INVITED TO DELIVER A LECTURE AT FISK UNIVERSITY.
In the spring of 1895 I was rather pleasantly surprised by receiving an
invitation from the Fisk University Lecture Bureau, in Nashville,
Tennessee, to deliver a lecture before this Bureau. Mr. Edgar Webber was
the president and presided at the meeting when I spoke. This was among
the first addresses which I had delivered in the South that was fully
reported by the Southern press. A full description of the meeting was
given by the Nashville Daily American and the Nashville Banner, and
papers throughout many portions of the South contained editorials based
upon this address. It was also my first opportunity to speak before any
large number of educated and representative colored people, and I
accepted the invitation very reluctantly and went to Nashville with a
good deal of fear and trembling, but my effort seemed to have met with
the hearty approval of the greater portion of the audience.
As the address delivered at Fisk University on this occasion constitutes
in a large measure the basis for many of my other addresses and much of
the work I have tried to do, I give in full what the Nashville American
said:
“An intelligent and appreciative audience composed of prominent colored
citizens, students and quite a large number of white people, crowded the
beautiful and commodious Fisk memorial chapel last night to hear Prof.
Booker T. Washington lecture on ‘Industrial Education.’ The lecture was
the first given under the auspices of the Student’s Lecture Bureau of
Fisk University, and was in every way a complete success. Mr. Washington
is a powerful and convincing speaker. His simplicity and utter
unselfishness, both in speech and action are impressive. He speaks to
the point. He does not waste words in painting beautiful pictures, but
deals mostly with plain facts. Nevertheless, he is witty and caused his
audience last night to laugh and applaud repeatedly the jokes and
striking points of his address.
“Booker T. Washington is doing a great work for his race and the South.
He has the right views.
“Prof. Washington was introduced by Edgar Webber, President of the
Lecture Bureau, and among other things he said:
“‘I am exceedingly anxious that every young man and woman should keep a
hopeful and cheerfull spirit as to the future. Despite all of our
disadvantages and hardships, ever since our forefathers set foot upon
the American soil as slaves, our pathway has been marked by progress.
Think of it: We went into slavery pagans; we came out Christians. We
went into slavery pieces of property; we came out American citizens. We
went into slavery without a language; we came out speaking the proud
Anglo-Saxon tongue. We went into slavery with slave chains clanking
about our wrists; we came out with the American ballot in our hands.
“‘I believe that we are to reach our highest development largely along
the lines of scientific and industrial education. For the last fifty
years education has tended in one direction, the cementing of mind to
matter.’
“The speaker then said most people had the idea that industrial
education was opposed to literary training, opposed to the highest
development. He wanted to correct this error. He would choose the
college graduate as the subject to receive industrial education. The
more mind the subject had, the more satisfactory would be the results in
industrial education. It requires as strong a mind to build a Corliss
engine as it did to write a Greek grammar. Without industrial education,
the speaker feared they would be in danger of getting too many ‘smart
men’ scattered through the South. A young colored man in a certain town
had been pointed out to him as being exceedingly smart and he had heard
of him as being very accomplished before. Upon inquiry, however, he
learned the young man applied his knowledge and training to no earthly
good. He was just a smart man, that was all.’
“Continuing, the speaker said: ‘As a race there are two things we must
learn to do--one is to put brains into the common occupations of life,
and the other is to dignify common labor. If we do not we cannot hold
our own as a race. Ninety per cent. of any race on the globe earns its
living at the common occupations of life, and the Negro can be no
exception to this rule.’
“Prof. Washington then illustrated the importance of this by citing the
fact that while twenty years ago every large and paying barber shop over
the country was in the hands of black men, today in all the large cities
you cannot find a single large or first class barber shop operated by
colored men. The black men had had a monopoly of that industry, but had
gone on from day to day in the same old monotonous way without improving
anything about the industry. As a result the white man has taken it up,
put brains into it, watched all the fine points, improved and progressed
until his shop today was not known as a barber shop, but as a tonsorial
parlor, and he was no longer called a barber but a tonsorial artist.
