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Title: My larger education
Being chapters from my experience
Author: Booker T. Washington
Release date: June 27, 2024 [eBook #73923]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1910
Credits: Richard Tonsing, Mary Glenn Krause, MFR, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY LARGER EDUCATION ***
MY LARGER EDUCATION
[Illustration:
A NEW PORTRAIT OF MR. WASHINGTON
“When I had something to say about the white people I said it to the
white people; when I had something to say about coloured people I
said it to coloured people.”
]
MY LARGER EDUCATION
BEING CHAPTERS FROM MY EXPERIENCE
BY
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
_Author of “Up From Slavery,” “The Story of the Negro,” “Character
Building,” etc._
ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
[Illustration: [Logo]]
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1911
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1910, 1911, DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Learning from Men and Things 3
II. Building a School Around a Problem 21
III. Some Exceptional Men, and What I Have Learned from Them 51
IV. My Experience with Reporters and Newspapers 81
V. The Intellectuals and the Boston Mob 102
VI. A Commencement Oration on Cabbages 128
VII. Colonel Roosevelt and What I Have Learned from Him 158
VIII. My Educational Campaigns Through the South and What They
Taught Me 183
IX. What I Have Learned from Black Men 205
X. Meeting High and Low in Europe 239
XI. What I Learned About Education in Denmark 262
XII. The Mistakes and the Future of Negro Education 287
ILLUSTRATIONS
A new portrait of Mr. Washington _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
A partial view of Hampton Institute 10
The site of Tuskegee Institute when it was first bought 22
The house in Malden, W. Va., in which Mr. Washington
lived when he began teaching 46
Hon. P. B. S. Pinchback, of Louisiana 104
Blanche K. Bruce, of Mississippi 104
Major John R. Lynch, U. S. A. 104
Charles Banks 104
A type of the unpretentious cabin which an Alabama Negro
formerly occupied and the modern home in which he now
lives 124
The “Rising Star” schoolhouse 146
Two types of coloured churches 152
“Little Texas” schoolhouse, Alabama 164
“Washington Model School,” Alabama 164
Mr. Washington addressing an audience of Virginia
Negroes 186
Rufus Herron, of Camp Hill, Ala. 218
Major Robert Russa Moton 218
Professor George Washington Carver 218
Bishop George W. Clinton 218
A meeting of the Negro ministers of Macon County,
Alabama 234
Tompkins Memorial Hall, Hampton Institute 248
Trade School at Hampton Institute 248
Bricklaying at Hampton Institute 268
Blacksmithing at Hampton Institute 268
Collis P. Huntington Memorial Building, Tuskegee
Institute 300
The Office Building in which are located the
administrative offices of the school 300
MY LARGER EDUCATION
CHAPTER I
LEARNING FROM MEN AND THINGS
It has been my fortune to be associated all my life with a problem—a
hard, perplexing, but important problem. There was a time when I looked
upon this fact as a great misfortune. It seemed to me a great hardship
that I was born poor, and it seemed an even greater hardship that I
should have been born a Negro. I did not like to admit, even to myself,
that I felt this way about the matter, because it seemed to me an
indication of weakness and cowardice for any man to complain about the
condition he was born to. Later I came to the conclusion that it was not
only weak and cowardly, but that it was a mistake to think of the matter
in the way in which I had done. I came to see that, along with his
disadvantages, the Negro in America had some advantages, and I made up
my mind that opportunities that had been denied him from without could
be more than made up by greater concentration and power within.
Perhaps I can illustrate what I mean by a fact I learned while I was in
school. I recall my teacher’s explaining to the class one day how it was
that steam or any other form of energy, if allowed to escape and
dissipate itself, loses its value as a motive power. Energy must be
confined; steam must be locked in a boiler in order to generate power.
The same thing seems to have been true in the case of the Negro. Where
the Negro has met with discriminations and with difficulties because of
his race, he has invariably tended to get up more steam. When this steam
has been rightly directed and controlled, it has become a great force in
the upbuilding of the race. If, on the contrary, it merely spent itself
in fruitless agitation and hot air, no good has come of it.
Paradoxical as it may seem, the difficulties that the Negro has met
since emancipation have, in my opinion, not always, but on the whole,
helped him more than they have hindered him. For example, I think the
progress which the Negro has made within less than half a century in the
matter of learning to read and write the English language has been due
in large part to the fact that, in slavery, this knowledge was forbidden
him. My experience and observation have taught me that people who try to
withhold the best things in civilization from any group of people, or
race of people, not infrequently aid that people to the very things that
they are trying to withhold from them. I am sure that, in my own case, I
should never have made the efforts that I did make in my early boyhood
to get an education and still later to develop the Tuskegee Institute in
Alabama if I had not been conscious of the fact that there were a large
number of people in the world who did not believe that the Negro boy
could learn or that members of the Negro race could build up and conduct
a large institution of learning.
A wider acquaintance with men in all the different grades of life taught
me that the Negro’s case is not peculiar. The majority of successful men
are persons who have had difficulties to overcome, problems to master;
and, in overcoming those difficulties and mastering those problems, they
have gained strength of mind and a clearness of vision that few persons
who have lived a life of ease have been able to attain. Experience has
taught me, in fact, that no man should be pitied because, every day in
his life, he faces a hard, stubborn problem, but rather that it is the
man who has no problem to solve, no hardships to face, who is to be
pitied. His misfortune consists in the fact that he has nothing in his
life which will strengthen and form his character; nothing to call out
his latent powers, and deepen and widen his hold on life. It has come
home to me more in recent years that I have had, just because my life
has been connected with a problem, some unusual opportunities. I have
had unusual opportunities for example in getting an education in the
broader sense of the word.
If I had not been born a slave, for example, I never could have had the
opportunity, perhaps, of associating day by day with the most ignorant
people, so far as books are concerned, and thus coming in contact with
people of this class at first hand. The most fortunate part of my early
experience was that which gave me the opportunity of getting into direct
contact and of communing with and taking lessons from the old class of
coloured people who have been slaves. At the present time few
experiences afford me more genuine pleasure than to get a day or a half
a day off and go out into the country, miles from town and railroad, and
spend the time in close contact with a coloured farmer and his family.
And then I have felt for a long while that, if I had not been a slave
and lived on a slave plantation, I never would have had the opportunity
to learn nature, to love the soil, to love cows and pigs and trees and
flowers and birds and worms and creeping things. I have always been
intensely fond of outdoor life. Perhaps the explanation for this lies
partly in the fact that I was born nearly out of doors. I have also,
from my earliest childhood, been very fond of animals and fowls. When I
was but a child, and a slave, I had close and interesting acquaintances
with animals.
During my childhood days, as a slave, I did not see very much of my
mother, since she was obliged to leave her children very early in the
morning to begin her day’s work. The early departure of my mother often
made the matter of my securing breakfast uncertain. This led to my first
intimate acquaintance with animals.
In those days it was the custom upon the plantation to boil the Indian
corn that was fed to the cows and pigs. At times, when I had failed to
get any other breakfast, I used to go to the places where the cows and
pigs were fed and make my breakfast off this boiled corn, or else go to
the place where it was the custom to boil the corn, and get my share
there before it was taken to the animals.
If I was not there at the exact moment of feeding, I could still find
enough corn scattered around the fence or the trough to satisfy me. Some
people may think that this was a pretty bad way in which to get one’s
food, but, leaving out the name and the associations, there was nothing
very bad about it. Any one who has eaten hard-boiled corn knows it has a
delicious taste. I never pass a pot of boiled corn now without yielding
to the temptation to eat a few grains.
I think that I owe a great deal of my present strength and ability to
work to my love of outdoor life. It is true that the amount of time that
I can spend in the open air is now very limited. Taken on an average, it
is perhaps not more than an hour a day, but I make the most of that
hour. In addition to this I get much pleasure out of the anticipation
and the planning for that hour.
When I am at my home at Tuskegee, I usually find a way, by rising early
in the morning, to spend at least half an hour in my garden, or with my
fowls, pigs, or cows. As far as I can get the time, I like to find the
new eggs each morning myself, and when at home am selfish enough to
permit no one else to do this in my place. As with the growing plants,
there is a sense of freshness and newness and of restfulness in
connection with the finding and handling of newly laid eggs that is
delightful to me. Both the anticipation and the realization are most
pleasing. I begin the day by seeing how many eggs I can find, or how
many little chickens there are that are just beginning to peep through
the shells.
I am deeply interested in the different kinds of fowls, and, aside from
the large number grown by the school in its poultry house and yards, I
grow at my own home common chickens, Plymouth Rocks, Buff Cochins and
Brahmas, Peking ducks, and fantailed pigeons.
The pig, I think, is my favourite animal. I do not know how this will
strike the taste of my readers, but it is true. In addition to some
common bred pigs, I keep a few Berkshires and some Poland Chinas; and it
is a real pleasure to me to watch their development and increase from
month to month. Practically all the pork used in my family is of my own
raising.
This will, perhaps, illustrate what I mean when I say that I have gotten
a large part of my education from actual contact with things, rather
than through the medium of books. I like to touch things and handle
them; I like to watch plants grow and observe the behaviour of animals.
For the same reason, I like to deal with things, as far as possible, at
first hand, in the way that the carpenter deals with wood, the
blacksmith with iron, and the farmer with the earth. I believe that
there is something gained by getting acquainted, in the way which I have
described, with the physical world about you that is almost
indispensable.
A number of years ago, in a book called, “Up From Slavery,” I told a
story of my early life, describing the manner in which I got my early
schooling and the circumstances under which I came to start the Tuskegee
Normal and Industrial Institute. At the time that school was organized I
had read very little, and, in fact, few books on the subject of
teaching, and knew very little about the science of education and
pedagogy. I had had the advantage of going through an exceptional school
at Hampton and of coming in contact with an inspired teacher in General
Armstrong; but I had never attempted to formulate the methods of
teaching I used in that school, and I had very little experience in
applying them to the new and difficult problems I met as soon as I
attempted to conduct a school of my own. What I learned about the
science of education I learned in my efforts in working out the plans
for, and organizing and perfecting the educational methods at, Tuskegee.
[Illustration:
A PARTIAL VIEW OF HAMPTON INSTITUTE, VIRGINIA
Where Mr. Washington received a large part of the training and of the
inspiration for his great work
]
The necessity of collecting large sums of money every year to carry on
the work at Tuskegee compelled me to travel much and brought me in
contact with all kinds of people. As soon as I began to meet educated
and cultivated people, people who had had the advantage of study in
higher institutions of learning, as well as the advantages of much
reading and travel, I soon became conscious of my own disadvantages. I
found that the people I met were able to speak fluently and with perfect
familiarity about a great many things with which I was acquainted in
only the vaguest sort of way. In speaking they used words and phrases
from authors whom I had never read and often never heard of. All this
made me feel more keenly my deficiencies, and the more I thought about
it the more it troubled and worried me. It made me feel all the more
badly because I discovered that, if I were to carry on the work I had
undertaken to do, if I was ever going to accomplish any of the things
that it seemed to me important to do, I should never find time, no
matter how diligent and studious I might be, to overtake them and
possess myself of the knowledge and familiarity with books for which I
envied those persons who had been more highly educated than myself.
After a time, however, I found that while I was at a certain
disadvantage among highly educated and cultivated people in certain
directions, I had certain advantages over them in others. I found that
the man who has an intimate acquaintance with some department of life
through personal experience has a great advantage over persons who have
gained their knowledge of life almost entirely through books. I found
also that, by using my personal experience and observation; by making
use of the stories that I had heard, as illustrations; by relating some
incident that happened in my own case or some incident that I had heard
from some one else, I could frequently express what I had to say in a
much clearer and more impressive way than if I made use of the language
of books or the statements and quotations from the authors of books.
More than that, as I reflected upon the matter, I discovered that these
authors, in their books, were after all merely making use of their own
experiences or expressing ideas which they had worked out in actual
life, and that to make use of their language and ideas was merely to get
life second hand.
The result was that I made up my mind that I would try to make up for my
defects in my knowledge of books by my knowledge of men and things. I
said I would take living men and women for my study, and I would give
the closest attention possible to everything that was going on in the
world about me. I determined that I would get my education out of my
work; I would learn about education in solving the problems of the
school as they arose from day to day, and learn about life by learning
to deal with men. I said to myself that I would try to learn something
from every man I met; make him my text-book, read him, study him, and
learn something from him. So I began deliberately to try to learn from
men. I learned something from big men and something from little men,
from the man with prejudice and the man without prejudice. As I studied
and understood them, I found that I began to like men better; even those
who treated me badly did not cause me to lose my temper or patience, as
soon as I found that I could learn something from them.
For example, some years ago, I had an experience which taught me a
lesson in politeness and liberality which I shall long remember. I was
in a large city making calls on wealthy people in order to interest them
in our work at Tuskegee Institute. I called at the office of a man, and
he spoke to me in the most abrupt and insulting manner. He not only
refused to give any money but spoke of my race in a manner that no
gentleman of culture ought ever to permit himself to speak of another
race. A few minutes later I called on another gentleman in the same
city, who received me politely, thanked me for calling upon him, but
explained that he was so situated that he could not help me. My
interview with the first man occupied about twice as much of his time
and my time as was true of the second gentleman. I learned from this
experience that it takes no more time to be polite to every one than it
does to be rude.
During the later years of my experience I have had the good fortune to
study not only white men and learn from them, but coloured men as well.
In my earlier experiences I used to have sympathy with the coloured
people who were narrow and bitter toward white people. As I grew older I
began to study that class of coloured people, and I found that they did
not get anywhere, that their bitterness and narrowness toward the white
man did not hurt the white man or change his feeling toward the coloured
race, but that, in almost every case, the cherishing of such feeling
toward the white man reacted upon the coloured man and made him narrow
and bitter.
In the chapters which follow, I have given some account of the way in
which my work has brought me in contact, not so much with plants and
animals and with physical objects, but rather with human institutions,
with politics, with newspapers, with educational and social problems of
various kinds and descriptions, and I have tried to indicate in every
case the way in which I have been educated through them.
One of the purposes in writing these later chapters from my experience
is to complete the story of my education which I began in the book, “Up
From Slavery”; to answer the questions I have frequently been asked as
to how I have worked out for myself the educational methods which we are
now using at Tuskegee; and, finally, to illustrate, for the benefit of
the members of my own race, some of the ways in which a people who are
struggling upward may turn disadvantages into opportunities; how they
may gain within themselves something that will compensate them for what
they have been deprived of from without.
If I have learned much from things, I have learned more from men. The
work that I started to do brought me early in contact with some of the
most generous, high-minded and public-spirited persons in the country.
In the chapters that follow I have tried to indicate what I have learned
from contact with those men. Perhaps I can best indicate the way in
which I have been educated by my contact with these men if I tell
something of my relations with one man from whom, after General
Armstrong, my first teacher, I learned, perhaps, more than from any
other. I refer to the late William H. Baldwin, Jr.
I well remember my first meeting with Mr. Baldwin, although the exact
date has now slipped from my memory. He was at that time manager and
vice-president of the Southern Railway, with headquarters in Washington,
D. C. I had been given a letter to him by his father, in Boston. I found
him one morning in his office and presented this letter, which he read
over carefully, as was his custom in such matters. Then we began talking
about the school at Tuskegee and its work. I had been in the room but a
few minutes when the conviction forced itself upon me that I had met a
man who could thoroughly understand me and whom I understood. Indeed, I
had the feeling that I was in the presence of one in whose mind there
was neither faltering nor concealment, and one from whom it would be
impossible to hide a single thought or purpose. I never had occasion,
during all the years that I knew Mr. Baldwin, to change the opinion
formed of him at my first visit, or to feel that the understanding
established between us then was ever clouded or diminished.
Mr. Baldwin did not at first manifest any definite interest in the work
at Tuskegee. He said he would come down and “look us over” and if he
found we were doing “the real thing,” as he expressed it, he would do
anything he could to help us.
Within a few weeks after this first meeting, Mr. Baldwin fulfilled his
promise to “look us over” and see if we were doing “the real thing.” He
spent a busy day on the grounds of the institution, going through every
department with the thoroughness of an experienced executive. He found,
as a matter of course, a great many deficiencies in the details of the
management and organization of the school, but he saw what the
institution was striving to do and at once determined to help. In fact,
from that time he never lost an opportunity to serve the institution in
every possible way. He was just as deeply and as practically interested
in everything that concerned the progress and reputation of the school
and its work as any one connected with it. I think I never met any one
who was more genuinely interested than Mr. Baldwin in the success of the
Negro people. During his last visit to Tuskegee I remember that Mrs.
Washington said to me one day that she would be glad when he went away.
She meant that he sympathized too deeply, felt too profoundly the
bigness of the task and the limitations under which the school was
labouring. He was touched by everything he saw. The struggles of
individual students and teachers whom he came to know weighed heavily on
him and he needed to get out of the atmosphere of the school and its
work, and rest. None of us realized at that time that the disease that
finally took him away was already doing its fatal work.
William H. Baldwin, Jr., understood, as few men have, the Negro people,
and, understanding them as he did, he was in full sympathy with their
ambition to rise to a position of usefulness as large and as honourable
as that of any other race. Persons who knew him only slightly, after
hearing him express himself on the race question, gained the impression
that he was not in full sympathy with the deepest aspirations of the
Negro people. But this impression was mistaken. He was, before all,
anxious that the Negro people, in their struggle to go forward and
succeed, should not mistake the appearance for the real thing. In his
effort to have them avoid this danger he sometimes seemed to go too far.
But I would do injustice to the memory of Mr. Baldwin if, by anything I
have written or said, I should leave the impression that, because he was
interested in the welfare of the Negro, he was any the less interested
in the progress of the white race in the South. He saw with perfect
clearness that both races were, to a certain extent, hampered in their
struggles upward by conditions which they had inherited and for which
neither was wholly responsible. He saw, also, that in the long run the
welfare of each was bound up with that of the other. Much as he did for
Negro education, he never overlooked an opportunity to get money and
secure support for the education of the unfortunate white people of the
South.
Mr. Baldwin’s greatest service to Tuskegee Institute was in the
reorganization of the finances of the institution. When he first became
one of the trustees, the business organization of the school, its
finances, and the system of keeping the accounts were in a very
uncertain and unsatisfactory condition. He began at once to look into
our investments and to study the items of our annual budget. The school
was growing rapidly. The number of productive industries carried on by
the school, the large amount of building we were engaged in, and the
large amount of business carried on between the different departments
made the accounts of the school particularly complicated and the problem
of a proper business organization a most important one.
As I look back over the years in which he and I worked together, it
seems to me that the most pleasant and profitable hours I have ever
known were spent with Mr. Baldwin in his library in Brooklyn, while we
studied out together the problems and discussed the questions which this
work involved. When I came to New York he would often invite me to his
home and, as soon as dinner was over, we would spend three or four hours
in his library, sometimes not breaking up our conference until after
midnight.
Among other things I learned from Mr. Baldwin was that it is the
smaller, the petty, things in life that divide people. It is the great
tasks that bring men together. Any man who will take up his life in a
broad spirit, not of class nor sect nor locality, but in the freer
spirit which seeks to perform a work simply because it is good, that man
can have the support and the friendship of the best and highest people
in the world.
As I have said before, I do not regret that I was born a slave. I am not
sorry that I found myself part of a problem; on the contrary, that
problem has given direction and meaning to my life and has brought me
friendships and comforts that I could have gotten in no other way.
CHAPTER II
BUILDING A SCHOOL AROUND A PROBLEM
One of the first questions that I had to answer for myself after
beginning my work at Tuskegee was how I was to deal with public opinion
on the race question.
It may seem strange that a man who had started out with the humble
purpose of establishing a little Negro industrial school in a small
Southern country town should find himself, to any great extent, either
helped or hindered in his work by what the general public was thinking
and saying about any of the large social or educational problems of the
day. But such was the case at that time in Alabama; and so it was that I
had not gone very far in my work before I found myself trying to
formulate clear and definite answers to some very fundamental questions.
The questions came to me in this way: Coloured people wanted to know why
I proposed to teach their children to work. They said that they and
their parents had been compelled to work for two hundred and fifty
years, and now they wanted their children to go to school so that they
might be free and live like the white folks—without working. That was
the way in which the average coloured man looked at the matter.
Some of the Southern white people, on the contrary, were opposed to any
kind of education of the Negro. Others inquired whether I was merely
going to train preachers and teachers, or whether I proposed to furnish
them with trained servants.
Some of the people in the North understood that I proposed to train the
Negro to be a mere “hewer of wood and drawer of water,” and feared that
my school would make no effort to prepare him to take his place in the
community as a man and a citizen.
Of course all these different views about the kind of education that the
Negro ought or ought not to have were deeply tinged with racial and
sectional feelings. The rule of the “carpet-bag” government had just
come to an end in Alabama. The masses of the white people were very
bitter against the Negroes as a result of the excitement and agitation
of the Reconstruction period.
[Illustration:
THE SITE OF TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE WHEN IT WAS FIRST BOUGHT
Two of the buildings are still in use as dormitories
]
On the other hand, the coloured people—who had recently lost, to a very
large extent, their place in the politics of the state—were greatly
discouraged and disheartened. Many of them feared that they were going
to be drawn back into slavery. At this time also there was still a great
deal of bitterness between the North and the South in regard to anything
that concerned political matters.
I found myself, as it were, at the angle where these opposing forces
met. I saw that, in carrying out the work I had planned, I was likely to
be opposed or criticised at some point by each of these parties. On the
other hand, I saw just as clearly that in order to succeed I must in
some way secure the support and sympathy of each of them.
I knew, for example, that the South was poor and the North was rich. I
knew that Northern people believed, as the South at that time did not
believe, in the power of education to inspire, to uplift, and to
regenerate the masses of the people. I knew that the North was eager to
go forward and complete, with the aid of education, the work of
liberation which had been begun with the sword, and that Northern people
would be willing and glad to give their support to any school or other
agency that proposed to do this work in a really fundamental way.
It was, at the same time, plain to me that no effort put forth in behalf
of the members of my own race who were in the South was going to succeed
unless it finally won the sympathy and support of the best white people
in the South. I knew also—what many Northern people did not know or
understand—that however much they might doubt the wisdom of educating
the Negro, deep down in their hearts the Southern white people had a
feeling of gratitude toward the Negro race; and I was convinced that in
the long run any sound and sincere effort that was made to help the
Negro was going to have the Southern white man’s support.
Finally, I had faith in the good common-sense of the masses of my own
race. I felt confident that, if I were actually on the right track in
the kind of education that I proposed to give them and at the same time
remained honest and sincere in all my dealings with them, I was bound to
win their support, not only for the school that I had started, but for
all that I had in my mind to do for them.
Still it was often a puzzling and a trying problem to determine how best
to win and hold the respect of all three of these classes of people,
each of which looked with such different eyes and from such widely
different points of view at what I was attempting to do. The temptation
which presented itself to me in my dealings with these three classes of
people was to show each group the side of the subject that it would be
most willing to look at, and, at the same time, to keep silent about
those matters in regard to which they were likely to differ with me.
There was the temptation to say to the white man the thing that the
white man wanted to hear; to say to the coloured man the thing that he
wanted to hear; to say one thing in the North and another in the South.
Perhaps I should have yielded to this temptation if I had not perceived
that in the long run I should be found out, and that if I hoped to do
anything of lasting value for my own people or for the South I must
first get down to bedrock.
There is a story of an old coloured minister, which I am fond of
telling, that illustrates what I mean. The old fellow was trying to
explain to a Sunday-school class how it was and why it was that Pharaoh
and his party were drowned when they were trying to cross the Red Sea,
and how it was and why it was that the Children of Israel crossed over
dry-shod. He explained it in this wise:
“When the first party came along it was early in the morning and the ice
was hard and thick, and the first party had no trouble in crossing over
on the ice; but when Pharaoh and his party came along the sun was
shining on the ice, and when they got on the ice it broke, and they went
in and got drowned.”
Now there happened to be in this class a young coloured man who had had
considerable schooling, and this young fellow turned to the old minister
and said:
“Now, Mr. Minister, I do not understand that kind of explanation. I have
been going to school and have been studying all these conditions, and my
geography teaches me that ice does not freeze within a certain distance
of the equator.”
The old minister replied: “Now, I’se been expecting something just like
this. There’s always some fellow ready to spile all the theology. The
time I’se talkin’ about was before they had any jogerphies or ’quaters
either.”
Now this old man, in his plain and simple way, was trying to brush aside
all artificiality and to get down to bedrock. So it was with me. There
have always been a number of educated and clever persons among my race
who are able to make plausible and fine-sounding statements about all
the different phases of the Negro problem, but I saw clearly that I
should have to follow the example of the old preacher and start on a
solid basis in order to succeed in the work that I had undertaken.
So, after thinking the matter all out as I have described, I made up my
mind definitely on one or two fundamental points. I determined:
First, that I should at all times be perfectly frank and honest in
dealing with each of the three classes of people that I have mentioned;
Second, that I should not depend upon any “short-cuts” or expedients
merely for the sake of gaining temporary popularity or advantage,
whether for the time being such action brought me popularity or the
reverse. With these two points clear before me as my creed, I began
going forward.
One thing which gave me faith at the outset, and increased my confidence
as I went on, was the insight which I early gained into the actual
relations of the races in the South. I observed, in the first place,
that as a result of two hundred and fifty years of slavery the two races
had become bound together in intimate ways that people outside of the
South could not understand, and of which the white people and coloured
people themselves were perhaps not fully conscious. More than that, I
perceived that the two races needed each other and that for many years
to come no other labouring class of people would be able to fill the
place occupied by the Negro in the life of the Southern white man.
I saw also one change that had been brought about as a result of
freedom, a change which many Southern white men had, it seemed to me,
failed to see. As long as slavery existed, the white man, for his own
protection and in order to keep the Negro contented with his condition
of servitude, was compelled to keep him in ignorance. In freedom,
however, just the reverse condition exists. Now the white man is not
only free to assist the Negro in his effort to rise, but he has every
motive of self-interest to do so, since to uplift and educate the Negro
would reduce the number of paupers and criminals of the race and
increase the number and efficiency of its skilled labourers.
Clear ideas did not come into my mind on this subject at once. It was
only gradually that I gained the notion that there had been two races in
slavery; that both were now engaged in a struggle to adjust themselves
to the new conditions; that the progress of each meant the advancement
of the other; and that anything that I attempted to do for the members
of my own race would be of no real value to them unless it was of equal
value to the members of the white race by whom they were surrounded.
As this thought got hold in my mind and I began to see further into the
nature of the task that I had undertaken to perform, much of the
political agitation and controversy that divided the North from the
South, the black man from the white, began to look unreal and artificial
to me. It seemed as if the people who carried on political campaigns
were engaged to a very large extent in a battle with shadows, and that
these shadows represented the prejudices and animosities of a period
that was now past.
On the contrary, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me
that the kind of work that I had undertaken to do was a very real sort
of thing. Moreover, it was a kind of work which tended not to divide,
but to unite, all the opposing elements and forces, because it was a
work of construction.
Having gone thus far, I began to consider seriously how I should proceed
to gain the sympathy of each of the three groups that I have mentioned
for the work that I had in hand.
I determined, first of all, that as far as possible I would try to gain
the active support and coöperation, in all that I undertook, of the
masses of my own race. With this in view, before I began my work at
Tuskegee, I spent several weeks travelling about among the rural
communities of Macon County, of which Tuskegee is the county seat.
During all this time I had an opportunity to meet and talk individually
with a large number of people representing the rural classes, which
constitute 80 per cent. of the Negro population in the South. I slept in
their cabins, ate their food, talked to them in their churches, and
discussed with them in their own homes their difficulties and their
needs. In this way I gained a kind of knowledge which has been of great
value to me in all my work since.
As years went on, I extended these visits to the adjoining counties and
adjoining states. Then, as the school at Tuskegee became better known, I
took advantage of the invitations that came to me to visit more distant
parts of the country, where I had an opportunity to learn still more
about the actual life of the people and the nature of the difficulties
with which they were struggling.
In all this, my purpose was to get acquainted with the masses of the
people—to gain their confidence so that I might work with them and for
them.
In the course of travel and observation I became more and more impressed
with the influence that the organizations which coloured people have
formed among themselves exert upon the masses of the people.
The average man outside of the Negro race is likely to assume that the
ten millions of coloured people in this country are a mere disorganized
and heterogeneous collection of individuals, herded together under one
statistical label, without head or tail, and with no conscious common
purpose. This is far from true. There are certain common interests that
are peculiar to all Negroes, certain channels through which it is
possible to touch and influence the whole people. In my study of the
race in what I may call its organized capacity, I soon learned that the
most influential organization among Negroes is the Negro church. I
question whether or not there is a group of ten millions of people
anywhere, not excepting the Catholics, that can be so readily reached
and influenced through their church organizations as the ten millions of
Negroes in the United States. Of these millions of black people there is
only a very small percentage that does not have formal or informal
connection with some church. The principal church groups are: Baptists,
African Methodists, African Methodist Episcopal Zionists, and Coloured
Methodists, to which I might add about a dozen smaller denominations.
I began my work of getting the support of these organizations by
speaking (or lecturing, as they are accustomed to describe it) to the
coloured people in the little churches in the country surrounding the
school at Tuskegee. When later I extended my journeys into other and
more distant parts of the country, I began to get into touch with the
leaders in the church and to learn something about the kind and extent
of influence which these men exercise through the churches over the
masses of the Negro people.
It has always been a great pleasure to me to meet and to talk in a
plain, straightforward way with the common people of my own race
wherever I have been able to meet them. But it is in the Negro churches
that I have had my best opportunities for meeting and getting acquainted
with them.
It has been my privilege to attend service in Trinity Church, Boston,
where I heard Phillips Brooks. I have attended service in the Fifth
Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, where I heard the late Dr. John
Hall. I have attended service in Westminster Abbey, in London. I have
visited some of the great cathedrals in Europe when service was being
held. But not any of these services have had for me the real interest
that certain services among my own people have had. Let me describe the
type of the service that I have enjoyed more than any other in all my
experience in attending church, whether in America or Europe.
In Macon County, Ala., where I live, the coloured people have a kind of
church-service that is called an “all-day meeting.” The ideal season for
such meetings is about the middle of May. The churchhouse that I have in
mind is located about ten miles from town. To get the most out of the
“all-day meeting” one should make an early start, say eight o’clock.
During the drive one drinks in the fresh fragrance of forests and wild
flowers. The church building is located near a stream of water, not far
from a large, cool spring, and in the midst of a grove or primitive
forest. Here the coloured people begin to come together by nine or ten
o’clock in the morning. Some of them walk; most of them drive. A large
number come in buggies, but many use the more primitive wagons or carts,
drawn by mules, horses, or oxen. In these conveyances a whole family,
from the youngest to the eldest, make the journey together. All bring
baskets of food, for the “all-day meeting” is a kind of Sunday picnic or
festival. Preaching, preceded by much singing, begins at about eleven
o’clock. If the building is not large enough, the services are held out
under the trees. Sometimes there is but one sermon; sometimes there are
two or three sermons, if visiting ministers are present. The sermon
over, there is more plantation singing. A collection is taken—sometimes
two collections—then comes recess for dinner and recreation.
Sometimes I have seen at these “all-day meetings” as many as three
thousand people present. No one goes away hungry. Large baskets, filled
with the most tempting spring chicken or fresh pork, fresh vegetables,
and all kinds of pies and cakes, are then opened. The people scatter in
groups. Sheets or table-cloths are spread on the grass under a tree near
the stream. Here old acquaintances are renewed; relatives meet members
of the family whom they have not seen for months. Strangers, visitors,
every one must be invited by some one else to dinner. Kneeling on the
fresh grass or on broken branches of trees surrounding the food, dinner
is eaten. The animals are fed and watered, and then at about three
o’clock there is another sermon or two, with plenty of singing thrown
in; then another collection, or perhaps two. In between these sermons I
am invited to speak, and am very glad to accept the invitation. At about
five o’clock the benediction is pronounced and the thousands quietly
scatter to their homes with many good-bys and well-wishes. This, as I
have said, is the kind of church-service that I like best. In the
opportunities which I have to speak to such gatherings I feel that I
have done some of my best work.
In carrying out the policy which I formed early, of making use of every
opportunity to speak to the masses of the people, I have not only
visited country churches and spoken at such “all-day meetings” as I have
just described, but for years I have made it a practice to attend,
whenever it has been possible for me to do so, every important
ministers’ meeting. I have also made it a practice to visit town and
city churches and in this way to get acquainted with the ministers and
meet the people.
During my many and long campaigns in the North, for the purpose of
getting money to carry on Tuskegee Institute, it has been a great
pleasure and satisfaction to me, after I have spoken in some white
church or hall or at some banquet, to go directly to some coloured
church for a heart-to-heart talk with my own people. The deep interest
that they have shown in my work and the warmth and enthusiasm with which
coloured people invariably respond to any one who talks to them frankly
and sincerely in regard to matters that concern the welfare of the race,
make it a pleasure to speak to them.
Many times on these trips to the North it has happened that coloured
audiences have waited until ten or eleven o’clock at night for my
coming. This does not mean that coloured people may not attend the other
meetings which I address, but means simply that they prefer in most
cases to have me to speak to them alone. When at last I have been able
to reach the church or the hall where the audience was gathered, it has
been such a pleasure to meet them that I have often found myself
standing on my feet until after twelve o’clock. No one thing has given
me more faith in the future of the race than the fact that Negro
audiences will sit for two hours or more and listen with the utmost
attention to a serious discussion of any subject that has to do with
their interest as a people. This is just as true of the unlettered
masses as it is of the more highly educated few.
Not long ago, for example, I spoke to a large audience in the Chamber of
Commerce in Cleveland, Ohio. This audience was composed for the most
part of white people, and the meeting continued rather late into the
night. Immediately after this meeting I was driven to the largest
coloured church in Cleveland, where I found an audience of something
like twenty-five hundred coloured people waiting patiently for my
appearance. The church building was crowded, and many of those present,
I was told, had been waiting for two or three hours.
As I entered the building an unusual scene presented itself. Each member
of the audience had been provided with a little American flag, and as I
appeared upon the platform, the whole audience rose to its feet and
began waving these flags. The reader can, perhaps, imagine the picture
of twenty-five hundred enthusiastic people each of whom is wildly waving
a flag. The scene was so animated and so unexpected that it made an
impression on me that I shall never forget. For an hour and a half I
spoke to this audience, and, although the building was crowded until
there was apparently not an inch of standing room in it, scarcely a
single person left the church during this time.
Another way in which I have gained the confidence and support of the
millions of my race has been in meeting the religious leaders in their
various state and national gatherings. For example, every year, for a
number of years past, I have been invited to deliver an address before
the National Coloured Baptist Convention, which brings together four or
five thousand religious leaders from all parts of the United States. In
a similar way I meet, once in four years, the leaders in the various
branches of the Methodist Church during their general conferences.
Invitations to address the different secret societies in their national
gatherings frequently come to me also. Next to the church, I think it is
safe to say that the secret societies or beneficial orders bring
together greater numbers of coloured people and exercise a larger
influence upon the race than any other kind of organization. One can
scarcely shake hands with a coloured man without receiving some kind of
grip which identifies him as a member of one or another of these many
organizations.
I am reminded, in speaking of these secret societies, of an occasion at
Little Rock, Ark., when, without meaning to do so, I placed my friends
there in a very awkward position. It had been pretty widely advertised
for some weeks before that I was to visit the city. Among the plans
decided upon for my reception was a parade in which all the secret and
beneficial societies in Little Rock were to take part. Much was expected
of this parade, because secret societies are numerous in Little Rock,
and the occasions when they can all turn out together are rare.
A few days before I reached that city some one began to make inquiry as
to which one of these orders I belonged to. When it finally became known
among the rank and file that I was not a member of any of them, the
committee which was preparing for the parade lost a great deal of its
enthusiasm, and a sort of gloom settled down over the whole proceeding.
The leading men told me that they found it quite a difficult task after
that to make the people understand why they were asked to turn out to
honour a person who was not a member of any of their organizations.
Besides, it seemed unnatural that a Negro should not belong to some kind
of order. Somehow or other, however, matters were finally straightened
out; all the organizations turned out, and a most successful reception
was the result.
Another agency which exercises tremendous power among Negroes is the
Negro press. Few if any persons outside of the Negro race understand the
power and influence of the Negro newspaper. In all, there are about two
hundred newspapers published by coloured men at different points in the
United States. Many of them have only a small circulation and are,
therefore, having a hard struggle for existence; but they are read in
their local communities. Others have built up a national circulation and
are conducted with energy and intelligence. With the exception of about
three, these two hundred papers have stood loyally by me in all my plans
and policies to uplift the race. I have called upon them freely to aid
me in making known my plans and ideas, and they have always responded in
a most generous fashion to all the demands that I have made upon them.
