Booker T. Washington Part 2

He would next turn to his own people and tell them of their phenomenal progress since emanc.i.p.ation and of the great and essential part they had played in the upbuilding of the South--left prostrate by the Civil War. One could see their eager, upturned faces glow with pride and self-satisfaction. But suddenly he would s.h.i.+ft the tone of his comments and tell them how sadly those of them who were indolent and s.h.i.+ftless and unreliable and vicious were r.e.t.a.r.ding the upward struggles of the industrious and self-respecting majority and how they were perpetuating the prejudice against the whole race. And as he pictured this seamy side of the situation one could see the glow of pride gradually wilt from the myriads of swarthy upturned faces.

Hardly less successful than his use of statistics was his use of the much-abused funny story. He never told a story, however good, for its own sake. He told it only when it would most effectively drive home whatever point he happened to be making. In this same speech he was saying that a Negro who is lazy and unreliable and does nothing to acc.u.mulate property or improve his earning capacity deserves no consideration from whites or blacks and has no right to say that the color line is drawn against him. By way of ill.u.s.tration he told this story: "A s.h.i.+ftless Southern poor white asked a self-respecting old black man for three cents with which to pay his ferry fare across a river. The old black man replied: I's sorry not to commerdate yer, boss, but der fac' is dat a man what ain't got three cents is jest as bad off on one side ob der ribber as der udder.'"

At another point in this speech he was telling his people not to be discouraged because their race has less to point to than other races in the way of past achievements. He said that after all it was the future that was of vital concern and not the past, and that the future was theirs to a peculiar degree because they were a young race. And to ill.u.s.trate their situation he told of meeting old Aunt Caroline one evening striding along with a basket on her head. He said, "Where are you going, Aunt Caroline?" And she replied: "Lor' bless yer, Mister Was.h.i.+n'ton, I dun bin where I's er goin'." "And so," he concluded, "some of the races of the earth have dun bin where dey was er goin'!"

but fortunately the Negro race was not among them.

In making the point that, in spite of race prejudice, the handicaps to which his people were subjected in the South were after all superficial and did not interfere with their chance to work and earn a living, he told the experience of an old Negro who was accompanying him on one of his Southern educational tours. At a certain city they were obliged to wait several hours between trains, so this old man took advantage of the opportunity to stroll about and see the sights of the place. After a while he pulled out his watch and found he had barely time to get back to the station before the train was due to leave. Accordingly he rushed to a hack stand and called out to the first driver he came to, who happened to be a white man: "Hurry up an'

take me to the station, I's gotta get the 4:32 train!" To which the white hack driver replied: "I ain't never drove a n.i.g.g.e.r in my hack yit an' I ain't goin' ter begin now. You can git a n.i.g.g.e.r driver ter take ye down!"

To this the old colored man replied with perfect good nature: "All right, my frien', we won't have no misunderstanding or trouble; I'll tell you how we'll settle it: you jest hop in on der back seat an' do der ridin' and I'll set in front an' do der drivin'." In this way they reached the station amicably and the old man caught his train. Like this old Negro, Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton always devoted his energies to catching the train, and it made little difference to him whether he sat on the front or the back seat.

A few months later, to the five thousand people of his own race in the Harlem Casino in New York City, he described their daily lives, their problems, perplexities, and temptations in terms as homely, as picturesque, and as vivid as he used in talking to the Georgia farmers. He urged them, just as he did the farmers, to stop moving about and to settle down--"to stop _staying_ here and there and everywhere and begin to _live_ somewhere." He urged them to leave the little mechanical job of window was.h.i.+ng, or what not, and go into business for themselves, even if they could only afford a few newspapers or peanuts to start with. He told of a certain New York street where he had found all the people on one side of a row of push carts were selling something, while all the people on the other side were buying something. Those that were selling were white people, while those that were buying were colored people. That, he said, was a color line they had drawn themselves. He reminded them of the high cost of living, and by way of example he commented upon the expense of having to buy so many shoes. He said: "Up here you not only have to have good, expensive shoes, but you have to wear them all the time."

And then he reminded them how back in the country down South, before they came to the city, they would buy a pair of shoes at Christmas and after Christmas put them away in the "chist" and not take them out again until "big meeting day," and then wear them only in the meeting and not walking to and from the church. And as he concluded with the words, "Under those conditions shoes last a long time," people all over the audience were chuckling and nudging and winking at one another as people will when characteristic incidents in their past lives are graphically recalled to them.