Just so the old Negro man with his bucket of whitewash and his long
pole and brush had given way to the white man, who had applied his
knowledge of chemistry to mixing materials, his knowledge of physics to
the blending of colors, and his knowledge of geometry to figuring and
decorating the ceiling. But the white man was not called a whitewasher;
he was called a house decorater. He had put brains into his work, had
given dignity to it, and the old colored man with the long pole and
bucket was a thing of the past. The old Negro woman and her wash tub
were fast being supplanted by the white man with his steam laundry,
washing over a hundred shirts an hour. The many colored men who had
formerly earned a living by cutting the grass in the front yards and
keeping the flower beds in trim were no competitors for the white man,
who, bringing his knowledge of surveying and terracing and plotting
land, and his knowledge of botany and blending colors into active play,
had dignified and promoted the work. He was not called a grass cutter or
a yard cleaner, but a florist or a landscape gardener. The old black
‘mammy’ could never again enter the sick-room, where she was once known
as a peerless nurse. She had given place to the tidy little white woman,
with her neat white cap and apron, her knowledge of physiology,
bandaging, principles of diseases and the administration of medicine,
who had dignified, beautified and glorified the art of nursing and had
turned it into a profession. Just so, too, the black cook was going out
of date under the influence of the superior knowledge and art of cookery
possessed by white ‘chefs,’ who were educated men and commanded large
salaries.
“‘Now,’ said the speaker, ‘what are we going to do? Are we going to put
brains into these common occupations? Are we going to apply the
knowledge we gain at school? Are we going to keep up with the world, or
are we going to let these occupations, which mean our very life blood,
slip from us? Education in itself is worthless; it is only as it is used
that it is of value. A man might as well fill his head with so much
cheap soup as with learning unless he is going to use his knowledge.’
“Prof. Washington said that he had been told that the young colored man
is cramped, and that after he gets his education there were few chances
to use it. He had little patience with such argument. The idea had been
too prevalent that the educated colored man must either teach, preach,
be a clerk or follow some profession. The educated colored man must,
more and more, go to the farms, into the trades, start brickyards,
saw-mills, factories, open coal mines; in short, apply their education
to conquering the forces of nature.
“One trouble with the average Negro, said the speaker, was he was always
hungry, and it was impossible to make progress along educational, moral
or religious lines while in that condition. It was a hard matter to make
a Christian out of a hungry man. It had often been contended that the
Negro needed no industrial education, because he already knew too well
how to work. There never was a greater mistake, and the speaker
compared, as an illustration, the white man with his up-to-date
cultivator to the ‘one gallused’ Negro with his old plow, patched
harness and stiff-jointed mule.
“The speaker was inclined to fear that the Negro race lay too much
stress on their grievances and not enough on their opportunities. While
many wrongs had been perpetrated on them in the South, still it was
recognized by all intelligent colored people that the black man has far
better opportunity to rise in his business in the South than in the
North. While he might not be permitted to ride in the first-class car in
the South, he was not allowed to help build that first-class car in the
North. He could sooner conquer Southern prejudice than Northern
competition. The speaker found that when it came to business, pure and
simple, the black man in the South was put on the same footing with the
white man, and here, said he, was the Negro’s great opportunity. The
black man could always find a purchaser for his wares among the whites.
“Prof. Washington concluded with an appeal to his race to use the
opportunities that are right about them and thus grow independent.
“He has made a lasting impression on the minds of all who heard him. If
he continues his wonderful career he will be classed with Douglass as a
benefactor to the Negro race.”
The Memphis Commercial-Appeal a few days after this address was
delivered contained an editorial concerning it. I quote that in full
because it is among the first editorials from a Southern newspaper
concerning my addresses and the work at Tuskegee, and also because it
shows that the efforts put forth at Tuskegee in behalf of industrial
education for the Negro have had the effect of awakening not only the
Negroes but even the Southern whites to the necessity of more education
of this kind. The editorial is as follows:
“Prof. Booker T. Washington, a short time since, delivered an address
before the students of Fisk University, in which he advocated industrial
education for the Negro race. The address has received considerable
attention and evoked many favorable comments, and the theme is one
worthy of far more consideration than it has ever received in the
South. Our interest in the matter, however, does not particularly
concern its application to the Negro. We are chiefly interested for the
Southern whites and the South itself. The South is just about to enter
an era of industrial development that will be almost without parallel.
