VISIT TO EUROPE--RETURN TO TUSKEGEE
In the summer of the year 1899 Mr and Mrs Booker Washington had a sum of
money given them by a number of friends, which was to be spent in making
a tour in Europe. The travellers, after a prosperous voyage, landed at
Antwerp and, after seeing something of Holland and France, came to
England, where they were entertained by a number of friends.
On Monday, July 3, Dr and Mrs Brooke Herford gave a reception to meet Mr
and Mrs Booker Washington, which took place at Essex Hall, Essex Street,
Strand, and after this reception a meeting, at which a number of
well-known and distinguished persons were present, also took place, and
at which Mr J. H. Choate, the United States Ambassador, presided. The
many who attended, and the quality of a large number, gave significance
to this meeting, and testified in no equivocal manner to the esteem in
which Booker Washington and his work were held in Great Britain. The
following summary of the American Ambassador's speech on this occasion
was given in _The Times_:--
"The Chairman expressed the pleasure which he felt at having been asked
to preside and to introduce to the meeting his friend, Mr Booker T.
Washington. There were 10,000,000 coloured persons in the United States
living side by side with some 60,000,000 of whites. The freedom of which
the negroes had been deprived for more than 200 years had been restored
to them, but the question was how best they could be enabled to take
advantage of it. The blacks were an interesting race. Fidelity was their
great characteristic. During the Civil War, when the South was stripped
of every man and almost every boy to sustain their cause in arms, the
women and children were left in the sole care, he might say, of these
slaves, and no instance of violence or outrage that he had been able to
learn was ever reported. He thought it would be admitted, therefore,
that on that occasion they amply manifested their loyalty and fidelity
to their masters. The black people had done much for themselves. About
one-tenth of the men had acquired some portion of land, and they had
made a certain advance. Mr Washington was a pupil of the late General
Armstrong, who devoted many years of his life to the establishment and
maintenance of the leading school at Hampton, Virginia. Mr Washington
had qualified himself to follow in Armstrong's path. He also had founded
a school, or training college, at Tuskegee, Alabama, where the pupils
were not only given a primary education, but were afforded the means of
earning a livelihood. There were now 1100 pupils in the school. About
half the number of those who passed through it went out as teachers to
spread the light and the knowledge they had acquired there among their
own race, and the other half were put into a position to support
themselves by manual trades. The Government of the United States thought
well of the work. It gave the school a grant of 25,000 acres of land in
Alabama only last year. The State of Alabama, in which it was placed,
gave it an annual donation. In addition it derived something from the
funds left by the great philanthropist, George Peabody, and from another
fund founded by an American philanthropist. The remainder of the sum
needed for carrying on the work--some £15,000 a year--was derived from
voluntary contributions, which were stimulated by the appeals made by Mr
Washington, whom he regarded as the leader of his race in America."
There were no long speeches at this reception and after meeting. Booker
Washington himself was brief in his speech while describing the
condition and outlook of the coloured race in the United States. He
said:--
"Immediately after receiving their freedom the negroes, for the most
part, got into debt, and they had not been able to free themselves to
the present day. In many places it was found that as many as
three-fourths of the coloured people were in debt, living on mortgaged
land, and in many cases under agreements to pay interest on their
indebtedness ranging between fifteen and forty per cent. The work of
improving their condition was far from hopeless, and he was far from
being discouraged. If his people got no other good out of slavery they
got the habit of work. But they did not know how to utilise the results
of their labour; the greatest injury which slavery wrought upon them was
to deprive them of executive power, of the sense of independence. They
required education and training, and this was gradually being provided.
Starting in 1881 in the little town of Tuskegee with one teacher and
thirty students, they had progressed until in the present day they had
built up an institution which had connected with it over a thousand men
and women. They had some eighty-six instructors, and in all that they
did they tried to make a careful and honest study of the condition of
the negroes and to advance their material and moral welfare. Industrial
education was a vital power in helping to lift his people out of their
present state. Twenty-six different industries were taught, and every
student had to learn some trade or other in addition to the studies of
the class-room. The coloured students came from upwards of twenty States
and territories, and the labour which they performed had an economic
value to the institution itself. There were thirty-eight buildings upon
the grounds of the college, including a chapel having seating capacity
for 2500 persons, built by the students themselves. The value of the
entire property was about $300,000. Seeing that one-third of the
population of the South was of the negro race, he held that no
enterprise seeking the material, civil or moral welfare of America could
disregard this element of the population and reach the highest good."