Then he described the almost innumerable temptations to spend money which the city offers. Some of the store windows are so enticing that, as he said, "the dollars almost jump out of your pockets as you go by on the sidewalk." "Then you men working for rich men here in the city smell the smoke of so many twenty-five-cent cigars that after a while you feel as though you must smoke twenty-five-cent cigars. You don't stop to think that when the grandfathers of those very men first came from the country a hundred years ago they smoked two-for-five cigars." Then he told of a family he had found living on the tenth story of an electric-lighted, steam-heated apartment house with elevator service, and this very family only two years before was living in a two-room cabin in the Yazoo Valley on the Mississippi bottoms. And he commented: "Now, that family's in danger. No people can change as much and as fast as that without great danger!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: A study in black. Note the tensity of expression with which the group is following his each and every word.]

Next he touched on the high rents and said: "You mothers know that sooner or later you have to take in roomers to help pay that rent, and after a while you take in Tom, d.i.c.k, or Harry, or anybody who's got the money regardless of who or what they are, and you mothers know the danger that spells for your daughters." (At this point he was interrupted by a chorus of "amens" from women all over the great hall.) He continued: "Now, you take the 'old man' aside an' tell him straight, you're not going to have any more roomers hanging round your house--that he's got to hustle for a better job or go into some little business for himself, or move out into some little cottage in the country, or do something to get rid of those Tom, d.i.c.k, and Harry roomers."

In short, in this speech Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton showed that he knew just as intimately the lives of his people in the flats of Greater New York as on the farms of southwestern Georgia.

In spite of his grasp of details Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton never became so immersed in them as to lose sight of his ultimate goal, and conversely he never became so blinded by the vision of his ultimate goal as to overlook details. The solution of the so-called Negro problem in America, he felt, is to be found along these lines: As his people have more and more opportunity for training and become better and better trained they become more and more self-sufficient. They are developing their own carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, farmers, merchants, and bankers as well as lawyers, teachers, preachers, and physicians. These trained people naturally, for the most part, serve their own race, and to them the members of the race naturally turn for the service that each is equipped to render. As they acquire wealth, education, and cultivation, the persons possessing these advantages naturally intermingle socially and build up a society from which the rough, ignorant, and uncouth of their own race are as inevitably excluded as are such persons from all polite social intercourse of whatever people. These Negroes of education and cultivation no more desire to force themselves into the society of the other race than do any persons of real education and cultivation desire to go where they are not wanted. As the race increases in wealth and culture it becomes more and more easy and natural for its successful members to satisfy their social desires and ambitions in their own society. Already in the centres of Negro prosperity and culture it would be almost, if not quite, as impossible for a white man to be received into the best Negro society as it would for a Negro to be received into the best white society. This growing independence and self-sufficiency in the trades, the professions, and social intercourse leads inevitably, as he pointed out, to a form of natural segregation based upon economic needs and social preferences, and in conformity to the laws of nature, which is a very different matter from the artificial and arbitrary segregation forced upon unwilling people by the laws of men. Under these conditions the disputes as to whether the best society of the blacks is inferior or superior to the best society of the whites becomes as academic and futile as would be similar contentions as to whether the best society of Constantinople is inferior or superior to that of Boston.

While Negroes are more and more drawing apart from the whites into their own section of the city, town, or county they nevertheless find it a source of strength to live near the whites in order that they may have the benefit of their aid in those matters in which the older and stronger race excels. Nor is this an entirely one-sided advantage, as there are not a few matters in which the Negroes have natural advantages over the whites and hence may render them useful service.

Thus the two races, socially separated but economically interdependent, may to mutual advantage live side by side.

Some persons claim that any such plan of race adjustment, while theoretically plausible and ideally desirable, is nevertheless practically impossible. They contend that no so radically different races have ever lived side by side in harmony and each aiding the other. However that may be, there remains the fact that such a harmonious and mutually helpful relations.h.i.+p between the two races does already exist in the town of Tuskegee, throughout Macon County, and in many other of the more progressive localities throughout the South to-day. And at the same time, the lynchings and riots and other manifestations of racial conflict are continuously if slowly growing less frequent. Whatever may be the relative strength of the two theories, the facts are lining up in support of the Booker Was.h.i.+ngton prophecy at the Atlanta Exposition when he said: "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."