Its progress will be all the more rapid because of the long delay that
has allowed other fields to be exhausted before the vast wealth of our
natural resources began to be developed. The one great drawback to the
development of the south has been the lack of skilled and educated
labor, and in the great industrial awakening that is upon us the skill
to manage and operate our mills and factories and convert our abundant
crude material into finished products, must come from the North, unless
something is done to educate our own people in the industrial arts. The
opening of the eyes of the world to the vast natural wealth of the South
will then simply mean that strangers will come in and dispossess our own
people of their vintage and turn to their own account the opportunities
we have never learned to employ. We must awake to the fact that we are
face to face with a new civilization. The old order changeth giving
place to the new. We must adjust ourselves to the changed conditions, or
be left behind in the march of progress. We must catch the spirit of
modern progress and achievement or be rooted out by those that have.
The great men of this generation are not statesmen, lawyers, orators or
poets. The richest rewards of intellectual effort go to those who know
how to bring the forces of nature to aid the processes of production; in
the natural era that is now upon us this will be especially true of the
South. The men who have the capacity for taking active and effective
part in the development of our resources, for the management of mills
and factories, for contributing skilled labor to the fashioning of crude
material into finished product, these are the men who will reap the
mighty harvest and the men who will possess and rule our country. The
same is true of the farm as well as the factory. The crude and unskilled
methods of Southern agriculture must give way to more scientific
tillage. If our own farmers cannot learn the lesson they must be
displaced by those that know it.
“All the Southern States are doing much in the way of educating the
people; but without disparaging the value of the learning obtained in
our schools, how much of it goes to prepare the young for grappling with
the conditions that surround them or will help to make them masters or
successful workers in the great field of modern progress? Look at the
vast wealth of undeveloped resources that encompasses almost every
Southern community. Look at the fertile fields or the worn lands still
in bondage to ignorant labor and an ante-bellum agricultural system.
Will a knowledge of grammar or of Greek convert our coal, our iron and
our timber into wealth, or make our fields bountiful with the harvest?
The plain truth is that much of the learning obtained in our schools is
wasted erudition. The young are not only not educated with reference to
the conditions of the age, but their minds are carefully and
systematically trained in other directions. They see no triumphs of
intellect except in politics or the ‘learned professions.’ Their
imaginations are inflamed by stories of how men from humble beginnings
became great statesmen, great orators and great lawyers. The result is
that thousands miserably fail because their little book learning has
diverted them from occupations in which they might have achieved
honorable success and even distinction. These men who might have become
machinists become pettifogging lawyers, quack doctors or small-bore
politicians. Industrial education is the great need of the South,
because industrial skill and educated labor are to be the factors of its
future progress, and these are to reap the richest rewards it will have
to bestow. If our own children cannot be prepared to take their part in
the great work, strangers will reap and enjoy the harvest.”
I wish to add here that there are few instances of a member of my race
betraying a specific trust. One of the best illustrations of this which
I know of, is in the case of an ex-slave from Virginia, whom I met not
long ago in a little town in the state of Ohio. I found that this man
had made a contract with his master, two or three years previous to the
Emancipation Proclamation, to the effect that the slave was to buy
himself, by paying so much per year for his body; and while he was
paying for himself, he was to be permitted to labor where and for whom
he pleased. Finding that he could secure better wages in Ohio, he went
there. When freedom came, he was still in debt to his master some three
hundred dollars. Notwithstanding that the Emancipation Proclamation
freed him from any obligation to his master, this black man walked the
greater portion of the distance back to where his old master lived in
Virginia, and placed the last dollar, with interest, in his hands. In
talking to me about this, the man told me that he knew he did not have
to pay the debt, but he had given his word to his master, and his word
he had never broken. He felt that he could not enjoy his freedom till he
had fulfilled his promise.