It has been suggested to me at different times that I should purchase a
Negro newspaper in order that I might have an “organ” to make known my
views on matters concerning the policies and interests of the race.
Certain persons have suggested also that I pay money to certain of these
papers in order to make sure that they support my views.
I confess that there have frequently been times when it seemed that the
easiest way to combat some statement that I knew to be false, or to
correct some impression which seemed to me peculiarly injurious, would
be to have a paper of my own or to pay for the privilege of setting
forth my own views in the editorial columns of some paper which I did
not own.
I am convinced, however, that either of these two courses would have
proved fatal. The minute it should become known—and it would be
known—that I owned an “organ,” the other papers would cease to support
me as they now do. If I should attempt to use money with some papers, I
should soon have to use it with all. If I should pay for the support of
newspapers once, I should have to keep on paying all the time. Very soon
I should have around me, if I should succeed in bribing them, merely a
lot of hired men and no sincere and earnest supporters. Although I might
gain for myself some apparent and temporary advantage in this way, I
should destroy the value and influence of the very papers that support
me. I say this because if I should attempt to hire men to write what
they do not themselves believe, or only half believe, the articles or
editorials they write would cease to have the true ring; and when they
cease to have the true ring, they will exert little or no influence.
So, when I have encountered opposition or criticism in the press, I have
preferred to meet it squarely. Frequently I have been able to profit by
these criticisms of the newspapers. At other times, when I have felt
that I was right and that those who criticised me were wrong, I have
preferred to wait and let the results show. Thus, even when we differed
with one another on minor points, I have usually succeeded in gaining
the confidence and support of the editors of the different papers in
regard to those matters and policies which seemed to me really
important.
In travelling throughout the United States I have met the Negro editors.
Many of them have been to Tuskegee. It has taken me twenty years to get
acquainted with them and to know them intimately. In dealing with these
men I have not found it necessary to hold them at arm’s-length. On the
contrary, I am in the habit of speaking with them frankly and openly in
regard to my plans. A number of the men who own and edit Negro
newspapers are graduates or former students of the Tuskegee Institute. I
go into their offices and I go to their homes. We know one another; they
are my friends, and I am their friend.
In dealing with newspaper people, whether they are white or black, there
is no way of getting their sympathy and support like that of actually
knowing the individual men, of meeting and talking with them frequently
and frankly, and of keeping them in touch with everything you do or
intend to do. Money cannot purchase or control this kind of friendship.
Whenever I am in a town or city where Negro newspapers are published, I
make it a point to see the editors, to go to their offices, or to invite
them to visit Tuskegee. Thus we keep in close, constant, and sympathetic
touch with one another. When these papers write editorials endorsing any
project that I am interested in, the editors speak with authority and
with intelligence because of our close personal relations. There is no
more generous and helpful class of men among the Negro race in America
to-day than the owners and editors of Negro newspapers.
Many times I have been asked how it is that I have secured the
confidence and good wishes of so large a number of the white people of
the South. My answer in brief is that I have tried to be perfectly frank
and straightforward at all times in my relations with them. Sometimes
they have opposed my actions, sometimes they have not, but I have never
tried to deceive them. There is no people in the world which more
quickly recognizes and appreciates the qualities of frankness and
sincerity, whether they are exhibited in a friend or in an opponent, in
a white man or in a black man, than the white people of the South.
In my experience in dealing with men of my race I have found that there
is a class that has gained a good deal of fleeting popularity for
possessing what was supposed to be courage in cursing and abusing all
classes of Southern white people on all possible occasions. But, as I
have watched the careers of this class of Negroes, in practically every
case their popularity and influence with the masses of coloured people
have not been lasting. There are few races of people the masses of whom
are endowed with more common-sense than the Negro, and in the long run
these common people see things and men pretty much as they are.
On the other hand, there have always been in every Southern community a
certain number of coloured men who have sought to gain the friendship of
the white people around them in ways that were more or less dishonest.
For a number of years after the close of the Civil War, for example, it
was natural that practically all the Negroes should be Republicans in
politics. There were, however, in nearly every community in the South,
one or two coloured men who posed as Democrats. They thought that by
pretending to favour the Democratic party they might make themselves
popular with their white neighbours and thus gain some temporary
advantage. In the majority of cases the white people saw through their
pretences and did not have the respect for them that they had for the
Negro who honestly voted with the party to which he felt that he
belonged.
I remember hearing a prominent white Democrat remark not long ago that
in the old days whenever a Negro Democrat entered his office he always
took a tight grasp upon his pocket-book. I mention these facts because I
am certain that wherever I have gained the confidence of the Southern
people I have done so, not by opposing them and not by truckling to
them, but by acting in a straightforward manner, always seeking their
good-will, but never seeking it upon false pretences.
I have made it a rule to talk _to_ the Southern white people concerning
what I might call their shortcomings toward the Negro rather than talk
_about_ them. In the last analysis, however, I have succeeded in getting
the sympathy and support of so large a number of Southern white people
because I have tried to recognize and to face conditions as they
actually are, and have honestly tried to work with the best white people
in the South to bring about a better condition.
From the first I have tried to secure the confidence and good-will of
every white citizen in my own county. My experience teaches me that if a
man has little or no influence with those by whose side he lives, as a
rule there is something wrong with him. The best way to influence the
Southern white man in your community, I have found, is to convince him
that you are of value to that community. For example, if you are a
teacher, the best way to get the influence of your white neighbours is
to convince them that you are teaching something that will make the
pupils that you educate able to do something better and more useful than
they would otherwise be able to do; to show, in other words, that the
education which they get adds something of value to the community.
In my own case, I have attempted from the beginning to let every white
citizen in my own town see that I am as much interested in the common,
every-day affairs of life as himself. I tried to let them see that the
presence of Tuskegee Institute in the community means better farms and
gardens, good housekeeping, good schools, law and order. As soon as the
average white man is convinced that the education of the Negro makes of
him a citizen who is not always “up in the air,” but one who can apply
his education to the things in which every citizen is interested, much
of opposition, doubt, or indifference to Negro education will disappear.
During all the years that I have lived in Macon County, Ala., I have
never had the slightest trouble in either registering or casting my vote
at any election. Every white person in the county knows that I am going
to vote in a way that will help the county in which I live.
Many nights I have been up with the sheriff of my county, in
consultation concerning law and order, seeking to assist him in getting
hold of and freeing the community of criminals. More than that, Tuskegee
Institute has constantly sought, directly and indirectly, to impress
upon the twenty-five or thirty thousand coloured people in the
surrounding county the importance of coöperating with the officers of
the law in the detection and apprehension of criminals. The result is
that we have one of the most orderly communities in the state. I do not
believe that there is any county in the state, for example, where the
prohibition laws are so strictly enforced as in Macon County, in spite
of the fact that the Negroes in this county so largely outnumber the
whites.
[Illustration:
THE HOUSE IN MALDEN, W. VA., IN WHICH MR. WASHINGTON LIVED WHEN HE
BEGAN TEACHING
]
Whatever influence I have gained with the Northern white people has come
about from the fact, I think, that they feel that I have tried to use
their gifts honestly and in a manner to bring about real and lasting
results. I learned long ago that in education as in other things nothing
but honest work lasts; fraud and sham are bound to be detected in the
end. I have learned, on the other hand, that if one does a good, honest
job, even though it may be done in the middle of the night when no eyes
see but one’s own, the results will just as surely come to light.
My experience has taught me, for example, that if there is a filthy
basement or a dirty closet anywhere in the remotest part of the school
grounds it will be discovered. On the other hand, if every basement or
every closet—no matter how remote from the centre of the school
activities—is kept clean, some one will find it and commend the care and
the thoughtfulness that kept it clean.
It has always been my policy to make visitors to Tuskegee feel that they
are seeing more than they expected to see. When a person has
contributed, say, $20,000 for the erection of a building, I have tried
to provide a larger building, a better building, than the donor expected
to see. This I have found can be brought about only by keeping one’s
eyes constantly on all the small details. I shall never forget a remark
made to me by Mr. John D. Rockefeller when I was spending an evening at
his house. It was to this effect: “Always be master of the details of
your work; never have too many loose outer edges or fringes.”
Then, in dealing with Northern people, I have always let them know that
I did not want to get away from my own race; that I was just as proud of
being a Negro as they were of being white people. No one can see through
a sham more quickly, whether it be in speech or in dress, than the
hard-headed Northern business man.
I once knew a fine young coloured man who nearly ruined himself by
pretending to be something that he was not. This young man was sent to
England for several months of study. When he returned he seemed to have
forgotten how to talk. He tried to ape the English accent, the English
dress, the English walk. I was amused to notice sometimes, when he was
off his guard, how he got his English pronunciation mixed with the
ordinary American accent which he had used all of his life. So one day I
quietly called him aside and said to him: “My friend, you are ruining
yourself. Just drop all those frills and be yourself.” I am glad to say
that he had sense enough to take the advice in the right spirit, and
from that time on he was a different man.
The most difficult and trying of the classes of persons with which I am
brought in contact is the coloured man or woman who is ashamed of his or
her colour, ashamed of his or her race and, because of this fact, is
always in a bad temper. I have had opportunities, such as few coloured
men have had, of meeting and getting acquainted with many of the best
white people, North and South. This has never led me to desire to get
away from my own people. On the contrary, I have always returned to my
own people and my own work with renewed interest.
I have never at any time asked or expected that any one, in dealing with
me, should overlook or forget that I am a Negro. On the contrary, I have
always recognized that, when any special honour was conferred upon me,
it was conferred not in spite of my being a Negro, but because I am a
Negro, and because I have persistently identified myself with every
interest and with every phase of the life of my own people.
Looking back over the twenty-five and more years that have passed since
that time, I realize, as I did not at that time, how the better part of
my education—the education that I got after leaving school—has been in
the effort to work out those problems in a way that would gain the
interest and the sympathy of all three of the classes directly
concerned—the Southern white man, the Northern white man, and the Negro.
In order to gain consideration from these three classes for what I was
trying to do I have had to enter sympathetically into the three
different points of view entertained by those three classes; I have had
to consider in detail how the work that I was trying to do was going to
affect the interests of all three. To do this, and at the same time
continue to deal frankly and honestly with each class, has been indeed a
difficult and at times a puzzling task. It has not always been easy to
stick to my work and keep myself free from the distracting influences of
narrow and factional points of view; but, looking back on it all after a
quarter of a century, I can see that it has been worth what it cost.
CHAPTER III
SOME EXCEPTIONAL MEN AND WHAT I HAVE LEARNED FROM THEM
There are some opportunities that come to the boy or girl who is born
poor that the boy or girl who is born rich does not have. In the same
way there are some advantages in belonging to a disadvantaged race. The
individual or the race which has to face peculiar hardships and to
overcome unusual difficulties gains an experience of men and things and
gets into close and intimate touch with life in a way that is not
possible to the man or woman in ordinary circumstances.
In the old slavery days, when any of the white folks were a little
uncertain about the quality of a new family that had moved into the
neighbourhood, they always had one last resource for determining the
character and the status of the new family. When in doubt, they could
always rely on old “Aunt Jenny.” After “Aunt Jenny” had visited the new
family and returned with her report, the question was settled. Her
decision was final, because “Aunt Jenny” knew. The old-fashioned house
servants gained, through their peculiar experiences, a keen sense for
what was called the “quality.”
In freedom also the Negro has had special opportunities for finding out
the character and the quality of the white people among whom he lives.
If there is a man in the community who is habitually kind and
considerate to the humblest people about him, the coloured people know
about that man. On the contrary, if there is a man in that community who
is unfair and unjust in his dealings with them, the coloured people know
that man also.
In their own way and among themselves the coloured people in the South
still have the habit of weighing and passing judgment on the white
people in their community; and, nine times out of ten, their opinion of
a man is pretty accurate. A man who can always be counted on to go out
of his way to assist and protect the members of an unpopular race, and
who is not afraid or ashamed to show that he is interested in the
efforts of the coloured people about him to improve their condition, is
pretty likely to be a good citizen in other respects.
In the average Southern community, also, it is almost always the best
people, those who are most highly cultured and religious, who know the
coloured people best. It is the best white people who go oftenest into
the Negro churches or teach in the Negro Sunday-schools. It is to
individual white men of this better class that the average coloured
people go most frequently for counsel and advice when they are in
trouble.
The fact that I was born a Negro, and the further fact that I have all
my life been engaged in a kind of work that was intended to uplift the
masses of my people, has brought me in contact with many exceptional
persons, both North and South. For example, it was because I was a poor
boy and a Negro that I found my way to Hampton Institute, where I came
under the influence of General Armstrong, who, as teacher and friend,
has had a larger influence upon my life than any other person I have
ever known, except my mother. As it was in my boyhood, so it has been in
a greater degree in my later life; because of the work I was trying to
do for the Negro race I have constantly been brought into contact with
men of the very highest type, generous, high-minded, enlightened, and
free. As I have already suggested, a large part of my education has been
gained by my personal contact with these exceptional men.
There have been times in my life when I fear that I should have lost
courage to go forward if I had not had constantly before me the example
of other men, some of them obscure and almost unknown outside of the
communities in which they lived, whose patient, unwavering cheerfulness
and good-will, in spite of difficulties, have been a continued
inspiration to me.
On my way to Tuskegee for the first time I met one of the finest
examples of the type of man I have tried to describe. He was a railroad
conductor and his name was Capt. Isaiah C. Howard. For many years he had
charge of a train on the Western Railroad of Alabama, between Montgomery
and Atlanta. I do not know where Captain Howard got his education, or
how much he had studied books. I do know that he was born in the South
and had spent all his life there. During a period of twenty years I
rarely, if ever, met a higher type of the true gentleman, North or
South.
I recall one occasion in particular when I was on his train between
Atlanta and Montgomery during the Christmas holiday season, when the
rougher and more ignorant of my race usually travel in large numbers,
and when owing to the general license that has always prevailed during
the holiday season, a certain class of coloured people are likely to be
more or less under the influence of whiskey.
After a time a disturbance arose in the crowd at the lower end of the
car. When Captain Howard appeared, some of the men who had been drinking
spoke to him in a way that most men, white or black, would have
resented. In the case of some men, the language these Negroes used might
easily have furnished an occasion for a shooting, the consequences of
which it was not difficult for me to picture to myself. I was deeply
touched to see how, like a wise and patient father, Captain Howard
handled these rough fellows. He spoke to them calmly, without the least
excitement in his voice or manner, and in a few moments he had obtained
almost complete order in the car. After that he gave them a few words of
very sensible advice which at once won their respect and gratitude,
because they understood the spirit that prompted it.
During all the time that I travelled with him I never saw Captain
Howard, even under the most trying circumstances, lose his temper or
grow impatient with any class of coloured people that he had to deal
with. During the long trips that I used to make with him, whenever he
had a little leisure time, he would drop down into the seat by my
side and we would talk together, sometimes for an hour at a time, on the
condition and prospects of the Negro in the South. I remember that he
had very definite ideas in regard to the white man’s duty and
responsibility, and more than once he expressed to me his own reasons
for believing that the Negro should be treated with patience and with
justice. He used frequently to express the fear that, by allowing
himself to get into the habit of treating Negroes with harshness, the
white man in the South would be injured more than the Negro.
I have spoken of Captain Howard at some length because he represents a
distinct class of white people in the South, of whom an increasing
number may be found in nearly every Southern community. He possessed in
a very high degree those qualities of kindness, self-control, and
general good breeding which belong to the real aristocracy of the South.
In his talks with me he frequently explained that he was no
“professional” lover of the Negro; that, in fact, he had no special
feeling for the Negro or against him, but was interested in seeing fair
play for every race and every individual. He said that his real reason
for wanting to give the Negro the same chance that other races have was
that he loved the South, and he knew that there could be no permanent
prosperity unless the lowest and poorest portion of the community was
treated with the same justice as the highest and most powerful.
I count it a part of my good fortune to have been thrown, early in my
life in Alabama, in contact with such a man as Captain Howard. After
knowing him I said to myself: “If, under the circumstances, a white man
can learn to be fair to my race instead of hating it, a black man ought
to be able to return the compliment.”
In connection with my work in Alabama, I early made the acquaintance of
another Southern white man, also an Alabamian by birth but of a
different type, a man of education and high social and official
standing—the late J. L. M. Curry.
It was my privilege to know Doctor Curry well during the last twenty
years of his life. He had fought on the side of the Confederacy during
the Civil War, he had served as a college professor and as United States
Minister to Spain, and had held other high public positions. More than
that, he represented, in his personal feelings and ways of thinking, all
that was best in the life of the Southern white people.
Notwithstanding the high positions he had held in social and official
life, Doctor Curry gave his latter years to the cause of education among
the masses of white and coloured people in the South, and was never
happier than when engaged in this work.
I met Doctor Curry for the first time, in a business way, at Montgomery,
Ala. While I was in the Capitol building I happened to be, for a few
moments, in a room adjoining that in which Doctor Curry and some other
gentlemen were talking, and could not avoid overhearing their
conversation. They were speaking about Negro education. One of the state
officials expressed some doubt about the propriety of a Southern
gentleman taking an active part in the education of the Negro. While I
am not able to give his exact words, Doctor Curry replied in substance
that he did not believe that he or any one else had ever lost anything,
socially or in any other way, on account of his connection with Negro
education.
“On the other hand,” Doctor Curry continued, “I believe that Negro
education has done a great deal more for me than I have ever been able
to do for Negro education.”
Then he went on to say that he had never visited a Negro school or
performed a kindly act for a Negro man, woman, or child, that he himself
was not made stronger and better for it.
Immediately after the Civil War, he said, he had been bitterly opposed
to every movement that had been proposed to educate the Negro. After he
came to visit some of the coloured schools, however, and saw for himself
the struggles that the coloured people were making to get an education,
his prejudice had changed into sympathy and admiration.
As far as my own experience goes—and I have heard the same thing said by
others—there is no gentler, kindlier, or more generous type of man
anywhere than those Southern white men who, born and bred to those
racial and sectional differences which, after the Civil War, were
mingled with and intensified by the bitterness of poverty and defeat,
have struggled up to the point where they feel nothing but kindness to
the people of all races and both sections. It is much easier for those
who shared in the victory of the Civil War—I mean the Northern white man
and the Negro—to emancipate themselves from racial and sectional
narrowness.
There is another type of white man in the South who has aided me in
getting a broader and more practical conception of my work. I refer to
the man who has no special sentiment for or against the Negro, but
appreciates the importance of the Negro race as a commercial asset—a man
like Mr. John M. Parker, of New Orleans. Mr. Parker is the president of
the Southern Industrial Congress, and is one of the largest planters in
the Gulf states. His firm in New Orleans, I understand, buys and sells
more cotton than any other firm in the world. Mr. Parker sees more
clearly than any white man in the South with whom I have talked, the
fact that it is important to the commercial progress of the country that
the Negro should be treated with justice in the courts, in business, and
in all the affairs of life. He realizes also that, in order that the
Negro may have an incentive to work regularly, he must have his wants
increased; and this can be brought about only through education.
I have heard many addresses to coloured people in all parts of the
country, but I have never heard words more sensible, practical, and to
the point from the lips of any man than those of an address which Mr.
Parker delivered before nearly a thousand Negro farmers at one of the
annual Negro Conferences at the Tuskegee Institute. Mr. Parker has for
years been a large employer of Negro labour on his plantation. He was
thus able to speak to the farmers simply and frankly, and, even though
he told them some rather unpleasant truths, the audience understood and
appreciated not only what was said, but the spirit in which it was
uttered.
The hope of the South, so far as the interests of the Negro are
concerned, rests very largely upon, men like Mr. Parker, who see the
close connection between labour, industry, education, and political
institutions, and have learned to face the race problem in a large and
tolerant spirit, and are seeking to solve it in a practical way.
A quite different type of man with whom I have been thrown in frequent
contact is Col. Henry Watterson, of the Louisville _Courier-Journal_.
Colonel Watterson seems to me to represent the Southern gentleman of the
old school, a man of generous impulses, high ideals, and gracious
manner. I have had frequent and long conversations with him about the
Negro and about conditions in the South. If there is anywhere a man who
has broader or more liberal ideas concerning the Negro, or any
undeveloped race, I have not met him.
A few years ago, when a meeting had been arranged at Carnegie Hall, New
York, in order to interest the public in the work of our school at
Tuskegee, we were disappointed in securing a distinguished speaker from
the South who had promised to be present. At the last moment the
committee in charge telegraphed to Colonel Watterson. Although (because
of the death of one of his children) he had made up his mind not to
speak again in public for some time, Colonel Watterson went to New York
from Louisville and made one of the most eloquent speeches in behalf of
the Negro that I have ever heard. He told me at the time that nothing
but his interest in the work that we were trying to do at Tuskegee would
have induced him to leave home at that time.
Whenever I have been tempted to grow embittered or discouraged about
conditions in the South, my acquaintance with such men as Mr. Parker and
Colonel Watterson has given me new strength and increased my faith.
I have been fortunate also in the coloured men with whom I have been
associated. There is a class of Negroes in the South who are just as
much interested as the best white people in the welfare of the
communities in which they live. They are just as much opposed as the
best white people to anything that tends to stir up strife between the
races. But there are two kinds of coloured people, just as there are two
kinds of white people.
There is a class of coloured people who are narrow in their sympathies,
short-sighted in their views, and bitter in their prejudices against the
white people. When I first came to Alabama I had to decide whether I
could unite with this class in a general crusade of denunciation against
the white people of the South, in order to create sympathy in the North
for the work that I was seeking to carry on, or whether I would consider
the real interests of the masses of my race, and seek to preserve and
promote the good relations that already existed between the races.
I do not deny that I was frequently tempted, during the early years of
my work, to join in the general denunciation of the evils and injustice
that I saw about me. But when I thought the matter over, I saw that such
a course would accomplish no good and that it would do a great deal of
harm. For one thing, it would serve only to mislead the masses of my own
race in regard to the opportunities that existed right about them.
Besides that, I saw that the masses of the Negro people had no
disposition to carry on any general war against the white people. What
they wanted was the help and encouragement of their white neighbours in
their efforts to get an education and to improve themselves.
Among the coloured men who saw all this quite as clearly as myself was
Rufus Herron, of Camp Hill, Ala. He was born in slavery and had had
almost no school advantages, but he was not lacking in practical wisdom
and he was a leader in the community in which he lived. Some years ago,
after he had harvested his cotton crop he called to see me at the
Tuskegee Institute. He said that he had sold all of his cotton, had got
a good price for it, had paid all his debts for the year, and had twenty
dollars remaining. He handed me ten dollars and asked me to use it in
the education of a student at Tuskegee. He returned to his home and gave
the other ten to the teacher of the white school in his vicinity, and
asked him to use it in the education of a white student.
Since that day I have come to know Rufus Herron well. He never misses a
session of the annual Tuskegee Negro conference. He is the kind of man
that one likes to listen to because he always says something that goes
straight to the point, and after he has covered the subject he stops. I
do not think that I have ever talked with him that he did not have
something to suggest in regard to the material, educational, and moral
improvement of the people, or something that might promote better
relations between white people and black people. If there is a white
man, North or South, that has more love for his community or his country
than Rufus Herron, it has not been my good fortune to meet him. In his
feelings and ambitions he also is what I have called an aristocrat.
I have no disposition to deny to any one, black or white, the privilege
of speaking out and protesting against wrong and injustice, whenever and
wherever they choose to do so. I would do injustice to the facts and to
the masses of my people in the South, however, if I did not point out
how much more useful a man like Rufus Herron has made his life than the
man who spends his time and makes a profession of going about talking
about his “rights” and stirring up bitterness between the white people
and coloured people. The salvation of the Negro race in America is to be
worked out, for the most part, not by abstract argument and not by mere
denunciation of wrong, but by actual achievement in constructive work.
In Nashville there is another coloured man—a banker, a man of education,
wealth, and culture. James C. Napier is about the same age as Rufus
Herron. I have been closely associated with him for twenty years. I have
been with him in the North and in the South; I have worked with him in
conventions, and I have talked with him in private in my home and in his
home. During all the years that I have known him I have never heard Mr.
Napier express a narrow or bitter thought toward the white race. On the
contrary, he has shown himself anxious to give publicity to the best
deeds of the white people rather than the worst. During the greater part
of my life I have done my work in association with such men as he. There
is no part of the United States in which I have not met some of this
type of coloured men. I honour such men all the more because, had they
chosen to do so, they could easily have made themselves and those about
them continually miserable by dwelling upon the mean things which people
say about the race or the injustices which are so often a part of the
life of the Negro.
Let me add that, so far as I have been able to see, there is no real
reason why a Negro in this country should make himself miserable or
unhappy. The average white man in the United States has the idea that
the average Negro spends most of his time in bemoaning the fact that he
is not a white man, or in trying to devise some way by which he will be
permitted to mingle, in a purely social way, with white people. This is
far from the truth. In my intercourse with all classes of the Negro,
North and South, it is a rare occurrence when the matter of getting away
from the race, or of social intermingling with the white people, is so
much as mentioned. It is especially true that intelligent Negroes find a
satisfaction in social intercourse among themselves that is rarely known
or understood by any one outside of the Negro race. In their family
life, in the secret societies and churches, as well as other
organizations where coloured people come together, the most absorbing
topic of conversation invariably relates to some enterprise for the
betterment of the race.
Among coloured farmers, as among white farmers, the main topic of
discussion is naturally the farm. The Negro is, in my opinion, naturally
a farmer, and he is at his very best when he is in close contact with
the soil. There is something in the atmosphere of the farm that develops
and strengthens the Negro’s natural common-sense. As a rule the Negro
farmer has a rare gift of getting at the sense of things and of stating
in picturesque language what he has learned. The explanation of it is,
it seems to me, that the Negro farmer studies nature. In his own way he
studies the soil, the development of plants and animals, the streams,
the birds, and the changes of the seasons. He has a chance of getting
the kind of knowledge that is valuable to him at first-hand.
In a visit some years ago to a Negro farmers’ institute in the country,
I got a lesson from an unlettered coloured farmer which I have never
forgotten. I had been invited by one of the Tuskegee graduates to go
into the country some miles from Tuskegee to be present at this
institute. When I entered the room the members of the institute were
holding what they called their farmers’ experience meeting. One coloured
farmer was asked to come up to the platform and give his experience. He
was an old man, about sixty-five years of age. He had had no education
in the book, but the teacher had reached him, as he had others in the
community, and showed him how to improve his methods of farming.
When this old man came up to the front of the room to tell his
experience, he said: “I’se never had no chance to study no science, but
since dis teacher has been here I’se been trying to make some science
for myself.”
Thereupon he laid upon the table by his side six stalks of cotton and
began to describe in detail how, during the last ten years, he had
gradually enriched his land so as to increase the number of bolls of
cotton grown upon each individual stalk. He picked up one stalk and
showed it to the audience; before the teacher came to the community, he
said, and before he began to improve his land, his cotton produced only
two bolls to the stalk. The second year he reached the point where, on
the same land, he succeeded in producing four bolls on a stalk. Then he
showed the second stalk to the audience. After that he picked up the
third and fourth stalks, saying that during the last few years he had
reached a point where a stalk produced eight bolls.
Finally he picked up the last stalk and said: “This year I made cotton
like dis”—and he showed a stalk containing fourteen bolls. Then the old
fellow took his seat.
Some one in the audience from a distance arose and said: “Uncle, will
you tell us your name?”
The old fellow arose and said: “Now, as you ask me for my name, I’ll
tell you. In de old days, before dis teacher come here, I lived in a
little log-cabin on rented land, and had to mortgage my crop every year
for food. When I didn’t have nothin’, in dem days, in my community dey
used to call me ‘Old Jim Hill.’ But now I’se out o’ debt; I’se de deeds
for fifty acres of land; and I lives in a nice house wid four rooms
that’s painted inside and outside; I’se got some money in de bank; I’se
a taxpayer in my community; I’se edicated my children. And now, in my
community, dey calls me ‘Mr. James Hill.’”
The old fellow had not only learned to raise cotton during these ten
years, but, so far as he was concerned, he had solved the race problem.
As one travels through the Southland, he is continually meeting old
Negro farmers like the one that I have described. It has been one of the
great satisfactions of my life to be able from time to time to go out
into the heart of the country, on the plantations and on the farms where
the masses of the coloured people live. I like to get into the fields
and into the woods where they are at work and talk with them. I like to
attend their churches and Sunday-schools and camp-meetings and revival
meetings. In this way I have gotten more material which has been of
service to me in writing and speaking than I have ever gotten by reading
books. There are no frills about the ordinary Negro farmer, no pretence.
He, at least, is himself and no one else. There is no type of man that I
more enjoy meeting and knowing.
A disadvantaged race has, too, the advantage of coming in contact with
the best in the North, and this again has been my good fortune. There
are two classes of people in the North—one that is just as narrow and
unreasonable toward the white man at the South as any Southern white man
can be toward the Negro or a Northern white man. I have always chosen to
deal with the other white man at the North—the man with large and
liberal views.
In saying this I make an exception of the “professional” friend of the
Negro. I have little patience with the man who parades himself as the
“professional” friend of any race. The “professional” friend of the
Chinese or Japanese or Filipino is frequently a well-meaning person, but
he is always tiresome. I like to meet the man who is interested in the
Negro because he is a human being. I like to talk with the man who wants
to help the Negro because he is a member of the human family, and
because he believes that, in helping the Negro, he is helping to make
this a better world to live in.
During the twenty-five years and more that I have been accustomed to go
North every year to obtain funds with which to build up and support the
Tuskegee Institute, I have made the acquaintance of a large number of
exceptional people in that part of the country. Because I was seeking
aid for Negro education, seeking assistance in giving opportunities to a
neglected portion of our population, I had an opportunity to meet these
people in a different and, perhaps, more intimate way than the average
man. I had an opportunity to see a side of their lives of which many of
their business acquaintances, perhaps, did not know the existence.
Few people, I dare say, who were acquainted with the late Mr. H. H.
Rogers, former head of the Standard Oil Company, knew that he had any
special interest or sympathy for the Negro. I remember well, however, an
occasion when he showed this interest and sympathy. I was showing him
one day the copy of a little Negro farmers’ newspaper, published at
Tuskegee, containing an account of the efforts the people in one of our
country communities were making to raise a sum of money among themselves
in order that they might receive the aid he had promised them in
building a schoolhouse. As Mr. Rogers read the account of this school
“rally,” as it was called, and looked down the long list of names of the
individuals who in order to make up the required sum, had contributed
out of their poverty, some a penny, some five cents, some twenty-five,
some a dollar and a few as much as five dollars, his eyes filled with
tears. I do not think he ever before realized, as he did at that moment,
the great power—and the great power for good—which his money gave them.
During the last years of his life, Mr. Rogers was greatly interested in
the building of the Virginian Railway, which was constructed upon his
own plans and almost wholly with his own capital, from Norfolk, Va., to
Deep Water, W. Va. One of the first things he did, after this new
railway was completed, was to make arrangements for a special train in
order that I might travel over and speak at the different towns to the
coloured people along the line and, at the same time, study their
situation in order that something might be done to improve their
condition. From his point of view, these people were part of the
resources of the country which he wanted to develop. He desired to see
the whole country through which this railway passed, which, up to that
time, had remained in a somewhat backward condition, made prosperous and
flourishing and filled with thriving towns and with an industrious and
happy people. He died, however, just as he seemed on the eve of
realizing this dream.
For a number of years before his death, I knew Mr. H. H. Rogers
intimately. I used to see him frequently in his office in New York;
sometimes I made trips with him on his yacht. At such times I had
opportunity to talk over in detail the work that I was trying to do. Mr.
Rogers had one of the most powerful and resourceful minds of any man I
ever met. His connection with large business affairs had given him a
broad vision and practical grasp of public and social questions, and I
learned much from my contact with him.
In this connection I might name another individual who represents
another and entirely different type of man, with whom I have frequently
come in contact during my travels through the Northern states. I refer
to Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the New York _Evening Post_.
Mr. Villard is not primarily a business man in the sense that Mr. Rogers
was, and his interest in the education and progress of the Negro is of a
very different kind from that of Mr. Rogers; at least he approaches the
matter from a very different point of view.
Mr. Villard is the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist.
He is a literary man and idealist, and he cherishes all the intense zeal
for the rights of the Negro which his grandfather before him displayed.
He is anxious and determined that the Negro shall have every right and
every opportunity that any other race of people has in this country. He
is the outspoken opponent of every institution and every individual who
seeks to limit in any way the freedom of any man or class of men
anywhere. He has not only continued in the same way and by much the same
methods that his grandfather used, to fight the battles for human
liberty, but he has interested himself in the education of the Negro. It
is due to the suggestion and largely to the work of Mr. Villard that
Tuskegee, at the celebration of its twenty-fifth anniversary received
the $150,000 memorial fund to commemorate the name and service of Mr.
William H. Baldwin to Tuskegee and Negro education in the South. Mr.
Villard has given much of his time and personal service to the work of
helping and building up some of the smaller and struggling Negro schools
in the South. He is a trustee of at least two of such institutions,
being president of the board of trustees in one case, and takes an
active part in the direction and control of their work. He has recently
been active and, in fact, is largely responsible for the organization of
the National Association for the Advancement of the Coloured People, a
sort of national vigilance committee, which will watch over and guard
the rights and interests of the race, and seek through the courts,
through legislation, and through other public and private means, to
redress the wrongs from which the race now suffers in different parts of
the country.
Perhaps I ought to add in fairness that, while I sympathize fully with
Mr. Villard’s purposes, I have frequently differed with him as to the
methods he has used to accomplish them. Sometimes he has criticised me
publicly in his newspaper and privately in conversation. Nevertheless,
during all this time, I have always felt that I retained his friendship
and good-will. I do not think there has ever been a time when I went to
him with a request of any kind either for myself personally or to obtain
his help in any way in the work in which I was engaged that he has not
shown himself willing and anxious to do everything in his power to
assist me. While I have not always been able to follow his suggestions,
or agree with him as to the methods I should pursue, I have,
nevertheless, I think, profited by his criticism and have always felt
and appreciated the bracing effect upon public sentiment of his vigorous
and uncompromising spirit.
I have learned also from Mr. Villard the lesson that persons who have a
common purpose may still maintain helpful, friendly relations, even if
they do differ as to details and choose to travel to the common goal by
different roads.
Another man who has exercised a deep influence upon me is Robert C.
Ogden. Some months after I became a student at Hampton Institute, Mr.
Robert C. Ogden, in company with a number of other gentlemen from New
York, came to Hampton on a visit. It was the first time I ever saw him
and the first sight of a man of the physical, mental, and moral build of
Mr. Ogden—strong, fresh, clean, vigorous—made an impression upon me that
it is hard for any one not in my situation to appreciate. The thing that
impressed me most was this: Here was a man, intensely earnest and
practical, a man who was deeply engrossed in business affairs, who still
found time to turn aside from his business and give a portion of his
time and thought to the elevation of an unfortunate race.
Mr. Ogden is a man of a very different type from either Mr. Rogers or
Mr. Villard. He does not look at the question of uplifting the Negro as
a question of rights and liberty exclusively: he does not think of it
merely as a means of developing one of the neglected resources of the
South. He looks upon it, if I may venture to say so, as a question of
humanity. Mr. Ogden is intensely interested in human beings; he cannot
think of an unfortunate individual or class of individuals without
feeling a strong impulse to help them. He has spent a large portion of
his time, energy, and fortune in inspiring a large number of other
people with that same sentiment. I do not believe any man has done more
than Mr. Odgen to spread, among the masses of the people, a spirit of
unselfish service to the interests of humanity, irrespective of
geographical, sectarian or racial distinction.
Perhaps I can in no better way give an idea of what Mr. Ogden has
accomplished in this direction than by giving a list of some of the
activities in which he has been engaged. Mr. Ogden is:
President and only Northern member of the Conference for Southern
Education,
President of the Southern Education Board,
President of the Board of Trustees of Hampton Institute,
Trustee of Tuskegee Institute,
Trustee of the Anna T. Jeans Fund for Improvement of the Negro Common
School,
Member of the General Education Board.
From this it will be seen that Mr. Ogden is directly connected with
almost every important movement for education in the South, whether for
white people or for black people. In addition to that he is president of
the Board of Directors of the Union Theological Seminary of New York,
member of the Sage Foundation Board, and of the Presbyterian Board of
Home Missions. In all these different directions he has worked quietly,
steadily, without stinting himself, for the good of the whole country.
Many of the sentiments which he has expressed in his annual addresses at
the meetings of these different organizations have in them the breadth
of view of a real statesman. His idea was that in giving an equal
opportunity for education to every class in the community he was laying
the foundation for a real democracy. He spoke of the educational
conference, for instance, as “a congress called by the voice of
‘democracy’”; and again he said of this same institution, “Its
foundation is the proposition that every American child is entitled to
an education.”
