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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 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.
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