Up from Slavery

Booker Taliaferro Washington was born a slave in 1856, on the Burroughs tobacco farm in Virginia. His mother was a cook, his father, a white man from a nearby farm. He went to school in Franklin County, not as a student, but to carry books for one of James Burroughs’s daughters, since it was illegal to educate slaves. After the Emancipation Proclamation, Booker’s family moved to West Virginia, where Booker took a job in the mines, but attended school whenever possible. Within a few years, Booker was taken in as a houseboy by a wealthy townswoman who further encouraged his desire to learn. At age sixteen, he returned to Virginia and enrolled in the Hampton Institute, where he later became an instructor. In 1881, he left Hampton and founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which he and his small staff and students built with their own hands. He soon became recognized as the nation’s foremost black educator, as one of the pioneers of black education in the United States, and as one of the most outspoken critics of racism. In 1896, he became the first African-American to receive an honorary Ph.D. from Harvard University. Up from Slavery, his autobiography, was published in 1901. In October 1915, Washington collapsed while delivering a speech in New York City and was hospitalized. He asked to be returned home, and died on his beloved campus the next day.

Ishmael Reed is the author of nine novels, four books of essays, five plays, and four books of poetry. Mr. Reed wishes to thank Mrs. Donzella Maupin, Mrs. Deborah Green, and Mrs. Cynthia Poston, of the Hampton University Archives, for their assistance on his Introduction to Up from Slavery.

Robert J. Norrell is Bernadotte Schmitt Professor of History at the University of Tennessee. Among his acclaimed works of scholarship are Reaping The Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (Robert F. Kennedy Book Award); Opening Doors: An Appraisal of Contemporary American Race Relations; The House I Live In: Race in the American Century; and Up from History: A Life of Booker T. Washington.

UP
FROM
SLAVERY

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

With an Introduction by
Ishmael Reed
and a New Afterword by
Robert J. Norrell

Introduction:
Booker Vs. the Negro-Saxons

Written in the modern reader-friendly prose style, Up From Slavery, by Booker T. Washington, chronicles his rise from being a nameless slave child to a man who was treated as though he were the president of a sovereign nation. Not only does his life provide a valuable glimpse into the state of race relations between the end of the Civil War to 1915, the year of his death, but shows how his strategies for the advancement of African-Americans and those of his chief rival, W.E.B. DuBois, sometimes collided but often complemented one another. For example, The National Negro Business League, of which Booker T. Washington was president, was W.E.B. DuBois’s idea.

The result of their efforts was the development of Tuskegee Institute, which, since an initial enrollment of thirty students, has graduated thousands of professionals, and the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The N.A.A.C.P.’s using legal challenges to advance the cause of African-Americans has been enormously successful. Ironically, however, the organization drew some of the same criticism from 1960s militants that were formerly aimed at Booker T. Washington from turn-of-the-century firebrands like Monroe Trotter.

So vehemently opposed to Washington’s policies was Trotter, that he participated in a rowdy Boston event arranged to disrupt Washington’s appearance at the Columbus Avenue Zion Church in the summer of 1903. This disturbance became known as the Boston Riot. Monroe Trotter’s serving a thirty-day sentence for his participation was one of those events that inspired the Niagara Movement, named for members of the African-American elite who met at the Erie Beach Hotel in Ontario, Canada, during the same year. They met to form “organized determination and aggressive action on the part of men who believe in Negro freedom and growth.”

Washington was right to ask whether Trotter and his friends would have pulled such a stunt in a white church, and found it ironic that DuBois’s “Talented Tenth,” which accused the “Tuskegee Machine” (a derogatory name given to Washington’s organization by his enemies) of suppressing dissidence, would, in this instance, seek to prohibit his. In 1903, DuBois defined the Talented Tenth in this manner:

Can the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more quickly raised than by the effort and example of this aristocracy of talent and character? Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground. This is the history of human progress; and the two historic mistakes which have hindered that progress were the thinking first that no more could ever rise save the few already risen; or second, that it would better the unrisen to pull the risen down.

But Trotter’s action only reflected the frustration of Northern elitist intellectuals—the Negro-Saxons—with Booker T. Washington’s policies, which they viewed as insuring the inferior position of African-Americans in the United States. Their criticisms dogged him throughout his career. DuBois even blamed Washington for the Jim Crow laws that Southern states would adopt following his “Atlanta Compromise Speech” of 1895.

In some ways this was a conflict about class. Washington was born a slave and did not receive “higher education,” while some of his enemies were born free, and Harvard-educated. Washington was also correct when he characterized the difference between W.E.B. DuBois and himself as one of appealing to different constituencies. In a letter to Emmett Jay Scott, his trusted aide, Washington wrote “ . . . the Negroes of the South are with me . . . and only the ‘intellectuals’ of the North are against me.” He also criticized DuBois for living in the North and only visiting the South to promote trouble between African-Americans and whites.

