Introduction

by Booker T. Washington

　　The details of Mr. Washington's early life, as frankly set downin "Up from Slavery," do not give quite a whole view of hiseducation. He had the training that a coloured youth receives atHampton, which, indeed, the autobiography does explain. But thereader does not get his intellectual pedigree, for Mr. Washingtonhimself, perhaps, does not as clearly understand it as anotherman might. The truth is he had a training during the mostimpressionable period of his life that was very extraordinary,such a training as few men of his generation have had. To see itsfull meaning one must start in the Hawaiian Islands half acentury or more ago.* There Samuel Armstrong, a youth ofmissionary parents, earned enough money to pay his expenses at anAmerican college. Equipped with this small sum and theearnestness that the undertaking implied, he came to WilliamsCollege when Dr. Mark Hopkins was president. Williams College hadmany good things for youth in that day, as it has in this, butthe greatest was the strong personality of its famous president.Every student does not profit by a great teacher; but perhaps noyoung man ever came under the influence of Dr. Hopkins, whosewhole nature was so ripe for profit by such an experience asyoung Armstrong. He lived in the family of President Hopkins, andthus had a training that was wholly out of the common; and thistraining had much to do with the development of his own strongcharacter, whose originality and force we are only beginning toappreciate.* For this interesting view of Mr. Washington's education, I amindebted to Robert C. Ogden, Esq., Chairman of the Board ofTrustees of Hampton Institute and the intimate friend of GeneralArmstrong during the whole period of his educational work.In turn, Samuel Armstrong, the founder of Hampton Institute, tookup his work as a trainer of youth. He had very raw material, anddoubtless most of his pupils failed to get the greatest lessonsfrom him; but, as he had been a peculiarly receptive pupil of Dr.Hopkins, so Booker Washington became a peculiarly receptive pupilof his. To the formation of Mr. Washington's character, then,went the missionary zeal of New England, influenced by one of thestrongest personalities in modern education, and thewide-reaching moral earnestness of General Armstrong himselfThese influences are easily recognizable in Mr. Washington to-dayby men who knew Dr. Hopkins and General Armstrong.I got the cue to Mr. Washington's character from a very simpleincident many years ago. I had never seen him, and I knew littleabout 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 nomention of my addressing him as a clergyman. But when I hadoccasion to write to him again, and persisted in making him apreacher, his second letter brought a postscript: "I have noclaim to 'Rev.'" I knew most of the coloured men who at that timehad become prominent as leaders of their race, but I had not thenknown one who was neither a politician nor a preacher; and I hadnot heard of the head of an important coloured school who was nota preacher. "A new kind of man in the coloured world," I said tomyself--"a new kind of man surely if he looks upon his task as aneconomic one instead of a theological one." I wrote him anapology for mistaking him for a preacher.The first time that I went to Tuskegee I was asked to make anaddress to the school on Sunday evening. I sat upon the platformof the large chapel and looked forth on a thousand colouredfaces, and the choir of a hundred or more behind me sang afamiliar religious melody, and the whole company joined in thechorus with unction. I was the only white man under the roof, andthe scene and the songs made an impression on me that I shallnever forget. Mr. Washington arose and asked them to sing oneafter another of the old melodies that I had heard all my life;but I had never before heard them sung by a thousand voices norby the voices of educated Negroes. I had associated them with theNegro of the past, not with the Negro who was struggling upward.They brought to my mind the plantation, the cabin, the slave, notthe freedman in quest of education. But on the plantation and inthe cabin they had never been sung as these thousand studentssang them. I saw again all the old plantations that I had everseen; the whole history of the Negro ran through my mind; and theinexpressible pathos of his life found expression in these songsas I had never before felt it.And the future? These were the ambitious youths of the race, atwork with an earnestness that put to shame the conventionalstudent life of most educational institutions. Another songrolled up along the rafters. And as soon as silence came, I foundmyself in front of this extraordinary mass of faces, thinking notof them, but of that long and unhappy chapter in our country'shistory which followed the one great structural mistake of theFathers of the Republic; thinking of the one continuous greatproblem that generations of statesmen had wrangled over, and amillion men fought about, and that had so dwarfed the mass ofEnglish men in the Southern States as to hold them back a hundredyears