During the last twenty years of his life Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton came more and more to be regarded as the representative and spokesman of his race, and was invited to represent and speak for them at such national and international gatherings as the annual conventions of the National Negro Business League, of which he was the president and founder; the great meeting in honor of the brotherhood of man, held in Boston in 1897; the Presbyterian rally for Home Missions, at which President Grover Cleveland presided; the International Sunday-school Convention held in Chicago in 1914; the meeting of the National Educational a.s.sociation in St. Louis in 1904; the Thanksgiving Peace Jubilee in the Chicago Auditorium at the close of the war with Spain in 1898, with President McKinley and his Cabinet in attendance; the Commencement exercises at Harvard in 1896, when President Eliot conferred upon him the degree of Master of Arts; the International Conference on the Negro, held at Tuskegee in 1912, with representatives present from Europe, Africa, the West Indies, and South America, as well as all sections of the United States. Dartmouth College conferred his Doctorate upon him in 1901.

At Harvard in 1896 President Eliot, with these words, conferred upon Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton the first honorary degree ever conferred by a great university upon an American Negro: "Teacher, wise helper of his race; good servant of G.o.d and country." In his speech delivered at the Alumni Dinner on the same day Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton brought this message to Harvard: "If through me, an humble representative, seven millions of my people in the South might be permitted to send a message to Harvard--Harvard that offered up on death's altar young Shaw, and Russell, and Lowell, and scores of others, that we might have a free and united country--that message would be: 'Tell them that the sacrifice was not in vain. Tell them that by the way of the shop, the field, the skilled hand, habits of thrift and economy, by way of industrial school and college, we are coming. We are crawling up, working up, yea, bursting up. Often through oppression, unjust discrimination, and prejudice, but through them all we are coming up, and with proper habits, intelligence, and property, there is no power on earth that can permanently stay our progress!'"

The next year at the great meeting in honor of the brotherhood of man held in Music Hall, Boston, which concluded with the unveiling of the monument of Robert Gould Shaw, Booker Was.h.i.+ngton in concluding his address turned to the one-armed color bearer of Colonel Shaw's regiment and said: "To you, to the scarred and scattered remnants of the Fifty-fourth, who with empty sleeve and wanting leg have honored this occasion with your presence--to you, your commander is not dead.

Though Boston erected no monument, and history recorded no story, in you and the loyal race which you represent Robert Gould Shaw will have a monument which time cannot wear away."

In his speech at the Peace Jubilee exercises after the war with Spain, Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton said: "When you have gotten the full story of the heroic conduct of the Negro in the Spanish-American War--heard it from the lips of Northern soldiers and Southern soldiers, from ex-abolitionist and ex-master--then decide within yourselves whether a race that is thus willing to die for its country should not be given the highest opportunity to live for its country." And again in the same speech, after rehearsing the successes of American arms, he said: "We have succeeded in every conflict, except the effort to conquer ourselves in the blotting out of racial prejudices.... Until we thus conquer ourselves, I make no empty statement when I say that we shall have, especially in the Southern part of our country, a cancer gnawing at the heart of the Republic that shall one day prove as dangerous as an attack from an army without or within." Note this as the language of a man on a great national occasion who has been accused of a time-serving acquiescence in the injustices which his race suffers!

In his address before the National Educational a.s.sociation in St.

Louis, in 1904, he made the following remarks which are typical of points he sought to emphasize when addressing audiences of white people: "Let me free your minds, if I can, from possible fear and apprehension in two directions: the Negro in this country does not seek, as a race, to exercise political supremacy over the white man, nor is social intermingling with any race considered by the Negro to be one of the essentials to his progress. You may not know it, but my people are as proud of their racial ident.i.ty as you are of yours, and in the degree that they become intelligent, racial pride increases. I was never prouder of the fact that I am cla.s.sed as a Negro than I am to-day.... I can point you to groups of my people in nearly every part of our country that in intelligence and high and unselfish purpose of their school and church life, and in the purity and sweetness of their home life and social intercourse, will compare favorably with the races of the earth. You can never lift any large section of people by continually calling attention to their weak points. A race, like a child in school, needs encouragement as well as chastis.e.m.e.nt."

In his address before the annual session of 1914 of the National Negro Business League at Muskogee, Oklahoma, Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton made the following remarks which are typical of his points of chief emphasis in addressing his own people: "Let your success thoroughly eclipse your shortcomings. We must give the world so much to think and talk about that relates to our constructive work in the direction of progress that people will forget and overlook our failures and shortcomings....

One big, definite fact in the direction of achievement and construction will go farther in securing rights and removing prejudice than many printed pages of defense and explanation.... Let us in the future spend less time talking about the part of the city that we cannot live in, and more time in making that part of the city that we can live in beautiful and attractive."