In spite of what he has done in a multitude of ways to advance
education, I have heard Mr. Ogden say, both in public and in private,
that he was not an educated man. Perhaps he has not gotten so much
education in the usual, formal, technical matter out of books as some
other people. But through the study of books, or men, or things, Mr.
Ogden has secured the finest kind of education, and deserves to be
classed with the scholars of the world. So far as I have studied Mr.
Ogden’s career, it is of interest and value to the public in three
directions:
First: He has been a successful business man.
Second: More than any other one individual except Gen. S. C.
Armstrong, he has been the leader in a movement to educate the whole
South, regardless of race or colour.
Third: In many important matters relating to moral and religious
education in the North, Mr. Ogden is an important leader.
I know of few men in America whose life can be held up before young
people as a model as can Mr. Ogden’s life.
It would be difficult for me to describe or define the manner and extent
to which I have been influenced and educated by my contact with Mr.
Ogden. It was characteristic of him, that the only reason I came to know
him is because I needed him, needed him in the work which I was trying
to do. Had I not been a Negro I would probably never have had the rare
experience of meeting and knowing intimately a man who stands so high in
every walk of life as Mr. Robert C. Ogden. Had Mr. Ogden been a weak
man, seeking his own peace of mind and social position, he would not
have been brave enough and strong enough to ignore adverse criticism in
his efforts to serve the unfortunate of both races in the South, and in
that case I should probably not have made his acquaintance.
The men that I have mentioned are but types of many others, men
intellectually and spiritually great, who, directly and indirectly, have
given comfort, help, and counsel to the ten millions of my race in
America.
CHAPTER IV
MY EXPERIENCE WITH REPORTERS AND NEWSPAPERS
I have learned much from reporters and newspapers. Seldom do I go into
any city, or even step out on the platform between trains, but that it
seems to me some newspaper reporter finds me. I used to be surprised at
the unexpected places in which these representatives of the press would
turn up, and still more surprised and sometimes embarrassed by the
questions they would ask me. It seemed to me that, if there was any
particular thing that I happened to know and did not feel at liberty to
talk about, that would be the precise thing that the reporter who met me
wanted to question me about. In such cases, too, the reporter usually
got the information he wanted, or, if he didn’t, I was sorry afterward,
because if the actual facts had been published they would have done less
damage than the half truths which he did get hold of.
I confess that when I was less experienced I used to dread reporters.
For a long time I used to look upon a reporter as a kind of professional
pry, a sort of social mischief-maker, who was constantly trying to find
out something that would make trouble. The consequence was that when I
met reporters I was likely to find myself laying plans to circumvent
them and keep them in the dark in regard to my purposes and business.
A wide acquaintance with newspapers and newspaper men has completely
changed my attitude toward them. In the first place I have discovered
that reporters usually ask just the questions that the average man in
the community in which the newspapers are located would ask if he had
the courage to do so. The only difference is that the reporter comes out
squarely and plumply and asks you the question that another person would
ask indirectly of some one else.
For my part, I have found it both interesting and important to know what
sort of questions the average man in the community was asking, for
example about the progress of the Negro, or about my work. The sort of
questions the reporters in the different parts of the country ask
indicate pretty clearly, not only what the people in the community know
about my work, but they tell me a great deal, also, about the feeling of
the average man toward the members of my race in that community and
toward the Negro generally. Not only do the newspaper reporters keep me
informed, in the way I have described, in regard to a great many things
I want to know, but frequently, by the questions that they ask, they
enable me to correct false impressions and to give information which it
seems important the public should have, in regard to the condition and
progress of the Negro.
One other consideration has changed my attitude toward the reporters. As
I have become better acquainted with newspapers I have come to
understand the manner and extent to which they represent the interests
and habits of thought of the people who read and support them. Any man
who is engaged in any sort of work that makes constant demands upon the
good-will and confidence of the public knows that it is important that
he should have an opportunity to reach this public directly and to
answer just the sort of questions the newspapers ask of him. As I have
said, these inquiries represent the natural inquiries of the average
man. If the newspaper did not ask and answer these questions, they would
remain unanswered, or the public would get the information it wanted
from some more indirect and less reliable source.
Several times, during the years that I have been at Tuskegee, a
representative from some Southern paper or magazine has come to me to
inquire in regard to some rumour or report that has got abroad in regard
to conditions inside our school. In such cases I have simply told the
reporter to take as much time as he chose and make as thorough an
examination of the school and everything about it as he cared to. At the
same time, I have assured him that he was perfectly free to ask any
questions on any subject, of any person that he met on the grounds. In
other words, I have given him every opportunity to go as far as he
wanted, and to make his investigation as thorough as he desired.
Of course, in every institution as large as ours, there is abundant
opportunity for a malicious or ill-disposed person to make injurious
criticism, or to interpret what he learns in a way that would injure the
institution. But in every such case, instead of printing anything
derogatory to the school, the newspaper investigation has proved the
most valuable sort of advertisement, and the rumours that had been
floating about have been silenced. There is no means so effectual in
putting an end to gossip as a newspaper investigation and report. On the
other hand, I have found that there is no way of so quickly securing the
good-will of a newspaper reporter as by showing him that you have
nothing to conceal.
Frequently I have heard people criticise the newspapers because they
print and give currency to so much that is merely trivial; in other
words, what we commonly speak of as gossip. What I know of the
newspapers convinces me that they do not print one tenth of the reports
that are sent in to them, and that a large part of the time of every
newspaper man is spent in running down and proving the falsity of
stories and rumours that have gained currency in the community as a
result of the natural disposition of mankind to accept and believe any
kind of statement that is sufficiently circumstantial and interesting.
My own experience leads me to believe that if the newspaper performed no
other service for the community but that of rooting out of the public
mind the malice and prejudice that rest upon misinformation and gossip,
it would justify its existence in this way alone.
In saying this, I do not overlook the fact that daily papers are
responsible for giving currency to many statements that are false and
misleading: that too frequently the emphasis is placed upon the things
that are merely exciting, while important matters—or, at least, matters
that seem important to some of us who are on the outside—are passed over
in silence. To a very large extent the daily newspapers have merely
taken up the work that was formerly performed by the village gossip, or
by the men who sat around in the village store, talked politics, and
made public opinion. The newspaper, however, does that work on a higher
plane. It gives us a world-wide outlook, and it makes a commendable
effort to get the truth. Even if, like the village gossip, it puts the
emphasis sometimes on the wrong things and spends a lot of time over
personal and unimportant matters, it at least brings all classes of
people together in doing so. People who read the same newspaper are
bound to feel neighbourly, even though they may never meet one another,
even though they live thousands of miles apart.
I have learned much from newspapers and from newspaper men. I think I
have met all kinds of newspaper reporters, not only those who work on
the conservative, but also those on the so-called “yellow” journals, and
what I have seen of them convinces me that no class of men in the
community work harder or more faithfully to perform the difficult tasks
to which they are assigned or, considering all the circumstances,
perform their work better. I confess that I have grown to the point
where I always like to meet and talk with newspaper men, because they
know the world, they know what is going on, and they know men. I have
frequently been amazed, in talking with newspaper men, to learn the
amount of accurate, intimate, and inside information that they had about
public and even private matters, and at the insight they showed in
weighing and judging public men and their actions.
One thing that has interested me in this connection has been the
discovery that practically every large newspaper in the country has in
its office a vast array of facts which, out of charity for the
individuals concerned or because some public interest would be injured
by their publication, never get into print. I am convinced that much
more frequently than is supposed newspaper men show their interest in
individuals and in the public welfare by what they withhold from
publication rather than by what they actually do print. Considering
that, under the conditions in which modern newspapers are conducted, any
fact which would interest and excite the community has become a kind of
commodity which it is the business of the newspaper to gather up and
sell, it is surprising that these publications are as discriminating and
as considerate as they are.
It seems to me, also, that there has been a noticeable improvement, in
recent years, in the method of getting and preparing newspaper reports.
I am not sure whether this is due more to the improvement in the class
of men who represent the papers or whether it is due to a better
understanding on the part of the public as to the methods of dealing
with reporters; to a more definite recognition on the part of both the
public and the newspapers of the responsible position which the modern
newspaper occupies in the complex organization of modern social life.
Both private individuals and public men seem to have recognized the fact
that, in a country where the life of every individual touches so closely
the life of every other, it is in the interest of all that each should
work, as it were, in the open, where all the world may know and
understand what he is doing.
On the other hand, newspapers have discovered that the only
justification for putting any fact in a newspaper is that publication
will serve some sort of public interest, and that, in the long run, the
value of a piece of news and the reputation of a newspaper that prints
it depend upon the absolute accuracy and trustworthiness of its reports.
I have learned something about newspapers and newspaper men from my own
experience with them, but I have learned much, also, from the manner in
which some of the best known men in this country have been accustomed to
deal with them.
On several occasions when I was at the White House, during the time that
Colonel Roosevelt was President, I saw him surrounded by half a dozen
reporters—representing great daily papers. I was greatly surprised on
those occasions to observe that the President would talk to these
reporters just as frankly and freely about matters pertaining to the
government, and his plans and policies, as one partner in business would
talk to another partner. While these men, as a result of the interview,
would telegraph long despatches to their papers, I am sure I am safe in
saying that the President’s confidence was rarely, if ever, betrayed.
It was largely through such frank interviews, taking the whole country
into his confidence, as it were, that President Roosevelt was able, in
so large a degree, to carry the whole country along with him. Ever since
I have known Colonel Roosevelt, one of the things that I have observed
in his career has been his ability and disposition to keep in close
personal touch with the brightest newspaper men and magazine writers of
the country. The newspaper men like him because he understands the
conditions under which they work and at the same time recognizes the
important part that they and their reports play in the actual, if not in
the official, government in a democratic country like ours.
Another noted man whom it has been my privilege to see a good deal of,
in connection with newspapers, is Mr. Andrew Carnegie. Not long ago I
heard the question asked why it was that, while so many rich men were
unpopular, Andrew Carnegie held the love and respect of the common
people. From what I have seen of Mr. Carnegie I ascribe a good deal of
his popularity to the candour and good sense with which he deals with
reporters and newspapers. Mr. Carnegie has something of Mr. Roosevelt’s
disposition to take reporters into his confidence. Both Colonel
Roosevelt and Mr. Carnegie have known how to use newspapers as a means
of letting the world know what they are doing and, in both cases, I
believe that the popularity of these men is due, in very large part, to
their ability to get into a sort of personal touch with the masses of
the people through the newspapers.
In saying this I do not mean that either Colonel Roosevelt or Mr.
Carnegie has made use of the newspapers merely for the sake of
increasing their personal popularity. The man who is known, and has the
confidence of the public, can, if he does not allow himself to be fooled
by his own popularity, accomplish a great deal more, perform a much
greater public service, than the man whose name is unknown.
In the case of both Colonel Roosevelt and Mr. Carnegie, the names of
private individuals have, in each case, become associated in the public
mind with certain large public interests. They have come to be, in a
very real sense, public men because they have embodied in their persons
and their lives certain important public interests. Although, so far as
I know, he has never held public office of any kind, Mr. Carnegie is
nevertheless a public man. Mr. Roosevelt has not ceased to be identified
with certain important public interests; nor has he lost, to any great
extent, political power because he is no longer President of the United
States. The power which these men exercise upon the minds and hearts of
the masses of their fellow countrymen is largely due to the fact that
they were able to make the acquaintance of the public through the
newspapers.
I have always counted it a great privilege that my name became
associated, comparatively early in my life, with what has always seemed
to me a great and important public interest, namely, a form of education
which seems to me best suited to fit a recently enfranchised race for
the duties and responsibilities of citizenship in a republic. The fact
that I have been compelled to raise the larger part of the money for
establishing this kind of education by direct appeals to the public has
made my name pretty generally known. I am glad that this is true, for
through the medium of the newspapers I have been able to get in touch
with many hundreds and thousands of persons that I would never have been
able to reach with my voice. All this has multiplied my powers for
service a hundredfold.
Of course it is just as true that a man who has become well known and
gained the confidence of the public through the medium of the press can
use that power for purely selfish purposes, if he chooses, as that he
can use it for the public welfare. I have no doubt that nearly every man
who has in any way gained the confidence of the public has every year
many opportunities for turning his popularity to private account.
Several times in the course of a year, for example, some one makes me a
present of shares of stock in some new concern, and, on several
occasions, I have had deeds of lots in some land scheme or new town
presented to me. I have made it a rule to promptly return every gift of
that kind, first of all for the good business reason that it would not
pay me to have my name connected with any enterprise, no matter how
legitimate it might be, for which I could not be personally responsible,
and the use of my name, under such circumstances, so far as it
influenced any one to invest in the scheme, would be a fraud.
A second reason is my desire to keep faith with the public, if I may so
express it. In order to do that, I have never been able to see how I
could afford to give any of my time or attention to any enterprise or
any kind of work that did not have to do specifically and directly with
the work of Negro education, in the broad spirit in which I have
interpreted it.
I have already said that, in my early experience with newspaper
reporters, I used to think it was necessary to be very careful in
letting them know what my ambitions and aims in regard to my work were.
But I have learned that it is pretty hard to keep anything from the
newspapers that the newspapers think the public wants to know. As a
result of what I have learned I try to be perfectly frank with newspaper
men. For some years I have made it my custom to talk with them
concerning all my plans and everything of a public nature in which I am
interested. I talk with them just the same as I would with one of my
friends or business acquaintances. When a reporter comes to interview me
I tell him what I wish he might publish, and what I wish he would not
publish. Frequently I have discovered that the newspaper man understood
better than I how to state things in a way that should give the right
impression to the public. This seems to be especially true of the
Washington correspondents of the great dailies, who, considering the
many important matters which they have to handle, exercise, it seems to
me, a remarkable discretion as to what should, and should not, be
printed.
Let me give an illustration: When Colonel Roosevelt was President, he
invited me to come to the White House to read over an important part of
one of his annual messages to Congress. The passage of his message in
regard to which he consulted me referred to a subject upon which there
was great interest at that time, and the newspaper reporters in
Washington, and especially those on duty at the White House, had some
inkling as to the subject that the President wished to discuss with me.
I was with the President for a considerable time. When I came out of the
President’s office I was at once surrounded by half a dozen newspaper
men who wished me to tell them, in detail, just what I had discussed
with the President. After some hesitation I made up my mind to try the
experiment of being perfectly frank with them. I gave them an outline of
what was in the message and went into some detail in regard to our
discussion of it. After I had given them the facts, I said to them:
“Now, gentlemen, do you think that this is a subject that I ought to
give out to the public at this time through the newspapers?”
Each one of them promptly replied that he did not think it was a matter
that I ought to give out to the public. The result was that the next day
not a single newspaper represented in this conversation had a line
concerning the matter which had called me to the White House. This is an
example of an experience which I have frequently had in dealing with
reporters. If I had tried to hide something from them, or to deceive
them, I suspect that some garbled report or misstatement of the facts
would have been given to the public in regard to the matter.
There is always a question with me, and I presume there is with most
public speakers, as to what is the best form of preparing and delivering
a public address, and of getting the gist of it correctly and properly
reported through the newspapers. When I first began speaking in public I
used to follow the plan to a great extent of committing speeches to
memory. This plan, however, I soon gave up. At present I do not commit
speeches to memory, except on very important occasions, or when I am to
speak on an entirely new subject.
The plan of writing out one’s speech and reading it has its advantages,
but it also has its disadvantages. A written speech is apt to sound
stiff and formal; besides, if one depends upon a manuscript, he will not
be able to adapt himself to the occasion. Writing out a speech, however,
has the advantage of enabling one to give out something to the
newspapers that will be absolutely accurate.
After trying both the plan of committing to memory and of writing out my
addresses, I have struck upon a compromise which I find, in my case,
answers the purpose pretty well. The plan which I now follow is this: I
think out what I want to say pretty carefully. After having done that, I
write head lines, or little suggestions that will call my attention to
the points that I wish to make in covering my speech. After having
thought out the general line of my speech, and then having prepared my
head lines, I have for a number of years been accustomed to dictate my
speech to a stenographer. By long practice, I have found that, after
dictating my speech, I can take my head lines or memorandum sheet and
follow the dictation almost exactly when I deliver my address. I give
out all or a portion of the dictated address to the newspapers in
advance. This the reporters consider an accommodation to them. It
insures accuracy and at the same time leaves me free while speaking to
throw aside the stiffness and formality that would naturally be
necessary in reading an address or in delivering an address that had
been committed to memory, and to take advantage of any local interests
that would give a more lively colour to what I have to say.
Another disadvantage of a written address, or of one committed to
memory, is that it is difficult to adapt it to the interests of the
immediate audience. To me, talking to an audience is like talking to an
individual. Each audience has a personality of its own, and one can no
more find two audiences that are exactly alike than he can find two
individuals that are exactly alike. The speaker who fails to adapt
himself to the conditions, surroundings, and general atmosphere of his
audience in a large degree fails, I think, as a speaker. I have found
that the best plan is, as I have stated, to study one’s subject through
and through, to saturate himself with it so that he is master of every
detail, and then use head lines as a memorandum.
One of the questions which I suppose, every man who deals with the
public has to meet sooner or later is how to deal with a false newspaper
report. I have made it a rule never to deny a false report, except under
very exceptional circumstances. In nine cases out of ten the denying of
the report simply calls attention to the original statement in a way to
magnify it. Many people who did not see the original false report will
see the denial and will then begin to search for the original report to
find out what it was. And then, unfortunately, there are always some
newspapers that will spread a report that is not justified by facts, for
the purpose of securing a denial or of exciting a discussion. My
experience is that it always gives a certain dignity and standing to a
slander or a falsehood to deny it. Every one likes a fight, and a
controversy will frequently lend a fictitious interest and importance to
comparatively trivial circumstances.
During a long period of years in dealing with the public I have been
deceived only once in recent years by a newspaper reporter. This was the
case of a man on a New York paper who got aboard a train with me, took a
seat by my side, and began the discussion of a question which was much
before the public at that time. He gave me the impression that he was a
man engaged in business and was only incidentally interested in the
subject under discussion. I talked with him pretty freely and frankly,
as I would with any gentleman. My suspicions were not aroused until I
noticed that suddenly and unceremoniously he left the train at a way
station. I at once made up my mind that I had been talking, not to an
individual, but to the public. The next morning a long report of this
interview appeared in his paper. I at once informed the managing editor
of what had occurred.
I am not sure that anything definite came of my letter, but I believe
that one way to improve the methods of the newspapers in dealing with
individuals is to protest when you think you have been badly treated.
The important thing, it seems to me, about the newspaper is that it
represents the interest and reflects the opinions and intelligence of
the average man in the community where the paper is published. The local
press reflects the local prejudice. Its failings are the common human
failings. Its faults are the faults of the average man in the community,
and on the whole it seems to me best that it should be so. If the
newspapers were not a reflex of the minds of their readers, they would
not be as interesting or as valuable as they are. We should not know the
people about us as well as we do. As long as the newspaper exists we not
only have a means of understanding how the average man thinks and feels,
but we have a medium for reaching and influencing him. People who
profess to have no respect for the newspapers as a rule, I fear, have
very little understanding or respect for the average man.
The real trouble with the newspapers is that while they frequently
exhibit the average man at his worst, they rarely show him at his best.
In order to read the best about the average man we must still go to
books or to magazines. The newspaper has the advantage that it touches
real things and real persons, but it touches them only on the surface.
For that reason I have found it safe never to give too much weight to
what a newspaper says about a man either good or bad.
Nevertheless I have learned more from newspapers than I have from books.
In fact, aside from what I have learned from actual contact with men and
with things, I believe I have gained the greatest part of my education
from newspapers. I am sure this is so if I include among the newspapers
those magazines which deal with current topics. Certainly I have been
stimulated in all my thinking more by news than I have by the general
statements I have met in books. In this, as in other matters, I like to
deal at first-hand with the raw material and this I find in the
newspapers more than in books.
Frequently I have heard persons speak of the newspaper as if its only
purpose in making its reports was to tear down rather than build up. It
is certainly true that newspapers are rather ruthless in the way in
which they seem to bring every man, particularly every public man, to
the bar of public opinion and make him explain and justify his work.
Nevertheless it is important that every man who is in any way engaged,
directly or indirectly, in performing any kind of public service should
never be permitted to forget that the only title to place or privilege
that any man enjoys in the community is ultimately based on the service
that he performs. I believe that any man, public or private, who meets
newspaper men and deals with the newspaper in that spirit will find
himself helped immensely in his work by the press rather than injured.
For my own part I feel sure that I owe much of such success as I have
been able to achieve to the sympathy and interest which the newspaper
press, North and South, has shown in the work that I have been trying to
do. Largely through the medium of the newspapers I have been able to
come into contact with the larger public outside of my community and the
circle of my immediate friends and, by this means, to make the school at
Tuskegee, not merely a private philanthropy, but in the truest sense of
that word a public institution, supported by the public and conducted
not in the interest of any one race or section, merely, but in the
interest of the whole country.
CHAPTER V
THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE BOSTON MOB
It makes a great deal of difference in the life of a race, as it does in
the life of an individual, whether the world expects much or little of
that individual or of that race. I suppose that every boy and every girl
born in poverty have felt at some time in their lives the weight of the
world against them. What the people in the communities did not expect
them to do it was hard for them to convince themselves that they could
do.
After I got so that I could read a little, I used to take a great deal
of satisfaction in the lives of men who had risen by their own efforts
from poverty to success. It is a great thing for a boy to be able to
read books of that kind. It not only inspires him with the desire to do
something and make something of his life, but it teaches him that
success depends upon his ability to do something useful, to perform some
kind of service that the world wants.
The trouble in my case, as in that of other coloured boys of any age,
was that the stories we read in school were all concerned with the
success and achievements of white boys and men. Occasionally I spoke to
some of my schoolmates in regard to the characters of whom I had read,
but they invariably reminded me that the stories I had been reading had
to do with the members of another race. Sometimes I tried to argue the
matter with them, saying that what others had done some of us might also
be able to do, and that the lack of a past in our race was no reason why
it should not have a future.
They replied that our case was entirely different. They said, in effect,
that because of our colour and because we carried in our faces the brand
of a race that had been in slavery, white people did not want us to
succeed.
In the end I usually wound up the discussion by recalling the life of
Frederick Douglass, reminding them of the high position which he had
reached and of the great service which he had performed for his own race
and for the cause of human freedom in the long anti-slavery struggle.
Even before I had learned to read books or newspapers, I remember
hearing my mother and other coloured people in our part of the country
speak about Frederick Douglass’s wonderful life and achievements. I
heard so much about Douglass when I was a boy that one of the reasons
why I wanted to go to school and learn to read was that I might read for
myself what he had written and said. In fact, one of the first books
that I remember reading was his own story of his life, which Mr.
Douglass published under the title of “My Life and Times.” This book
made a deep impression upon me, and I read it many times.
After I became a student at Hampton, under Gen. Samuel C. Armstrong, I
heard a great deal more about Frederick Douglass, and I followed all his
movements with intense interest. At the same time I began to learn
something about other prominent and successful coloured men who were at
that time the leaders of my race in the United States. These were such
men as Congressman John M. Langston, of Virginia; United States Senator
Blanche K. Bruce, of Mississippi; Lieut.-Gov. P. B. S. Pinchback, of
Louisiana; Congressman John R. Lynch, of Mississippi; and others whose
names were household words among the masses of the coloured people at
that time. I read with the greatest eagerness everything I could get
hold of regarding the prominent Negro characters of that period, and was
a faithful student of their lives and deeds. Later on I had the
privilege of meeting and knowing all of these men, but at that time I
little thought that it would ever be my fortune to meet and know any of
them.
[Illustration:
HON. P. B. S. PINCHBACK
OF LOUISIANA
Lieutenant-Governor 1871–72, and afterward Congressman
]
[Illustration:
MAJOR JOHN R. LYNCH, U. S. A.
Who served as a member of Congress from Mississippi
]
[Illustration:
BLANCHE K. BRUCE
OF MISSISSIPPI
Who was born a slave, but was the first Negro to become a member of
the United States Senate
]
[Illustration:
CHARLES BANKS
“He has taught me the value of common-sense in dealing with conditions
as they exist in the South”
]
On one occasion, when I happened to be in Washington, I heard that
Frederick Douglass was going to make a speech in a near-by town. I had
never seen him nor heard him speak, so I took advantage of the
opportunity. I was profoundly impressed both by the man and by the
address, but I did not dare approach even to shake hands with him. Some
three or four years after I had organized the Tuskegee Institute I
invited Mr. Douglass to make a visit to the school and to speak at the
commencement exercises of the school. He came and spoke to a great
audience, many of whom had driven thirty or forty miles to hear the
great orator and leader of the race. In the course of time I invited all
of the prominent coloured men whose names I have mentioned, as well as
others, to come to Tuskegee and speak to our students and to the
coloured people in our community.
As a matter of course, the speeches (as well as the writings) of most of
these men were concerned for the most part with the past history, or
with the present and future political problems, of the Negro race. Mr.
Douglass’s great life-work had been in the political agitation that led
to the destruction of slavery. He had been the great defender of the
race, and in the struggle to win from Congress and from the country at
large the recognition of the Negro’s rights as a man and a citizen he
had played an important part. But the long and bitter political struggle
in which he had engaged against slavery had not prepared Mr. Douglass to
take up the equally difficult task of fitting the Negro for the
opportunities and responsibilities of freedom. The same was true to a
large extent of other Negro leaders. At the time when I met these men
and heard them speak I was invariably impressed, though young and
inexperienced, that there was something lacking in their public
utterances. I felt that the millions of Negroes needed something more
than to be reminded of their sufferings and of their political rights;
that they needed to do something more than merely to defend themselves.
Frederick Douglass died in February, 1895. In September of the same year
I delivered an address in Atlanta at the Cotton States Exposition.
I spoke in Atlanta to an audience composed of leading Southern white
people, Northern white people, and members of my own race. This seemed
to me to be the time and the place, without condemning what had been
done, to emphasize what ought to be done. I felt that we needed a
policy, not of destruction, but of construction; not of defence, but of
aggression; a policy, not of hostility or surrender, but of friendship
and advance. I stated, as vigorously as I was able, that usefulness in
the community where we resided was our surest and most potent
protection.
One other point which I made plain in this speech was that, in my
opinion, the Negro should seek constantly in every manly,
straightforward manner to make friends of the white man by whose side he
lived, rather than to content himself with seeking the good-will of some
man a thousand miles away.
While I was fully convinced, in my own mind, that the policy which I had
outlined was the correct one, I was not at all prepared for the
widespread interest with which my words were received.
I received telegrams and congratulations from all parts of the country
and from many persons whose names I did not know or had heard of only
indirectly through the newspapers or otherwise. Very soon invitations
began to come to me in large numbers to speak before all kinds of bodies
and on all kinds of subjects. In many cases I was offered for my
addresses what appeared to me almost fabulous sums. Some of the lecture
bureaus offered me as high as $300 and $400 a night for as long a period
as I would speak for them. Among other things which came to me was an
offer from a prominent Western newspaper of $1000 and all expenses for
my services if I would describe for it a famous prize-fight.
I was invited, here and there, to take part in political campaigns,
especially in states where the Negro vote was important. Lecture bureaus
not only urged upon me the acceptance of their offers through letters,
but even sent agents to Tuskegee. Newspapers and magazines made generous
offers to me to write special articles for them. I decided, however, to
wait until I could get my bearings. Apparently the words which I had
spoken at Atlanta, simple and almost commonplace as they were, had
touched a deep and responsive chord in the public mind.[1] This gave me
much to think about. In the meantime I determined to stick close to my
work at Tuskegee.
Footnote 1:
The following is copied from the official history of the exposition:
“Then came Booker T. Washington, who was destined to make a national
reputation in the next fifteen minutes. He appeared on the programme
by invitation of the directors as the representative of the Negro
race. This would appear to have been a natural arrangement, if not a
matter of course, and it seems strange now that there should have been
any doubt as to the wisdom or propriety of giving the Negro a place in
the opening exercises. Nevertheless, there was, and the question was
carefully, even anxiously, considered before it was decided. There
were apprehensions that the matter would encourage social equality and
prove offensive to the white people, and in the end unsatisfactory to
the coloured race. But the discussion satisfied the board that this
course was right, and they resolved to risk the expediency of doing
right. The sequel showed the wisdom of their decision. The orator
himself touched upon the subject with great tact, and the recognition
that was given has greatly tended to promote good feeling between the
races, while the wide and self-respecting course of the Negroes on
that occasion has raised them greatly in the estimation of their white
fellow-citizens.”
In introducing the speaker, Governor Bullock said: “We have with us
to-day the representative of Negro enterprise and Negro civilization.
I have the honour to introduce to you Prof. Booker T. Washington,
principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial College, who will
formally present the Negro exhibit.”
Professor Washington was greeted with applause, and his speech
received marked attention.
One of the most surprising results of my Atlanta speech was the number
of letters, telegrams, and newspaper editorials that came pouring in
upon me from all parts of the country, demanding that I take the place
of “leader of the Negro people,” left vacant by Frederick Douglass’s
death, or assuming that I had already taken this place. Until these
suggestions began to pour in upon me, I never had the remotest idea that
I should be selected or looked upon, in any such sense as Frederick
Douglass had been, as a leader of the Negro people. I was at that time
merely a Negro school teacher in a rather obscure industrial school. I
had devoted all my time and attention to the work of organizing and
bringing into existence the Tuskegee Institute, and I did not know just
what the functions and duties of a leader were, or what was expected of
him on the part of the coloured people or of the rest of the world. It
was not long, however, before I began to find out what was expected of
me in the new position into which a sudden newspaper notoriety seemed to
have thrust me.
I was not a little embarrassed, when I first began to appear in public,
to find myself continually referred to as “the successor of Frederick
Douglass.” Wherever I spoke—whether in the North or in the South—I
found, thanks to the advertising I had received, that large audiences
turned out to hear me.
It has been interesting, and sometimes amusing, to note the amount and
variety of disinterested advice received by a man whose name is to any
extent before the public. During the time that my Atlanta address was,
so to speak, under discussion, and almost every day since, I have
received one or more letters advising me and directing my course in
regard to matters of public interest.
One day I receive a letter, or my attention is called to some newspaper
editorial, in which I am advised to stick to my work at Tuskegee and put
aside every other interest that I may have in the advancement of my
race. A day or two later I may receive a letter, or read an editorial in
a newspaper, saying that I am making a mistake in confining my attention
entirely to Tuskegee, to Negro education, or even to the Negro in the
United States. It has been frequently urged upon me, for example, that I
ought, in some way or other, to extend the work that we are trying to do
at Tuskegee to Africa or to the West Indies, where Negroes are a larger
part of the population than in this country.
There has been a small number of white people and an equally small
number of coloured people who felt, after my Atlanta speech, that I
ought to branch out and discuss political questions, putting emphasis
upon the importance of political activity and success for the members of
my race. Others, who thought it quite natural that, while I was in the
South, I should not say anything that would be offensive, expected that
I would cut loose in the North and denounce the Southern people in a way
to keep alive and intensify the sectional differences which had sprung
up as a result of slavery and the Civil War. Still others thought that
there was something lacking in my style of defending the Negro. I went
too much into the facts and did not say enough about the Rights of Man
and the Declaration of Independence.
When these people found that I did not change my policy as a result of
my Atlanta speech, but stuck to my old line of argument, urging the
importance of education of the hand, the head, and the heart, they were
thoroughly disappointed. So far as my addresses made it appear that the
race troubles in the South could be solved by education rather than by
political measures, they felt that I was putting the emphasis in the
wrong place.
I confess that all these criticisms and suggestions were not without
effect upon my mind. But, after thinking the matter all over, I decided
that, pleasant as it might be to follow the programme that was laid out
for me, I should be compelled to stick to my original job and work out
my salvation along the lines that I had originally laid down for myself.
My determination to stand by the programme which I had worked out during
the years that I had been at Tuskegee and which I had expressed in my
Atlanta speech, soon brought me into conflict with a small group of
coloured people who sometimes styled themselves “The Intellectuals,” at
other times “The Talented Tenth.” As most of these men were graduates of
Northern colleges and made their homes for the most part in the North,
it was natural enough, I suppose, that they should feel that leadership
in all race matters should remain, as heretofore, in the North. At any
rate, they were opposed to any change from the policy of uncompromising
and relentless antagonism to the South so long as there seemed to them
to be anything in Southern conditions wrong or unjust to the Negro.
My life in the South and years of study and effort in connection with
actual and concrete problems of Southern life had given me a different
notion, and I believed that I had gained some knowledge and some insight
which they were not able to obtain in the same degree at a distance and
from the study of books.
The first thing to which they objected was my plan for the industrial
education of the Negro. It seemed to them that in teaching coloured
people to work with the hands I was making too great a concession to
public opinion in the South. Some of them thought, probably, that I did
not really believe in industrial education myself; but in any case they
were opposed to any “concession,” no matter whether industrial education
was good or bad.
According to their way of looking at the matter, the Southern white man
was the natural enemy of the Negro, and any attempt, no matter for what
purpose, to gain his sympathy or support must be regarded as a kind of
treason to the race.
All these matters furnished fruitful subjects for controversy, in all of
which the college graduates that I have referred to were naturally the
leaders. The first thing that such a young man was tempted to do after
leaving college was, it seems, to start out on a lecturing tour,
travelling about from one town to another for the purpose of discussing
what are known as “race” subjects.
I remember one young man in particular who graduated from Yale
University and afterward took a postgraduate course at Harvard, and who
began his career by delivering a series of lectures on “The Mistakes of
Booker T. Washington.” It was not long, however, before he found that he
could not live continuously on my mistakes. Then he discovered that in
all his long schooling he had not fitted himself to perform any kind of
useful and productive labour. After he had failed in several other
directions he appealed to me, and I tried to find something for him to
do. It is pretty hard, however, to help a young man who has started
wrong. Once he gets the idea that—because he has crammed his head full
with mere book knowledge—the world owes him a living, it is hard for him
to change. The last I heard of the young man in question, he was trying
to eke out a miserable existence as a book agent while he was looking
about for a position somewhere with the Government as a janitor or for
some other equally humble occupation.
When I meet cases, as I frequently do, of such unfortunate and misguided
young men as I have described, I cannot but feel the most profound
sympathy for them, because I know that they are not wholly to blame for
their condition. I know that, in nine cases out of ten, they have gained
the idea at some point in their career that, because they are Negroes,
they are entitled to the special sympathy of the world, and they have
thus got into the habit of relying on this sympathy rather than on their
own efforts to make their way.
In college they gave little thought or attention to preparing for any
definite task in the world, but started out with the idea of preparing
themselves to solve the race problem. They learned in college a great
deal about the history of New England freedom; their minds were filled
with the traditions of the anti-slavery struggle; and they came out of
college with the idea that the only thing necessary to solve at once
every problem in the South was to apply the principles of the
Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. They had learned in
their studies little of the actual present-day conditions in the South
and had not considered the profound difference between the political
problem and the educational problem, between the work of destruction and
of construction, as it applies to the task of race building.
Among the most trying class of people with whom I come in contact are
the persons who have been educated in books to the extent that they are
able, upon every occasion, to quote a phrase of a sentiment from
Shakespeare, Milton, Cicero, or some other great writer. Every time any
problem arises they are on the spot with a phrase or a quotation. No
problem is so difficult that they are not able, with a definition or
abstraction of some kind, to solve it. I like phrases, and I frequently
find them useful and convenient in conversation, but I have not found in
them a solution for many of the actual problems of life.
In college they studied problems and solved them on paper. But these
problems had already been solved by some one else, and all that they had
to do was to learn the answers. They had never faced any unsolved
problems in college, and all that they had learned had not taught them
the patience and persistence which alone solve real problems.
I remember hearing this fact illustrated in a very apt way by a coloured
minister some years ago. After great sacrifice and effort he had
constructed in the South a building to be used for the purpose of
sheltering orphans and aged coloured women. After this minister had
succeeded in getting his building constructed and paid for, a young
coloured man came to inspect it and at once began pointing out the
defects in the building. The minister listened patiently for some time
and then, turning to the young man, he said: “My friend, you have an
advantage over me.” Then he paused and looked at the young man, and the
young man looked inquiringly at the minister, who continued: “I am not
able to find fault with any building which you have constructed.”
Perhaps I ought to add, in order that my statements may not be
misleading, that I do not mean to say that the type of college man that
I have described is confined to the members of my own race. Every kind
of life produces its own peculiar kind of failures, and they are not
confined to one race. It would be quite as wrong for me to give the
impression that the description which I have given applies to all
coloured graduates of New England or other colleges and to none others.