behind their fellows in every other part of the world--inEngland, in Australia, and in the Northern and Western States; Iwas thinking of this dark shadow that had oppressed everylarge-minded statesman from Jefferson to Lincoln. These thousandyoung men and women about me were victims of it. I, too, was aninnocent victim of it. The whole Republic was a victim of thatfundamental error of importing Africa into America. I held firmlyto the first article of my faith that the Republic must standfast by the principle of a fair ballot; but I recalled thewretched mess that Reconstruction had made of it; I recalled thelow level of public life in all the "black" States. Every effortof philanthropy seemed to have miscarried, every effort atcorrecting abuses seemed of doubtful value, and the race frictionseemed to become severer. Here was the century-old problem in allits pathos seated singing before me. Who were the more to bepitied--these innocent victims of an ancient wrong, or I and menlike me, who had inherited the problem? I had long ago thrownaside illusions and theories, and was willing to meet the factsface to face, and to do whatever in God's name a man might dotowards saving the next generation from such a burden. But I feltthe weight of twenty well-nigh hopeless years of thought andreading and observation; for the old difficulties remained andnew ones had sprung up. Then I saw clearly that the way out of acentury of blunders had been made by this man who stood beside meand was introducing me to this audience. Before me was thematerial he had used. All about me was the indisputable evidencethat he had found the natural line of development. He had shownthe way. Time and patience and encouragement and work would dothe rest.It was then more clearly than ever before that I understood thepatriotic significance of Mr. Washington's work. It is thisconception of it and of him that I have ever since carried withme. 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 hismaster did in one way and hunger has done in another; yet boththese left Southern life where they found it. But to teach theNegro to do skilful work, as men of all the races that have risenhave worked,--responsible work, which is education and character;and most of all when Negroes so teach Negroes to do this thatthey will teach others with a missionary zeal that puts allordinary philanthropic efforts to shame,--this is to change thewhole economic basis of life and the whole character of a people.The plan itself is not a new one. It was worked out at HamptonInstitute, but it was done at Hampton by white men. The plan had,in fact, been many times theoretically laid down by thoughtfulstudents of Southern life. Handicrafts were taught in the days ofslavery on most well-managed plantations. But Tuskegee is,nevertheless, a brand-new 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 acarpenter." In one sense, therefore, it is of greater value thanany other institution for the training of men and women that wehave, from Cambridge to Palo Alto. It is almost the only one ofwhich it may be said that it points the way to a new epoch in alarge area of our national life.To work out the plan on paper, or at a distance--that is onething. For a white man to work it out--that too, is an easything. For a coloured man to work it out in the South, where, inits constructive period, he was necessarily misunderstood by hisown people as well as by the whites, and where he had to adjustit at every step to the strained race relations--that is so verydifferent and more difficult a thing that the man who did it putthe country under lasting obligations to him.It was not and is not a mere educational task. Anybody couldteach boys trades and give them an elementary education. Suchtasks have been done since the beginning of civilization. Butthis task had to be done with the rawest of raw material, donewithin the civilization of the dominant race, and so done as notto run across race lines and social lines that are the strongestforces in the community. It had to be done for the benefit of thewhole community. It had to be done, moreover, without local help,in the face of the direst poverty, done by begging, and done inspite of the ignorance of one race and the prejudice of theother.No man living had a harder task, and a task that called for morewisdom to do it right. The true measure of Mr. Washington'ssuccess is, then, not his teaching the pupils of Tuskegee, noreven gaining the support of philanthropic persons at a distance,but this--that every Southern white man of character and ofwisdom has been won to a cordial recognition of the value of thework, even men who held and still hold to the conviction that amere book education for the Southern blacks under presentconditions is a positive evil. This is a demonstration of theefficiency of the Hampton-Tuskegee idea that stands like thedemonstration of the value of democratic institutionsthemselves--a demonstration made so clear in spite of thegreatest odds that it is no longer open to argument.Consider the change that has come in twenty years in thediscussion of the Negro problem. Two or three