chapter in the history of the Negro, and in the history of the

knottiest problem we have ever faced. It not only makes “a carpenter of

a man; it makes a man of a carpenter.” In one sense, therefore, it is

of greater value than any other institution for the training of men and

women that we have, from Cambridge to Palo Alto. It is almost the only

one of which it may be said that it points the way to a new epoch in a

large area of our national life.

To work out the plan on paper, or at a distance—that is one thing. For

a white man to work it out—that too, is an easy thing. For a coloured

man to work it out in the South, where, in its constructive period, he

was necessarily misunderstood by his own people as well as by the

whites, and where he had to adjust it at every step to the strained

race relations—that is so very different and more difficult a thing

that the man who did it put the country under lasting obligations to

him.

It was not and is not a mere educational task. Anybody could teach boys

trades and give them an elementary education. Such tasks have been done

since the beginning of civilization. But this task had to be done with

the rawest of raw material, done within the civilization of the

dominant race, and so done as not to run across race lines and social

lines that are the strongest forces in the community. It had to be done

for the benefit of the whole community. It had to be done, moreover,

without local help, in the face of the direst poverty, done by begging,

and done in spite of the ignorance of one race and the prejudice of the

other.

No man living had a harder task, and a task that called for more wisdom

to do it right. The true measure of Mr. Washington’s success is, then,

not his teaching the pupils of Tuskegee, nor even gaining the support

of philanthropic persons at a distance, but this—that every Southern

white man of character and of wisdom has been won to a cordial

recognition of the value of the work, even men who held and still hold

to the conviction that a mere book education for the Southern blacks

under present conditions is a positive evil. This is a demonstration of

the efficiency of the Hampton-Tuskegee idea that stands like the

demonstration of the value of democratic institutions themselves—a

demonstration made so clear in spite of the greatest odds that it is no

longer open to argument.

Consider the change that has come in twenty years in the discussion of

the Negro problem. Two or three decades ago social philosophers and

statisticians and well-meaning philanthropists were still talking and

writing about the deportation of the Negroes, or about their settlement

within some restricted area, or about their settling in all parts of

the Union, or about their decline through their neglect of their

children, or about their rapid multiplication till they should expel

the whites from the South—of every sort of nonsense under heaven. All

this has given place to the simple plan of an indefinite extension

among the neglected classes of both races of the Hampton-Tuskegee

system of training. The “problem” in one sense has disappeared. The

future will have for the South swift or slow development of its masses

and of its soil in proportion to the swift or slow development of this

kind of training. This change of view is a true measure of Mr.

Washington’s work.

The literature of the Negro in America is colossal, from political

oratory through abolitionism to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Cotton is

King”—a vast mass of books which many men have read to the waste of

good years (and I among them); but the only books that I have read a

second time or ever care again to read in the whole list (most of them

by tiresome and unbalanced “reformers”) are “Uncle Remus” and “Up from

Slavery”; for these are the great literature of the subject. One has

all the best of the past, the other foreshadows a better future; and

the men who wrote them are the only men who have written of the subject

with that perfect frankness and perfect knowledge and perfect poise

whose other name is genius.

Mr. Washington has won a world-wide fame at an early age. His story of

his own life already has the distinction of translation into more

languages, I think, than any other American book; and I suppose that he

has as large a personal acquaintance among men of influence as any

private citizen now living.

His own teaching at Tuskegee is unique. He lectures to his advanced

students on the art of right living, not out of text-books, but

straight out of life. Then he sends them into the country to visit

Negro families. Such a student will come back with a minute report of

the way in which the family that he has seen lives, what their earnings

are, what they do well and what they do ill; and he will explain how

they might live better. He constructs a definite plan for the

betterment of that particular family out of the resources that they

have. Such a student, if he be bright, will profit more by an

experience like this than he could profit by all the books on sociology

and economics that ever were written. I talked with a boy at Tuskegee

who had made such a study as this, and I could not keep from

contrasting his knowledge and enthusiasm with what I heard in a class

room at a Negro university in one of the Southern cities, which is

conducted on the idea that a college course will save the soul. Here

the class was reciting a lesson from an abstruse text-book on

economics, reciting it by rote, with so obvious a failure to assimilate

it that the waste of labour was pitiful.

I asked Mr. Washington years ago what he regarded as the most important

result of his work, and he replied:

“I do not know which to put first, the effect of Tuskegee’s work on the

Negro, or the effect on the attitude of the white man to the Negro.”

The race divergence under the system of miseducation was fast getting

wider. Under the influence of the Hampton-Tuskegee idea the races are

coming into a closer sympathy and into an honourable and helpful

relation. As the Negro becomes economically independent, he becomes a

responsible part of the Southern life; and the whites so recognize him.

And this must be so from the nature of things. There is nothing

artificial about it. It is development in a perfectly natural way. And

the Southern whites not only so recognize it, but they are imitating it

in the teaching of the neglected masses of their own race. It has thus

come about that the school is taking a more direct and helpful hold on

life in the South than anywhere else in the country. Education is not a

thing apart from life—not a “system,” nor a philosophy; it is direct

teaching how to live and how to work.

To say that Mr. Washington has won the gratitude of all thoughtful

Southern white men, is to say that he has worked with the highest

practical wisdom at a large constructive task; for no plan for the

up-building of the freedman could succeed that ran counter to Southern

opinion. To win the support of Southern opinion and to shape it was a

necessary part of the task; and in this he has so well succeeded that

the South has a sincere and high regard for him. He once said to me

that he recalled the day, and remembered it thankfully, when he grew

large enough to regard a Southern white man as he regarded a Northern

one. It is well for our common country that the day is come when he and

his work are regarded as highly in the South as in any other part of

the Union. I think that no man of our generation has a more noteworthy

achievement to his credit than this; and it is an achievement of moral

earnestness of the strong character of a man who has done a great

national service.

Walter H. Page.

UP FROM SLAVERY