As a matter of fact, almost from the beginning we have had men from
these colleges at Tuskegee; I have come into contact with others at work
in various institutions of the South; and I have found that some of the
sanest and most useful workers were those who had graduated at Harvard
and other New England colleges. Those to whom I have referred are the
exception rather than the rule.
There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping
the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the
public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their
troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their
wrongs—partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays.
Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances,
because they do not want to lose their jobs.
A story told me by a coloured man in South Carolina will illustrate how
people sometimes get into situations where they do not like to part with
their grievances. In a certain community there was a coloured doctor of
the old school, who knew little about modern ideas of medicine, but who
in some way had gained the confidence of the people and had made
considerable money by his own peculiar methods of treatment. In this
community there was an old lady who happened to be pretty well provided
with this world’s goods and who thought that she had a cancer. For
twenty years she had enjoyed the luxury of having this old doctor treat
her for that cancer. As the old doctor became—thanks to the cancer and
to other practice—pretty well-to-do, he decided to send one of his boys
to a medical college. After graduating from the medical school, the
young man returned home, and his father took a vacation. During this
time the old lady who was afflicted with the “cancer” called in the
young man, who treated her; within a few weeks the cancer (or what was
supposed to be the cancer) disappeared, and the old lady declared
herself well.
When the father of the boy returned and found the patient on her feet
and perfectly well, he was outraged. He called the young man before him
and said: “My son, I find that you have cured that cancer case of mine.
Now, son, let me tell you something. I educated you on that cancer. I
put you through high school, through college, and finally through the
medical school on that cancer. And now you, with your new ideas of
practising medicine, have come here and cured that cancer. Let me tell
you, son, you have started all wrong. How do you expect to make a living
practising medicine in that way?”
I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who
don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds
out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an
easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the
public.
My experience is that people who call themselves “The Intellectuals”
understand theories, but they do not understand things. I have long been
convinced that, if these men could have gone into the South and taken up
and become interested in some practical work which would have brought
them in touch with people and things, the whole world would have looked
very different to them. Bad as conditions might have seemed at first,
when they saw that actual progress was being made, they would have taken
a more hopeful view of the situation.
But the environment in which they were raised had cast them in another
world. For them there was nothing to do but insist on the application of
the abstract principles of protest. Indignation meetings in Faneuil
Hall, Boston, became at one time so frequent as to be a nuisance. It
would not have been so bad if the meetings had been confined to the
subjects for which they were proposed; but when “The Intellectuals”
found that the Southern people rarely, if ever, heard of their protests
and, if they did hear of them, paid no attention to them, they began to
attack the persons nearer home. They began to attack the people of
Boston because they said that the people of Boston had lost interest in
the cause of the Negro. After attacking the friends of the Negro
elsewhere, particularly all those who happened to disagree with them as
to the exact method of aiding the Negro, they made me a frequent and
favourite object of attack—not merely for the reasons which I have
already stated, but because they felt that if they attacked me in some
particularly violent way it would surprise people and attract attention.
There is no satisfaction in holding meetings and formulating protests
unless you can get them into the newspapers. I do not really believe
that these people think as badly of the person whom they have attacked
at different times as their words would indicate. They are merely using
them as a sort of sounding-board or megaphone to make their own voices
carry farther. The persistence and success with which these men sought
this kind of advertising has led the general public to believe the
number of my opponents among the Negro masses to be much larger than it
actually is.
A few years ago when I was in Boston and the subject of those who were
opposing me was under discussion, a coloured friend of mine, who did not
belong to the so-called “Talented Tenth,” used an illustration which has
stuck in my mind. He was originally from the South, although he had
lived in Boston for a number of years. He said that he had once lived in
Virginia, near a fashionable hotel. One day a bright idea struck him and
he went to the proprietor of the hotel and made a bargain to furnish him
regularly with a large number of frogs, which were in great demand as a
table delicacy. The proprietor asked him how many he could furnish. My
friend replied that he felt quite sure that he could furnish him with a
cart-load, if necessary, once a week. The bargain was concluded. The man
was to deliver at the hotel the following day as large a number of frogs
as possible.
When he appeared, my friend had just six frogs. The proprietor looked at
the frogs, and then at my friend.
“Where are the others?” he said.
“Well, it is this way,” my friend replied; “for months I had heard those
bull-frogs in a pond near my house, and they made so much noise that I
supposed there were at least a million of them there. When I came to
investigate, however, I found that there were only six.”
Inspired by their ambition to “make themselves heard,” and, as they
said, compel the public to pay attention to their grievances, this
little group kept up their agitation in various forms and at different
places, until their plans culminated one night in Boston in 1903. To
convince the public how deep and sincere they were in their peculiar
views, and how profoundly opposed they were to every one who had a
different opinion, they determined to do something desperate. The
coloured citizens of Boston had asked me to deliver an address before
them in one of their largest churches. The meeting was widely
advertised, and there was a large audience present. Unknown to any of my
coloured friends in Boston, this group, who, as I have stated, were
mostly graduates of New England colleges, organized a mob to disturb the
meeting and to break it up if possible. The presiding officer at the
meeting was the Hon. William H. Lewis, a graduate of Amherst College and
of the Harvard Law School. Various members of the group were scattered
in different parts of the church. In addition to themselves there were
present in the audience—and this, better than anything else, shows how
far they had been carried in their fanaticism—some of the lowest men and
women from vile dens in Boston, whom they had in some way or other
induced to come in and help them disturb the meeting.
As soon as I began speaking, the leaders, stationed in various parts of
the house, began asking questions. In this and in a number of other ways
they tried to make it impossible for me to speak. Naturally the rest of
the audience resented this, and eventually it was necessary to call in
the police and arrest the disturbers.
Of course, as soon as the disturbance was over, most of those who had
participated in it were ashamed of what they had done. Many of those who
had classed themselves with “The Intellectuals” before, hastened to
disavow any sympathy with the methods of the men who had organized the
disturbance. Many who had before been lukewarm in their friendship
became my closest friends. Of course the two leaders, who were afterward
convicted and compelled to serve a sentence in the Charles Street Jail,
remained unrepentant. They tried to convince themselves that they had
been made martyrs in a great cause, but they did not get much
encouragement in this notion from other coloured people, because it was
not possible for them to make clear just what the cause was for which
they had suffered.
The masses of coloured people in Boston and in the United States
endorsed me by resolution and condemned the disturbers of the meeting.
The Negro newspapers as a whole were scathing in their criticism of
them. For weeks afterward my mail was filled with letters from coloured
people, asking me to visit various sections and speak to the people.
[Illustration:
A type of unpretentious cabin which an Alabama Negro formerly occupied
and the modern house in which he now lives
]
I was intensely interested in observing the results of this disturbance.
For one thing I wanted to find out whether a principle in human nature
that I had frequently observed elsewhere would prove true in this case.
I have found in my dealings with the Negro race—and I believe that the
same is true of all races—that the only way to hold people together is
by means of a constructive, progressive programme. It is not argument,
nor criticism, nor hatred, but work in constructive effort, that gets
hold of men and binds them together in a way to make them rally to the
support of a common cause.
Before many weeks had passed, these leaders began to disagree among
themselves. Then they began to quarrel, and one by one they began to
drop away. The result is that, at the present time, the group has been
almost completely dispersed and scattered. Many of “The Intellectuals”
to-day do not speak to one another.
The most surprising thing about this disturbance, I confess, is the fact
that it was organized by the very people who have been loudest in
condemning the Southern white people because they had suppressed the
expression of opinion on public questions and denied the Negro the right
of free speech.
As a matter of fact, I have talked to audiences in every part of this
country; I have talked to coloured audiences in the North and to white
audiences in the South; I have talked to audiences of both races in all
parts of the South; everywhere I have spoken frankly and, I believe,
sincerely on everything that I had in my mind and heart to say. When I
had something to say about the white people I said it to the white
people; when I had something to say about coloured people I said it to
coloured people. In all these years—that is the curious thing about
it—no effort has been made, so far as I can remember, to interrupt or to
break up a meeting at which I was present until it was attempted by “The
Intellectuals” of my own race in Boston.
I have gone to some length to describe this incident because it seems to
me to show clearly the defects of that type of mind which the so-called
“Intellectuals” of the race represent.
I do not wish to give the impression by what I have said that, behind
all the intemperance and extravagance of these men, there is not a vein
of genuine feeling and even at times of something like real heroism. The
trouble is that all this fervour and intensity is wasted on side issues
and trivial matters. It does not connect itself with anything that is
helpful and constructive. These crusaders, as nearly as I can see, are
fighting windmills.
The truth is, I suspect, as I have already suggested, that “The
Intellectuals” live too much in the past. They know books but they do
not know men. They know a great deal about the slavery controversy, for
example, but they know almost nothing about the Negro. Especially are
they ignorant in regard to the actual needs of the masses of the
coloured people in the South to-day.
There are some things that one individual can do for another, and there
are some things that one race can do for another. But, on the whole,
every individual and every race must work out its own salvation. Let me
add that if one thing more than another has taught me to have confidence
in the masses of my own people it has been their willingness (and even
eagerness) to learn and their disposition to help themselves and depend
upon themselves as soon as they have learned how to do so.
CHAPTER VI
A COMMENCEMENT ORATION ON CABBAGES
One of the advantages of a new people or a new race—such as, to a very
large extent, the American Negroes are—consists in the fact that they
are not hampered, as other peoples sometimes are, by tradition. In the
matter of education, for example, Negroes in the South are not hampered
by tradition, because they have never had any worth speaking of. As a
race we are free, if we so choose, to adopt at once the very latest and
most approved methods of education, because we are not held back by any
wornout tradition; and we have few bad educational habits to be got rid
of before we can start in to employ newer and better methods.
I have sometimes regarded it as a fortunate circumstance that I never
studied pedagogy. If I had done so, every time I attempted to do
anything in a new way I should have felt compelled to reckon with all
the past, and in my case that would have taken so much time that I
should never have got anywhere. As it was, I was perfectly free to go
ahead and do whatever seemed necessary at the time, without reference to
whether that same thing had ever been done by any one else at any
previous time or not.
As an illustration of the way in which too much learning will hamper a
man who finds himself in the presence of a new problem—one not in the
books—I recall the fate of the young Harvard graduate who was a teacher
at Tuskegee for one or two sessions several years ago. This young man
had very little practical experience as a teacher, but he had made a
special study of the subject of education while he was in college;
largely because of his high scholarship, he was given a position as
teacher of education at Tuskegee.
I am afraid that, until he arrived, we knew very little about pedagogy
at Tuskegee. He proceeded to enlighten us, however. He lectured and
preached to us about Comenius, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and all the others,
and what he said was very interesting. The trouble was that he made a
complete failure in his own classes. But that was not all. We were
trying to fit our students to go out as teachers in the rural districts.
I pointed out to him that if he were going to help them to any great
extent it would be necessary for him to study the conditions of the
country people and to get acquainted with some of the actual problems of
a small, rural Negro community. He did not seem to regard that as
important, because, as he said, the principles were the same in every
case and all that was necessary was to apply them.
I told him, then, that I thought we had worked out at Tuskegee a number
of definite methods of dealing with the problems of these rural
communities, and suggested to him that if he wanted to teach the general
principles he ought to work out a theory for these methods, so that the
teachers and students might understand the principles under which they
were actually working. He did not seem to take this suggestion
seriously. It seemed absurd to him that any one should come down to the
Black Belt of Alabama to look for anything new in the matter of
education. In short, his mind was so burdened with the traditions and
knowledge of other systems of education that he could not see anything
in any kind of education that seemed to break with these traditions. In
fact, he seemed to feel, whenever he did discover anything new or
strange about the methods that we employed, that there must be something
either wrong or dangerous about them.
My own early experience was, I suppose, like that of most other
teachers; I picked up quite naturally those methods of teaching that
were in vogue around me or that seemed to be prescribed by the
text-books. My method consisted in asking pupils to learn what was in
the book, and then requiring them to recite it.
I shall long remember the time when the folly and uselessness of much of
the old-time method of teaching first fairly dawned upon me. I was
teaching a country school near my old home in West Virginia. This school
was located near a piece of land that was wet and marshy, but
nevertheless beautiful in appearance. It was June and the day was hot
and sultry; when the usual recess or playtime came, I was as anxious as
the children were to get outside of the close and stuffy school room
into the open air. That day I prolonged the playtime to more than twice
the usual period.
The hour previous to recess had been employed by me in trying to get a
class of children interested in what proved to be a rather stupid
geography lesson. I had been asking my pupils a lot of dull and tiresome
questions, getting them to define and name lakes, capes, peninsulas,
islands, and so forth. Naturally the answers of the children were quite
as dull and stupid as the questions.
As soon as the children were out of doors at playtime, however, they
all, as if by common instinct, scampered off into the marshes. In a few
seconds they were wading in the cool water, jumping about in the
fragrant grass, and enjoying themselves in a way that was in striking
contrast to the dull labour of the geography lesson. I soon became
infected with the general fever; and in a few minutes I found myself
following the children at a rapid rate and entering into the full
enjoyment of the contrast between the dull, dead atmosphere of the
school room and the vivid tingling sense of the living out-doors.
We had not been out of the school house and away from the old geography
lesson long before one of the boys who had been among the dullest in his
recitation in the school room became the leader of a sort of exploring
party. Under his leadership we began to discover, as we waded along the
stream, dozens of islands, capes, and peninsulas, with here and there a
little lake or bay, which, as some of the pupils pointed out, would
furnish a safe harbour for ships if the stream were only large enough.
Soon every one of the children was busy pointing out and naming the
natural divisions of land and water. And then, after a few days, we got
pieces of wood and bark and let them float down the stream; we imagined
them to be great ships carrying their cargoes of merchandise from one
part of the world to another. We studied the way the stream wandered
about in the level land, and noticed how the little sand bars and the
corresponding harbours were formed by the particles of sand and earth
which were rolled down by the stream. We located cities on these
harbours, and tried to find water-power where we might build up
manufacturing centres.
Before long I discovered that, quite unconsciously, we had taken up
again the lessons in the school room and were studying geography after a
new fashion. This time, however, we found a real joy and zest in the
work, and I think both teacher and pupils learned more geography in that
short period than they ever learned in the same space of time before or
since.
For the first time the real difference between studying about things
through the medium of books, and studying things themselves without the
medium of books, was revealed to me. The children in this recess period
had gained more ideas in regard to the natural divisions of the earth
than they would have gained in several days by merely studying geography
inside the school room. To be sure, they had not learned the names, the
locations, nor the definitions of the capes, bays, and islands, but they
had learned what was more important—to _think_ capes, islands, and
peninsulas. From that time on they found no difficulty and were really
greatly interested in recognizing the natural divisions of land and
water wherever they met them.
The lesson that I learned thus early in my experience as a teacher I
have never forgotten. In all my work at Tuskegee Institute I have lost
no opportunity to impress upon our teachers the importance of training
their students to study, analyze, and compare actual things, and to use
what they have learned in the school room and in the text-book, to
enable them to observe, think about, and deal with the objects and
situations of actual life.
Not long ago I visited the class room of a new teacher at Tuskegee, who
was conducting a class in measurements. This teacher had insisted that
each member of the class should commit to memory the tables of
measurement, and when I came in they were engaged in reciting, singsong,
something that sounded like a sort of litany composed of feet, yards,
rods, acres, gills, pints, quarts, ounces, pounds, and the rest. I
looked on at this proceeding for a few minutes; then a happy thought
occurred to me and I asked the teacher to let me take the class in hand.
I began by asking if any one in the class had ever measured the class
room in which they were sitting. There was a dumb silence. Then I asked
if any one had ever marked off an acre of actual land, had ever measured
a gill of water, or had ever weighed an ounce or a pound of sugar. Not a
hand was raised in reply.
Then I told the teacher that I would like to take charge of the class
for a few days. Before the week was over I had seen to it that every
member of the class had supplied himself with a rule or a measure of
some sort. Under my direction the students measured the class room and
found what it would cost to paint the walls of the room.
From the class room we went to a part of the farm where the students
were engaged in planting sweet potatoes. Soon we had an acre of sweet
potatoes measured off. We computed the number of bushels raised on that
acre and calculated the cost and profit of raising them.
Before the week was over the whole class had been through the boarding
department, where they had an opportunity to weigh actual sugar. From
the steward we obtained some interesting figures as to how much sugar
was used a day; then we computed how much was used by each student. We
went to the farm again and weighed a live pig, and I had the class find
out the selling price of pork on that particular day, not in Chicago,
but in Alabama. I had them calculate the amount that—not an imaginary
pig or a pig in Chicago—the pig that they had weighed would bring that
day in the local market. It took some time to go through all these
operations, but I think that it paid to do so. Besides, it was fun. It
was fun for me, and it was a great deal more fun for the students.
Incidentally the teacher got an awakening and learned a lesson that I
dare say he has never forgotten.
At the present time all teachers in the academic studies are expected to
make a careful study of the work carried on by the students in the
industries. Nearly every day, for example, some class in mathematics,
goes under the charge of a teacher, into the shops or the dairy or out
on the farm to get its problems in mathematics at first hand. Students
are sent from the English classes to look up the history of some trade,
or some single operation performed by students in the shop, and to write
out an account of that trade or that operation for the benefit of the
other members of the class. In such cases attention is paid not merely
to the form in which the report is written, but more especially to the
accuracy and clearness of the statement. The student who prepares that
kind of paper is writing something in which other students have a
practical interest, and if students are not accurate there are always
one or more students in the class who know enough about the subject to
criticise and correct the statements made. The student in this case
finds himself dealing with live matters, and he naturally feels
responsibility for the statements that he makes—a responsibility that he
would not feel if he were merely putting together facts that he had
gathered from some encyclopædia or other second-hand source of
information.
In emphasizing the importance of studying things rather than books, I do
not mean to underrate the importance of studying history, general
literature, or any of the other so-called cultural studies. I do think,
however, that it is important that young men and young women should
first of all get clear and definite ideas of things right about them,
because these are the ideas by which they are going to measure and
interpret things farther removed from their practical interests. To
young, inexperienced minds there seems to be a kind of fatal charm about
the vague, the distant, and the mysterious.
In the early days of freedom, when education was a new thing, the boy
who went away to school had a very natural human ambition to be able to
come back home in order to delight and astonish the old folks with the
new and strange things that he had learned. If he could speak a few
words in some strange tongue that his parents had never heard before, or
read a few sentences out of a book with strange and mysterious
characters, he was able to make them very proud and happy. There was a
constant temptation therefore for schools and teachers to keep
everything connected with education in a sort of twilight realm of the
mysterious and supernatural. Quite unconsciously they created in the
minds of their pupils the impression that a boy or a girl who had passed
through certain educational forms and ceremonies had been initiated into
some sort of secret knowledge that was inaccessible to the rest of the
world. Connected with this was the notion that because a man had passed
through these educational forms and ceremonies he had somehow become a
sort of superior being set apart from the rest of the world—a member of
the “Talented Tenth” or some other ill-defined and exclusive caste.
Nothing, in my opinion, could be more fatal to the success of a student
or to the cause of education than the general acceptance of any such
ideas. In the long run it will be found that neither black people nor
white people want such an education for their children, and they will
not support schools that give it.
My experience has taught me that the surest way to success in education,
and in any other line for that matter, is to stick close to the common
and familiar things—things that concern the greater part of the people
the greater part of the time.
I want to see education as common as grass, and as free for all as
sunshine and rain.
The way to open opportunities of education for every one, however, is to
teach things that every one needs to know. I venture to say that
anything in any school, taught with the object of fitting students to
produce and serve food, for example, will win approval and popularity
for the school. The reason is simple: every human being is interested,
several times a day, in the subject of food; and a large part of the
world is interested, either directly or indirectly, in its production
and sale.
Not long ago I attended the closing exercises of a high school in a
community composed mainly of people in the humble walks of life. The
general theme of the graduating addresses was “An Imaginary Trip to
Europe.” Of course the audience was bored, and I was not surprised that
a number of people went to sleep. As a matter of fact, I do not think
that the parents of a single student who delivered one of these
addresses had ever been to Europe or will have an opportunity to go at
any time in the near future. The thing did not touch a common chord. It
was too far removed from all the practical, human interests of which
they had any experience. The average family in America is not ordinarily
engaged in travelling through Europe for any large part of the time.
Besides that, none of the members of this graduating class had ever been
to Europe; consequently they were not writing about something of which
they had any real knowledge.
Some years ago, in an effort to bring our rhetorical and commencement
exercises into a little closer touch with real things, we tried the
experiment at Tuskegee of having students write papers on some subject
of which they had first-hand knowledge. As a matter of fact, I believe
that Tuskegee was the first institution that attempted to reform its
commencement exercises in this particular direction.
Ordinarily, at the closing exercises of a high school, graduates are
expected to stand up on the platform and, out of all their inexperience,
instruct their elders how to succeed in life. We were fortunate at
Tuskegee, in the thirty-seven industries carried on there and in the
thousand acres of land that are cultivated, to be able to give our
students, in addition to their general education, a pretty good
knowledge of some one of the familiar trades or vocations. They have,
therefore, something to talk about in their essays in which all of the
audience are interested and with which all are more or less familiar.
Instead of having a boy or girl read a paper on some subject like
“Beyond the Alps Lies Italy,” we have them explain and demonstrate to
the audience how to build a roof, or the proper way to make cheese, or
how to hatch chickens with an incubator. Perhaps one of the graduates in
the nurses’ training school will show how to lend “first aid to the
injured.” If a girl is taking the course in dairying, she will not only
describe what she has learned but will go through, on the platform, the
various methods of operating a modern dairy.
Instead of letting a boy tell why one ought to do right, we ask him to
tell what he has learned about the feeding of pigs, about their
diseases, and the care of them when they are sick. In such a case the
student will have the pig on the platform, in order to illustrate the
methods of caring for it, and demonstrate to the audience the points
that he is trying to make.
One of our students, in his commencement oration last May, gave a
description of how he planted and raised an acre of cabbages. Piled high
upon the platform by his side were some of the largest and finest
cabbages that I have ever seen. He told how and where he had obtained
the seed; he described his method of preparing and enriching the soil,
of working the land, and harvesting the crop; and he summed up by giving
the cost of the whole operation. In the course of his account of this
comparatively simple operation, this student had made use of much that
he had learned in composition, grammar, mathematics, chemistry, and
agriculture. He had not merely woven into his narrative all these
various elements that I have referred to, but he had given the audience
(which was made up largely of coloured farmers from the surrounding
country) some useful and practical information in regard to a subject
which they understood and were interested in. I wish that any one who
does not believe it possible to make a subject like cabbages interesting
in a commencement oration could have heard the hearty cheers which
greeted the speaker when, at the close of his speech, he held up one of
the largest cabbages on the platform for the audience to look at and
admire. As a matter of fact, there is just as much that is interesting,
strange, mysterious, and wonderful; just as much to be learned that is
edifying, broadening, and refining in a cabbage as there is in a page of
Latin. There is, however, this distinction: it will make very little
difference to the world whether one Negro boy, more or less, learns to
construe a page of Latin. On the other hand, as soon as one Negro boy
has been taught to apply thought and study and ideas to the growing of
cabbages, he has started a process which, if it goes on and continues,
will eventually transform the whole face of things as they exist in the
South to-day.
I have spoken hitherto about industrial education as a means of
connecting education with life. The mere fact that a boy has learned in
school to handle a plane or that he has learned something about the
chemistry of the soil does not of itself insure that he has gained any
new and vital grip upon the life about him. He must at the same time
learn to use the knowledge and the training that he has received to
change and improve the conditions about him.
In my travels I have come across some very interesting and amusing
examples of the failures of teachers to connect their teaching with real
things, even when they had a chance right at hand to do so. I recall
visiting, not long since, a somewhat noted school which has a department
for industrial or hand training, concerning which the officers of the
school had talked a great deal. Almost directly in front of the building
used for the so-called industrial training—I noticed a large brick
building in process of erection. In the construction of this building
every principle of mechanics taught in the manual-training department of
this institution was being put into actual use. Notwithstanding this
fact, I learned upon inquiry that the teacher had made no attempt to
connect what was taught in the manual-training department with the work
on the brick building across the way. The students had no opportunity to
work on this building; they had not visited it with their teacher; they
had made no attempt to study the actual problems that had arisen in the
course of its construction. As far as they were concerned, there was no
relation whatever between the subjects discussed in the class room or
the operations carried on in the school shops and the work that was
going on outside. All that they were getting in the school was, as far
as I was able to learn, just as formal in its character, just as much an
educational ceremony, as if they were engaged in diagraming a sentence
in English or reciting the parts of a Latin verb.
My experience in the little country school in West Virginia first taught
me that it was possible to take teaching outside of the text-book and
deal with real things. I have learned from later experience that it is
just as important to carry education outside of the school building and
take it into the fields, into the homes, and into the daily life of the
people surrounding the school.
One of the most important activities of our school at Tuskegee is what
we call our Extension Work, in which nearly all the departments of the
Institute coöperate. In fact, at the present time more attention,
energy, and effort are directed to this work outside the school grounds
than to any other branch of work in which the school is engaged.
It would be impossible to describe here all the ramifications or all the
various forms which this extension work has taken in recent years. The
thing that I wish to emphasize, however, is that we are seeking in this
work less to teach (according to the old-fashioned notion of teaching)
than to improve conditions. We are trying to improve the methods of
farming in the country surrounding the school, to change and improve the
home life of the farming population, and to establish a model school
system—not only for Macon but for several other counties in the state.
Perhaps I can best illustrate what I mean when I say that education
should connect itself with life, by describing a type of rural school
which we have worked out and are seeking to establish in Macon County.
There are several schools in our county which might be called, in a
certain sense, model country schools. There are nearly fifty communities
in which, during the last four or five years, new school buildings have
been erected and the school terms lengthened to eight and nine months,
largely with funds collected from the Negro farmers under the direction
and inspiration of the Tuskegee Institute.
[Illustration:
THE “RISING STAR” SCHOOLHOUSE
With which the community was once satisfied
]
[Illustration:
THE “RISING STAR” SCHOOLHOUSE
That the changed conditions have produced
]
The school that I have in mind is known as the “Rising Star.” That is
the name that the coloured people gave to their church, and that is now
the name which has become attached to the little farming community
surrounding it. The “Rising Star” community is composed of some score or
more of hard-working, thrifty, successful Negro farmers, the larger
number of whom own their land. There is no wealth in this community;
neither is there much, if any, actual want. When I first made the
acquaintance of “Rising Star,” soon after beginning my work in Alabama,
the church which gave the neighbourhood its name was an old, dilapidated
building, located in a wornout field. It was about the worst looking
building that I had ever seen, up to that time, in which to carry on the
work of saving men’s souls. The condition of the farmhouses, the farms,
and the school was in keeping with the condition of the church. This was
true also of the minister. He was run down and dilapidated. I used
frequently to go Sunday afternoons to hear him preach. His sermons
usually held on for about an hour and a half. I remember that I used to
study them carefully from week to week in the hope that I might hear him
utter, at some time or other, a single sentence that seemed to me to
have any practical value to any man, woman, or child in his
congregation. I was always disappointed, however. Almost without
exception, his sermons related to something that is supposed to have
taken place two or three thousand years ago, or else they were made up
of a vivid description of the horrors of hell and of the glories of
heaven.
Nor far from the church, in another old field, there was a little
broken-down, unsightly building which had never been touched by paint or
whitewash. This was the school. The teacher went with the minister. He
had about fifty or sixty children in his school, but the things that he
taught them had no more relation to the life of that community than the
preacher’s sermons had. The weakness and poverty of this little Negro
settlement gave me, however, the chance that I wanted. I determined to
try there the experiment of building up a model school, one that should
actually seek to articulate school life into every-day life. I cannot
give here a detailed history of this experiment, but I will briefly
describe conditions as they exist to-day.
In place of the old building to which I have referred, there is now a
comfortable five-room house, resembling in style and general appearance
the cottages of the more prosperous farmers of the neighbourhood. In
this building, surrounded by its garden, with its stable and
outbuildings adjoining, the teachers (a man and his wife) live and teach
school. All of the rooms, as well as the garden and the stable, are used
at different times in the day for teaching pupils the ordinary household
duties of a farmer and his wife in that part of the country. Here the
children learn to make the beds and to clean, dust, and arrange the
sitting room. At noon they go into the kitchen, where they are taught to
cook, and into the dining room, where they are taught to lay the table
and serve a farmer’s meal. The flowers in the front yard are cared for
by the children of the school. The vegetables in the garden are those
which have been found best adapted to the soil and the needs of the
community, and all are planted and cared for by the teachers and
students. There is a cow in the barn, and near by are pigs and poultry.
The children are taught how to keep the cow house, the pig sty, and the
poultry house clean and attractive.
The usual academic studies of a public school are taught in the sitting
room. There is, however, this difference: the lessons in arithmetic
consist for the most part of problems that have to do with the work that
is going on at the time in the house, the garden, or on the farms in the
surrounding community. As far as possible, all the English composition
work is based on matters connected with the daily life of the community.
In addition to the ordinary reading book, pupils in this school spend
some time every week reading a little local agricultural newspaper which
is published at Tuskegee Institute in the interest of the farmers and
schools in the surrounding country.
It is interesting to observe the effect of this teaching on the fathers
and mothers of the children who attend this school. As soon as fathers
discovered that their boys were learning in school to tell how much
their pigs, cotton, and corn were worth, the fathers (who had been more
or less disappointed with the results of the previous education) felt
that the school was really worth something after all. When the girls
began to ask their mothers to let them take _their_ dresses to school so
that they might learn to patch and mend them, these mothers began to get
an entirely new idea of what school meant. Later, when these girls were
taught to make simple garments in the school room, their mothers became
still more interested. They began to attend the mothers’ meetings, and
before long there was a genuine enthusiasm in that community—not only
for the school and its teachers, but for the household improvement that
they taught. The teachers used their influence with the pupils first of
all to start a crusade of whitewashing and general cleaning-up. Houses
that had never known a coat of whitewash began to assume a neat and
attractive appearance. Better than all else, under the inspiration of
this school and of the other schools like it, the whole spirit of this
community and the others throughout the county improved.
In a short time a little revolution has taken place in the material,
educational, moral, and religious life of “Rising Star.” The influence
of the school has extended to the minister and to the church. At the
present time the sermons that are preached in the church have a vital
connection with the moral life of the community. I shall not soon forget
one of my recent visits to the church. The minister chose for his text:
“The earth is full of Thy riches,” and, to illustrate his sermon, he
placed on the platform beside the pulpit two bushels of prize corn which
he himself had grown on his farm. When he came to expound his text he
pointed with pride to his little agricultural exhibit as an indication
of the real significance of this sentence from the Bible, which had
never before had any definite meaning for him.
Education, such as I have attempted to describe, touches the life of the
white man as well as that of the black man. By encouraging Negro farmers
to buy land and improve their methods of agriculture, it has multiplied
the number of small landowners and increased the tax value of the land.
Recent investigations show that the number of Negro landowners in Macon
County has grown more in the last five or six years than in the whole
previous period since the abolition of slavery. Land that was selling
for two and three dollars an acre five years ago is now worth fifteen
and twenty dollars an acre. In many parts of the county large
plantations have been broken up and sold in small tracts to Negro
farmers. At the last annual meeting of the Coloured State Teachers’
Association, at Birmingham, one teacher from Macon County reported that
during the previous year she had organized a club among the farmers
through which six hundred acres of land had been purchased in her
community.
The struggles of the Negro farmer to lengthen the school term, and the
competition among different local communities in the county in the work
of building and equipping school buildings, has had the effect of
leading the coloured people to think about all kinds of matters that
concern the welfare of their local communities. For example, Law and
Order Leagues have been organized throughout Macon County to assist in
enforcing the prohibition law. I do not believe that there is a county
in the state where these laws are better enforced than they are in our
county at the present time. At the last sitting of the grand jury, only
seventeen indictments for all classes of offences were returned. The
next session of the criminal court will have, I am told, the smallest
docket in its history. I am convinced that there is not a county in that
state with so large a Negro population that has so small a number of
criminals.
Silently and almost imperceptibly, the work of education has gone on
from year to year, slowly changing conditions—not only in Macon County,
but, to a greater or less extent, in other parts of Alabama and of the
South. Education of the kind that I have described has helped to
diminish the cost of production on the farm and, at the same time, has
steadily increased the wants of the farmers. In other words, it has
enabled the Negro farmer to earn more money, and at the same time has
given him a reason for doing so.
[Illustration:
TWO TYPES OF COLOURED CHURCHES
]
Farmers have learned to plant gardens, to keep hogs and chickens, and,
as far as possible, to raise their own food and fodder. This has led
them to increase and sometimes double the annual amount of their labour.
Under former conditions, the Negro farmer did not work more than one
hundred and fifty days in the year. Merely to plant and harvest the
cotton crop—he did not need to do so.
In learning to raise his own provisions, the Negro farmer is no longer
dependent to the same extent that he formerly was upon the landlord or
the storekeeper. Under the old system the Negro farmer obtained his
provisions (or “advances” as they are called) from the storekeeper on
credit. In order to carry him through the year until the cotton crop was
harvested, the storekeeper borrowed from the local banker. The local
banker borrowed, in turn, from the bankers in the city, who, perhaps,
obtained a portion of their money from the large money centres of the
North. Every time this money passed from one hand to the other, the man
who loaned collected toll from the man who borrowed. At the bottom,
where the system connected up with the Negro farmer, the planter or
storekeeper added something to the costs which had already
accumulated—as a sort of insurance, and to pay the expenses of looking
after his tenant and seeing that he did his work properly. All this sum,
of course, was finally paid by the man on the soil.
The farmer who has become independent enough to raise his own
provisions, or a large portion of them, does not need the supervision of
his landlord in his farming operations. At the present time the majority
of the Negro farmers in Macon County get their money directly from the
bank and pay cash for their provisions. A number have money on deposit
in the local banks. The bankers’ capital and deposits have increased so
that they are not so dependent as they once were upon foreign capital to
aid them in carrying on the farming operations in the county.
I do not mean to say that all this has been effected as a direct result
of education; I merely wish to point out how intimately the kind of
education that we are trying to introduce does, in fact, touch all the
fundamental interests of the community.
Naturally the influences that I have referred to do not end with the
effects that I have already described. The results obtained have had a
reflex influence upon the schools themselves. From the very beginning of
my work at Tuskegee I saw that our problem was a double one. We had at
first to work out a kind of education which would meet the needs of the
masses of the coloured people. We had, in the second place, to convince
the white people that education could be made of real value to the
Negro.
There are many sincere and honest men in the South to-day who do not
believe that education has done or will do the race any good. In my
opinion, Negro education will never be an entire success in the South
until it gets the sympathy and support of these men. Arguments will not
go far toward convincing men like these. It is necessary to show them
results.
The people in Macon County are not exceptional in this respect. Until a
few years ago I think that I should have described the attitude of a
majority of the white people in that county as indifferent. To-day I
believe that I am safe in saying that nine tenths of the people of Macon
County believe in Negro education.
Let me speak of some of the ways in which this attitude of the white
people has manifested itself. In the first place, when a school house is
to be built or some improvements to be made in the community where the
white man lives, he contributes money toward it. One white man in Macon
County recently gave $100 toward the erection of such a school. A number
of white planters, who a few years ago were indifferent on the subject
of Negro education, give annual prizes to the coloured people on their
plantations. I know one planter who gives an annual prize to the Negro
farmer who raises the largest number of bushels of corn on an acre of
land. He gives another prize to the coloured family which keeps its
children in the public school the greatest number of days during the
year. He gives another prize to the woman who keeps her front yard in
the best condition.
One of the white bankers in Macon County has established an annual prize
to be given to the Negro farmer who raises the best oats on a given plot
of land. The editor of the county paper gives an annual prize to the
school in the county that has the best spelling class, the contest to
take place at the annual Macon County Coloured Farmers’ Fair. At these
fairs exhibitions are made of vegetables and grain raised by the
children on the school farms. There are also exhibitions of cooking and
sewing done by the children in the public schools of the county. Many of
the white merchants and white farmers offer prizes for the best
exhibition of agricultural products at this fair.
Gradually, as I have said, improved methods of educating the Negro are
extending the same influences throughout the state of Alabama and the
South. In fact, wherever a school is actually teaching boys and girls to
do something that the community wants, it is seldom that that school
fails to enlist the interest and coöperation of all the people in that
community, whether they be black or white. This is, as definitely as I
can express it, my own experience of the way in which educators can and
do solve the race problem.
CHAPTER VII
COLONEL ROOSEVELT AND WHAT I HAVE LEARNED FROM HIM
Some years ago—and not so very many, either—I think that I should have
been perfectly safe in saying that the highest ambition of the average
Negro in America was to hold some sort of office, or to have some sort
of job that connected him with the Government. Just to be able to live
in the capital city was a sort of distinction, and the man who ran an
elevator or merely washed windows in Washington (particularly if the
windows or the elevator belonged to the United States Government) felt
that he was in some way superior to a man who cleaned windows or ran an
elevator in any other part of the country. He felt that he was an
office-holder!