DuBois did spend thirteen years at Atlanta University, but, according to his autobiography, rarely ventured from the campus. In 1911, Washington wrote:

Dr. DuBois pursues the policy of stirring up strife between white people and black people. This would not be so bad, if after stirring up strife between white and black people in the South, he would live in the South and be brave enough to face conditions which his unwise course has helped to bring about; but instead of doing that he flees to the North and leaves the rank and file of colored people in the South no better off because of the unwise course which he and others like him have pursued.

Washington also criticized DuBois for being manipulated by whites. Washington’s aide, Thomas Fortune, told Washington in a 1911 letter, written after attending a New York meeting at which DuBois addressed “longhairs” and “discontents” (Fortune’s words) Fortune agreed with Washington that DuBois was “allowing himself to be used to put race leadership in the hands of white men.”

Maybe the Negroes of the South sympathized with Washington because they had firsthand experience with the particularly cruel, genocidal, and macabre (the bodies of lynching victims were carved up and used as souvenirs) style of racism that he was up against, while his critics were treated in the same manner that the French and other Europeans treated talented colored expatriates before droves of coloreds began pouring into their countries.

*   *   *

Washington was a practical man. Up From Slavery is full of practical advice about everything from growing vegetables to selling bricks. His controversial speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895, held in Atlanta, Georgia, is a masterpiece of hard-line practicality. It has become known as “The Atlanta Compromise Speech.” Washington knew that in order to win over the confidence of white supporters, he had to pacify the primal fear of many Southern white men. He knew that although a Southern white man could help himself to black women, the way white fathers had exploited his and Frederick Douglass’s African mothers, white men like novelist Thomas Dixon became psychotic at the idea of black men and white women intermingling. This is what integration meant to those primitives: White women making themselves available to black men. The line in the speech that gained the biggest applause of that day not only from white men but from white women—“The fairest women of Georgia stood and cheered”—dealt with social separation. He said that “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers. . . .” From the time of the arrival of African men in this hemisphere to this day, white men have used the threat of sexual liaisons between black men and white women in order to gain more political and financial power and to murder thousands of black men.

In her book, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South, Martha Hodes writes, “Black men’s hopes for and insistence on equality brought public expressions of fear from white Southerners, and those fears included direct references to white women and sex.” For their part, many white women have used the threat of the black rapist to torment, taunt and blackmail white men emotionally. In her book, Mothers of Invention, Drew Gilpin Faust notes the sign on a float bearing young white girls in a turn-of-the-century parade. It read “Protect Us”—and the parade was staged to support a candidate committed to black disenfranchisement.

Booker T. Washington met this hot-button issue head on and by doing so bought some time for black economic development. His stance would be met by charges of cowardice by Northern critics who invoked the names of black rebels Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner. None of these elitists, however, ever participated in an armed revolt. Nor had their white patrons. Though lynching still occurred, future historians may credit Washington with forestalling an even greater disaster: The extermination of Southern black people by those who had proven that they were capable of such ethnic cleansing. In one speech, Washington showed his awareness of the Fort Pillow massacre, during which a mad man named General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and founder of the K.K.K., massacred black men, women, and children even though they had surrendered. Washington also knew what had happened to the Cherokee who had tried their best to assimilate and adopt the white man’s ways, only to be removed from their homelands and sent on a Trail of Tears ordered by Andrew Jackson, the Milosevic of American Indian policy. His experience with Native Americans at Hampton Institute gave him a first-hand glimpse of how whites handled warriors.

Even to this day, the homicide rate among white Southern men is higher than that among Northern white men. These are the people who, after the Civil War, sought economic opportunities in the West. Their savagery alarmed even Rough Rider Theodore Roosevelt, who noted that “Many of the frontiersmen are brutal, reckless, and overbearing.” These are the people who gave us Jesse James, Frank James, and the Younger family, and their leader, William C. Quantrill. Civil War historian Kenneth C. Davis describes these men and others like them as “cold-blooded” and “psychotic.”

In an article entitled “. . . Southern Curse: Why America’s Murder Rate Is So High,” Fox Butterfield quotes historian David Hackett Fischer, who offers an explanation for “Southern bellicosity.” The professor at Brandeis University says “. . . a critical factor was the heavy settlement of the South by immigrants referred to today as Scotch Irish—people from the north of Britain, the lowlands of Scotland, and the north of Ireland. These settlers, whom Benjamin Franklin described as ‘white savages,’ brought with them a culture based upon centuries of fighting between the kings of England and Scotland over the borderlands they inhabited. They had a penchant for family feuds, a love of whisky, and a warrior ethic that demanded vengeance.” All of the founders of the Klan, including General Nathan Bedford Forrest, were Scotch Irish. The masses of Southern black people knew what Washington was up against.