It is characteristic of the kind of criticism to which Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton was subjected that a certain element of the Negro press violently denounced this comment as an indirect endors.e.m.e.nt of the legal segregation of Negroes. Probably the last article written by Mr.

Was.h.i.+ngton for any publication was the one published posthumously by the _New Republic_, New York City, December 4, 1915, ent.i.tled, "My View of Segregation Laws," in which he stated in no uncertain terms his views on the segregation laws which were being pa.s.sed in the South. In concluding his article, he said:

"Summarizing the matter in the large, segregation is ill-advised because:

1. It is unjust.

2. It invites other unjust measures.

3. It will not be productive of good, because practically every thoughtful Negro resents its injustice and doubts its sincerity. Any race adjustment based on injustice finally defeats itself. The Civil War is the best ill.u.s.tration of what results where it is attempted to make wrong right or seem to be right.

4. It is unnecessary.

5. It is inconsistent. The Negro is segregated from his white neighbor, but white business men are not prevented from doing business in Negro neighborhoods.

6. There has been no case of segregation of Negroes in the United States that has not widened the breach between the two races. Wherever a form of segregation exists it will be found that it has been administered in such a way as to embitter the Negro and harm more or less the moral fibre of the white man. That the Negro does not express this constant sense of wrong is no proof that he does not feel it.

"It seems to me that the reasons given above, if carefully considered, should serve to prevent further pa.s.sage of such segregation ordinances as have been adopted in Norfolk, Richmond, Louisville, Baltimore, and one or two cities in South Carolina.

"Finally, as I have said in another place, as white and black learn daily to adjust, in a spirit of justice and fair play, these interests which are individual and racial, and to see and feel the importance of those fundamental interests which are common, so will both races grow and prosper. In the long run, no individual and no race can succeed which sets itself at war against the common good; for in the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim."

In concluding his Muskogee speech he said: "If there are those who are inclined to be discouraged concerning racial conditions in this country we have but to turn our minds in the direction of the deplorable conditions in Europe, growing largely out of racial bitterness and friction. When we contrast what has taken place there with the peaceful manner in which black people and white people are living together in this country, notwithstanding now and then there are evidences of injustice and friction, which should always be condemned, we have the greatest cause for thanksgiving. Perhaps nowhere else in the world can be found so many white people living side by side with so many of dark skin in so much of peace and harmony as in the United States."

This concluding observation was particularly characteristic of him.

Somewhere, or somehow, he always turned to account all significant events for weal or woe from the most trivial personal happenings to the t.i.tanic world war.

Like all great leaders, Booker Was.h.i.+ngton did the bulk of his work quietly in his own office and not on dramatic historic occasions before great audiences. He received every day, for instance, a huge and varied mail which required not only industry to handle, but much judgment, patience, and tact to dispose of wisely and adequately. We will here mention and quote from a sheaf of letters taken at random from his files which partially ill.u.s.trate the range of his interests and the variety of the calls which were constantly made upon him.

A railroad official in Colorado asked his opinion on the question of separate schools for white and black children apropos of a movement to amend the State const.i.tution so as to make possible such separate schools. In his reply Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton said: "As a rule, colored people in the Northern States are very much opposed to any plans for separate schools, and I think their feelings in the matter deserve consideration. The real objection to separate schools, from their point of view, is that they do not like to feel that they are compelled to go to one school rather than the other. It seems as if it was taking away part of their freedom. This feeling is likely to be all the stronger where the matter is made a subject of public agitation. On the other hand, my experience is that if this matter is left to the discretion of the school officials it usually settles itself. As the colored people usually live pretty closely together, there will naturally be schools in which colored students are in the majority. In that case, the process of separation takes place naturally and without the necessity of changing the const.i.tution. If you make it a const.i.tutional question, the colored people are going to be opposed to it. If you leave it simply an administrative question, which it really is, the matter will very likely settle itself."

We next find a courteous reply to the letter of some poor crank who wanted to secure his backing for a preparation which he had concocted for taking the curl out of Negroes' hair. Then comes a letter to a man who wants to know whether it is true that the Negro race is dying out.

To him Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton quoted the United States census figures for 1910, which indicate an increase of 11-3/10 per cent. in the Negro population for the decade.

Next, we come upon a letter written to a man who is interested in an effort of the Freedman's Aid Society to raise a half a million dollars for Negro schools in the South. Since this letter so well describes an important phase of Booker Was.h.i.+ngton's leaders.h.i.+p we give it almost in full. It was written in 1913 and runs thus:

"I think the most interesting work that Tuskegee has done in recent years is its work in rural schools in the country surrounding the Inst.i.tute. During the last five or six years forty-seven school buildings have been erected in Macon County by colored people themselves. At the same time the school term has been lengthened in every part of the county from five to eight months. This work has been done under the direction of a supervising teacher working in connection with the extension department of the Inst.i.tute.