There has been a great change in this respect in recent years. Many
members of my race have learned that, in the long run, they can earn
more money and be of more service to the community in almost any other
position than that of an employé or office-holder under the Government.
I know of a number of recent cases in which Negro business men have
refused positions of honour and trust in the Government service because
they did not care to give up their business interests. Notwithstanding,
the city of Washington still has a peculiar attraction and even
fascination for the average Negro.
I do not think that I ever shared that feeling of so many others of my
race. I never liked the atmosphere of Washington. I early saw that it
was impossible to build up a race of which the leaders were spending
most of their time, thought, and energy in trying to get into office, or
in trying to stay there after they were in. So, for the greater part of
my life, I have avoided Washington; and even now I rarely spend a day in
that city which I do not look upon as a day practically thrown away.
I do not like politics, and yet, in recent years, I have had some
experience in political matters. However, no man who is in the least
interested in public questions can escape some sort of connection with
politics, I suppose, even if he does not want a political position. As a
matter of fact, it was just because it was well known that I sought no
political office of any kind and would accept no position with the
Government, unless it were an honorary one, that brought my connection
with politics about.
One thing that has taught me to dislike politics is the observation
that, as soon as any person or thing becomes the subject of political
discussion, he or it at once assumes in the public mind an importance
out of all proportion to his or its real merits. Time and time again I
have seen a whole community (sometimes a whole county or state) wrought
up to the highest pitch of excitement over the appointment of some
person to a political position paying perhaps not more than $25 or $50 a
month. At the same time I have seen individuals secure important
positions at the head of a manufacturing house or receive an appointment
to some important educational position that paid three or four times as
much money (or perhaps purchase a farm), where just as much executive
ability was required, without arousing public attention or causing
comment in the newspapers. I have also seen white men and coloured men
resign important positions in private life where they were earning much
more than they could get under the Government, simply because of the
false and mistaken ideas of the importance which they attached to a
political position. All this has given me a distaste for political life.
In Mississippi, for example, a coloured man and his wife had charge, a
few years ago, of a post-office. In some way or other a great discussion
was started in regard to this case, and before long the whole community
was in a state of excitement because coloured people held that position.
A little later the post-office was given up and the coloured man, Mr. W.
W. Cox, started a bank in the same town. At the present time he is the
president of the bank and his wife assists him. As bankers they receive
three or four times as much pay as they received from the post-office.
The bank is patronized by both white and coloured people, and, when last
I heard of it, was in a flourishing condition. As president of a Negro
bank, Mr. Cox is performing a much greater service to the community than
he could possibly render as postmaster. There are, no doubt, a great
many people in his town who would be able to fill the position of
postmaster, but there are very few who could start and successfully
carry on an institution that would so benefit the community as a Negro
bank. While he was postmaster, merely because his office was a political
one, Mr. Cox occupied for some time the attention of the whole state of
Mississippi; in fact, he (or rather his wife) was for a brief space
almost a national figure. Now he is occupying a much more remunerative
and important position in private life, but I do not think that he has
attracted attention to amount to anything outside of the community in
which he lives.
The effect of the excitement about this case has been greatly to
exaggerate the importance of holding a Government position. The average
Negro naturally feels that there must be some special value to him as an
individual, as well as to his race, in holding a position which white
people don’t want him to hold, simply because he is a Negro. It leads
him to believe that it is in some way more honourable or respectable to
work for the Government as an official than for the community and
himself as a private citizen.
Because of these facts, as well as for other reasons, I have never
sought nor accepted a political position. During President Roosevelt’s
administration I was asked to go as a Commissioner of the United Sates
to Liberia. In considering whether I should accept this position, it was
urged that, because of the work that I had already done in this country
for my own people and because my name was already known to some extent
to the people of Liberia, I was the person best fitted to undertake the
work that the Government wanted done. While I did not like the job and
could ill spare the time from the work which I was trying to do for the
people of my own race in America, I finally decided to accept the
position. I was very happy, however, when President Taft kindly decided
to relieve me from the necessity of making the trip and allowed my
secretary, Mr. Emmett J. Scott, to go to Africa in my stead. This was as
near as I ever came to holding a Government job. But there are other
ways of getting into politics than by holding office.
In the case of the average man, it has seemed to me that as soon as he
gets into office he becomes an entirely different man. Some men change
for the better under the weight of responsibility; others change for the
worse. I never could understand what there is in American politics that
so fatally alters the character of a man. I have known men who, in their
private life and in their business, were scrupulously careful to keep
their word—men who would never, directly or indirectly, deceive any one
with whom they were associated. When they took political office all this
changed.
I once asked a coloured hack-driver in Washington how a certain coloured
man whom I had known in private life (but who was holding a prominent
office) was getting on. The old driver had little education but he was a
judge of men, and he summed up the case in this way:
“Dere is one thing about Mr. ——; you can always depend on him.” The old
fellow shook his head and laughed. Then he added: “If he tells you he’s
gwine to do anything, you can always depend upon it that he’s _not_
gwine to do it.”
This sort of change that comes over people after they get office is not
confined, however, to the Negro race. Other races seem to suffer in the
same way. I have seen men who, in the ordinary affairs of life, were
cool and level headed, grow suspicious and jealous, give up interest in
everything, neglect their business, sometimes even neglect their
families; in short, lose entirely their mental and moral balance as soon
as they started out in quest of an office.
I have watched these men after the political microbe attacked them, and
I know all the symptoms of the disease that follows. They usually begin
by carefully studying the daily newspapers. They attach great importance
to the slightest thing that is said (or not said) by persons who they
believe have political influence or authority. These men (the men who
dispense the offices) soon come to assume an enormous importance in the
minds of office-seekers. They watch all the movements of the political
leaders with the greatest anxiety, and study every chance word that they
let drop, as if it had some dark and awful significance. Then, when they
get a little farther along, the office-seekers will, perhaps, be found
tramping the streets, getting signatures of Tom, Dick, and Harry as a
guarantee that they are best qualified to fill some office that they
have in view.
[Illustration:
“LITTLE TEXAS” SCHOOLHOUSE, ALABAMA
Which has been replaced by a $600 building
]
[Illustration:
“WASHINGTON MODEL SCHOOL,” ALABAMA
With dwelling for its two teachers
]
I remember the case of a white man who lived in Alabama when President
McKinley was first elected. This man gave up his business and went to
Washington with a full determination to secure a place in the
President’s cabinet. He wrote me regularly concerning his prospects.
After President McKinley had filled all the places in his cabinet, the
same individual applied for a foreign ambassadorship; failing in that,
he applied for an auditor-ship in one of the departments; failing in
that, he tried to get a clerkship in Washington; failing in that, he
finally wrote to me (and to a number of other acquaintances in Alabama)
and asked me to lend him enough money to defray his travelling expenses
back to Alabama.
Of course, not all men who go into politics are affected in the way that
I have described. Let me add that I have known many public men and have
studied them carefully, but the best and highest example of a man that
was the same in political office that he was in private life is Col.
Theodore Roosevelt. He is not the only example, but he is the most
conspicuous one in this respect that I have ever known.
I was thrown, comparatively early in my career, in contact with Colonel
Roosevelt. He was just the sort of man to whom any one who was trying to
do work of any kind for the improvement of any race or type of humanity
would naturally go to for advice and help. I have seen him and been in
close contact with him under many varying circumstances and I confess
that I have learned much from studying his career, both while he was in
office and since he has been in private life. One thing that impresses
me about Mr. Roosevelt is that I have never known him, having given a
promise, to overlook or forget it; in fact, he seems to forget nothing,
not even the most trivial incidents. I found him the same when he was
President that he was as a private citizen, or as Governor of New York,
or as Vice-President of the United States. In fact, I have no hesitation
in saying that I consider him the highest type of all-round man that I
have ever met.
One of the most striking things about Mr. Roosevelt, both in private and
public life, is his frankness. I have been often amazed at the absolute
directness and candour of his speech. He does not seem to know how to
hide anything. In fact, he seems to think aloud. Many people have
referred to him as being impulsive and as acting without due
consideration. From what I have seen of Mr. Roosevelt in this regard, I
have reached the conclusion that what people describe as impulsiveness
in him is nothing else but quickness of thought. While other people are
thinking around a question, he thinks through it. He reaches his
conclusions while other people are considering the preliminaries. He
cuts across the field, as it were, in his methods of thinking. It is
true that in doing so he often takes great chances and risks much. But
Colonel Roosevelt is a man who never shrinks from taking chances when it
is necessary to take them. I remember that, on one occasion, when it
seemed to me that he had risked a great deal in pursuing a certain line
of action, I suggested to him that it seemed to me that he had taken a
great chance.
“One never wins a battle,” he replied, “unless he takes some risks.”
Another characteristic of Colonel Roosevelt, as compared with many other
prominent men in public life, is that he rarely forgets or forsakes a
friend. If a man once wins his confidence, he stands by that man. One
always knows where to find him—and that, in my opinion, accounts to a
large degree for his immense popularity. His friend, particularly if he
happens to be holding a public position, may become very unpopular with
the public, but unless that friend has disgraced himself, Mr. Roosevelt
will always stand by him, and is not afraid or ashamed to do so. In the
long run the world respects a man who has the courage to stand by his
friends, whether in public or private life, and Mr. Roosevelt has
frequently gained popularity by doing things that more discreet
politicians would have been afraid to do.
I first became acquainted with Mr. Roosevelt through correspondence.
Later, in one of my talks with him—and this was at a time when there
seemed little chance of his ever becoming President, for it was before
he had even been mentioned for that position—he stated to me in the
frankest manner that some day he would like to be President of the
United States. The average man, under such circumstances, would not have
thought aloud. If he believed that there was a remote opportunity of
gaining the Presidency, he would have said that he was not seeking the
office; that his friends were thrusting it on him; that he did not have
the ability to be President, and so forth. Not so with Colonel
Roosevelt. He spoke out, as is his custom, that which was in his mind.
Even then, many years before he attained his ambition, he began to
outline to me how he wanted to help not only the Negro, but the whole
South, should he ever become President. I question whether any man ever
went into the Presidency with a more sincere desire to be of real
service to the South than Mr. Roosevelt did.
That incident will indicate one of the reasons why Mr. Roosevelt
succeeds. He not only thinks quickly, but he plans and thinks a long
distance ahead. If he had an important state paper to write, or an
important magazine article or speech to prepare, I have known him to
prepare it six or eight months ahead. The result is that he is at all
times master of himself and of his surroundings. He does not let his
work push him; he pushes his work.
Practically everything that he tried to do for the South while he was
President was outlined in conversations to me many years before it
became known to most people that he had the slightest chance of becoming
President. What he did was not a matter of impulse but the result of
carefully matured plans.
An incident which occurred immediately after he became President will
illustrate the way in which Mr. Roosevelt’s mind works upon a public
problem. After the death of President McKinley I received a letter from
him, written in his own hand, on the very day that he took the oath of
office at Buffalo as President—or was it the day following?—in which he
asked me to meet him in Washington. He wanted to talk over with me the
plans for helping the South that we had discussed years before. This
plan had lain matured in his mind for months and years and, as soon as
the opportunity came, he acted upon it.
When I received this letter from Mr. Roosevelt, asking me to meet him in
Washington, I confess that it caused me some grave misgivings. I felt
that I must consider seriously the question whether I should allow
myself to be drawn into a kind of activity that I had definitely
determined to keep away from. But here was a letter which, it seemed to
me, I could not lightly put aside, no matter what my personal wishes or
feelings might be. Shortly after Mr. Roosevelt became established in the
White House I went there to see him and we spent the greater part of an
evening in talk concerning the South. In this conversation he emphasized
two points in particular: First, he said that wherever he appointed a
white man to office in the South he wished him to be the very highest
type of native Southern white man—one in whom the whole country had
faith. He repeated and emphasized his determination to appoint such a
type of man regardless of political influences or political
consequences.
Then he stated to me, quite frankly, that he did not propose to appoint
a large number of coloured people to office in any part of the South,
but that he did propose to do two things which had not been done before
that time—at least not to the extent and with the definite purpose that
he had in mind. Wherever he did appoint a coloured man to office in the
South, he said that he wanted him to be not only a man of ability, but
of character—a man who had the confidence of his white and coloured
neighbours. He did not propose to appoint a coloured man to office
simply for the purpose of temporary political expediency. He added that,
while he proposed to appoint fewer coloured men to office in the South,
he proposed to put a certain number of coloured men of high character
and ability in office in the Northern states. He said that he had never
been able to see any good reason why coloured men should be put in
office in the Southern states and not in the North as well.
As a matter of fact, before Mr. Roosevelt became President, not a single
coloured man had ever been appointed, so far as I know, to a Federal
office in any Northern state. Mr. Roosevelt determined to set the
example by placing a coloured man in a high office in his own home city,
so that the country might see that he did not want other parts of the
country to accept that which he himself was not willing to receive. Some
months afterward, as a result of this policy, the Hon. Charles W.
Anderson was made collector of internal revenues for the second district
of New York. This is the district in which Wall Street is located and
the district that receives, perhaps, more revenue than any other in the
United States. Later on, Mr. Roosevelt appointed other coloured men to
high office in the North and West, but I think that any one who examines
into the individual qualifications of the coloured men appointed to
office by Mr. Roosevelt will find, in each case, that they were what he
insisted that they should be—men of superior ability and of superior
character.
President Taft happily has followed the same policy. He has appointed
Whitefield McKinlay, of Washington, to the collectorship of the port of
Georgetown, a position which has never heretofore been held by a black
man. He had designated J. C. Napier, cashier of the One-Cent Savings
Bank of Nashville, Tenn., to serve as register of the United States
treasury; and he has recently announced the appointment of William H.
Lewis, assistant United States district attorney, Boston, Mass., to the
highest appointive position ever held by a black man under the Federal
Government, namely, to a place as assistant attorney general of the
United States.
Back of their desire to improve the public service, Mr. Roosevelt and
Mr. Taft have had another purpose in appointing to office the kind of
coloured people that I have named. They have said that they desire the
persons appointed by them to be men of the highest character in order
that the younger generation of coloured people might see that men of
conspicuous ability and conspicuous purity of character are recognized
in politics as in other walks of life. They have hoped that such
recognition might lead other coloured people to strive to attain a high
reputation.
Mr. Roosevelt did not apply this rule to the appointments of coloured
people alone. He believed that he could not only greatly improve the
public service, but to some extent could change the tone of politics in
the South and improve the relations of the races by the appointment of
men who stood high in their professions and who were not only friendly
to the coloured people but had the confidence of the white people as
well. These men, he hoped, would be to the South a sort of model of what
the Federal Government desired and expected of its officials in their
relations with all parties.
During the first conference with Mr. Roosevelt in the White House, after
discussing many matters, he finally agreed to appoint a certain white
man, whose name had been discussed, to an important judicial position.
Within a few days the appointment was made and accepted. I question
whether any appointment made in the South has ever attracted more
attention or created more favourable comment from people of all classes
than was true of this one.
During the fall of 1901, while I was making a tour of Mississippi, I
received word to the effect that the President would like to have a
conference with me, as soon as it was convenient, concerning some
important matters. With a friend, who was travelling with me, I
discussed very seriously the question whether, with the responsibilities
I already had, I should take on others. After considering the matter
carefully, we decided that the only policy to pursue was to face the new
responsibilities as they arose, because new responsibilities bring new
opportunities for usefulness of which I ought to take advantage in the
interest of my race. I was the more disposed to feel that this was a
duty because Mr. Roosevelt was proposing to carry out the very policies
which I had advocated ever since I began work in Alabama. Immediately
after finishing my work in Mississippi I went to Washington. I arrived
there in the afternoon and went to the house of a friend, Mr. Whitefield
McKinlay, with whom I was expected to stop during my stay in Washington.
This trip to Washington brings me to a matter which I have hitherto
constantly refused to discuss in print or in public, though I have had a
great many requests to do so. At the time, I did not care to add fuel to
the controversy which it aroused, and I speak of it now only because it
seems to me that an explanation will show the incident in its true light
and in its proper proportions.
When I reached Mr. McKinlay’s house I found an invitation from President
Roosevelt asking me to dine with him at the White House that evening at
eight o’clock. At the hour appointed I went to the White House and dined
with the President and members of his family and a gentleman from
Colorado. After dinner we talked at considerable length concerning plans
about the South which the President had in mind. I left the White House
almost immediately and took a train the same night for New York. When I
reached New York the next morning I noticed that the New York _Tribune_
had about two lines stating that I had dined with the President the
previous night. That was the only New York paper, so far as I saw, that
mentioned the matter. Within a few hours the whole incident completely
passed from my mind. I mentioned the matter casually, during the day, to
a friend—Mr. William H. Baldwin, Jr., then president of the Long Island
Railroad—but spoke of it to no one else and had no intention of doing
so. There was, in fact, no reason why I should discuss it or mention it
to any one.
My surprise can be imagined when, two or three days afterward, the whole
press, North and South, was filled with despatches and editorials
relating to my dinner with the President. For days and weeks I was
pursued by reporters in quest of interviews. I was deluged with
telegrams and letters asking for some expression of opinion or an
explanation; but during the whole of this period of agitation and
excitement I did not give out a single interview and did not discuss the
matter in any way.
Some newspapers attempted to weave into this incident a deliberate and
well-planned scheme on the part of President Roosevelt to lead the way
in bringing about the social intermingling of the two races. I am sure
that nothing was farther from the President’s mind than this; certainly
it was not in my mind. Mr. Roosevelt simply found that he could spare
the time best during and after the dinner hour for the discussion of the
matters which both of us were interested in.
The public interest aroused by this dinner seemed all the more
extraordinary and uncalled for because, on previous occasions, I had
taken tea with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle; I had dined with the
governors of nearly every state in the North; I had dined in the same
room with President McKinley at Chicago at the Peace-jubilee dinner; and
I had dined with ex-President Harrison in Paris, and with many other
prominent public men.
Some weeks after the incident I was making a trip through Florida. In
some way it became pretty generally known along the railroad that I was
on the train, and the result was that at nearly every station a group of
people would get aboard and shake hands with me. At a little station
near Gainesville, Fla., a white man got aboard the train whose dress and
manner indicated that he was from the class of small farmers in that
part of the country. He shook hands with me very cordially, and said:
“I am mighty glad to see you. I have heard about you and I have been
wanting to meet you for a long while.”
I was naturally pleased at this cordial reception, but I was surprised
when, after looking me over, he remarked: “Say, you are a great man. You
are the greatest man in this country!”
I protested mildly, but he insisted, shaking his head and repeating,
“Yes, sir, the greatest man in this country.” Finally I asked him what
he had against President Roosevelt, telling him at the same time that,
in my opinion, the President of the United States was the greatest man
in the country.
“Huh! Roosevelt?” he replied with considerable emphasis in his voice. “I
used to think that Roosevelt was a great man until he ate dinner with
you. That settled him for me.”
This remark of a Florida farmer is but one of the many experiences which
have taught me something of the curious nature of this thing that we
call prejudice—social prejudice, race prejudice, and all the rest. I
have come to the conclusion that these prejudices are something that it
does not pay to disturb. It is best to “let sleeping dogs lie.” All
sections of the United States, like all other parts of the world, have
their own peculiar customs and prejudices. For that reason it is the
part of common-sense to respect them. When one goes to European
countries or into the Far West, or into India or China, he meets certain
customs and certain prejudices which he is bound to respect and, to a
certain extent, comply with. The same holds good regarding conditions in
the North and in the South. In the South it is not the custom for
coloured and white people to be entertained at the same hotel; it is not
the custom for black and white children to attend the same school. In
most parts of the North a different custom prevails. I have never
stopped to question or quarrel with the customs of the people in the
part of the country in which I found myself.
Thus, in dining with President Roosevelt, there was no disposition on my
part—and I am sure there was no disposition on Mr. Roosevelt’s part—to
attack any custom of the South. There is, therefore, absolutely no
ground or excuse for the assertion sometimes made that our dining
together was part of a preconcerted and well-thought-out plan. It was
merely an incident that had no thought or motive behind it except the
convenience of the President.
I was born in the South and I understand thoroughly the prejudices, the
customs, the traditions of the South—and, strange as it may seem to
those who do not wholly understand the situation, I love the South.
There is no Southern white man who cherishes a deeper interest than I in
everything that promotes the progress and the glory of the South. For
that reason, if for no other, I will never willingly and knowingly do
anything that, in my opinion, will provoke bitterness between the races
or misunderstanding between the North and the South.
Now that the excitement in regard to it is all over, it may not be out
of place, perhaps, for me to recall the famous order disbanding a
certain portion of the Twenty-fifth Infantry (a Negro regiment) because
of the outbreak at Brownsville, Texas, particularly since this is an
illustration of the trait in Mr. Roosevelt to which I have referred. I
do not mind stating here that I did not agree with Mr. Roosevelt’s
method of punishing the Negro soldiers, even supposing that they were
guilty. In his usual frank way, he told me several days prior to issuing
that order what he was going to do. I urged that he find some other
method of punishing the soldiers. While, in some matters, I was perhaps
instrumental in getting him to change an opinion that he had formed, in
this case he told me that his mind was perfectly clear and that he had
reached a definite decision which he would not change, because he was
certain that he was right.
At the time this famous order was issued there was no man in the world
who was so beloved by the ten millions of Negroes in America as Colonel
Roosevelt. His praises were sung by them on every possible occasion. He
was their idol. Within a few days—I might almost say hours—as a
consequence of this order, the songs of praise of ten millions of people
were turned into a chorus of criticism and censure.
Mr. Roosevelt was over and over again urged and besought by many of his
best friends, both white and coloured, to modify or change this order.
Even President Taft, who was at that time Secretary of War, urged him to
withdraw the order or modify it. I urged him to do the same thing. He
stood his ground and refused. He said that he was convinced that he was
right and that events would justify his course.
Notwithstanding the fact that I was deeply concerned in the outcome of
this order, I confess that I could not but admire the patience with
which Mr. Roosevelt waited for the storm to blow over. I do not think
that the criticisms and denunciation which he received had the effect of
swerving him in the least from the general course that he had determined
to pursue with regard to the coloured people of the country. He was just
as friendly in his attitude to them after the Brownsville affair as
before.
Months have passed since the issuing of the order; the agitation has
subsided and the bitterness has disappeared. I think that I am safe in
saying that, while the majority of coloured people still feel that
Colonel Roosevelt made a mistake in issuing the order, there is no
individual who is more popular and more loved by the ten millions of
Negroes in America than he.
CHAPTER VIII
MY EDUCATIONAL CAMPAIGNS THROUGH THE SOUTH AND WHAT THEY TAUGHT ME
Several years ago, in company with a few personal friends, most of them
Negro business men of Little Rock, Ark., I made a week’s journey through
Arkansas and Oklahoma, visiting most of the principal cities, speaking,
wherever I had time and opportunity along the route, to audiences of
both races.
In order to cover as much ground as possible in the eight days we had
allotted to the trip, and in order to make the journey as comfortable as
possible, we secured a special car in St. Louis and on the night of
November 17, 1905, I think it was, we started out on what was one of the
most interesting and memorable journeys I have ever made.
For several years my friend, Mr. John E. Bush, receiver of public moneys
at Little Rock, and at that time head of the local Negro Business League
in that city, had been urging me to come and see for myself the progress
which Negroes were making in Little Rock and the neighbouring city of
Pine Bluff. After I had finally decided to accept his invitation, I made
up my mind that I would take advantage of the opportunity to see
something, also, of the progress Negroes were making in the neighbouring
state of Oklahoma and in what was then the Indian Territory.
At that time thousands of Negroes were pouring into this new country
from the South. Some of my own students were either in business or
teaching school in different parts of the present state of Oklahoma and
from them, and from other sources, I had heard much of the progress that
coloured people were making, particularly at Muskogee and in the booming
little Negro town of Boley, where, within a few years, a flourishing
little city, controlled entirely by Negroes, and without a single white
inhabitant, had sprung into existence.
In the course of my journey I visited not only Little Rock and Pine
Bluff, Ark., but Oklahoma City, Guthrie, Muskogee, South McAlester, and
several other towns in Oklahoma, and I confess that I was surprised to
note the enterprise which these coloured immigrants had shown and the
progress they were making, particularly in material and business
directions. I met successful farmers, who, having sold their farms in
Texas or in Kansas at a considerable advance, had come out into this new
country to re-invest their money. I made the acquaintance in nearly
every part of the state, of successful merchants, bankers, and
professional men. At South McAlester I stayed at the home of E. E.
McDaniels, a successful railway contractor, the first Negro I ever
happened to meet who was engaged in that business. At Oklahoma City I
remember meeting Albert Smith, who is known out there as the “Negro
cotton king” because he gained the prize at the Paris Exposition in 1900
for the best bale of cotton. It was a great satisfaction to me to be
able to talk with these men, to hear from their own lips the stories of
their struggles, of their difficulties, mistakes, and successes. It
seemed to me that, after talking with them around the fireside and in
the close and intimate way I have suggested, I gained a deeper insight
into the forces that were making for the upbuilding of my race than I
could have possibly gained in any other way.
One thing that particularly impressed me was the difference between the
condition of the coloured people who were pouring into this new portion
of the Southwest and the condition of those who some thirty years before
had poured into Kansas at the time of the famous “exodus.” At that time
some forty thousand bewildered and helpless coloured people, coming for
the most part from the plantations of Louisiana, Arkansas, and
Mississippi, made their way to Kansas in the hope of finding there
greater opportunity and more freedom. It was people from these same
regions who, with much the same purpose, were at this time pouring into
Oklahoma. The difference was that these later immigrants came with a
definite notion of where they were going; they brought a certain amount
of capital with them, and had a pretty clear idea of what they would
find and what they proposed to do when they reached their destination.
The difference in these two movements of the population seemed to me the
most striking indication I had seen of the progress which the masses of
the Negro people had made in a little more than thirty years.
[Illustration:
MR. WASHINGTON ADDRESSING AN AUDIENCE OF VIRGINIA NEGROES
]
During the next five years, in company with different parties of Negro
business and professional men, I made similar journeys of observation
through Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina,
Delaware, and portions of Virginia and West Virginia. In several
instances we made use of special trains to make these trips, and this
enabled us to cover longer distances and make the journey practically on
our own time. On each of these journeys I took advantage of my
opportunities, not only to meet and talk with the people individually,
but also to speak to large audiences of white and coloured people about
many matters which concerned the interests of both races and
particularly about the importance, to both races, of increasing the
efficiency of the Negro schools. In fact, I had not made more than two
or three of these trips before they came to be regarded by both white
and coloured people as the beginning, in each of the states I visited,
of a movement or campaign in the interest of Negro education.
Perhaps I can best indicate the character of these campaigns and the
sort of information and insight that they gave me in regard to the
condition of the coloured people in the states I visited by giving a
more extended account of my journey in Mississippi in 1908. As an
indication of the general interest in the purpose and the success of my
visit I ought to say that, while the journey was made under the
direction of the Negro Business League of Mississippi, representatives
of nearly every important interest among Negroes in the state either
accompanied the party for a portion of the journey or assisted in making
the meetings successful at the different places at which we stopped. For
instance, as I remember, there were not less than eight presidents of
Negro banks and many other successful business men in the course of the
eight-day trip. Among them were Charles Banks, president of the Negro
Business League of Mississippi, and one of the most influential coloured
men of the state. It was he who was more directly responsible than any
one else for organizing and making a success of our journey. Not only
the business men, but the representatives of different religious
denominations and of the secret organizations, which are particularly
strong in Mississippi, united with the members of the business league to
make the meetings which we held in the different parts of the state as
successful and as influential as it was possible to make them.
It is a matter of no small importance to the success of the people of my
race in Mississippi that business men, teachers, and the members of the
different religious denominations are uniting disinterestedly in the
effort to give the coloured children of the state a proper and adequate
education, and that they are using their influence to encourage the
masses of the people to get property and build homes.
Dr. E. C. Morris, for instance, who was a member of the party,
represents the largest Negro organization of any kind in the world—the
National Baptist Convention, which has a membership of more than two
millions; J. W. Straughter, as a member of the finance committee of the
Negro Pythians, represented an organization of about seventy thousand
persons, owning about three hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars’
worth of property. The _African Methodist Episcopal Review_, of which
Dr. H. T. Kealing, now president of the Negro college at Quindaro, Kan.,
is editor, is probably the best-edited and one of the most influential
periodicals published by the Negro race. It has been in existence now
for more than twenty-five years.
I have mentioned the names of these men and have referred to their
positions and influence among the Negro people as showing how widespread
at the present time is the interest in the moral and material upbuilding
of the race.
I had heard a great deal, indirectly, before I reached Mississippi, of
the progress that the coloured people were making there. I had also
heard a great deal through the newspapers of the difficulties under
which they were labouring. There are some portions of Mississippi, for
instance, where a large part of the coloured population has been driven
out as a result of white-capping organizations. There are other portions
of the state where the white people and the coloured people seem to be
getting along as well as, if not better than, in any other portion of
the Union.
After leaving Memphis, the first place at which we stopped was Holly
Springs, in Marshall County. Holly Springs has long been an educational
centre for the coloured people of Mississippi. Shortly after the war the
Freedman’s Aid and Southern Educational Society of the Methodist Church
established here Rust University. Until a few years ago the State Normal
School for Training Negro Teachers was in existence in Holly Springs,
when it was finally abolished by former Governor Vardaman. The loss of
this school was a source of great disappointment to the coloured people
of the state, as they felt that, in vetoing the appropriation, the
governor was making an attack upon the Negro education of the state.
Under the leadership of Bishop Cottrell, a new industrial school and
theological seminary has grown up to take the place of the Normal
Training School and do its work. During the previous two years Bishop
Cottrell had succeeded in raising more than seventy-five thousand
dollars, largely from the coloured people of Mississippi, in order to
erect the two handsome modern buildings which form the nucleus of the
new school. In this city there had also been recently established a
Baptist Normal School, which is the contribution of the Negro Baptists
of the state in response to the abolition of the State Normal School.
The enthusiasm for education that I discovered at Holly Springs is
merely an indication of the similar enthusiasm in every other part of
the state that I visited. At Utica, Miss., I spoke in the assembly room
of the Utica Institute, founded October 27, 1903, by William H.
Holtzclaw, a graduate of Tuskegee. After leaving Tuskegee he determined
to go to the part of the country where it seemed to him that the
coloured people were most in need of a school that could be conducted
along the lines of Tuskegee Institute. He settled in Hinds County, where
there are forty thousand coloured people, thirteen thousand of whom can
neither read nor write. In the community in which this school was
started the Negroes outnumber the whites seven to one. He began teaching
out in the forests. From the very first he succeeded in gaining the
sympathy of both races for the work that he was trying to do. In the
five years since the school started he has succeeded in purchasing a
farm of fifteen hundred acres. He had at that time erected three large
and eleven small buildings of various kinds for school rooms, shops, and
homes. On the farm there were one large plantation house and about
thirty farm houses. He told me that a conservative estimate of the
property which the school owned would make the valuation something more
than seventy-five thousand dollars. In addition to this, he has already
started an endowment fund in order to make the work that he is doing
there permanent, and to give aid by means of scholarships to worthy
students who are not fully able to pay their own way.
At Jackson, Miss., there are two colleges for Negro students. Campbell
College was founded by the African Methodist Episcopal Church; Jackson
College, which had just opened a handsome new building for the use of
its students, was established and is supported by the Baptist
denomination. At Natchez I was invited to take part in the dedication of
the beautiful new building erected by the Negro Baptists of Mississippi
at a cost of about twenty thousand dollars.
Perhaps I ought to say that, while there has been considerable rivalry
among the different Negro churches along theological lines, it seems to
me that I can see that, as the leaders of the people begin to realize
the seriousness of the educational problem, this rivalry is gradually
dying out in a disinterested effort to educate the masses of the Negro
children irrespective of denominations. The so-called denominational
schools are merely a contribution of the members of the different sects
to the education of the race.
Nothing indicates the progress which the coloured people have made along
material lines so well as the number of banks that have been started by
coloured people in all parts of the South. I have made a special effort
recently to learn something of the influence of these institutions upon
the mass of the coloured people. At the present time there are no less
than fifty-six Negro banks in the United States. All but one or two of
them are in the Southern States. Of these fifty-six banks, eleven are in
the state of Mississippi. Not infrequently I have found that Negro banks
owe their existence to the secret and fraternal organizations. There are
forty-two of these organizations, for example, in the state of
Mississippi, and they collected $708,670 in 1907, and paid losses to the
amount of $522,757. Frequently the banks have been established to serve
as depositories for the funds of these institutions. They have then
added a savings department, and have done banking business for an
increasing number of stores and shops of various kinds that have been
established within the last ten years by Negro business men.
A special study of the city of Jackson, Miss., made shortly before I
visited the city, showed that there were ninety-three businesses
conducted by Negroes in that city. Of this number, forty-four concerns
did a total annual business of about three hundred and eighty-eight
thousand dollars a year. But, of this amount of business, one contractor
alone did one hundred thousand dollars’ worth. As near as could be
estimated, about 73 per cent. of the coloured people owned or were
buying their own homes. It is said that the Negroes, who make up one
half of the population, own one third of the area of the city of
Jackson. The value of this property, however, is only about one eleventh
of the taxable value of the city.
As nearly as could be estimated at that time, Negroes had on deposit in
the various banks of the city almost two hundred thousand dollars. Of
this amount, more than seventy thousand was in the two Negro banks of
the city. I learned that most of these businesses had been started in
the previous ten years, but, as a matter of fact, one of the oldest
business men in Jackson is a coloured man, with whom I stopped during my
visit to that city. H. T. Risher is the leading business man in his
particular line in Jackson. He has had a bakery and restaurant in that
city, as I understand, for more than twenty years. He has one of the
handsomest of the many beautiful residences of coloured people in
Jackson, which I had an opportunity to visit on my journey through the
state.
Among the other business enterprises that especially attracted my
attention during my journey was the drug store and offices of Dr. A. W.
Dumas, of Natchez. His store is located in a handsome two-story brick
block, and although there are a large number of Negro druggists in the
United States, I know of no store which is better kept and makes a more
handsome appearance.
According to the plan of our journey, I was to spend seven days in
Mississippi, starting from Memphis, Tenn., going thence to Holly
Springs, Utica, Jackson, Natchez, Vicksburg, Greenville, Mound Bayou,
and then, crossing the Mississippi, to spend Sunday in the city of
Helena, Ark. As a matter of fact, we did stop at other places and I had
an opportunity to speak to audiences of coloured people and white people
at various places along the railroad, the conductor kindly holding the
train for me to do this at several points, so that I think it is safe to
say that I spoke to forty or fifty thousand people during the eight days
of our journey. Everywhere, I found the greatest interest and enthusiasm
among both the white people and coloured people for the work that we
were attempting to do. In Jackson, which for a number of years had been
the centre of agitation upon the Negro question, there was some
opposition expressed to the white people of the town attending the
meeting, but I was told that among the people in the audience were
Governor Noel; Lieutenant-Governor Manship; Major R. W. Milsaps, who is
said to be the wealthiest man in Mississippi; Bishop Charles B.
Galloway, of the Methodist Episcopal Church (South), who has since died;
United States Marshal Edgar S. Wilson; the postmaster of Jackson, and a
number of other prominent persons.
At Natchez the white people were so interested in the object of the
meeting that they expressed a desire to pay for the opera house in which
I spoke, provided that the seating capacity should be equally divided
between the two races. At Vicksburg I spoke in a large building that had
been used for some time for a roller-skating rink. I was informed that
hundreds of people who wished to attend the meeting were unable to find
places. At Greenville I delivered an address in the court-house; and
there were so many people who were unable to attend the address that, at
the suggestion of the sheriff, I delivered a second one from the steps
of the court-house.
The largest and most successful meeting of the trip was held at Mound
Bayou, a town founded and controlled entirely by Negroes. This town,
also, is the centre of a Negro colony of about three thousand people.
Negroes own thirty thousand acres of land in direct proximity to the
town. Mound Bayou is in the centre of the Delta district, where the
coloured people outnumber the whites frequently as much as ten to one;
and there are a number of Negro settlements besides Mound Bayou in which
no white man lives. My audience extended out into the surrounding fields
as far as my voice could reach. I was greatly impressed with the
achievements and possibilities of this town, where Negroes are giving a
striking example of success in self-government and in business.