decades ago socialphilosophers and statisticians and well-meaning philanthropistswere still talking and writing about the deportation of theNegroes, or about their settlement within some restricted area,or about their settling in all parts of the Union, or about theirdecline through their neglect of their children, or about theirrapid multiplication till they should expel the whites from theSouth--of every sort of nonsense under heaven. All this has givenplace to the simple plan of an indefinite extension among theneglected classes of both races of the Hampton-Tuskegee system oftraining. The "problem" in one sense has disappeared. The futurewill have for the South swift or slow development of its massesand of its soil in proportion to the swift or slow development ofthis kind of training. This change of view is a true measure ofMr. Washington's work.The literature of the Negro in America is colossal, frompolitical oratory through abolitionism to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and"Cotton is King"--a vast mass of books which many men have readto the waste of good years (and I among them); but the only booksthat I have read a second time or ever care again to read in thewhole list (most of them by tiresome and unbalanced "reformers")are "Uncle Remus" and "Up from Slavery"; for these are the greatliterature of the subject. One has all the best of the past, theother foreshadows a better future; and the men who wrote them arethe only men who have written of the subject with that perfectfrankness and perfect knowledge and perfect poise whose othername is genius.Mr. Washington has won a world-wide fame at an early age. Hisstory of his own life already has the distinction of translationinto more languages, I think, than any other American book; and Isuppose that he has as large a personal acquaintance among men ofinfluence as any private citizen now living.His own teaching at Tuskegee is unique. He lectures to hisadvanced students on the art of right living, not out oftext-books, but straight out of life. Then he sends them into thecountry to visit Negro families. Such a student will come backwith a minute report of the way in which the family that he hasseen lives, what their earnings are, what they do well and whatthey do ill; and he will explain how they might live better. Heconstructs a definite plan for the betterment of that particularfamily out of the resources that they have. Such a student, if hebe bright, will profit more by an experience like this than hecould profit by all the books on sociology and economics thatever were written. I talked with a boy at Tuskegee who had madesuch a study as this, and I could not keep from contrasting hisknowledge and enthusiasm with what I heard in a class room at aNegro university in one of the Southern cities, which isconducted on the idea that a college course will save the soul.Here the class was reciting a lesson from an abstruse text-bookon economics, reciting it by rote, with so obvious a failure toassimilate it that the waste of labour was pitiful.I asked Mr. Washington years ago what he regarded as the mostimportant result of his work, and he replied:"I do not know which to put first, the effect of Tuskegee's workon the Negro, or the effect on the attitude of the white man tothe Negro."The race divergence under the system of miseducation was fastgetting wider. Under the influence of the Hampton-Tuskegee ideathe races are coming into a closer sympathy and into anhonourable and helpful relation. As the Negro becomeseconomically independent, he becomes a responsible part of theSouthern life; and the whites so recognize him. And this must beso from the nature of things. There is nothing artificial aboutit. It is development in a perfectly natural way. And theSouthern whites not only so recognize it, but they are imitatingit in the teaching of the neglected masses of their own race. Ithas thus come about that the school is taking a more direct andhelpful hold on life in the South than anywhere else in thecountry. Education is not a thing apart from life--not a"system," nor a philosophy; it is direct teaching how to live andhow to work.To say that Mr. Washington has won the gratitude of allthoughtful Southern white men, is to say that he has worked withthe highest practical wisdom at a large constructive task; for noplan for the up-building of the freedman could succeed that rancounter to Southern opinion. To win the support of Southernopinion and to shape it was a necessary part of the task; and inthis he has so well succeeded that the South has a sincere andhigh regard for him. He once said to me that he recalled the day,and remembered it thankfully, when he grew large enough to regarda Southern white man as he regarded a Northern one. It is wellfor our common country that the day is come when he and his workare regarded as highly in the South as in any other part of theUnion. I think that no man of our generation has a morenoteworthy achievement to his credit than this; and it is anachievement of moral earnestness of the strong character of a manwho has done a great national service.Walter H. Page.