Up from Slavery: An Autobiography
Chapter I. A Slave Among Slaves · 1/20
Up from Slavery: An Autobiography
Chapter I. A Slave Among Slaves
1AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY By Booker T. 2Washington This volume is dedicated to my Wife MRS. 3MARGARET JAMES WASHINGTON And to my Brother MR. 4JOHN H. 5WASHINGTON Whose patience, fidelity, and hard work have gone far to make the work at Tuskegee successful. 6CONTENTS Preface Introduction UP FROM SLAVERY 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. 7While 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. 8I am most grateful to the Outlook for permission to gratify these requests. 9I have tried to tell a simple, straightforward story, with no attempt at embellishment. 10My regret is that what I have attempted to do has been done so imperfectly. 11The 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. 12Much 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. 13Without the painstaking and generous assistance of Mr. 14Max Bennett Thrasher I could not have succeeded in any satisfactory degree. 15Introduction The details of Mr. 16Washington’s early life, as frankly set down in “Up from Slavery,” do not give quite a whole view of his education. 17He had the training that a coloured youth receives at Hampton, which, indeed, the autobiography does explain. 18But the reader does not get his intellectual pedigree, for Mr. 19Washington himself, perhaps, does not as clearly understand it as another man might. 20The 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. 21To see its full meaning one must start in the Hawaiian Islands half a century or more ago. 22* There Samuel Armstrong, a youth of missionary parents, earned enough money to pay his expenses at an American college. 23Equipped with this small sum and the earnestness that the undertaking implied, he came to Williams College when Dr. 24Mark Hopkins was president. 25Williams 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. 26Every student does not profit by a great teacher; but perhaps no young man ever came under the influence of Dr. 27Hopkins, whose whole nature was so ripe for profit by such an experience as young Armstrong. 28He 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. 29* For this interesting view of Mr. 30Washington’s education, I am indebted to Robert C. 31Ogden, 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. 32In turn, Samuel Armstrong, the founder of Hampton Institute, took up his work as a trainer of youth. 33He 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. 34Hopkins, so Booker Washington became a peculiarly receptive pupil of his. 35To the formation of Mr. 36Washington’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. 37These influences are easily recognizable in Mr. 38Washington to-day by men who knew Dr. 39Hopkins and General Armstrong. 40I got the cue to Mr. 41Washington’s character from a very simple incident many years ago. 42I had never seen him, and I knew little about him, except that he was the head of a school at Tuskegee, Alabama. 43I had occasion to write to him, and I addressed him as “The Rev. 44Booker T. 45Washington.” 46In his reply there was no mention of my addressing him as a clergyman. 47But 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.’” 48I 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. 49“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.” 50I wrote him an apology for mistaking him for a preacher. 51The first time that I went to Tuskegee I was asked to make an address to the school on Sunday evening. 52I 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. 53I was the only white man under the roof, and the scene and the songs made an impression on me that I shall never forget. 54Mr. 55Washington 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. 56I had associated them with the Negro of the past, not with the Negro who was struggling upward. 57They brought to my mind the plantation, the cabin, the slave, not the freedman in quest of education. 58But on the plantation and in the cabin they had never been sung as these thousand students sang them. 59I 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. 60And the future? 61These were the ambitious youths of the race, at work with an earnestness that put to shame the conventional student life of most educational institutions. 62Another song rolled up along the rafters. 63And 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. 64These thousand young men and women about me were victims of it. 65I, too, was an innocent victim of it. 66The whole Republic was a victim of that fundamental error of importing Africa into America. 67I 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. 68Every effort of philanthropy seemed to have miscarried, every effort at correcting abuses seemed of doubtful value, and the race friction seemed to become severer. 69Here was the century-old problem in all its pathos seated singing before me. 70Who were the more to be pitied—these innocent victims of an ancient wrong, or I and men like me, who had inherited the problem? 71I 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. 72But 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. 73Then 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. 74Before me was the material he had used. 75All about me was the indisputable evidence that he had found the natural line of development. 76He had shown the way. 77Time and patience and encouragement and work would do the rest. 78It was then more clearly than ever before that I understood the patriotic significance of Mr. 79Washington’s work. 80It is this conception of it and of him that I have ever since carried with me. 81It is on this that his claim to our gratitude rests. 82To teach the Negro to read, whether English, or Greek, or Hebrew, butters no parsnips. 83To 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. 84But 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. 85The plan itself is not a new one. 86It was worked out at Hampton Institute, but it was done at Hampton by white men. 87The plan had, in fact, been many times theoretically laid down by thoughtful students of Southern life. 88Handicrafts were taught in the days of slavery on most well-managed plantations. 89But 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. 90It not only makes “a carpenter of a man; it makes a man of a carpenter.” 91In 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. 92It 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. 93To work out the plan on paper, or at a distance—that is one thing. 94For a white man to work it out—that too, is an easy thing. 95For 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. 96It was not and is not a mere educational task. 97Anybody could teach boys trades and give them an elementary education. 98Such tasks have been done since the beginning of civilization. 99But 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. 100It had to be done for the benefit of the whole community. 101It 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. 102No man living had a harder task, and a task that called for more wisdom to do it right. 103The true measure of Mr. 104Washington’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. 105This 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. 106Consider the change that has come in twenty years in the discussion of the Negro problem. 107Two 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. 108All 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. 109The “problem” in one sense has disappeared. 110The 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. 111This change of view is a true measure of Mr. 112Washington’s work. 113The 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. 114One 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. 115Mr. 116Washington has won a world-wide fame at an early age. 117His 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. 118His own teaching at Tuskegee is unique. 119He lectures to his advanced students on the art of right living, not out of text-books, but straight out of life. 120Then he sends them into the country to visit Negro families. 121Such 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. 122He constructs a definite plan for the betterment of that particular family out of the resources that they have. 123Such 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. 124I 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. 125Here 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. 126I asked Mr. 127Washington 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.” 128The race divergence under the system of miseducation was fast getting wider. 129Under the influence of the Hampton-Tuskegee idea the races are coming into a closer sympathy and into an honourable and helpful relation. 130As the Negro becomes economically independent, he becomes a responsible part of the Southern life; and the whites so recognize him. 131And this must be so from the nature of things. 132There is nothing artificial about it. 133It is development in a perfectly natural way. 134And the Southern whites not only so recognize it, but they are imitating it in the teaching of the neglected masses of their own race. 135It 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. 136Education is not a thing apart from life—not a “system,” nor a philosophy; it is direct teaching how to live and how to work. 137To say that Mr. 138Washington 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. 139To 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. 140He 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. 141It 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. 142I 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. 143Walter H. 144Page. 145UP FROM SLAVERY
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