From what I was able to see during my visit to Mississippi, and from
what I have been able to learn from other sources, I have come to the
conclusion that more has been accomplished by the coloured people of
that state during the last ten years than was accomplished by them
during the whole previous period since the Civil War. To a large extent
this has been due to the fact that the coloured people have learned that
in getting land, in building homes, and in saving their money they can
make themselves a force in the communities in which they live. It is
generally supposed that the coloured man, in his efforts to rise, meets
more opposition in Mississippi than anywhere else in the United States,
but it is quite as true that there, more than anywhere else, the
coloured people seem to have discovered that, in gaining habits of
thrift and industry, in getting property, and in making themselves
useful, there is a door of hope open for them which the South has no
disposition to close.
As an illustration of what I mean, I may say that while I was in Holly
Springs I learned that, though the whites outnumbered the blacks nearly
three to one in Marshall County, there had been but one lynching there
since the Civil War. When I inquired of both white people and coloured
people why it was that the two races were able to live on such friendly
terms, both gave almost exactly the same answer. They said that it was
due to the fact that in Marshall County so large a number of coloured
farmers owned their farms. Among other things that have doubtless helped
to bring about this result is the fact that the treasurer of the Odd
Fellows of Mississippi, who lived in Holly Springs, frequently had as
much as two hundred thousand dollars on deposit in the local banks.
My purpose in making the educational campaigns to which I have referred
was not merely to see the condition of the masses of my own people, but
to ascertain, also, the actual relations existing between the races and
to say a word if possible that would bring about more helpful relations
between white men and black men in the communities which I visited.
Again and again in the course of these journeys I noticed that, almost
invariably, as soon as I began to inquire of some coloured school
teacher, merchant, banker, physician, how it was he had gotten his
start, each one began at once to tell me of some prominent white man in
their town who had befriended them. This man had advised them in their
business transactions, had, perhaps, loaned them money, or had pointed
out to them where they could invest their savings to advantage, and in
this way had managed to get ahead. In some cases the very men who had
privately befriended these individual coloured men were persons who in
their public life had the reputation, outside of the community in which
they lived, of being the violent opponents and enemies of the Negro
race.
These experiences have been repeated so often in my journeys through the
South that I have learned that public speeches and newspaper reports are
a very poor indication of the actual relations of the races. Somehow
when a Southern politician gets upon a platform to make a public speech
it comes perfectly natural to him to denounce the Negro. He has been
doing it so long that it is second nature.
Now one of the advantages of the educational campaigns I have described
is that they have given an opportunity to Southern men to stand up in
public and say what was deep down in their hearts with regard to the
Negro, to express a feeling toward the Negro that represents another and
higher side of Southern character and one which, as a result of
sectional feelings and political controversies, has been too long hidden
from the world.
After returning from my last educational trip through North Carolina I
received letters from prominent people in all parts of the state
expressing their approval of what I had said and of the work that my
visit was intended to accomplish. These letters came from business men,
from men who were or had been in public life, as well as from school
superintendents. For example, Charles L. Coon, superintendent of public
schools at Wilson, N. C., whose paper before the educational conference
in Atlanta, in 1909, was the most convincing plea for the Negro schools
I have ever read, wrote as follows:
I write to express my personal appreciation of your visit and its
effects here in Wilson. You had a good audience representing all
classes of our white and coloured population. Numbers of the best
white people in town have told me that your address was the very best
ever made here. Many of them say you must come back. Some want to get
a warehouse so that everybody can hear you.
The Negro school here is stronger in the affections of the coloured
people, the white people are prouder of it, than before you came. I
was delighted that we had a school building in which you could speak.
The Negro school will get better each year. It is not doing nearly all
it ought to do, but we are moving forward. There will be slight
opposition from now on. I am more than ever convinced that white
people will believe in and stand for the education of the Negro
children, if the matter is put to them in the right shape. Our Negro
school has more coloured than white opposition. In fact, the last
white man in town who counts _one_ was converted by you! I rejoice
over this sinner’s making his peace with me.
I have quoted Superintendent Coon’s letter because it represents the
attitude toward Negro education and toward the Negro of an increasing
number of thoughtful and earnest men of the younger generation in the
South. Perhaps I can give no better idea of how many of the older
generation of the Southerners feel toward the Negro than by quoting the
words of Judge Bond, of Brownsville, Tenn., in the course of a few
remarks he made at the close of my address in his city.
Judge Bond said, according to a short-hand report taken at the time and
afterward published in the Boston _Transcript_:
I was born and reared here in the South and have been associated all
my life with Negroes. I feel that as a Southern white man I owe a debt
to the Negro that I can never pay, that no Southern white man can ever
pay. During the war the Southern white man left his home, his wife,
and his children to be taken care of by the Negroes, and I have yet to
hear of a single instance where that trust was betrayed or where they
proved unfaithful; and ever since that time I have sworn by the Most
Divine that I shall ever be grateful to the coloured people as long as
I shall live, and that I shall never be unfair to that race. I have
always since thought that a white man is not a man who does not admit
that he owes a duty in the sight of God to the coloured people of this
country; he is not a man if he is not willing at all times and under
all circumstances to do all he can to acquit himself of that duty. If
there was ever a people in this country who owed a debt to any people,
it is the Southern white man to the Southern coloured man. The white
man who lives on the other side of the Ohio River owes him a debt,
too, but, by my honest conviction in the sight of God, his obligation
is nothing compared to that of the Southern white man to the coloured
people, and I have often wondered what will be the judgment on the
Southern white man and his children and his grandchildren in failing
to discharge his duty toward the old Negro, his children, and his
grandchildren for their many years’ faithful and true service.
My mother died at my birth. Now I am growing old. An old black mammy,
who, thank God, is living to-day, took me in her arms and nursed me
and cared for me and loved me until I grew strong and to manhood; and
there has never been a day since that she has not been willing to do
the same for my wife and children, even in spite of her years.
I remember some time ago very well, when I was sitting in a darkened
room nursing my youngest child, who was confined with the dreaded
disease small-pox, my wife in a most distressing manner appeared at
the head of the stairs (we had been separated because of our little
girl’s condition and we were kept from the rest of the family
upstairs). My wife called down to me and informed me that she feared
another of our children had fallen victim to the small-pox. We were in
a predicament, you may easily see. It was necessary at once to remove
the child from the rest, but there still remained a doubt as to her
being a victim, so we could not bring her into the room in which we
were and it was also necessary that she be taken out of the room in
which she was. She must be kept in a separate room and neither was it
safe for her mother or myself to be in the room in which she would be
taken. She must remain in this room all night without care or
attention from either, but just about that time the old black mammy,
this same black mammy who nursed and cared for me, appeared. Black
mammy was heard from. “Small-pox or no small-pox, that child cannot
stay in that room by herself to-night or no other night, even if I
takes the small-pox and dies to-morrow”; and she did go into that room
and stayed in that room until morning, and was willing to stay there
as long as it was necessary. God bless her old soul!
I am glad to see Mr. Washington here and to have him speak to us. He
is a credit to his race, and would be a credit to any race. I wish we
had many more men like him all over this country.
Mr. Washington, I pray to God that the Spirit may ever guide you in
your purpose to lift up your people and that you may inspire all
Southern white men as well as Southern coloured men to lift up and
elevate your race.
These expressions of interest in the welfare of my race and of hearty
sympathy with work which others and myself have been trying to do for
the upbuilding of the Negro have come to me in recent years from every
part of the South. Almost from the beginning of my work in Alabama,
however, I have had the support and the encouragement, both public and
private, not only of my neighbours, but of the best white people
everywhere in the South who were acquainted with what I was trying to
do. When I have been inclined to be discouraged, the expressions of
good-will have given me faith. They have taught me—in spite of wrongs
and injustices to which members of my race are frequently subjected—to
look with confidence to the future and to believe that the Negro has the
power within himself to become an indispensable part of the life of the
South, not feared and merely tolerated, but trusted and respected by the
members of the white race by whom he is surrounded.
CHAPTER IX
WHAT I HAVE LEARNED FROM BLACK MEN
No single question is more often asked me than this: “Has the pure
blooded black man the same ability or the same worth as those of mixed
blood?”
It has been my good fortune to have had a wide acquaintance with black
as well as brown and even white Negroes. The race to which I belong
permits me to meet and know people of all colours and conditions. There
is no race or people who have within themselves the choice of so large a
variety of colours and conditions as is true of the American Negro. The
Japanese, as a rule, can know intimately human nature in only one hue,
namely, yellow. The white man, as a rule, does not get intimately
acquainted with any other than white men. The Negro, however, has a
chance to know them all, because within his own race and among his own
acquaintances, he has friends, perhaps even relatives, of every colour
in which mankind has been painted.
Perhaps I can answer the question as to the relative value of the pure
Negro and the mixed blood in no better way than by telling what I know
concerning, and what I have learned from, some four or five men of the
purest blood and the darkest skins of any human beings I happen to
know—men to whom I am indebted for many things, but most of all for what
they have done for me in teaching me to value all men at their real
worth regardless of race or colour.
Among those black men whom I have known, the one who comes first to my
mind is Charles Banks, of Mound Bayou, Miss., banker, cotton broker,
planter, real-estate dealer, head of a hundred-thousand-dollar
corporation which is erecting a cottonseed oil mill, the first ever
built and controlled by Negro enterprise and Negro capital, and,
finally, leading citizen of the little Negro town of Mound Bayou.
I first met Charles Banks in Boston. As I remember, he came in company
with Hon. Isaiah T. Montgomery, the founder of Mound Bayou, to
represent, at the first meeting of the National Negro Business League in
1900, the first and at that time the only town in the United States
founded, inhabited, and governed exclusively by Negroes. He was then, as
he is to-day, a tall, big-bodied man, with a shiny round head, quick,
snapping eyes, and a surprisingly swift and quiet way of reaching out
and getting anything he happens to want. I never appreciated what a big
man Banks was until I began to notice the swift and unerring way in
which he reached out his long arm to pick up, perhaps a pin, or to get
hold of the buttonhole and of the attention of an acquaintance. He
seemed to be able to reach without apparent effort anything he wanted,
and I soon found there was a certain fascination in watching him move.
I have been watching Banks reach for things that he wanted, and get
them, ever since that time. I have been watching him do things, watching
him grow, and as I have studied him more closely my admiration for this
big, quiet, graceful giant has steadily increased. One thing that has
always impressed itself upon me in regard to Mr. Banks is the fact that
he never claims credit for doing anything that he can give credit to
other people for doing. He has never made any effort to make himself
prominent. He simply prefers to get a job done and, if he can use other
people and give them credit for doing the work, he is happy to do so.
At the present time Charles Banks is not, by any means, the wealthiest,
but I think I am safe in saying that he is the most influential, Negro
business man in the United States. He is the leading Negro banker in
Mississippi, where there are eleven Negro banks, and he is secretary and
treasurer of the largest benefit association in that state, namely, that
attached to the Masonic order, which paid death claims in 1910 to the
amount of one hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars and had a cash
balance of eighty thousand dollars. He organized and has been the moving
spirit in the state organization of the Business League in Mississippi
and has been for a number of years the vice-president of the National
Negro Business League.
Charles Banks is, however, more than a successful business man. He is a
leader of his race and a broad-minded and public-spirited citizen.
Although he holds no public office, and, so far as I know, has no desire
to do so, there are, in my opinion, few men, either white or black, in
Mississippi to-day who are performing, directly or indirectly, a more
important service to their state than Charles Banks.
Without referring to the influence that he has been able to exercise in
other directions, I want to say a word about the work he is doing at
Mound Bayou for the Negro people of the Yazoo Delta, where, in seventeen
counties, the blacks represent from seventy-five to ninety-four per
cent. of the whole population.
As I look at it, Mound Bayou is not merely a town; it is at the same
time and in a very real sense of that word, a school. It is not only a
place where a Negro may get inspiration, by seeing what other members of
his race have accomplished, but a place, also, where he has an
opportunity to learn some of the fundamental duties and responsibilities
of social and civic life.
Negroes have here, for example, an opportunity, which they do not have
to the same degree elsewhere, either in the North or in the South, of
entering simply and naturally into all the phases and problems of
community life. They are the farmers, the business men, bankers,
teachers, preachers. The mayor, the constable, the aldermen, the town
marshal, even the station agent, are Negroes.
Black men cleared the land, built the houses, and founded the town. Year
by year, as the colony has grown in population, these pioneers have had
to face, one after another, all the fundamental problems of
civilization. The town is still growing, and as it grows, new and more
complicated problems arise. Perhaps the most difficult problem the
leaders of the community have to face now is that of founding a school,
or a system of schools, in which the younger generation may be able to
get some of the kind of knowledge which these pioneers gained in the
work of building up and establishing the community.
During the twenty years this town has been in existence it has always
had the sympathetic support of people in neighbouring white communities.
One reason for this is that the men who have been back of it were born
and bred in the Delta, and they know both the land and the people.
Charles Banks was born and raised in Clarksdale, a few miles above Mound
Bayou, where he and his brother were for several years engaged in
business. It was his good fortune, as has been the case with many other
successful Negroes, to come under the influence, when he was a child, of
one of the best white families in the city in which he was born. I have
several times heard Mr. Banks tell of his early life in Clarksdale and
of the warm friends he had made among the best white people in that
city.
It happened that his mother was cook for a prominent white family in
Clarksdale. In this way he became in a sort of a way attached to the
family. It was through the influence of this family, if I remember
rightly, that he was sent to Rust University, at Holly Springs, to get
his education.
In 1900 Mr. Banks, because of his wide knowledge of local conditions in
that part of the country, was appointed supervisor of the census for the
Third district of Mississippi. In speaking to me of this matter Mr.
Banks said that every white man in town endorsed his application for
appointment.
Since he has been in Mound Bayou, Mr. Banks has greatly widened his
business connections. The Bank of Mound Bayou now counts among its
correspondents banks in Vicksburg, Memphis, and Louisville, together
with the National Bank of Commerce of St. Louis and the National Reserve
Bank of the City of New York. One of the officers of the former
institution, Mr. Eugene Snowden, in a recent letter to me, referring to
this and another Negro bank, writes: “It has been my pleasure to lend
them $30,000 a year and their business has been handled to my entire
satisfaction.”
Some years ago, in the course of one of my educational campaigns, I
visited Mound Bayou, among other places in Mississippi. Among other
persons I met the sheriff of Bolivar County, in which Mound Bayou is
situated. Without any suggestion or prompting on my part, he told me
that Mound Bayou was one of the most orderly—in fact, I believe he said
the most orderly—town in the Delta. A few years ago a newspaper man from
Memphis visited the town for the purpose of writing an article about it.
What he saw there set him to speculating, and among other things he
said:
Will the Negro as a race work out his own salvation along Mound Bayou
lines? Who knows? These have worked out for themselves a better local
government than any superior people has ever done for them in freedom.
But it is a generally accepted principle in political economy that any
homogeneous people will in time do this. These people have their local
government, but it is in consonance with the county, state, and
national governments and international conventions, all in the hands
of another race. Could they conduct as successfully a county
government in addition to their local government and still under the
state and national governments of another race? Enough Negroes of the
Mound Bayou type, and guided as they were in the beginning, will be
able to do so.
The words I have quoted will, perhaps, illustrate the sort of interest
and sympathy which the Mound Bayou experiment arouses in the minds of
thoughtful Southerners. Now it is characteristic of Charles Banks that,
in all his talks with me, he has never once referred to the work he is
doing as a solution of the problem of the Negro race. He has often
referred to it, however, as one step in the solution of the problem of
the Delta. He recognizes that, behind everything else, is the economic
problem.
Aside from the personal and business interest which he has in the growth
and progress of Mound Bayou, Mr. Banks sees in it a means of teaching
better methods of farming, of improving the home life, of getting into
the masses of the people greater sense of the value of law and order.
I have learned much from studying the success of Charles Banks. Before
all else he has taught me the value of common-sense in dealing with
conditions as they exist in the South. I have learned from him that, in
spite of what the Southern white man may say about the Negro in moments
of excitement, the sober sentiment of the South is in sympathy with
every effort that promises solid and substantial progress to the Negro.
Maj. R. R. Moton, of Hampton Institute, is one of the few black men I
know who can trace his ancestry in an unbroken line on both sides back
to Africa. I have often heard him tell the story, as he had it from his
grandmother, of the way in which his great-grandfather, who was a young
African chief, had come down to the coast to sell some captives taken in
war and how, after the bargain was completed, he was enticed on board
the white man’s ship and himself carried away and sold, along with these
unfortunate captives, into slavery in America. Major Moton is, like
Charles Banks, not only a full-blooded black man, with a big body and
broad Negro features, but he is, in his own way, a remarkably handsome
man. I do not think any one could look in Major Moton’s face without
liking him. In the first place, he looks straight at you, out of big
friendly eyes, and as he speaks to you an expression of alert and
intelligent sympathy constantly flashes and plays across his kindly
features.
It has been my privilege to come into contact with many different types
of people, but I know few men who are so lovable and, at the same time,
so sensible in their nature as Major Moton. He is chock-full of
common-sense. Further than that, he is a man who, without obtruding
himself and without your understanding how he does it, makes you believe
in him from the very first time you see him and from your first contact
with him, and, at the same time, makes you love him. He is the kind of
man in whose company I always feel like being, never tire of, always
want to be around him, or always want to be near him.
One of the continual sources of surprise to people who come for the
first time into the Southern States is to hear of the affection with
which white men and women speak of the older generation of coloured
people with whom they grew up, particularly the old coloured nurses. The
lifelong friendships that exist between these old “aunties” and “uncles”
and the white children with whom they were raised is something that is
hard for strangers to understand.
It is just these qualities of human sympathy and affection that endeared
so many of the older generation of Negroes to their masters and
mistresses and which seems to have found expression, in a higher form,
in Major Moton. Although he has little schooling outside of what he was
able to get at Hampton Institute, Major Moton is one of the best-read
men and one of the most interesting men to talk with I have ever met.
Education has not “spoiled” him, as it seems to have done in the case of
some other educated Negroes. It has not embittered or narrowed him in
his affections. He has not learned to hate or distrust any class of
people, and he is just as ready to assist and show a kindness to a white
man as to a black man, to a Southerner as to a Northerner.
My acquaintance with Major Moton began, as I remember, after he had
graduated at Hampton Institute and while he was employed there as a
teacher. He had at that time the position that I once occupied in charge
of the Indian students. Later he was given the very responsible position
he now occupies, at the head of the institute battalion, as commandant
of cadets, in which he has charge of the discipline of all the students.
In this position he has an opportunity to exert a very direct and
personal influence upon the members of the student body and, what is
especially important, to prepare them to meet the peculiar difficulties
that await them when they go out in the world to begin life for
themselves.
It has always seemed to me very fortunate that Hampton Institute should
have had in the position which Major Moton occupies a man of such kindly
good humour, thorough self-control, and sympathetic disposition.
Major Moton knows by intuition Northern white people and Southern white
people. I have often heard the remark made that the Southern white man
knows more about the Negro in the South than anybody else. I will not
stop here to debate that question, but I will add that coloured men like
Major Moton know more about the Southern white man than anybody else on
earth.
At the Hampton Institute, for example, they have white teachers and
coloured teachers; they have Southern white people and Northern white
people; besides, they have coloured students and Indian students. Major
Moton knows how to keep his hands on all of these different elements, to
see to it that friction is kept down and that each works in harmony with
the other. It is a difficult job, but Major Moton knows how to negotiate
it.
This thorough understanding of both races which Major Moton possesses
has enabled him to give his students just the sort of practical and
helpful advice and counsel that no white man who has not himself faced
the peculiar conditions of the Negro could be able to give.
I think it would do any one good to attend one of Major Moton’s
Sunday-school classes when he is explaining to his students, in the very
practical way which he knows how to use, the mistake of students
allowing themselves to be embittered by injustice or degraded by calumny
and abuse with which every coloured man must expect to meet at one time
or another. Very likely he will follow up what he has to say on this
subject by some very apt illustration from his own experience or from
that of some of his acquaintances which will show how much easier and
simpler it is to meet prejudice with sympathy and understanding than
with hatred; to remember that the man who abuses you because of your
race probably hasn’t the slightest knowledge of you personally, and,
nine times out of ten, if you simply refuse to feel injured by what he
says, will feel ashamed of himself later.
I think one of the greatest difficulties which a Negro has to meet is in
travelling about the country on the railway trains. For example, it is
frequently difficult for a coloured man to get anything to eat while he
is travelling in the South, because, on the train and at the lunch
counters along the route, there is often no provision for coloured
people. If a coloured man goes to the lunch counter where the white
people are served he is very likely, no matter who he may be, to find
himself roughly ordered to go around to the kitchen, and even there no
provision has been made for him.
Time and again I have seen Major Moton meet this situation, and others
like it, by going up directly to the man in charge and telling him what
he wanted. More than likely the first thing he received was a volley of
abuse. That never discouraged Major Moton. He would not allow himself to
be disturbed nor dismissed, but simply insisted, politely and
good-naturedly, that he knew the custom, but that he was hungry and
wanted something to eat. Somehow, without any loss of dignity, he not
only invariably got what he wanted, but after making the man he was
dealing with ashamed of himself, he usually made him his friend and left
him with a higher opinion of the Negro race as a whole.
I have seen Major Moton in a good many trying situations in which an
ordinary man would have lost his head, but I have never seen him when he
seemed to feel the least degraded or humiliated. I have learned from
Major Moton that one need not belong to a superior race to be a
gentleman.
[Illustration:
RUFUS HERRON
OF CAMP HILL, ALA.
“If there is a white man, North or South, that has more love for his
community or his country than Rufus Herron, it has not been my good
fortune to meet him”
]
[Illustration:
PROFESSOR GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER
“One of the most thoroughly scientific men of the Negro race”
]
[Illustration:
MAJOR ROBERT RUSSA MOTON
“It has been through contact with men like Major Moton that I have
received a kind of education no books could impart”
]
[Illustration:
BISHOP GEORGE W. CLINTON
“He is the kind of man who wins everywhere confidence and respect”
]
It has been through contact with men like Major Moton—clean, wholesome,
high-souled gentlemen under black skins—that I have received a kind of
education no books could impart. Whatever disadvantages one may suffer
from being a part of what is called an “inferior race,” a member of such
a race has the advantage of not feeling compelled to go through the
world, as some members of other races do, proclaiming their superiority
from the house tops. There are some people in this world who would feel
lonesome, and they are not all of them white people either, if they did
not have some one to whom they could claim superiority.
One of the most distinguished black men of my race is George W. Clinton,
of Charlotte, N. C., bishop of the A. M. E. Zion Church., Bishop Clinton
was born a slave fifty years ago in South Carolina. He was one of the
few young coloured men who, during the Reconstruction days, had an
opportunity to attend the University of South Carolina. He prides
himself on the fact that he was a member of that famous class of 1874
which furnished one Negro congressman, two United States ministers to
Liberia—the most recent of whom is Dr. W. D. Crum—five doctors, seven
preachers, and several business men who have made good in after life.
Among others was W. McKinlay, the present collector of customs for the
port of Georgetown, D. C.
Bishop Clinton has done a great service to the denomination to which he
belongs and his years of service have brought him many honours and
distinctions. He founded the _African Methodist Episcopal Zion Quarterly
Review_ and edited, for a time, another publication of the African
Methodist Episcopal Zion denomination. He has represented his church in
ecumenical conferences at home and abroad, is a trustee of Livingstone
College, chairman of the publishing board, has served as a member of the
international convention of arbitration and is vice-president of the
international Sunday-school union.
Bishop Clinton is a man of a very different type from the other men of
pure African blood I have mentioned. Although he says he is fifty years
of age, he is in appearance and manner the youngest man in the group. An
erect, commanding figure, with a high, broad forehead, rather refined
features and fresh, frank, almost boyish manner, he is the kind of man
who everywhere wins confidence and respect.
Although Bishop Clinton is by profession a minister, and has been all
his life in the service of the Church, he is of all the men I have named
the most aggressive in his manner and the most soldierly in his bearing.
Knowing that his profession compelled him to travel about a great deal
in all parts of the country, I asked him how a man of his temperament
managed to get about without getting into trouble.
“I have had some trouble but not much,” he said, “and I have learned
that the easiest way to get along everywhere is to be a gentleman. It is
simple, convenient, and practicable.
“The only time I ever came near having any serious trouble,” continued
Bishop Clinton, “was years ago when I was in politics.” And then he went
on to relate the following incident: It seems that at this time the
Negroes at the bishop’s home in Lancaster, S. C., were still active in
politics. There was an attempt at one time to get some of the better
class of Negroes to unite with some of the Democrats in order to elect a
prohibition ticket. The fusion ticket, with two Negroes and four white
men as candidates, was put in the field and elected. It turned out,
however, that a good many white people cut the Negroes on the ticket
and, at the same time, a good many Negroes cut the whites, so that there
was some bad blood on both sides. A man who was the editor of the local
paper at that time had accused young Clinton of having advised the
Negroes to cut the fusion ticket.
“As I knew him well,” said the bishop, “I went up to his office to
explain. Some rather foolish remark I made irritated the editor and he
jumped up and came toward me with a knife in his hands.”
The bishop added that he didn’t think the man really meant anything
“because my mother used to cook in his family” and they had known each
other since they were boys, so he simply took hold of his wrists and
held them. The bishop is a big, stalwart, athletic man with hands that
grip like a vise. He talked very quietly and they settled the matter
between them.
Bishop Clinton has told me that he has made many lifelong friends among
the white people of South Carolina, but this was the only time that he
ever had anything like serious trouble with a white man.
I first made the acquaintance of Bishop Clinton when he came to Tuskegee
in 1893 as representative of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion
Church, at the dedication of the Phelps Hall Bible training school. The
next year he came to Tuskegee as one of the lecturers in that school and
he has spent some time at Tuskegee every year since then, assisting in
the work of that institution.
Bishop Clinton has been of great assistance to us, not only in our work
at Tuskegee, but in the larger work we have been trying to do in
arousing interest throughout the country in Negro public schools. He
organized and conducted through North Carolina in 1910 what I think was
the most successful educational campaign I have yet been able to make in
any of the Southern States.
Although he is an aggressive churchman, Bishop Clinton has found time to
interest himself in everything that concerns the welfare of the Negro
race. He is as interested in the business and economic as he is in the
intellectual advancement of the race.
One of the most gifted men of the Negro race whom I ever happened to
meet is George W. Carver, Professor Carver, as he is called at Tuskegee,
where he has for many years been connected with the scientific and
experimental work in agriculture carried on in connection with the
Tuskegee Institute. I first met Mr. Carver about 1895 or 1896 when he
was a student at the State Agricultural College at Ames, Ia. I had heard
of him before that time through Hon. James Wilson, now secretary of
agriculture, who was for some time one of Mr. Carver’s teachers. It was
about this time that an attempt was made to put our work in agriculture
on a scientific basis, and Mr. Carver was induced to come to Tuskegee to
take charge of that work and of the state experiment station that had
been established in connection with it. He has been doing valuable work
in that department ever since and, as a result of his work in breeding
cotton and of the bulletins he has prepared on experiments in building
up wornout soils, he has become widely known to both coloured and white
farmers throughout the South.
When some years ago the state secretary of agriculture called a meeting
at Montgomery of the leading teachers of the state, Professor Carver was
the only coloured man invited to that meeting. He was at that time
invited to deliver an address to the convention and for an hour was
questioned on the interesting work he was doing at the experiment
station.
Professor Carver, like the other men I have mentioned, is of unmixed
African blood, and is one of the most thoroughly scientific men of the
Negro race with whom I am acquainted. Whenever any one who takes a
scientific interest in cotton growing, or in the natural history of this
part of the world, comes to visit Tuskegee, he invariably seeks out and
consults Professor Carver. A few years ago the colonial secretary of the
German empire, accompanied by one of the cotton experts of his
department, travelling through the South in a private car, paid a visit
of several days to Tuskegee largely to study, in connection with the
other work of the school, the cotton-growing experiments that Professor
Carver has been carrying on for some years.
In his book, “The Negro in the New World,” Sir Harry Johnston, who has
himself been much interested in the study of plant life in different
parts of the world, says: “Professor Carver, who teaches scientific
agriculture, botany, agricultural chemistry, etc., at Tuskegee, is, as
regards complexion and features, an absolute Negro; but in the cut of
his clothes, the accent of his speech, the soundness of his science, he
might be professor of botany, not at Tuskegee, but at Oxford or
Cambridge. Any European botanist of distinction, after ten minutes’
conversation with this man, instinctively would treat him as a man on a
level with himself.”
What makes all that Professor Carver has accomplished the more
remarkable is the fact that he was born in slavery and has had
relatively few opportunities for study, compared with those which a
white man who makes himself a scholar in any particular branch of
science invariably has.
Professor Carver knows but little of his parentage. He was born on the
plantation of a Mr. Carver in Missouri some time during the war.
It was a time when it was becoming very uncomfortable to hold slaves in
Missouri and so he and his mother were sent south into Arkansas. After
the war Mr. Carver, the master, sent south to inquire what had become of
his former slaves. He learned that they had all disappeared with the
exception of a child, two or three years old, by the name of George, who
was near dead with the whooping-cough and of so little value that the
people in Arkansas said they would be very glad to get rid of him.
George was brought home, but he proved to be such a weak and sickly
little creature that no attempt was made to put him to work and he was
allowed to grow up among chickens and other animals around the servants’
quarters, getting his living as best he could.
The little black boy lived, however, and he used his freedom to wander
about in the woods, where he soon got on very good terms with all the
insects and animals in the forest and gained an intimate and, I might
almost say personal, acquaintance with all the plants and the flowers.
As he grew older he began to show unusual aptitude in two directions: He
attracted attention, in the first place, by his peculiar knack and skill
in all sorts of household work. He learned to cook, to knit and crochet,
and he had a peculiar and delicate sense for colour. He learned to draw
and, at the present time, he devotes a large part of his leisure to
making the most beautiful and accurate drawings of different flowers and
forms of plant life in which he is interested.
In the second place, he showed a remarkable natural aptitude and
intelligence in dealing with plants. He would spend hours, for example,
gathering all the most rare and curious flowers that were to be found in
the woods and fields. One day some one discovered that he had
established out in the brush a little botanical garden, where he had
gathered all sorts of curious plants and where he soon became so expert
in making all sorts of things grow, and showed such skill in caring for
and protecting plants from all sorts of insects and diseases that he got
the name of “the plant doctor.”
Another direction in which he showed unusual natural talent was in
music. While he was still a child he became famous among the coloured
people as a singer. After he was old enough to take care of himself he
spent some years wandering about. When he got the opportunity he worked
in greenhouses. At one time he ran a laundry; at another time he worked
as a cook in a hotel. His natural taste and talent for music and
painting, and, in fact, almost every form of art, finally attracted the
attention of friends, through whom he secured a position as church
organist.
During all this time young Carver was learning wherever he was able. He
learned from books when he could get them; learned from experience
always; and made friends wherever he went. At last he found an
opportunity to take charge of the greenhouses of the horticultural
department of the Iowa Agricultural College at Ames. He remained there
until he was graduated, when he was made assistant botanist. He took
advantage of his opportunities there to continue his studies and finally
took a diploma as a postgraduate student, the first diploma of that sort
that had been given at Ames.
While he was at the agricultural college in Iowa he took part with the
rest of the students in all the activities of college life. He was
lieutenant, for example, in the college battalion which escorted
Governor Boies to the World’s Fair at Chicago. He began to read papers
and deliver lectures at the horticultural conventions in all parts of
the state. But, in spite of his success in the North, among the people
of another race, Mr. Carver was anxious to come South and do something
for his own race. So it was that he gladly accepted an invitation to
come to Tuskegee and take charge of the scientific and experimental work
connected with our department of agriculture.
Although Professor Carver impresses every one who meets him with the
extent of his knowledge in the matter of plant life, he is quite the
most modest man I have ever met. In fact, he is almost timid. He dresses
in the plainest and simplest manner possible; the only thing that he
allows in the way of decoration is a flower in his buttonhole. It is a
rare thing to see Professor Carver any time during the year without some
sort of flower on the lapel of his coat and he is particularly proud
when he has found somewhere in the woods some especially rare specimen
of a flower to show to his friends.
I asked Professor Carver at one time how it was, since he was so timid,
that he managed to have made the acquaintance of so many of the best
white as well as coloured people in our part of the country. He said
that as soon as people found out that he knew something about plants
that was valuable he discovered they were very willing and eager to talk
with him.
“But you must have some way of advertising,” I said jestingly; “how do
all these people find out that you know about plants?”
“Well, it is this way,” he said. “Shortly after I came here I was going
along the woods one day with my botany can under my arm. I was looking
for plant diseases and for insect enemies. A lady saw what she probably
thought was a harmless old coloured man, with a strange looking box
under his arm, and she stopped me and asked if I was a peddler. I told
her what I was doing. She seemed delighted and asked me to come and see
her roses, which were badly diseased. I showed her just what to do for
them—in fact, sat down and wrote it out for her.
“In this,” he continued, “and several other ways it became noised abroad
that there was a man at the school who knew about plants. People began
calling upon me for information and advice.”
I myself recall that several years ago a dispute arose down town about
the name of a plant. No one knew what it was. Finally one gentleman
spoke up and said that they had a man out at the normal school by the
name of Carver who could name any plant, tree, bird, stone, etc., in the
world, and if he did not know there was no use to look farther. A man
was put on a horse and the plant brought to Professor Carver at the
Institute. He named it and sent him back. Since then Professor Carver’s
laboratory has never been free from specimens of some kind.
I have always said that the best means which the Negro has for
destroying race prejudice is to make himself a useful and, if possible,
an indispensable member of the community in which he lives. Every man
and every community is bound to respect the man or woman who has some
form of superior knowledge or ability, no matter in what direction it
is. I do not know of a better illustration of this than may be found in
the case of Professor Carver. Without any disposition to push himself
forward into any position in which he is not wanted, he has been able,
because of his special knowledge and ability, to make friends with all
classes of people, white as well as black, throughout the South. He is
constantly receiving inquiries in regard to his work from all parts of
the world, and his experiments in breeding new varieties of cotton have
aroused the greatest interest among those cotton planters who are
interested in the scientific investigation of cotton growing.
There are few coloured men in the South to-day who are better or more
widely known than Dr. Charles T. Walker, pastor of the Tabernacle
Baptist Church of Augusta, Ga. President William H. Taft, referring to
Doctor Walker, said that he was the most eloquent man he had ever
listened to. For myself I do not know of any man, white or black, who is
a more fascinating speaker either in private conversation or on the
public platform.
Doctor Walker’s speeches, like his conversation, have the charm of a
natural-born talker, a man who loves men, and has the art of expressing
himself simply, easily, and fluently, in a way to interest and touch
them.
On the streets of Augusta, his home, it is no uncommon thing to see
Doctor Walker—after the familiar and easy manner of Southern
people—stand for hours on a street corner or in front of a grocery
store, surrounded by a crowd who have gathered for no other purpose than
to hear what he will say. It is said that he knows more than half of the
fifteen thousand coloured people of Augusta by name, and when he meets
any of them in the street he is disposed to stop, in his friendly and
familiar way, in order to inquire about the other members of the family.
He wants to know how each is getting on and what has happened to any one
of them since he saw them last.
If one of these acquaintances succeeds in detaining him, he will, very
likely, find himself surrounded by other friends and acquaintances and,
when once he is fairly launched on one of the quaintly humorous accounts
of his adventures in some of the various parts of the world he has
visited, or is discussing, in his vivid and epigrammatic way, some
public question, business in that part of the town stops for a time.
Doctor Walker is a great story teller. He has a great fund of anecdotes
and a wonderful art in using them to emphasize a point in argument or to
enforce a remark. I recall that the last time he was at Tuskegee,
attending the Negro conference, he told us what he was trying to do at
the school established by the Walker Baptist Association at Augusta for
the farmers in his neighbourhood. From that he launched off into some
remarks upon the coloured farmer, his opportunities, and his progress.
He said Senator Tillman had once complained that the coloured farmer
wasn’t as ignorant as he pretended to be, and then he told this story:
He said that an old coloured farmer in his part of the country had
rented some land of a white man on what is popularly known as “fourths.”
By the term of the contract the white man was to get one fourth of the
crop for the use of the land.
When it came time to divide the crop, however, it turned out that there
were just three wagon loads of cotton and this the old farmer hauled to
his own barn.
Of course the landlord protested. He said: “Look here, Uncle Joe, didn’t
you promise me a fourth of that cotton for my share?”
“Yes, cap’n,” was the reply, “Dat’s so. I’se mighty sorry, but dere
wasn’t no fort’.”
“How is that?” inquired the landlord.
“There wasn’t no fort’ ’cause dere was just three wagon loads, and dere
wasn’t no fort’ dere.”
Doctor Walker is not only a fascinating conversationalist, a
warm-hearted friend, but he is, also, a wonderfully successful preacher.
During the time when he was in New York, as pastor of the Mt. Olivet
Baptist Church, his sermons and his wonderful success as an evangelist
were frequently reported in the New York papers.
