Chapter XVII. Last Words

UP FROM SLAVERY:

Preface

This volume is the outgrowth of a series of articles, dealing with

incidents in my life, which were published consecutively in the

Outlook. While they were appearing in that magazine I was constantly

surprised at the number of requests which came to me from all parts of

the country, asking that the articles be permanently preserved in book

form. I am most grateful to the Outlook for permission to gratify these

requests.

I have tried to tell a simple, straightforward story, with no attempt

at embellishment. My regret is that what I have attempted to do has

been done so imperfectly. The greater part of my time and strength is

required for the executive work connected with the Tuskegee Normal and

Industrial Institute, and in securing the money necessary for the

support of the institution. Much of what I have said has been written

on board trains, or at hotels or railroad stations while I have been

waiting for trains, or during the moments that I could spare from my

work while at Tuskegee. Without the painstaking and generous assistance

of Mr. Max Bennett Thrasher I could not have succeeded in any

satisfactory degree.

Introduction

The details of Mr. Washington’s early life, as frankly set down in “Up

from Slavery,” do not give quite a whole view of his education. He had

the training that a coloured youth receives at Hampton, which, indeed,

the autobiography does explain. But the reader does not get his

intellectual pedigree, for Mr. Washington himself, perhaps, does not as

clearly understand it as another man might. The truth is he had a

training during the most impressionable period of his life that was

very extraordinary, such a training as few men of his generation have

had. To see its full meaning one must start in the Hawaiian Islands

half a century or more ago.* There Samuel Armstrong, a youth of

missionary parents, earned enough money to pay his expenses at an

American college. Equipped with this small sum and the earnestness that

the undertaking implied, he came to Williams College when Dr. Mark

Hopkins was president. Williams College had many good things for youth

in that day, as it has in this, but the greatest was the strong

personality of its famous president. Every student does not profit by a

great teacher; but perhaps no young man ever came under the influence

of Dr. Hopkins, whose whole nature was so ripe for profit by such an

experience as young Armstrong. He lived in the family of President

Hopkins, and thus had a training that was wholly out of the common; and

this training had much to do with the development of his own strong

character, whose originality and force we are only beginning to

appreciate.

* For this interesting view of Mr. Washington’s education, I am

indebted to Robert C. Ogden, Esq., Chairman of the Board of Trustees

of Hampton Institute and the intimate friend of General Armstrong

during the whole period of his educational work.

In turn, Samuel Armstrong, the founder of Hampton Institute, took up

his work as a trainer of youth. He had very raw material, and doubtless

most of his pupils failed to get the greatest lessons from him; but, as

he had been a peculiarly receptive pupil of Dr. Hopkins, so Booker

Washington became a peculiarly receptive pupil of his. To the formation

of Mr. Washington’s character, then, went the missionary zeal of New

England, influenced by one of the strongest personalities in modern

education, and the wide-reaching moral earnestness of General Armstrong

himself. These influences are easily recognizable in Mr. Washington

to-day by men who knew Dr. Hopkins and General Armstrong.

I got the cue to Mr. Washington’s character from a very simple incident

many years ago. I had never seen him, and I knew little about him,

except that he was the head of a school at Tuskegee, Alabama. I had

occasion to write to him, and I addressed him as “The Rev. Booker T.

Washington.” In his reply there was no mention of my addressing him as

a clergyman. But when I had occasion to write to him again, and

persisted in making him a preacher, his second letter brought a

postscript: “I have no claim to ‘Rev.’” I knew most of the coloured men

who at that time had become prominent as leaders of their race, but I

had not then known one who was neither a politician nor a preacher; and

I had not heard of the head of an important coloured school who was not

a preacher. “A new kind of man in the coloured world,” I said to

myself—“a new kind of man surely if he looks upon his task as an

economic one instead of a theological one.” I wrote him an apology for

mistaking him for a preacher.

The first time that I went to Tuskegee I was asked to make an address

to the school on Sunday evening. I sat upon the platform of the large

chapel and looked forth on a thousand coloured faces, and the choir of

a hundred or more behind me sang a familiar religious melody, and the

whole company joined in the chorus with unction. I was the only white

man under the roof, and the scene and the songs made an impression on

me that I shall never forget. Mr. Washington arose and asked them to

sing one after another of the old melodies that I had heard all my

life; but I had never before heard them sung by a thousand voices nor

by the voices of educated Negroes. I had associated them with the Negro

of the past, not with the Negro who was struggling upward. They brought

to my mind the plantation, the cabin, the slave, not the freedman in

quest of education. But on the plantation and in the cabin they had

never been sung as these thousand students sang them. I saw again all

the old plantations that I had ever seen; the whole history of the

Negro ran through my mind; and the inexpressible pathos of his life

found expression in these songs as I had never before felt it.

And the future? These were the ambitious youths of the race, at work

with an earnestness that put to shame the conventional student life of

most educational institutions. Another song rolled up along the

rafters. And as soon as silence came, I found myself in front of this

extraordinary mass of faces, thinking not of them, but of that long and

unhappy chapter in our country’s history which followed the one great

structural mistake of the Fathers of the Republic; thinking of the one

continuous great problem that generations of statesmen had wrangled

over, and a million men fought about, and that had so dwarfed the mass

of English men in the Southern States as to hold them back a hundred

years behind their fellows in every other part of the world—in England,

in Australia, and in the Northern and Western States; I was thinking of

this dark shadow that had oppressed every large-minded statesman from

Jefferson to Lincoln. These thousand young men and women about me were

victims of it. I, too, was an innocent victim of it. The whole Republic

was a victim of that fundamental error of importing Africa into

America. I held firmly to the first article of my faith that the

Republic must stand fast by the principle of a fair ballot; but I

recalled the wretched mess that Reconstruction had made of it; I

recalled the low level of public life in all the “black” States. Every

effort of philanthropy seemed to have miscarried, every effort at

correcting abuses seemed of doubtful value, and the race friction

seemed to become severer. Here was the century-old problem in all its

pathos seated singing before me. Who were the more to be pitied—these

innocent victims of an ancient wrong, or I and men like me, who had

inherited the problem? I had long ago thrown aside illusions and

theories, and was willing to meet the facts face to face, and to do

whatever in God’s name a man might do towards saving the next

generation from such a burden. But I felt the weight of twenty

well-nigh hopeless years of thought and reading and observation; for

the old difficulties remained and new ones had sprung up. Then I saw

clearly that the way out of a century of blunders had been made by this

man who stood beside me and was introducing me to this audience. Before

me was the material he had used. All about me was the indisputable

evidence that he had found the natural line of development. He had

shown the way. Time and patience and encouragement and work would do

the rest.

It was then more clearly than ever before that I understood the

patriotic significance of Mr. Washington’s work. It is this conception

of it and of him that I have ever since carried with me. It is on this

that his claim to our gratitude rests.

To teach the Negro to read, whether English, or Greek, or Hebrew,

butters no parsnips. To make the Negro work, that is what his master

did in one way and hunger has done in another; yet both these left

Southern life where they found it. But to teach the Negro to do skilful

work, as men of all the races that have risen have worked,—responsible

work, which IS education and character; and most of all when Negroes so

teach Negroes to do this that they will teach others with a missionary

zeal that puts all ordinary philanthropic efforts to shame,—this is to

change the whole economic basis of life and the whole character of a

people.

The plan itself is not a new one. It was worked out at Hampton

Institute, but it was done at Hampton by white men. The plan had, in

fact, been many times theoretically laid down by thoughtful students of

Southern life. Handicrafts were taught in the days of slavery on most

well-managed plantations. But Tuskegee is, nevertheless, a brand-new