"Among other things that have been attempted to encourage the people to improve their schools has been a model country school started in a community called Rising Star, a few miles from the Inst.i.tute. The school at Rising Star is an example of the rural school that Tuskegee is seeking to promote. It consists of a five-room frame house in which the teachers--a Tuskegee graduate and his wife--not only teach, but live. All the rooms are used by the school children. In the kitchen they are taught to cook, in the dining-room to serve a meal, in the bedroom to make the beds. In the garden they are taught how to raise vegetables, poultry, pigs, and cows. They recite in the sitting-room or on the veranda, and their lessons all deal with matters of their own every-day life.... Instead of figuring how long it will take an express train to reach the moon if it travelled at the rate of forty miles an hour, the pupils figure out how much corn can be raised on neighbor Smith's patch of land and how much farmer Jones' pig will bring when slaughtered.

"The pupils learn neatness and cleanliness by living in a decent home during their school hours. They carry the lesson home, and the result is seen in cleaner and better farmhouses. The model school has become the pattern on which the farmers and their wives are improving their homes...."

Then comes a letter from a poor woman who wants him in the course of his travels to look up her husband who abandoned her some years before. For purposes of identification she says: "This is the hith of him 5-6 light eyes dark hair unwave shave and a Suprano Voice his age 58 his name Steve...." Even though Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton did not agree to spend his spare time looking for a disloyal husband with a soprano voice, he sent the poor woman a kind reply and suggested some means of tracing her recreant spouse.

We come next upon a long letter written to a man who wishes to quote for publication in a magazine Booker Was.h.i.+ngton's opinion on the relation between crime and education. In the concluding paragraphs of his reply Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton says: "In nine cases out of ten the crimes which serve to unite and give an excuse for mob violence are committed by men who are without property, without homes, and without education except what they have picked up in the city slums, in prisons, or on the chain gang. The South is spending too much money in giving the Negro this kind of education that makes criminals and not enough on the kind of schools that turn out farmers, carpenters, and blacksmiths. Other things being equal, it is true not only in America, in the South, but throughout the world, that there is the least crime where there is the most education. This is true of the South and of the Negro, just the same as it is true of every other race.

Particularly is it true that the individuals who commit crimes of violence and crimes that are due to lack of self-control are individuals who are, for the most part, ignorant. The decrease in lynching in the Southern States is an index of the steady growth of the South in wealth, in industry, in education, and in individual liberty."

Then comes a letter to an individual who desires to know what proportion of the American Negroes can read and write now, and what proportion could at the time of the Civil War. The reply again quotes the 1910 census to the effect that 69.5 per cent. can now read and write as compared with only 3 per cent. at the close of the war. The letter also points out that the rate of illiteracy among American Negroes is now lower than the rate for all the peoples of Russia, Portugal, Brazil, and Venezuela, and almost as low as that of Spain.

There follows a sheaf of correspondence in which Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton agreed to speak at the unveiling of a tablet in Auburn, New York, to the memory of "Aunt Harriet" Tubman Davis, the black woman, squat of stature and seamed of face, who piloted three or four hundred slaves from the land of bondage to the land of freedom. While there he also agreed to speak at Auburn prison in response to the special request of some of the prisoners.

Then we find a courteous but firmly negative reply to a long-winded bore who writes a six-page letter urging Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton to secure the acceptance by the Negro race of a flag which he has designed as their racial flag.

After this follows a group of letters which pa.s.sed between him and the late Edgar Gardiner Murphy, author of "The Present South," "The Basis of Ascendency," and other important books. In one of these letters Mr.

Was.h.i.+ngton agrees, as requested, to read the proofs of "The Basis of Ascendency," and in another he thus characteristically comments upon Mr. Murphy's fears that a pessimistic book on the status of the Negro written by a supposed authority (a colored man) would do wide-reaching harm: "Of course among a certain element it will have an influence for harm, but human nature, as I observe it, is so constructed that it does not take kindly to a description of a failure. It is hard to get up enthusiasm in connection with a funeral procession. No man, in my opinion, could write a history of the Southern Confederacy that would be read generally because it failed. I am not saying, of course, that the Negro race is a failure. Mr. ---- writes largely from that point of view, hence there is no rallying point for the general reader."