Doctor Walker is not only an extraordinary pulpit orator, but he is a
man of remarkably good sense. I recall some instances in particular in
which he showed this quality in a very conspicuous way. The first was at
a meeting of the National Convention of Negro Baptists at St. Louis in
1886. At this meeting some one delivered an address on the subject,
“Southern Ostracism,” in which he abused the Southern white Baptists,
referring to them as mere figureheads, who believe “there were separate
heavens for white and coloured people.”
Later in the session Doctor Walker found an opportunity to reply to
these remarks, pointing out that a few months before the Southern
Baptist Convention had passed a resolution to expend $10,000 in mission
work among the coloured Baptists of the South. He formulated his protest
against the remarks made by the speaker of the previous day in a
resolution which was passed by the convention.
[Illustration:
A MEETING OF THE NEGRO MINISTERS OF MACON COUNTY, ALABAMA
]
His speech and the resolution were published in many of the Southern
newspapers and denominational organs and did much to change the currents
of popular feeling at that time and bring about a better understanding
between the races.
Dr. Charles T. Walker was born at the little town of Hepzibah, Richmond
County, Ga., about sixteen miles south of his present home, Augusta. His
father, who was his master’s coachman, was also deacon in the little
church organized by the slaves in 1848, of which his uncle was pastor.
Doctor Walker comes of a race of preachers. The Walker Baptist
Association is named after one of his uncles, Rev. Joseph T. Walker,
whose freedom was purchased by the members of his congregation who were
themselves slaves. In 1880, upon a resolution of Doctor Walker, this
same Walker Association passed a resolution to establish a normal school
for coloured children, known as the Walker Baptist Institute. This
school has from the first been supported by the constant and unremitting
efforts of Doctor Walker.
Meanwhile he has been interested in other good works. He assisted in
establishing the Augusta _Sentinel_, and in 1891, while he was
travelling in the Holy Land, his accounts of his travels did much to
brighten its pages and increase its circulation. In 1893 he was one of a
number of other coloured people to establish a Negro state fair at
Augusta, which has continued successfully ever since. Another of his
enterprises started and carried on in connection with his church is the
Tabernacle Old Folks’ Home. He has taken a prominent part in all the
religious and educational work of the state and has even dipped, to some
extent, into politics, having been at one time a member of the
Republican state executive committee.
Aside from these manifold activities, and beyond all he has done in
other directions, Doctor Walker has been a man who has constantly sought
to take life as he found it and make the most of the opportunities that
he saw about him for himself and his people. He has not been an agitator
and has done more than any other man I know to bring about peace and
good-will between the two sections of the country and the races. It is
largely due to his influence that in Augusta, Ga., the black man and the
white man live more happily and comfortably than they do in almost any
other city in the United States.
The motto of Doctor Walker’s life I can state in his own words. “I am
determined,” he has said, “never to be guilty of ingratitude; never to
desert a friend; and never to strike back at an enemy.”
It is because of such men as Doctor Walker and many others like him that
I have learned not only to respect but to take pride in the race to
which I belong.
In seeking to answer the question as to the relative value of the man of
pure African extraction and the man of mixed blood I have referred to
five men who have gained some distinction in very different walks of
life. There are hundreds of others I could name, who, though not so
conspicuous nor so well known, are performing in their humble way
valuable service for their race and country. I might also mention here
the fact that at Tuskegee, during an experience of thirty years, we have
found that, although perhaps a majority of our students are not of pure
black blood, still the highest honours in our graduating class, namely,
that of valedictorian, which is given to students who have attained the
highest scholarship during the whole course of their studies, has been
about equally divided between students of mixed and pure blood.
For my own part, however, it seems to me a rather unprofitable
discussion that seeks to determine in advance the possibilities of any
individual or any race or class of individuals. In the first place,
races, like individuals, have different qualities and different
capacities for service and, that being the case, it is the part of
wisdom to give every individual the opportunities for growth and
development which will fit him for the greatest usefulness.
When any individual and any race is allowed to find that place, freely
and without compulsion, they will not only be happy and contented in
themselves, but will fall naturally into the happiest possible relations
with all other members of the community.
In the second place, it should be remembered that human life and human
society are so complicated that no one can determine what latent
possibilities any individual or any race may possess. It is only through
education, and through struggle and experiment in all the different
activities and relations of life, that it is possible for a race or an
individual to find the place in the common life in which they can be of
the greatest value to themselves and the rest of the world.
To assume anything else is to deny the value of the free institutions
under which we live and of all the centuries of struggle and effort it
has cost to bring them into existence.
CHAPTER X
MEETING HIGH AND LOW IN EUROPE
I have gotten an education by meeting all classes of people in the
United States. I have been fortunate in getting much education by coming
into contact with different classes of people in Europe.
In the course of my journey across Europe I visited, in the fall of
1910, the ancient city of Cracow, the former capital of Poland. It was
evening when we reached our destination, and, as we had been travelling
all day without sighting an American or any one who spoke English, I
began to feel more at sea than I had ever felt before in my life. I was
a little surprised, therefore, as I was getting out of the omnibus, to
hear some one say in an unmistakable American accent: “Excuse me, but
isn’t this Booker T. Washington?”
I replied that it was, and added that I was very glad to hear that kind
of a voice in this remote corner of Europe. In a few minutes I was
exchanging notes with a man who once lived, he said, in the same part of
the country I came from, in West Virginia. He had come originally from
Poland and was, I suspect, a Polish Jew, one of that large number of
returned immigrants whom one meets in every part of Eastern and Southern
Europe.
The next day I met a very intelligent American lady, though of Polish
origin, who turned out to be the wife of the Polish count who was the
owner and proprietor of the hotel. It was this lady who advised me to go
and visit, while I was in Cracow, the tomb of the Polish patriot,
Kosciuszko, whose name I had learned in school as one of those
revolutionary heroes who, when there was no longer any hope of liberty
for their own people in the old world, had crossed the seas to help
establish it in the new.
I knew from my school history what Kosciuszko had done for America in
its early struggle for independence. I did not know, however, until my
attention was called to it in Cracow, what Kosciuszko had done for the
freedom and education of my own people.
After his second visit to this country in 1797 Kosciuszko, I learned,
made a will in which he bequeathed part of his property in this country
in trust to Thomas Jefferson to be used for the purpose of purchasing
the freedom of Negro slaves and giving them instruction in the trades
and otherwise.
Seven years after his death a school of Negroes, known as the Kosciuszko
school, was established in Newark, N. J. The sum left for the benefit of
this school amounted to thirteen thousand dollars.
The Polish patriot is buried in the cathedral at Cracow, which is the
Westminster Abbey of Poland, and is filled with memorials of the
honoured names of that country. Kosciuszko lies in a vault beneath the
marble floor of the cathedral. As I looked upon his tomb I thought how
small the world is after all, and how curiously interwoven are the
interests that bind people together. Here I was in this strange land,
farther from my home than I had ever expected to be in my life, and yet
I was paying my respects to a man to whom the members of my race owed
one of the first permanent schools for them in the United States.
When I visited the tomb of Kosciuszko I placed a rose on it in the name
of my race.
A few days later I took a day’s journey by train and wagon into a remote
part of the country districts of Poland in order to see something of the
more primitive peasant life of that region. Away up in the mountains we
stopped at a little group of thatched-roof cottages. As I wanted to see
what their homes looked like inside, I knocked at the door of one of
them and made some inquiry or other in English, not expecting to get a
reply that I could understand. I was surprised to hear a man answer me
in fairly good English. He told me that he had lived for a long time in
Detroit, Mich. My companion, Dr. Robert E. Park, who had also lived in
that city, was soon talking familiarly with him about a famous rebel
priest, Kolisinski, who had been a leader of the Polish colony in that
city.
A week before that I had visited, in the wildest part of Sicily, the
sulphur mines of Campo Franco. In the deepest part of these mines I
discovered a man who had been a miner in West Virginia, in the same
region in which, years before, I had myself learned to mine coal.
These incidents were characteristic of a kind of experience I had
everywhere in Europe. In the most remote parts of the country, where I
expected to meet people who had, perhaps, never heard of America, I
found people who not only spoke my own language, but welcomed me almost
as a fellow countryman. All this led me to realize, as I had not been
able to do before, the close and intimate way in which the life, the
problems, and the people of Europe were touching and influencing
America. But it led me also to notice and study the curious and to me
surprising reflex influence of America on Europe.
I have made in all three visits to Europe. On my first visit, a number
of years ago, I made the journey with no very definite purpose in mind.
I kept in the main line of travel and saw what I may call the polite and
official side of life in England and some portions of the continent. In
London, for example, I was entertained by the American ambassador, Hon.
Joseph H. Choate, had the privilege of attending one of the queen’s
luncheons at Windsor Castle, and made the acquaintance of Hon. James
Bryce, the present ambassador to the United States, besides meeting a
number of distinguished men whose names were familiar to me in
connection with some important phase of the world’s work in which they
were engaged.
On my last trip I made up my mind to leave, as far as possible, the main
highways of travel and see something of the condition of the poorer
people, whose lives are neither polite nor picturesque nor pleasant to
look at. My purpose in making this trip was to compare, as far as I was
able, the condition of the masses of my own people in this country with
the masses of the people in Europe, who are in relatively the same
situation in political and economic opportunity. I believed that if the
black people in America knew something of the burdens and difficulties
under which the masses of the people in Europe live and work they would
see that their own situation was by no means so hopeless as they have
been sometimes taught to believe.
I had another reason for desiring to get acquainted with the situation
of people at the bottom in Europe. For a number of years I have been
convinced that there is a very intimate relation between the work I have
been trying to do at Tuskegee Institute for the masses of the Negroes in
the South and the work that was being done for the poorer classes of the
people in the different parts of Europe. Different as has been the
history of the black man in the South and the white man in Europe, there
were, I was convinced, many points in which the life of the one would
compare with the life of the other. In the case of the Negro we have a
black people struggling up from slavery to freedom: in the other case we
have a white man making his way upward through a milder form of
subjection and servitude to a position of political and economic
independence; and, in each case, the means by which the long journey has
been made, in the one instance by a race, in the other by a class, has
been, in many respects, the same.
But aside from all that, I was interested in these people for their own
sake. An individual or a race that has come up from slavery cannot but
feel a peculiar interest and sympathy with any other individual or race
that has travelled that same journey or any part of it.
I arrived in London in the late summer. At that time all the polite
world, all the distinguished and all the wealthy people, were away in
some other part of the world upon their vacations, and the city, as far
as these people were concerned, was like a winter residence which had
been closed for the summer. But the other six million, whose
acquaintance I had determined to make upon this trip, were there.
In one way or another I saw a good deal of the life of the poorer
classes, particularly in that vast region inhabited almost wholly by
people of the poorer and working classes, which goes under the name of
East London. I tramped about at night, visiting the darkest corners of
the city I could find. One night I interviewed, on the Thames
Embankment, those dreary outcasts of the great city who wander up and
down the bank of the river all day and sleep upon the pavement at night.
At another time I visited the alehouses and the bar-rooms, where men and
women of the poorer classes congregate at night to drink and gossip. I
went several times to the police courts in some of the poorer parts of
the city, where I had a chance to observe the methods by which the
police courts of London deal with the failures and unfortunates of the
city who in one way or other fall into the hands of the police.
It had been my plan to give as large a part of my time as possible to
getting acquainted with the working classes in the farming regions of
Austria, Italy, and Denmark.
To a certain extent the condition of the urban labourers in London
connected itself in my mind with the condition of the rural population
in other countries I have mentioned, since London represents the largest
city population in the world, and England is the country in which the
masses of the people have been most completely detached from the land,
while Austria, Italy, and Denmark are distinctly agricultural countries,
and leaving out Russia, represent the parts of Europe where the people,
to a greater extent than elsewhere, live close to the soil.
It is impossible for me to describe in detail what I learned in regard
to the condition of the masses of the people in the different parts of
Europe I visited. As a rule I suppose the man on the soil has always
represented the most backward and neglected portion of the population.
This class has everywhere, until recent years, had fewer opportunities
for education than the similar classes in the cities and, where the
people who tilled the soil have not succeeded in getting possession of
the soil—as is especially true in certain parts of Austria-Hungary and
lower Italy—they have remained in a condition of greater or less
subjection to the landowning classes. In lower Italy, where the masses
of the farming population have neither land nor schools, they have
remained in a position not far removed from slavery. In Denmark, on the
contrary, where the farming class is, for the most part, made up of
independent landowners, not only has agriculture been more thoroughly
developed and organized than elsewhere, but farmers are a dominating
influence in the political life of the country.
In England, which is the home of political liberty, the working classes
have all the political privileges of other Englishmen, although the bulk
of the land is in the hands of a comparatively few landowners. On the
other hand, the majority of the labourers in the cities have not
increased their economic independence. In fact, the English city
labourer, from all that I could observe, seemed to be in a position of
greater dependence upon his employer and upon the capitalist than is
true of any other country I visited.
I recall one incident of my stay in London which emphasized this fact in
my mind: I noticed one day a man who was standing, with his hands in his
pockets, looking vaguely into the street, one of those types of the
casual labourer of whom one meets so many examples in London. I asked if
work was plentiful about this time of the year.
“No,” he replied. “It is hard to get anything to do, so many people are
out of town.”
This man looked to me like a dock labourer. I met him somewhere, I
think, on or near Mile End Road, in the East End, which is in the centre
of a district of over a million inhabitants made up entirely of working
people. I told him I could not understand how the absence of a few
hundred or a few thousand individuals from a great city like London
could make much difference to him. “It makes a great difference, sir,”
he replied. “Everything seems to stop when they go away.”
This man was, to be sure, a casual labourer, one who had, perhaps, been
crowded out by competition from the regular avenues of employment. But
there is an enormous number of these casual labourers in England. They
seem to be a product of the system.
[Illustration:
TOMPKINS MEMORIAL HALL, HAMPTON INSTITUTE
In the Tompkins Memorial Hall 1700 students during the school term
take their meals three times daily. The building cost approximately
$175,000, and is the largest building on the Institute Grounds.
]
[Illustration:
TRADE SCHOOL AT HAMPTON INSTITUTE
]
A week or ten days later I met at Skibo Castle in the Highlands of
Scotland, Lord John Morley, at that time secretary of state for India.
During the time that I was there the question of the condition of the
labouring classes was several times touched upon in conversation and
some reference was made to the condition I have referred to. I recall
that Lord Morley listened to the discussion for some time without making
any comment. Then he said very positively that, in spite of all that had
been said, the English labourer was, in his opinion, in a greatly better
position to-day than he had ever been before in his history. I was the
more impressed with this statement because it came from a man who has a
world-wide reputation as a scholar and a writer, and who is at the same
time a member of what is the most democratic government that has ever
ruled in England, a government, also, that has sought to do more than
any other to improve the living conditions of the labouring classes.
The experience I had among the poorer classes in London helped me to
realize, as I had not done before, the opportunity that the Negro, in
spite of the discriminations and injustices from which he suffers, has
in America to-day, and particularly in the Southern States, where there
is still opportunity to get land, to live in God’s open country and in
contact with simple, natural things, compared with that of the people in
the crowded English cities, where hundreds of thousands of them live
practically from hand to mouth and where one tenth of the population,
according to an investigation some years ago, are living either in
poverty or on the edge of destitution.
At the present moment the national government, in conjunction with the
city of London, is spending immense sums of money in laying out parks,
in building public baths, model tenements and lodging houses in some of
the poorer quarters of the city. Better than all else, they are building
out in the suburbs, on some of the vacant land outside the city,
beautiful garden cities, rows and rows of model houses, each with its
little garden in front of it, and each provided with every convenience
that modern invention and science can suggest to make it healthful,
convenient, and comfortable. As a result of this improvement, thousands
of working people are being removed every year from the dark, gloomy,
and unhealthy regions of the overcrowded city to these free, open
spaces, where they have an opportunity to get in contact with God’s free
air and sunlight.
I confess that I marvelled at the time and interest and money that have
been expended not only by the government, but by the philanthropic
people of London, in attempting to ameliorate and to raise the level of
life among the poorer working classes. I am convinced that if one half
or one tenth of the money, interest, and sympathy that have been
expended for the education and uplifting of the poorer classes in London
were spent upon the Negro in the South, the race problem in our country
would be practically solved.
After visiting London, I went, as I have said, to Austria and spent some
time in the city of Prague, in Bohemia; in Vienna, Austria, and
Budapest, Hungary. While there I had opportunity several times to go out
into the country districts and see something of the condition of the
farm labourers. From there I went to Sicily. I saw something of the
condition of the small farmers in the region of Palermo. I visited the
sulphur mines at Campo Franco in the mountainous region of the interior.
I passed several days at Catania and saw the grape harvest and the men
bare-legged treading the wine in the same way I have read in the Bible.
From there I returned and passed several days in Austrian Poland and
visited the salt mines. I went out into the country districts and saw
the condition of the people in the small country towns in the region
around Cracow. I crossed the frontier into Russian Poland and visited a
Russian village. From there I went to Copenhagen and gained new
acquaintance with the wonderful things that have been accomplished in
the way of organizing and developing agricultural life in that little
state.
In thinking over all that I saw and learned during my trip abroad, it
seemed to me that I could clearly discern, in all those parts of Europe
where the people are most backward, the signs of a great, silent
revolution. Everywhere, with perhaps the exception of lower Italy and
Sicily, I thought I could see that the man at the bottom was making his
way upward and, in doing so, was lifting the level of civilization.
Directly and indirectly this revolution has, to a very considerable
extent, been brought about through the influence of the United States.
For example, one of the results of the opening up of the great grain
fields in the central part of the United States was to break up the
whole system of agriculture in every part of Europe where the products
of American agriculture come in competition with those of Europe. It was
this same competition with American agriculture that provoked the
immigration from Austria, Hungary, and southern Italy. I found that
wherever the condition of farm labour was particularly bad in Southern
Europe the emigration from that part of Europe to America was especially
large and increasing. On the other hand, in Denmark, where the
agricultural crisis had been overcome by more intensive and intelligent
methods of farming, emigration to the United States had almost ceased.
A secondary effect has been to bring about a reorganization of
agriculture in such a way as to improve the condition of the farmer. In
several countries efforts have been made to break up the large estates
and increase the number of small landowners. There has been a very
general improvement in the character of the rural schools. The states of
Europe, having discovered that their rural population is one of the most
important of the natural resources, have begun to take practical
measures to educate and improve the neglected masses.
To a large extent it seemed to me that the older civilization had been
built up on the ignorance and the oppression of the masses of the people
who were at the bottom. The welfare of the few was obtained at the
expense of the many. On the other hand, at the present time, wherever
any of these countries are successful and are making progress, they are
seeking to do so, not by oppressing and holding down the masses of the
people, but by building them up, making them more intelligent, more
independent, better able to think and care for themselves.
It was, first of all, the competition with America which brought this
result about. It was, in the second place, the contact of the masses of
the people with life in America which has made the change. I met
everywhere in Southern Europe, among the labouring classes of the
people, those who had been to America and who had returned. Frequently
they had returned with money which they had earned at common labour in
America, and had bought and improved property. The number of small
landowners has increased greatly in Hungary, Poland, and in southern
Italy as the result of the emigration to America. These people came
back, sometimes with money, but always with new ideas and new ambitions.
They refused to work for the same wages that they had previously worked
for. The result was that the price of farm labour has greatly increased,
both in Italy and in other parts of Southern Europe.
On the other hand, this compelled the greater use of farm machinery,
compelled more intensive and rational methods of agriculture. But
nowhere did I find, as some people had expected, that this emigration
had had a deterrent effect upon the development of the country. For the
labouring masses, particularly in the rural parts of Southern Europe,
the journey to America has been a sort of higher education; it has
taught them not only to work better and more efficiently, but to have
confidence in themselves and to hope and believe in a better future for
themselves and their children. In this way the silent revolution to
which I refer in Europe has come about.
Now if there is any lesson to be drawn from these facts, it seems to me
it is this: that more and more, at the present day, education must take
the place of force in the affairs of men. The world is changing. The
greatest nation to-day is not the nation with the greatest army, not the
nation that can destroy the most, but the nation with the most efficient
labourers and the most productive machinery; the nation that can produce
the most.
But if labour is to be efficient, it must be trained and it must be
free. The school teacher to-day is more important to the state than the
soldier, and the aim of the highest statesmanship should be the
improvement not so much of the army as of the school.
Although I started out on my last visit to Europe with the determination
of getting acquainted with the people at the bottom and made that my
main business while I was there, I did, incidentally, have opportunity
to see something, also, of the people at the top. In fact, some of the
pleasantest and most profitable moments I had during my stay in Europe
were those spent in conversation with people who were either interested
or actively engaged in some kind of public service which connected
itself with the work that I have been trying to do for my own people in
America.
For example, I made the acquaintance through my friend, Mr. Jacob Riis,
of Mr. V. Cavling, the editor of one of the most important papers in
Denmark, the _Politiken_. It was largely through him that I was able to
see and learn as much as I did, during the short time that I was there,
of the life of the country people and of the remarkable schools that
have been established for their benefit in the country districts. While
I was in Copenhagen I was introduced by the American ambassador, Mr.
Maurice F. Egan, to the king and queen of Denmark. I learned to my
surprise that their majesties were perfectly familiar with the work that
we are doing at Tuskegee and I found them anxious to talk with me about
the possibility of a similar work for the Negroes in the Danish West
India Islands, where there are about thirty thousand people of African
descent. The queen told me that she had read not only my earlier book
“Up From Slavery,” but the volume I had just completed, “The Story of
the Negro.” What surprised me most was to find the king and queen of
Denmark so much better informed in regard to the actual condition and
progress of the Negro in America than so many Americans I have met.
At another time I was the guest of Mr. Andrew Carnegie at his summer
home in Scotland. Three of the most interesting and restful days I have
ever had were spent at Skibo Castle. Although Skibo is situated in the
wildest and most Northern part of Scotland, farther removed from the
world, it seemed to me, than any other place I had ever visited, I never
felt nearer the centre of things than I did while I was there.
All kinds of people find their way to Skibo Castle, and apparently any
one who has something really valuable to contribute to the world’s
welfare or progress finds a welcome there.
Naturally, among guests of that sort, conversation and discussion took a
wide range. For three days I had an opportunity of hearing great world
questions discussed familiarly by men who knew them at first hand. At
the time that I met Lord John Morley at Skibo Castle he was still
secretary of state for India. I had never been able to get any definite
conception, from what I had read in the newspapers, of the actual
situation as between the two races in India, the English and the native
Indians, and I was very glad to hear Lord Morley comment on that
puzzling and perplexing problem. What he said about the matter was the
more interesting because he was able to draw parallels between racial
conditions in the Eastern and the Western world, between the Indians in
India and the Negroes in the United States.
After I returned from the south of Europe I made two addresses in
London, one under the auspices of the Anti-slavery and Aborigines
Protection Society, and the other at the National Liberal Club. At these
meetings I had an opportunity to see face to face people who, as
missionaries, writers, or government officials, had, both in Africa and
at home, laboured for the welfare and the salvation of the members of my
race in parts of the world I had never seen.
For example, at the luncheon given me under the auspices of the
Anti-slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, Sir T. Folwell Buxton,
grandson of the noted abolitionist and statesman who did so much for the
abolition of slavery in the British West Indies, was the presiding
officer.
It happened that, at this time, the Society of Friends, which has been
from the beginning to the present day, both in England and America, the
best friend the Negro has ever had, was holding its annual meeting, and
many of the members of this sect were present the day I spoke. Among
others I remember who have distinguished themselves by what they have
done for the Negro in Africa were Sir Harry H. Johnston, the noted
African explorer; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mr. E. D. Morel, and Rev. J.
H. Harris, secretary of the Anti-slavery and Aborigines Protection
Society, all of whom have had so large a part in the struggle to bring
about reform in the Congo Free State.
Among the many pleasant surprises of this luncheon were a large number
of letters from distinguished persons who were unable to be present.
Among them, I remember, was a very cordial note from the Prime Minister
of England, the Rt. Hon. Herbert Henry Asquith, and among others were
two from distinguished personal friends which expressed so generous an
appreciation of the work I have attempted to do that I am tempted to
reproduce them here. These letters were addressed to John H. Harris,
secretary of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, and
were as follows:
SKIBO CASTLE,
DORNECH
SUTHERLAND,
SEPT. 19th, 1910.
DEAR MR. HARRIS:
I regret exceedingly to miss any opportunity of doing honor to one of
the greatest men living, Booker Washington. Taking into account his
start in life, born a slave, and now the acknowledged leader of his
people, I do not know a parallel to the ascent he has made. He has
marched steadily upward to undisputed leadership, carrying with this
the confidence and approval of the white race, and winning the warm
friendship of its foremost members—a double triumph.
Booker Washington is to rank with the few immortals as one who has not
only shown his people the promised land, but is teaching them to prove
themselves worthy of it—a Joshua and Moses combined.
Very truly yours,
(Signed) ANDREW CARNEGIE.
The other letter, from the Archbishop of Canterbury, was as follows:
‘It is a great disappointment to me that paramount engagements far
away from London render it impossible for me to be present at the
gathering which is to give greeting and Godspeed to Mr. Booker T.
Washington’s acquaintance, and I share with all those who know the
facts, the appreciation of the services he has rendered and is
rendering to the solution of one of the gravest and most perplexing
problems of our time. He is a man who, in every sense, deserves well
of his contemporaries, and I believe that, when hereafter the story is
written of Christian people’s endeavor in our day to atone for and to
amend the racial wrongdoing of the past, Mr. Booker T. Washington’s
name will stand in the very forefront of those for whom the world will
give thanks.’
It was a great pleasure and satisfaction to me to meet and speak to
these distinguished people and the many others whom I met while I was in
London. What impressed me through it all was the wide outlook which they
had upon the world and its problems. Questions which we in America are
inclined to look upon as local and peculiar to our own country assume in
the eyes of Englishmen whose interests are not confined to any single
country or continent the character of world problems. I learned in
England to see that the race problem in the United States is, as Mr.
Herbert Samuels, the English postmaster-general said, “a problem which
faces all countries in which races of a widely divergent type are living
side by side.”
The success of the Negro in America and the progress which has been made
here in the solution of the racial problem gained wider and deeper
meaning for me as a result of my visit to Europe.
CHAPTER XI
WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT EDUCATION IN DENMARK
On the railway train between Copenhagen, Denmark, and Hamburg, Germany,
I fell into conversation with an English traveller who had been in many
parts of the world and who, like myself, was returning from a visit of
observation and study in Denmark. We exchanged traveller’s experiences
with each other. I found that he had had opportunity to study conditions
in that country a great deal more thoroughly than was true in my case
and he gave me much information that I was glad to have about the
condition of agriculture and the life of the people.
In return I told him something of the places I had visited before going
to Denmark and of the way I had attempted to dig down, here and there in
different parts of Europe, beneath the crust and see what was going on
in the lower strata of social life. I said to him, finally, that, after
all I had seen, I had come to the conclusion that the happiest country
in Europe, perhaps the happiest country in the world, is Denmark. Then I
asked him if he knew any part of the world where the people seemed to
come so near to solving all their problems as in Denmark.
He seemed a little startled and a little amused at that way of putting
the matter, but, after considering the question, he confessed that he
had never visited any other part of the world that seemed to be in a
more generally healthy and wholesome condition than this same little
country which we were just leaving behind us.
Denmark is not rich in the sense that England and the United States are
rich. I do not know what the statisticians say about the matter, but I
suppose that in Denmark there are few if any such great fortunes as one
finds in England, in the United States, and in many parts of Europe. In
fact, there is hardly room enough in this little land for a
multimillionaire to move about in, as it is less than one third the size
of the state of Alabama, although it has one third more population.
Denmark is an agricultural country. About two fifths of the whole
population are engaged in some form or other of agriculture. The farms
in Denmark have been wonderfully prosperous in recent years. I doubt,
however, whether as much money has been made or can be made in Denmark
as has been made on the farms in the best agricultural districts in
America. The soil is not particularly rich. A large section of the
country is, or has been until recent years, made up of barren heath like
that in northern Scotland. Within the past few years, as a result of one
of the most remarkable pieces of agricultural engineering that has ever
been attempted, large tracts of this waste have been made over into
fruitful farm land.
In spite of disadvantages, however, the country has greatly prospered
for a number of years past. People have been coming from all over the
world to study Danish agriculture and they have gone away marvelling at
the results. I am not going to try to tell in detail what these results
were or in what manner they have been obtained. I will merely say that
it seems to be generally conceded that, both in the methods of culture
and in the marketing of the crops, Denmark has gone farther and made
greater progress than any other part of the world. Furthermore, there is
no country, I am certain, not even the United States or Canada, where
the average farmer stands so high or exercises so large an influence
upon political and social life as he does in Denmark at the present
time.
“What’s back of the Danish farmer?” I said to my English friend. “What
is it that has made agriculture in this country?”
“It’s the Danish schools,” he replied.
I had asked the same question before and received various replies, but
they all wound up with a reference to the schools, particularly the
country high schools. I had heard much of them in America; I heard of
them again in England; for 90 per cent. of Denmark’s agricultural
exports goes to England.
It was not, however, until I reached Denmark, saw the schools
themselves, and talked with some of the teachers—not, in fact, until
after I had left Denmark and had an opportunity to look into and study
their history and organization—that I began to comprehend the part that
the rural high schools were playing in the life of the masses of the
Danish people, and to understand the manner in which they had influenced
and helped to build up the agriculture of the country.
There are two things about these rural high schools that were of
peculiar interest to me: First, they have had their origin in a movement
to help the common people, and to lift the level of the masses,
particularly in the rural district; second, they have succeeded. I
venture to say that in no part of the world is the general average
intelligence of the farming class higher than it is in Denmark. I was
impressed in my visits to the homes of some of the small farmers by the
number of papers and magazines to be found in their homes.
In recent years there has sprung up in many parts of Europe a movement
to improve the condition of the working masses through education.
Wherever any effort has been made on a large scale to improve
agriculture, it has almost invariably taken the form of a school of some
sort or other. For example, in Hungary, the state has organized
technical education in agriculture on a grand scale. Nowhere in Europe,
I learned, has there been such far-reaching effort to improve
agriculture through experimental and research stations, agricultural
colleges, high schools, and common schools. There is this difference,
however: Hungary has tried to improve agriculture by starting at the
top, creating a body of teachers and experts who are expected in turn to
influence and direct the classes below them. Denmark has begun at the
bottom.
One of the principal aims of the Hungarian Government, as appears from a
report by the Minister of Agriculture, was “to adapt the education to
the needs of the different classes and take care, at the same time, that
these different classes did not learn too much, did not learn anything
that would unfit them for their station in life.”
I notice, for example, that it was necessary to close the agricultural
school at Debreczen, which was conducted in connection with an
agricultural college at the same place, because, as the report of the
Minister of Agriculture states, “the pupils of this school, being in
daily contact with the first-year pupils of the college, attempted to
imitate their ways, wanted more than was necessary for their social
position, and at the same time aimed at a position they were unable to
maintain.”
All this is in striking contrast to the spirit and method of the Danish
rural high school, which started among the poorest farming class, and
has grown, year by year, until it has drawn within its influence nearly
all the classes in the rural community. In this school it happens that
the daughters of the peasant and of the nobleman sometimes sit together
on the same bench, and that the sons of the landlord and of the tenant
frequently work and study side by side, sharing the personal friendship
of their teacher and not infrequently the hospitality of his home.
The most striking thing about the rural high school in Denmark is that
it is neither a technical nor an industrial school and, although it was
created primarily for the peasant people, the subject of agriculture is
almost never mentioned, at least not with the purpose of giving
practical or technical education in that subject.
It may seem strange that, in a school for farmers, nothing should be
said about agriculture, and I confess that it took some time for me to
see the connection between this sort of school and Denmark’s
agricultural prosperity. It seemed to me, as I am sure it will seem to
most other persons, that the simplest and most direct way to apply
education to agriculture was to teach agriculture in the schools.
The real difference between the Hungarian and the Danish methods of
dealing with this problem is, however, in the spirit rather than in the
form. In Hungary the purpose of the schools seems to be to give each
individual such training as it is believed will fit him for the
particular occupation which his station in life assigns him, and no
more. The government decides. In other words, education is founded on a
system of caste. If the man below learns in school to look to the man in
station above him, if he begins to dream and hope for something better
than the life to which he has been accustomed—then, a social and
political principle is violated, and, as the Commissioner of Agriculture
says, “the government is not deterred from issuing energetic orders.”
[Illustration:
BRICKLAYING AT HAMPTON INSTITUTE
]
[Illustration:
BLACKSMITHING AT HAMPTON INSTITUTE
]
Of course, the natural result of such measures is to increase the
discontent. Just as soon as any class of people feel that privileges
granted to others are denied to them, immediately these
privileges—whether they be the opportunities for education, or anything
else—assume in the eyes of the people to whom they are denied a new
importance and value.
The result of this policy is seen in emigration statistics. I doubt,
from what I have been able to learn, whether all the efforts made by the
Hungarian Government in the way of agricultural instruction have done
very much to allay the discontent among the masses of the farming
population. Thousands of these Hungarian peasants every year still
prefer to try their fortune in America, and the steady exodus of the
farming population continues.
The rural high school in Denmark has pursued just the opposite policy.
It has steadily sought to stimulate the ambitions and the intellectual
life of the peasant people. Instead, however, of compelling the
ambitious farmer’s boy, who wants to know something about the world, to
go to America, to the ordinary college, or to the city, the schools have
brought the learning of the colleges and the advantages of the city to
the country.
The most interesting and remarkable thing about these high schools is
the success that they have had in presenting every subject that an
educated man should know about in such a form as will make it
intelligible and interesting to country boys and girls who have only
had, perhaps, the rudiments of a common school education.
The teachers in these country high schools are genuine scholars. They
have to be, for the reason that the greater part of their teaching is in
the form of lectures, without text-books of any kind, and their success
depends upon the skill with which they can present their subjects. In
order to awaken interest and enthusiasm, they have to go to the sources
for their knowledge.
Most of the teachers whom I met could speak two or three languages. I
was surprised at the knowledge which every one I met in Denmark, from
the King and Queen to the peasants, displayed in American affairs, and
the interest they showed in the progress of the Negro and the work we
have been doing at Tuskegee. As an illustration of the wide interests
which occupy the teachers in these rural schools, I found one of them
engaged in translating Prof. William James’s book on “Pragmatism” into
the Danish language.
I have heard it said repeatedly since I was in Denmark that the Danish
people as a whole were better educated and better informed than any
other people in Europe. Statistics seem to bear out this statement; for,
according to the immigration figures of 1900, although 24.2 per cent. of
all persons over fourteen years of age coming into the United States as
immigrants could neither read nor write, only .8 per cent. of the
immigrants from Scandinavia were illiterate. Of the Germans, among whom
I had always supposed education was more widely diffused than elsewhere
in Europe, 5.8 per cent. were illiterate.
Before I go farther, perhaps, I ought to give some idea of what these
rural high schools look like. One of the most famous of them is situated
about an hour’s ride from Copenhagen, near the little city of Roskilde.
It stands on a piece of rolling ground, overlooking a bay, where the
little fisher vessels and small seafaring craft are able to come far
inland, almost to the centre of the island. All around are wide
stretches of rich farm land, dotted here and there with little country
villages.
There is, as I remember, one large building with a wing at either end.
In one of these wings the head master of the school lives, and in the
other is a gymnasium. In between are the school rooms where the lectures
are held. Everything about the school is arranged in a neat and orderly
manner—simple, clean, and sweet—and I was especially impressed by the
wholesome, homelike atmosphere of the place. Teachers and pupils eat
together at the same table and meet together in a social way in the
evening. Teachers and students are thus not merely friends; they are in
a certain sense comrades.
In the school at Roskilde there are usually about one hundred and fifty
students. During the winter term of five months the young men are in
school; in the summer the young women take their turn. Pupils pay for
board and lodging twenty crowns, a little more than five dollars a
month, and for tuition, twenty crowns the first month, fifteen the
second, ten the third, five the fourth, and nothing the fifth. These
figures are themselves an indication of the thrift as well as the
simplicity with which these schools are conducted. Twenty years ago,
when they were first started, I was told the pupils used to sleep
together, in a great sleeping room on straw mattresses, and eat with
wooden spoons out of a common dish, just as the peasant people did at
that time. This reminds me that just about this same time, at Tuskegee,
pupils were having similar hardships. For one thing, I recall that, in
those days, the food for the whole school was cooked in one large iron
kettle and that sometimes we had to skip a meal because there wasn’t
anything to put in the kettle. Since that time conditions have changed,
not only in the rural high schools of Denmark, but among the country
people. At the present day, if not every peasant cottage, at least every
coöperative dairy has its shower-bath. The small farmer, who, a few
years ago, looked upon every innovation with mistrust, is likely now to
have his own telephone—for Denmark has more telephones to the number of
the population than has any other country in Europe—and every country
village has its gymnasium and its assembly hall for public lectures.
