into the best
Negro society as it would for a Negro to be received into the best
white society. This growing independence and self-sufficiency in the
trades, the professions, and social intercourse leads inevitably, as
he pointed out, to a form of natural segregation based upon economic
needs and social preferences, and in conformity to the laws of nature,
which is a very different matter from the artificial and arbitrary
segregation forced upon unwilling people by the laws of men. Under
these conditions the disputes as to whether the best society of the
blacks is inferior or superior to the best society of the whites
becomes as academic and futile as would be similar contentions as to
whether the best society of Constantinople is inferior or superior to
that of Boston.
While Negroes are more and more drawing apart from the whites into
their own section of the city, town, or county they nevertheless find
it a source of strength to live near the whites in order that they may
have the benefit of their aid in those matters in which the older and
stronger race excels. Nor is this an entirely one-sided advantage, as
there are not a few matters in which the Negroes have natural
advantages over the whites and hence may render them useful service.
Thus the two races, socially separated but economically
interdependent, may to mutual advantage live side by side.
Some persons claim that any such plan of race adjustment, while
theoretically plausible and ideally desirable, is nevertheless
practically impossible. They contend that no so radically different
races have ever lived side by side in harmony and each aiding the
other. However that may be, there remains the fact that such a
harmonious and mutually helpful relationship between the two races
does already exist in the town of Tuskegee, throughout Macon County,
and in many other of the more progressive localities throughout the
South to-day. And at the same time, the lynchings and riots and other
manifestations of racial conflict are continuously if slowly growing
less frequent. Whatever may be the relative strength of the two
theories, the facts are lining up in support of the Booker Washington
prophecy at the Atlanta Exposition when he 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."
During the last twenty years of his life Mr. Washington came more and
more to be regarded as the representative and spokesman of his race,
and was invited to represent and speak for them at such national and
international gatherings as the annual conventions of the National
Negro Business League, of which he was the president and founder; the
great meeting in honor of the brotherhood of man, held in Boston in
1897; the Presbyterian rally for Home Missions, at which President
Grover Cleveland presided; the International Sunday-school Convention
held in Chicago in 1914; the meeting of the National Educational
Association in St. Louis in 1904; the Thanksgiving Peace Jubilee in
the Chicago Auditorium at the close of the war with Spain in 1898,
with President McKinley and his Cabinet in attendance; the
Commencement exercises at Harvard in 1896, when President Eliot
conferred upon him the degree of Master of Arts; the International
Conference on the Negro, held at Tuskegee in 1912, with
representatives present from Europe, Africa, the West Indies, and
South America, as well as all sections of the United States. Dartmouth
College conferred his Doctorate upon him in 1901.
At Harvard in 1896 President Eliot, with these words, conferred upon
Mr. Washington the first honorary degree ever conferred by a great
university upon an American Negro: "Teacher, wise helper of his race;
good servant of God and country." In his speech delivered at the
Alumni Dinner on the same day Mr. Washington brought this message to
Harvard: "If through me, an humble representative, seven millions of
my people in the South might be permitted to send a message to
Harvard--Harvard that offered up on death's altar young Shaw, and
Russell, and Lowell, and scores of others, that we might have a free
and united country--that message would be: 'Tell them that the
sacrifice was not in vain. Tell them that by the way of the shop, the
field, the skilled hand, habits of thrift and economy, by way of
industrial school and college, we are coming. We are crawling up,
working up, yea, bursting up. Often through oppression, unjust
discrimination, and prejudice, but through them all we are coming up,
and with proper habits, intelligence, and property, there is no power
on earth that can permanently stay our progress!'"
The next year at the great meeting in honor of the brotherhood of man
held in Music Hall, Boston, which concluded with the unveiling of the
monument of Robert Gould Shaw, Booker Washington in concluding his
address turned to the one-armed color bearer of Colonel Shaw's
regiment and said: "To you, to the scarred and scattered remnants of
the Fifty-fourth, who with empty sleeve and wanting leg have honored
this occasion with your presence--to you, your commander is not dead.
Though Boston erected no monument, and history recorded no story, in
you and the loyal race which you represent Robert Gould Shaw will have
a monument which time cannot wear away."