Mr Bryce, M.P., also gave a brief speech, and showed that he was in
agreement with what the founder of the institution of Tuskegee had said
in reference to the importance of basing the progress of the negroes on
an industrial training:--
"Having made two or three visits to the South he had got an impression
of the extreme complexity and difficulty of the problem which Mr
Washington was so nobly striving to solve. It was no wonder that it
should be difficult, seeing that the whites had such a long start of the
coloured people in civilisation. He believed that the general sentiment
of white people was one of friendliness and a desire to help the
negroes. The exercise of political rights and the attainment to equal
citizenship must depend upon the quality of the people who exercised
those rights, and the best thing the coloured people could do,
therefore, was to endeavour to attain material prosperity by making
themselves capable of prosecuting these trades and occupations which
they began to learn in the days of slavery, and which now, after waiting
for twenty years, they had begun to see were necessary to their
well-being."
At the present time the institution at Tuskegee represents a value of
£100,000, if we include the endowment fund; and the annual cost of
training 1100 or more students is not less than £16,000. The work
continues to expand, as must ever be the case with all healthy
enterprises of the kind. Perhaps the most hopeful symptom of all is the
sanguine enthusiasm of Booker Washington himself, who, happily for
himself and for those whom he seeks to benefit, is, and must ever be, an
optimist. He believes that his race has a future, and that it is capable
of being so uplifted as to become a benefit to the world. We must all
allow that the right means are being used to bring about this new
reformation; but, at the same time, we need not close our eyes to the
fact that there are observers and even well-wishers of the coloured
people who are not so hopeful. By way of giving what may be regarded as
the more pessimistic view, take the following passage from an article in
the _Daily Mail_ of October 23, 1901:--
"Frederick Douglass was an honoured guest in hundreds of Northern homes;
his career as United States senator was marked with every token of
respect and admiration, and many others like him were expected to
appear. But in the forty years since the war the North has become more
conservative in this respect, although it has been untiring in its
efforts to foster the negro's education, to direct his energy wisely,
and to make him capable of enjoying the liberties of the American
Republic. In the South there may still be oppression to-day and the
restriction of the negro's constitutional rights, but such a charge has
never been made against the North, even by the black man's most
prejudiced apostles. If the North refuses to-day to grant social
equality to the negro, the reasons are that it is considered not only
impossible to accomplish, but dangerous even to attempt. It is
considered impossible because the feeling has deepened instead of being
dispelled since the war, that the negro is greatly inferior by nature
and will never be otherwise. In his forty years of freedom he has
advanced more in crime and lawlessness, according to statistics, than he
has in education or development. Taking the blacks and mulattos together
they form sixteen per cent. of the entire population, and furnish thirty
per cent. of the penitentiary convicts. Crimes against the person
especially constitute a menace from the negro almost unknown before the
war, and Frederick Douglass said, shortly before he died, 'It throws
over every coloured man a mantle of odium, and sets upon him a mark for
popular hatred more distressing than the mark set upon the first
murderer. It has cooled our friends and fired our enemies.' The race
has, as a matter of fact, shown almost no power to fight its own
battles, and its problems hang like a weight of lead around the neck of
the American people, a weight growing heavier and causing more
hopelessness as the years go on."
If the above is not actually too dark a picture, the evil is certainly
one which a great Republic need not regard as an evil incapable of
correction. Booker Washington himself is not so sanguine as to ignore
difficulties; he foresees clearly enough that the earlier half of this
present century must needs be a time of much rough pioneering service on
the part of those who are the most earnest friends of the negro race. As
lookers-on from afar on the European side of the broad Atlantic, we are
able to descry many reassuring signs. Both in the North and the South,
Booker Washington has met with abundance of sympathy, and a good deal of
honest, practical help. When Harvard University bestowed on him the
degree of Master of Arts, he was the first negro who had ever received
that distinction. That good Christian man and enlightened politician,
the late President M'Kinley, paid a visit to Tuskegee at the end of
1899, and on behalf of the nation he was thankful for what was being
done. His successor, President Roosevelt, entertained Booker Washington
at dinner at the White House, thus showing that he was of the same mind
as his predecessor. Thus the great work goes on from the beginning to
the end of each year, the aim of the continued and far-reaching effort
being to bring two races together, one being able to help the other
because both have interests in common.
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