I have before me, on my desk, a school plan showing the manner in which
the day is disposed of. School begins at eight o’clock in the morning
and ends at seven o’clock in the evening, with two hours rest at noon.
Two thirds of the time of the school is devoted to instruction in the
Danish mother-tongue and in history. The rest is given to arithmetic,
geography, and the natural sciences.
It is peculiar to these schools that most of the instruction is given in
the form of lectures. There are no examinations and few recitations. Not
only the natural sciences, but even the higher mathematics, are taught
historically, by lectures. The purpose is not to give the student
training in the use of these sciences, but to give him a general insight
into the manner in which different problems have arisen and of the way
in which the solution of them has widened and increased our knowledge of
the world.
In the Danish rural high school, emphasis is put upon the folksongs,
upon Danish history and the old Northern mythology. The purpose is to
emphasize, in opposition to the Latin and Greek teaching of the
colleges, the value of the history and the culture of the Scandinavian
people; and, incidentally, to instil into the minds of the pupils the
patriotic conviction that they have a place and mission of their own
among the people of the world.
There are several striking things about this system of rural high
schools, of which there are now 120 in Denmark. The first thing about
them that impressed me was the circumstances in which they had their
origin. In the beginning the rural high schools were a private
undertaking, as indeed they are still, although they get a certain
amount of support from the State. The whole scheme was worked out by a
few courageous individuals, who were sometimes opposed, but frequently
assisted by the Government. The point which I wish to emphasize is that
they did not spring into existence all at once, but that they grew up
slowly and are still growing. It took long years of struggles to
formulate and popularize the plans and methods which are now in use in
these schools. In this work the leading figure was a Lutheran bishop,
Nicolai Frederick Severen Grundvig, who is often referred to as the
Luther of Denmark. The rural school movement grew out of a non-sectarian
religious movement and was, in fact, an attempt to revive the spiritual
life of the masses of the people.
Rural high schools were established as early as 1844, but it was not
until twenty years later, when Denmark, as a result of her disastrous
war with Prussia, had lost one third of her richest territory, that the
rural high school movement began to gain ground. It was at that time,
when affairs were at their lowest ebb in Denmark, that Grundvig began
preaching to the Danish people the gospel that what had been lost
without, must be regained within; and that what had been lost in battle
must be gained in peaceful development of the national resources.
Bishop Grundvig saw that the greatest national resource of Denmark, as
it is of any country, was its common people. The schools he started and
the methods of education he planned were adapted to the needs of the
masses. They were an attempt to popularize learning, put it in simple
language, rob it of its mystery and make it the common property of the
common people.
Another thing peculiar about these schools is that they were not for
children, but for older students. Eighty per cent. of the students in
the rural high schools are from eighteen to twenty-five years of age; 12
per cent, are more than twenty-five years of age and only 8 per cent.
are under eighteen. These schools, are, in fact, farmer’s colleges. They
presuppose the education of the common school. The farmer’s son and the
farmer’s daughter, before they enter the rural high school, have had the
training in the public schools and have had practical schooling in the
work of the farm and the home. At just about the age when a boy or a
girl begins to think about leaving home and of striking out in the world
for himself; just at the age when there comes, if ever, to a youth the
desire to know something about the larger world and about all the
mysteries and secrets that are buried away in books or handed down as
traditions in the schools—just at this time the boys and girls are sent
away to spend two seasons or more in a rural high school. As a rule they
go, not to the school in their neighbourhood but to some other part of
the country. There they make the acquaintance of other young men and
women who, like themselves, have come directly from the farms, and this
intercourse and acquaintance helps to give them a sense of common
interest and to build up what the socialists call a “class
consciousness.” All of this experience becomes important a little later
in the building up of the coöperative societies, coöperative dairies,
coöperative slaughter houses, societies for the production and sale of
eggs, for cattle raising and for other purposes.
The present organization of agriculture in Denmark is indirectly but
still very largely due to the influence of the rural school.
The rural high school came into existence, as I have said, as the result
of a religious rather than of a merely social or economic movement.
Different in methods and in outward form as these high schools are from
the industrial schools for the Negro in America, they have this in
common, that they are non-sectarian, but in the broadest, deepest sense
of that word, religious. They seek, not merely to broaden the minds, but
to raise and strengthen the moral life of masses of the people. This
peculiar character of the Danish rural high school was defined to me in
one word by a gentleman I met in Denmark. He called them
“inspirational.”
It is said of Grundvig that he was one of those who did not look for
salvation merely in political freedom. In spite of this fact, the rural
high schools have had a large influence upon politics in Denmark. It is
due to them, although they have carefully abstained from any kind of
political agitation, that Denmark, under the influence of its “Peasant
Ministry,” has become the most democratic country in Europe. It is
certainly a striking illustration of the result of this education that
what, a comparatively few years ago, was the lowest and the most
oppressed class in Denmark, namely the small farmer, has become the
controlling power in the State, as seems to be the case at the present
time.
I have gone to some length to describe the plans and general character
of the rural high schools because they are the earliest, the most
peculiar and unusual feature in Danish rural life and education, and
because, although conducted in the same spirit, they are different in
form and methods from the industrial schools with which I have been
mainly interested during the greater part of my life.
The high schools, however, are only one part of the Danish system of
rural schools. In recent years there has grown up side by side with the
rural high school another type of school for the technical training in
agriculture and in the household arts. For example, not more than half a
mile from the rural high school which I visited at Roskilde, there has
recently been erected what we in America would call an industrial
school, where scientific agriculture, as well as technical training in
home-keeping are given. In this school, young men and women get much the
same practical training that is given our students at Tuskegee, with the
exception that this training is confined to agriculture and
housekeeping. Besides, there is, in these agricultural schools, no
attempt to give students a general education as is the case with the
industrial schools in the South. In fact, schools like Hampton and
Tuskegee are trying to do for their students at one and the same time,
what is done in Denmark through two distinct types of school.
I found this school, like its neighbour the high school, admirably
situated, surrounded by beautiful gardens in which the students raised
their own vegetables. In the kitchen, the young women learned to prepare
the meals and to set the tables. I was interested to see also that, in
the whole organization of the school there was an attempt to preserve
the simplicity of country life. In the furniture, for example, there was
an attempt to preserve the solid simplicity and quaint artistic shapes
with which the wealthier peasants of fifty or a hundred years ago
furnished their homes. Dr. Robert E. Park, my companion on my trip
through Europe, told me when I visited this school that he found one of
the professors at work in the garden wearing the wooden shoes that used
to be worn everywhere in the country by the peasant people. This man had
travelled widely, had studied in Germany, where he had taken a degree in
his particular specialty at one of the agricultural colleges.
Perhaps the most interesting and instructive part of my visit was the
time that I spent at what is called a husmand’s or cotter’s school,
located at Ringsted and founded by N. J. Nielsen-Klodskov in 1902. At
this school I saw such an exhibition of vegetables, grains, and
especially of apples, as I think I had never seen before, certainly not
at any agricultural school.
I wish I had opportunity to describe in detail all that I saw and
learned about education and the possibilities of country life in the
course of my visit to this interesting school. What impressed me most
with regard to it and to the others that I visited, was the way in which
the different types of schools in Denmark have succeeded in working into
practical harmony with one another; the way also, in which each in its
separate way had united with the other to uplift, vivify, and inspire
the life and work of the country people.
For example, the school at Ringsted, in addition to the winter course in
farming for men and the summer school in household arts for women,
offers, just as we do at Tuskegee, a short course to which the older
people are invited. The courses are divided between the men and the
women, the men’s course coming in the winter and the women’s course in
the summer. During the period of instruction, which lasts eleven days,
these older people live in the school, just as the younger students do
and gain thus the benefit of an intimate association with each other and
with their teachers. To illustrate to what extent this school and the
others like it have reached and touched the people, I will quote from a
letter written to me by the founder. He says: “The Keorehave
Husmandskole (cotter’s school) is the first of its kind in Denmark. It
is a private undertaking and the buildings erected since 1902 are worth
about 400,000 crowns ($100,000). During the seven years in which it has
been in operation 631 men and 603 women have had training for six
months. In addition 3,205 men and women have attended the eleven-day
courses.”
In addition to the short courses in agriculture and housekeeping,
offered by the school at Ringsted, some of the rural high schools hold,
every fall, great public assemblies like our Chautauquas, which last
from a few days to a week and are attended by men and women of the rural
districts. At these meetings there are public lectures on historical,
literary and religious subjects. In the evening there are music,
singing, and dancing, and other forms of amusement. These annual
assemblies, held under the direction of the rural high schools, have
largely taken the place of the former annual harvest-home festivals in
which there was much eating and drinking, as I understand, but very
little that was educational or uplifting. In addition to these yearly
meetings, which draw together people from a distance, there are monthly
meetings which are held either in the high school buildings, or in the
village assembly buildings, or in the halls connected with the village
gymnasiums. In the cities these meetings are sometimes held in the “High
School Homes” as they are called, which serve the double purpose of
places for the meetings of young men’s and young women’s societies and
at the same time as cheap and homelike hotels for the travelling country
people.
In this way the rural high schools have extended their influence to
every part of the country, making the life on the farm attractive, and
enabling Denmark to set before the world an example of what a simple,
wholesome, and beautiful country life can be.
No doubt there are in the country life of Denmark, as of other
countries, some things that cast a shadow here and there on the bright
picture I have drawn. New problems always spring up out of the solution
of the old ones. No matter how much has been accomplished those who know
conditions best will inevitably feel that their work has just been
begun. However that may be, I do not believe there will be found
anywhere a better illustration of the possibilities of education than in
the results achieved by the rural schools of Denmark.
One of the things that one hears a great deal of talk about in America
is the relative value of cultural and vocational education. I do not
think that I clearly understood until I went to Denmark what a
“cultural” education was. I had gotten the idea, from what I had seen of
the so-called “cultural” education in America, that culture was always
associated with Greek and Latin, and that people who advocated it
believed there was some mysterious, almost magical power which was to be
gotten from the study of books, or from the study of something ancient
and foreign, far from the common and ordinary experiences of men. I
found, in Denmark, schools in which almost no text-books are used, which
were more exclusively cultural than any I had ever seen or heard of.
I had gotten the impression that what we ordinarily called culture was
something for the few people who are able to go to college, and that it
was somehow bottled up and sealed in abstract language and in phrases
which it took long years of study to master. I found in Denmark real
scholars engaged in teaching ordinary country people, making it their
peculiar business to strip the learning of the colleges of all that was
technical and abstract and giving it, through the medium of the common
speech, to the common people.
Cultural education has usually been associated in my mind with the
learning of some foreign language, with learning the history and
traditions of some other people. I found in Denmark a kind of education
which, although as far as it went touched every subject and every land
that it was the business of the educated man to know about, sought
especially to inspire an interest and enthusiasm in the art, the
traditions, the language, and the history of Denmark and in the people
by whom the students were surrounded. I saw that a cultural education
could be and should be a kind of education that helps to awaken,
enlighten, and inspire interest, enthusiasm, and faith in one’s self, in
one’s race and in mankind; that it need not be, as it sometimes has been
in Denmark and elsewhere, a kind of education that robs its pupils of
their natural independence, makes them feel that something distant,
foreign, and mysterious is better and higher than what is familiar and
close at hand.
I have never been especially interested in discussing the question of
the particular label that should be attached to any form of education; I
have never taken much interest, for example, in discussing whether the
form of education which we have been giving our students at Tuskegee was
cultural, vocational, or both. I have been only interested in seeing
that it was the kind that was needed by the masses of the people we were
trying to reach, and that the work was done as well as possible under
the circumstances. From what I have learned in Denmark, I have
discovered that what has been done, for example, by Dr. R. H. Boyd in
teaching the Negro people to buy Negro instead of white dolls for their
children, “in order,” as Dr. Boyd says, “to teach the children to admire
and respect their own type”; that what has been done at Fisk University
to inspire in the Negro a love of folksongs; that what has been done at
Tuskegee in our annual Negro Conferences, and in our National Business
League, to awaken an interest and enthusiasm in the masses of the people
for the common life and progress of the race has done more good, and, in
the true sense of the word, been more cultural than all the Greek and
Latin that have ever been studied by all Negroes in all the colleges in
the country.
For culture of this kind spreads over more ground; it touches more
people and touches them more deeply. My study of the Danish rural
schools has not only taught me what may be done to inspire and foster a
national and racial spirit, but it has shown how closely interwoven are
the moral and material conditions of the people, so that each man
responds to and reflects the progress of every other man in a way to
bring about a healthful, wholesome condition of national and racial
life.
CHAPTER XII
THE MISTAKES AND THE FUTURE OF NEGRO EDUCATION
During the thirty years I have been engaged in Negro education in the
South my work has brought me into contact with many different kinds of
Negro schools. I have visited these schools in every part of the South
and have had an opportunity to study their work and learn something of
their difficulties as well as of their successes. During the last five
years, for example, I have taken time from my other work to make
extended trips of observation through eight different states, looking
into the condition of the schools and saying a word, wherever I went, in
their interest. I have had opportunities, as I went about, to note not
merely the progress that has been made inside the school houses, but to
observe, also, the effects which the different types of schools have had
upon the homes and in the communities by which they are surrounded.
Considering all that I have seen and learned of Negro education in the
way I have described, it has occurred to me that I could not do better
in the concluding reminiscences of my own larger education than give
some sort of summary statement, not only of what has been accomplished,
but what seems to be the present needs and prospects of Negro education
in general for the Southern States. In view also of the fact that I have
gained the larger part of my own larger education in what I have been
able to do for this cause, the statement may not seem out of place here.
Let me then, first of all, say that never in the history of the world
has a people, coming so lately out of slavery, made such efforts to
catch up with and attain the highest and best in the civilization about
them; never has such a people made the same amount of progress in the
same time as is the case of the Negro people of America.
At the same time, I ought to add, also, that never in the history of the
world has there been a more generous effort on the part of one race to
help civilize and build up another than has been true of the American
white man and the Negro. I say this because it should be remembered
that, if the white man in America was responsible for bringing the Negro
here and holding him in slavery, the white man in America was equally
responsible for giving him his freedom and the opportunities by which he
has been able to make the tremendous progress of the last forty-eight
years.
In spite of this fact, in looking over and considering conditions of
Negro education in the South to-day, not so much with reference to the
past as to the future, I am impressed with the imperfect, incomplete,
and unsatisfactory condition in which that education now is. I fear that
there is much misconception, both in the North and in the South, in
regard to the actual opportunities for education which the Negro has.
In the first place, in spite of all that has been said about it, the
mass of the Negro people has never had, either in the common schools or
in the Negro colleges in the South, an education in the same sense as
the white people in the Northern States have had an education. Without
going into details, let me give a few facts in regard to the Negro
schools of so-called higher learning in the South. There are twenty-five
Negro schools which are ordinarily classed as colleges in the South.
They have, altogether, property and endowments, according to the report
of the United States commissioner of education, of $7,993,028. There are
eleven single institutions of higher learning in the Northern States,
each of which has property and endowment equal to or greater than all
the Negro colleges in the South. There are, for instance, five colleges
or universities in the North every one of which has property and
endowments amounting to more than $20,000,000; there are three
universities which together have property and endowments amounting to
nearly $100,000,000.
The combined annual income of twenty-four principal Negro colleges is
$1,048,317. There are fifteen white schools that have a yearly income of
from one million to five million dollars each. In fact, there is one
single institution of learning in the North which, in the year of 1909,
had an income, nearly twice as large as the combined income of the one
hundred and twenty-three Negro colleges, industrial schools, and other
private institutions of learning of which the commissioner of education
has any report. These facts indicate, I think, that however numerous the
Negro institutions of higher learning may be, the ten million Negroes in
the United States are not getting from them, either in quality or in
quantity, an education such as they ought to have.
Let me speak, however, of conditions as I have found them in some of the
more backward Negro communities. In my own state, for example, there are
communities in which Negro teachers are now being paid not more than
from fifteen dollars to seventeen dollars a month for services covering
a period of three or four months in the year. As I stated in a recent
open letter to the Montgomery _Advertiser_, more money is paid for Negro
convicts than for Negro teachers. About forty-six dollars a month is now
being paid for first-class, able-bodied Negro convicts, thirty-six
dollars for second-class, and twenty-six dollars for third-class, and
this is for twelve months in the year. This will, perhaps, at least
suggest the conditions that exist in some of the Negro rural schools.
I do not mean to say that conditions are as bad everywhere as these that
I refer to. Nevertheless, when one speaks “of the results of Negro
education” it should be remembered that, so far as concerns the masses
of the Negro people, education has never yet been really tried.
One of the troubles with Negro education at the present time is that
there are no definite standards of education among the different Negro
schools. It is not possible to tell, for instance, from the name of an
institution, whether it is teaching the ordinary common school branches,
Greek and Latin, or carpentry, blacksmithing, and sewing. More than
that, there is no accepted standard as to the methods or efficiency of
the teaching in these schools. A student may be getting a mere
smattering, not even learning sufficient reading and writing to be able
to read with comfort a book or a newspaper. He may be getting a very
good training in one subject and almost nothing in some other. A boy
entering such a school does not know what he is going for, and, nine
times out of ten, he will come away without knowing what he got. In many
cases, the diploma that the student carries home with him at the
conclusion of his course is nothing less than a gold brick. It has made
him believe that he has gotten an education, when he has actually never
had an opportunity to find out what an education is.
I have in mind a young man who came to us from one of those little
colleges to which I have referred where he had studied Greek, Latin,
German, astronomy, and, among other things, stenography. He found that
he could not use his Greek and Latin and that he had not learned enough
German to be able to use the language, so he came to us as a
stenographer. Unfortunately, he was not much better in stenography and
in English than he was in German. After he had failed as a stenographer,
he tried several other things, but because he had gone through a college
and had a diploma, he could never bring himself to the point of fitting
himself to do well any one thing. The consequence was that he went
wandering about the country, always dissatisfied and unhappy, never
giving satisfaction to himself or to his employers.
Although this young man was not able to write a letter in English
without making grammatical errors or errors of some kind or other, the
last time I heard of him he was employed as a teacher of business, in
fact, he was at the head of the business department in one of the little
colleges to which I have referred. He was not able to use his
stenography in a well-equipped office, but he was able to teach
stenography sufficiently well to meet the demands of the business course
as given in the kind of Negro college of which there are, unfortunately,
too many in the South.
Now, there was nothing the matter with this young man—excepting his
education. He was industrious, ambitious, absolutely trustworthy, and,
if he had been able to stick at any one position long enough to learn to
do the work required of him well, he would have made, in my opinion, a
very valuable man. As it was, his higher education spoiled him. In going
through college he had been taught that he was getting an education
when, as a matter of fact, he really had no education worth the mention.
One of the mistakes that Negro schools have frequently made has been the
effort to cover, in some sort of way, the whole school curriculum from
the primary, through the college, taking their students, as a friend of
mine once said, “from the cradle to the grave.” The result is that many
of the Negro colleges have so burdened themselves with the work of an
elementary grade that they are actually doing no college work at all,
although they still keep up the forms and their students still speak of
themselves as “college students.”
In this way nearly every little school calling itself a college has
attempted to set up a complete school system of its own, reaching from
the primary grade up through the university. These schools, having set
themselves an impossible task, particularly in view of the small means
that they have at their command, it is no wonder that their work is
often badly done.
I remember visiting one of these institutions in the backwoods district
of one of the Southern States. The school was carried on in an old
ramshackle building, which had been erected by the students and the
teachers, although it was evident that not one of them had more than the
most primitive notion of how to handle a saw or a square.
The wind blew through the building from end to end. Heaps of Bibles,
which had been presented to the school by some friends, were piled up on
the floor in one corner of the building. The dormitory was in the most
disorderly condition one could possibly imagine. Half of the building
had been burned away and had never been rebuilt. Broken beds and old
mattresses were piled helter-skelter about in the rooms. What showed as
well as anything the total incompetency of everybody connected with the
school were the futile efforts that had been made to obtain a supply of
drinking water. The yard around the school, which they called the
“campus,” was full of deep and dangerous holes, where some one had
attempted at different times to dig a well but failed, because, as was
evident enough, he had not the slightest idea of how the work should
have been done.
At the time I was there the school was supplied with water from an old
swamp in the neighbourhood, but the president of the college explained
to me an elaborate plan which he had evolved for creating an artificial
lake and this enterprise, he said, had the added advantage of furnishing
work for the students.
When I asked this man in regard to his course of study, he handed me a
great sheet of paper, about fifteen inches wide and two feet long,
filled with statements that he had copied from the curricula of all
sorts of different schools, including theological seminaries,
universities, and industrial schools. From this sheet, it appeared that
he proposed to teach in his school everything from Hebrew to telegraphy.
In fact, it would have taken at least two hundred teachers to do all the
work that he had laid out.
When I asked him why it was that he did not confine himself within the
limits of what the students needed and of what he would be able to
teach, he explained to me that he had found that some people wanted one
kind of education and some people wanted another. As far as he was
concerned, he took a liberal view and was willing to give anybody
anything that was wanted. If his students wanted industrial education,
theological education, or college education, he proposed to give it to
them.
I suggested to him that the plan was liberal enough, but it would be
impossible for him to carry it out. “Yes,” he replied, “it may be
impossible just now, but I believe in aiming high.” The pathetic thing
about it all was that this man and the people with whom he had
surrounded himself were perfectly sincere in what they were trying to
do. They simply did not know what an education was or what it was for.
We have in the South, in general, five types of Negro schools. There are
(1) the common schools, supported in large part by state funds
supplemented in many cases by contributions from the coloured people;
(2) academies and so-called colleges, or universities, supported partly
by different Negro religious denominations and partly by the
contributions of philanthropic persons and organizations; (3) the state
normal, mechanical, and agricultural colleges, supported in part by the
state and in part by funds provided by the Federal Government; (4)
medical schools, which are usually attached to some one or other of the
colleges, but really maintain a more or less independent existence; (5)
industrial schools, on the model of Hampton and Tuskegee.
Although these schools exist, in many cases, side by side, most of them
are attempting to do, more or less, the work of all the others. Because
every school is attempting to do the work of every other, the
opportunities for coöperation and team work are lost. Instead one finds
them frequently quarrelling and competing among themselves both for
financial support and for students. The colleges and the academies
frequently draw students away from the public schools. The state
agricultural schools, supported in part by the National Government, are
hardly distinguishable from some of the theological seminaries. Instead
of working in coöperation with one another and with the public
authorities in building up the public schools, thus bringing the various
institutions of learning into some sort of working harmony and system,
it not infrequently happens that the different schools are spending time
and energy in trying to hamper and injure one another.
We have had some experience at Tuskegee of this lack of coöperation
among the different types of Negro schools. For some years we have
employed as teachers a large number of graduates, not only from some of
the better Negro colleges in the South, but from some of the best
colleges in the North as well. In spite of the fact that Tuskegee offers
a larger market for the services of these college graduates than they
are able to find elsewhere, I have yet to find a single graduate who has
come to us from any of these colleges in the South who has made any
study of the aims or purposes of industrial education. And this is true,
although some of the colleges claim that a large part of their work
consists in preparing teachers for work in industrial schools.
Not only has it been true that graduates of these colleges have had no
knowledge or preparation which fitted them for teaching in an industrial
school, but in many cases, they have come to us with the most distorted
notions of what these industrial schools were seeking to do.
Perhaps the larger proportion of the college graduates go, when they
leave college, as teachers into the city or rural schools. Nevertheless,
there is the same lack of coöperation between the colleges and the
public schools that I have described as existing between the colleges
and the industrial schools. It is a rare thing, so far as my experience
goes, for students in the Negro colleges to have had an opportunity to
make any systematic study of the actual condition and needs of the
schools or communities in which they are employed after they graduate.
Instead of working out and teaching methods of connecting the school
with life, thus making it a centre and a source of inspiration that
might gradually transform the communities about them, these colleges
have too frequently permitted their graduates to go out with the idea
that their diploma was a sort of patent of nobility, and that the
possessor of it was a superior being who was making a sacrifice in
merely bestowing himself or herself as a teacher upon the communities to
which he or she was called.
One of the chief hindrances to the progress of Negro education in the
public schools in the South is in my opinion due to the fact that the
Negro colleges in which so many of the teachers are prepared have not
realized the importance of convincing the Southern white people that
education makes the same improvement in the Negro that it does in the
white man; makes him so much more useful in his labour, so much better a
citizen, and so much more dependable in all the relations of life, that
it is worth while to spend the money to give him an education. As long
as the masses of the Southern white people remain unconvinced by the
results of the education which they see about them that education makes
the Negro a better man or woman, so long will the masses of the Negro
people who are dependent upon the public schools for their instruction
remain to a greater or less extent in ignorance.
[Illustration:
COLLIS P. HUNTINGTON MEMORIAL BUILDING
Tuskegee Institute
]
[Illustration:
THE OFFICE BUILDING
In which are located the administrative offices of the school, the
Institute Bank and the Institute Post Office
]
Some of the schools of the strictly academic type have declared that
their purpose in sticking to the old-fashioned scholastic studies was to
make of their students Christian gentlemen. Of course, every man and
every woman should be a Christian and, if possible, a gentleman or a
lady; but it is not necessary to study Greek or Latin to be a Christian.
More than that, a school that is content with merely turning out ladies
and gentlemen who are not at the same time something else—who are not
lawyers, doctors, business men, bankers, carpenters, farmers, teachers,
not even housewives, but merely ladies and gentlemen—such a school is
bound, in my estimation, to be more or less of a failure. There is no
room in this country, and never has been, for the class of people who
are merely gentlemen, and, if I may judge from what I have lately seen
abroad, the time is coming when there will be no room in any country for
the class of people who are merely gentlemen—for people, in other words,
who are not fitted to perform some definite service for the country or
the community in which they live.
In the majority of cases I have found that the smaller Negro colleges
have been modelled on the schools started in the South by the
anti-slavery people from the North directly after the war. Perhaps there
were too many institutions started at that time for teaching Greek and
Latin, considering that the foundation had not yet been laid in a good
common school system. It should be remembered, however, that the people
who started these schools had a somewhat different purpose from that for
which schools ordinarily exist to-day. They believed that it was
necessary to complete the emancipation of the Negro by demonstrating to
the world that the black man was just as able to learn from books as the
white man, a thing that had been frequently denied during the long
anti-slavery controversy.
I think it is safe to say that that has now been demonstrated. What
remains to be shown is that the Negro can go as far as the white man in
using his education, of whatever kind it may be, to make himself a more
useful and valuable member of society. Especially is it necessary to
convince the Southern white man that education, in the case of the
coloured man, is a necessary step in the progress and upbuilding, not
merely of the Negro, but of the South.
It should be remembered in this connection that there are thousands of
white men in the South who are perfectly friendly to the Negro and would
like to do something to help him, but who have not yet been convinced
that education has actually done the Negro any good. Nothing will change
their minds but an opportunity to see results for themselves.
The reason more progress has not been made in this direction is that the
schools planted in the South by the Northern white people have
remained—not always through their own fault to be sure—in a certain
sense, alien institutions. They have not considered, in planning their
courses of instruction, the actual needs either of the Negro or of the
South. Not infrequently young men and women have gotten so out of touch
during the time that they were in these schools with the actual
conditions and needs of the Negro and the South that it has taken years
before they were able to get back to earth and find places where they
would be useful and happy in some form or other of necessary and useful
labour.
Sometimes it has happened that Negro college students, as a result of
the conditions under which they were taught, have yielded to the
temptation to become mere agitators, unwilling and unfit to do any kind
of useful or constructive work. Naturally under such conditions as
teachers, or in any other capacity, they have not been able to be of
much use in winning support in the South for Negro education.
Nevertheless it is in the public schools of the South that the masses of
the Negro people must get their education, if they are to get any
education at all.
I have long been of the opinion that the persons in charge of the Negro
colleges do not realize the extent to which it is possible to create in
every part of the South a friendly sentiment toward Negro education,
provided it can be shown that this education has actually benefited and
helped in some practical way the masses of the Negro people with whom
the white man in the South comes most in contact. We should not forget
that as a rule in the South it is not the educated Negro, but the masses
of the people, the farmers, labourers, and servants, with whom the white
people come in daily contact. If the higher education which is given to
the few does not in some way directly or indirectly reach and help the
masses very little will be done toward making Negro education popular in
the South or toward securing from the different states the means to
carry it on.
On the other hand, just so soon as the Southern white man can see for
himself the effects of Negro education in the better service he receives
from the labourer on the farm or in the shop; just so soon as the white
merchant finds that education is giving the Negro not only more wants,
but more money with which to satisfy these wants, thus making him a
better customer; when the white people generally discover that Negro
education lessens crime and disease and makes the Negro in every way a
better citizen, then the white taxpayer will not look upon the money
spent for Negro education as a mere sop to the Negro race, or perhaps as
money entirely thrown away.
I said something like this some years ago to the late Mr. H. H. Rogers
and together we devised a plan for giving the matter a fair test. He
proposed that we take two or three counties for the purpose of the
experiment, give them good schools, and see what would be the result.
We agreed that it would be of no use to build these schools and give
them outright to the people, but determined rather to use a certain
amount of money to stimulate and encourage the coloured people in these
counties to help themselves. The experiment was started first of all in
Macon County, Ala., in the fall of 1905. Before it was completed Mr.
Rogers died, but members of his family kindly consented to carry on the
work to the end of the term that we had agreed upon—that is to say, to
October, 1910.
As a result of this work forty-six new school buildings were erected at
an average cost of seven hundred dollars each; school terms were
lengthened from three and four to eight and nine months, at an average
cost to the people themselves of thirty-six hundred dollars per year.
Altogether about twenty thousand dollars was raised by the people in the
course of this five-year period. Similar work on a less extensive scale
was done in four other counties. As a result we now have in Macon County
a model public-school system, supported in part by the county board of
education, and in part by the contributions of the people themselves.
As soon as we had begun with the help of the coloured people in the
different country communities to erect these model schools throughout
the county, C. J. Calloway, who had charge of the experiment, began
advertising in coloured papers throughout the South that in Macon County
it was possible for a Negro farmer to buy land in small or large tracts
near eight-months’ schools. Before long the Negro farmers not only from
adjoining counties, but from Georgia and the neighbouring states, began
to make inquiries. A good many farmers who were not able to buy land but
wanted to be near a good school began to move into the county in order
to go to work on the farms. Others who already had property in other
parts of the South sold out and bought land in Macon County. Mr.
Calloway informs me that, during the last five years, he alone has sold
land in this county to something like fifty families at a cost of
$49,740. He sold during the year 1910 1450 acres at a cost of $21,335.
I do not think that any of us realized the full value of this
immigration into Macon County until the census of 1910 revealed the
extent to which the dislocation of the farming population has been going
on in other parts of the state. The census shows, for example, that a
majority of the Black Belt counties in Alabama instead of increasing
have lost population during the last ten years. It is in the Black Belt
counties which have no large cities that this decrease has taken place.
Macon County, although it has no large cities, is an exception, for
instead of losing population it shows an increase of more than ten per
cent.
I think that there are two reasons for this: In the first place there is
very little Negro crime and no mob violence in Macon County. The liquor
law is enforced and there are few Negroes in Macon County who do not
coöperate with the officers of the law in the effort to get rid of the
criminal element.
In the second place, Macon County is provided not only with the schools
that I have described, but with teachers who instruct their pupils in
regard to things that will help them and their parents to improve their
homes, their stock, and their land, and in other ways to earn a better
living.
When the facts brought out by the census were published in Alabama they
were the subject of considerable discussion among the large planters and
in the public press generally. In the course of this discussion I called
attention, in a letter to the Montgomery _Advertiser_, to the facts to
which I have referred.
In commenting upon this letter the editor of The _Advertiser_ said:
The State of Alabama makes liberal appropriations for education and it
is part of the system for the benefit to reach both white and black
children. It must be admitted that there are many difficulties in
properly spending the money and properly utilizing it which will take
time and the legislature to correct. The matter complained of in the
Washington letter could be easily remedied by the various county
superintendents and it is their duty to see that the causes for such
complaint are speedily removed. Negro fathers and mothers have shown
intense interest in the education of their children and if they cannot
secure what they want at present residences they will as soon as
possible seek it elsewhere. We commend Booker Washington’s letter on
this subject to the careful consideration of all the school officials
and to all citizens of Alabama.
The value of the experiment made in Macon County is, in my opinion, less
in the actual good that has been done to the twenty-six thousand people,
white and black, who live there, than it is in the showing by actual
experiment what a proper system of Negro education can do in a country
district toward solving the racial problem.
We have no race problem in Macon County; there is no friction between
the races; agriculture is improving; the county is growing in wealth. In
talking with the sheriff recently he told me that there is so little
crime in this county that he scarcely finds enough to keep him busy.
Furthermore, I think I am perfectly safe in saying that the white people
in this county are convinced that Negro education pays.
What is true of Macon County may, in my opinion, be true of every other
county in the South. Much will be accomplished in bringing this about if
those schools which are principally engaged in preparing teachers shall
turn about and face in the direction of the South, where their work
lies. My own experience convinces me that the easiest way to get money
for any good work is to show that you are willing and able to perform
the work for which the money is given. The best illustration of this is,
perhaps, the success, in spite of difficulties and with almost no
outside aid, of the best of the Negro medical colleges. These colleges,
although very largely dependent upon the fees of their students for
support, have been successful because they have prepared their students
for a kind of service for which there was a real need.
What convinces me that the same sort of effort outside of Macon County
will meet with the same success is that it has in fact met with the same
success in the case of Hampton and some other schools that are doing a
somewhat similar work. On “the educational campaigns” which I have made
from time to time through the different Southern States I have been
continually surprised and impressed at the interest taken by the better
class of white people in the work that I was trying to do. Everywhere in
the course of these trips I have met with a cordial, even an
enthusiastic, reception not only from the coloured people but from the
white people as well.
For example, during my trip through North Carolina in November of 1910,
not only were the suggestions I tried to make for the betterment of the
schools and for the improvement of racial relations frequently discussed
and favourably commented upon in the daily newspapers, but after my
return I received a number of letters and endorsements from
distinguished white men in different parts of the state who had heard
what I had had to say.
I was asked the other day by a gentleman who has long been interested in
the welfare of the coloured people what I thought the Negro needed most
after nearly fifty years of freedom. I promptly answered him that the
Negro needed now what he needed fifty years ago, namely, education. If I
had attempted to be more specific I might have added that what Negro
education needed most was not so much more schools or different kinds of
schools as an educational policy and a school system.
In the last analysis, the work of building up such a school system as I
have suggested must fall upon the industrial normal schools and colleges
which prepare the teacher, because it is the success or failure of the
teacher which determines the success of the school. In order to make a
beginning in the direction which I have indicated, the different schools
and colleges will have to spend much less time in the future than they
have in the past in quarrelling over the kind of education the Negro
ought to have and devote more time and attention to giving him some kind
of education.
In order to accomplish this it will be necessary for these schools to
obtain very much larger sums of money for education than they are now
getting. I believe, however, if the different schools will put the
matter to the people in the North and the people in the South “in the
right shape,” it will be possible to get much larger sums from every
source. I believe the state governments in the South are going to see to
it that the Negro public schools get a much fairer share of the money
raised for education in the future than they have in the past. At the
same time I feel that very few people realize the extent to which the
coloured people are willing and able to pay, and, in fact, are now
paying, for their own education. The higher and normal schools can
greatly aid the Negro people in raising among themselves the money
necessary to build up the educational system of the South if they will
prepare their teachers to give the masses of the people the kind of
education which will help them to increase their earnings instead of
giving them the kind of education that makes them discontented and
unhappy and does not give them the courage or disposition to help
themselves.
In spite of all the mistakes and misunderstandings, I believe that the
Negro people, in their struggle to get on their feet intellectually and
find the kind of education that would fit their needs, have done much to
give the world a broader and more generous conception of what education
is and should be than it had before.
Education, in order to do for the Negro the thing he most needed, has
had to do more and different things than it was considered possible and
fitting for a school to undertake before the problem of educating a
newly enfranchised people arose. It has done this by bringing education
into contact with men and women in their homes and in their daily work.
The importance of the scheme of education which has been worked out,
particularly in industrial schools, is not confined to America or to the
Negro race. Wherever in Europe, in Africa, in Asia, or elsewhere great
masses are coming for the first time in contact with and under the
influence of a higher civilization, the methods of industrial education
that have been worked out in the South by, with, and through the Negro
schools are steadily gaining recognition and importance.
It seems to me that this is a fact that should not only make the Negro
proud of his past, brief as it has been, but, at the same time, hopeful
of the future.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Used numbers for footnotes.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
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