Though one of his more fervent critics accuses him of designing a program that “practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races,” passages in Up From Slavery gush with racial pride. “From any point of view, I had rather be what I am, a member of the Negro race, than be able to claim membership with the most favored of any other race,” writes Washington, referring to the African-American race as “. . . the race to which I am proud to belong.” By contrast, his Harvard tormentors seemed uncomfortable with their African heritage. W.E.B. DuBois, a product of a white supremacist curriculum, believed that whites were an advanced race and that African societies were primitive, a view that would be considered uninformed by those who have examined African literature, art, and dance. He also characterized the masses of African-Americans as “primitive” and pinned his hopes for African-American progress on a Talented Tenth—one-tenth of the ten million population of African-Americans at the time—an elite that would lead African-Americans to liberation.

Early in the reading of Up From Slavery, one realizes the difference between Booker T. Washington and his critics, who were referred to in one letter as “academic theorists.” While they monitored and were inspired by the theories of a succession of white thinkers, Booker T. Washington based his actions not on books, but on experience. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, and their intellectual followers believed that if one digested the contents of “Great Books,” that is, books written by white men, one would be, in DuBois’s words, “wedded” to the truth. They believed that by ingesting this material, African-Americans would assimilate “high,” that is, European culture. Their obedience to this concept led them to accept uncritically material that was not based upon science, but folklore and wild speculation. While Booker T. Washington based his values on the teachings of Christianity, they worshipped at the altar of modernism, a movement now considered passé.

*   *   *

And so, unlike the modernists, Washington relied upon common sense and experience. His mother, Jane, a resourceful woman who deserves a separate biography, taught him the frugality that would lead to his running Tuskegee the way that a banker would run a bank. She showed him how to avoid spending money on foolish things. He had visited homes where only one fork was available at mealtime, while expensive clocks and organs went unused in the living rooms. The ex-slaves lacked knowledge of fiscal management because they were used to being property while others looked after the books.

After working in the household of Mrs. Viola Ruffner, a “strict Yankee,” and apparent housekeeper from hell, he says “. . . the lessons that I learned in the home of Mrs. Ruffner were as valuable to me as any education.” He didn’t study the conditions of the post-slavery generation through sociological works, but lived among them, and his ideas about education were formed by what he had observed. When he used the image of “a lone black boy poring over French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home” he knew what he was talking about, and his writings are full of anecdotes about blacks who knew abstract theories but didn’t know how to raise vegetables or maintain a house. Booker T. Washington learned by observation and these early lessons would inform his conduct for the rest of his life. Surrounded by filth in his early years, he became obsessively devoted to “Absolute cleanness of the body. . . .” and other forms of hygiene. Washington makes much of the importance of the toothbrush, which for him became “The gospel of the tooth-brush.”

W.E.B. DuBois asked what Socrates and Saint Francis of Assisi would have said to Washington’s point about ex-slaves who knew the classics but had no knowledge of how to fend for themselves, a remark that would prompt a practical man like Washington to refer to DuBois as a “dunce.” When Washington describes a black intellectual as someone with “high hat, imitation gold eye-glasses, a showy walking-stick, kid gloves, fancy boots, and what not . . .” we have a pretty good idea about whom he is signifying. The men exchanged insults and at one point DuBois referred to Washington as “the Arch Tempter,” a synonym for Satan. Sometimes, his anger with Washington led him to abandon the scientific objectivity that he admired. His charge that Washington had bribed the black press was unsubstantiated and he was not above printing tabloid-style gossip about Thomas Fortune, one of the members of Washington’s “Tuskegee Machine,” a derogatory name given to Washington’s organization by his enemies. (DuBois’s autobiography hints at his own bout with sex addiction). It is also clear that the “Tuskegee Machine,” often in a competition with DuBois and his followers for white patrons, frustrated some of DuBois’s career goals.

Though commentators dwell on the feud between Washington and the African-American New England intellectuals as one over Washington’s insistence that industrial education for African-Americans take priority over what he considered the frills of the “New England” curriculum, he was not inflexible on this point—and DuBois admits this in his autobiography, a book that, in some ways, is superior to The Souls of Black Folk. In a letter commemorating the career of his patron, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Washington endorses both “hand” and “head” education, saying that half of the student’s education should be devoted to learning industrial trades and half to book learning. Washington also complained to the editor of the Indianapolis Star about DuBois’s distorting his record. “He knows perfectly well I am not seeking to confine the Negro race to industrial education nor make them hewers of wood and drawers of water, but I am trying to do the same thing for the Negro which is done for all races of the world, and that is to make the masses of them to combine brains with hand work to the extent that their services will be wanted in the communities where they live, and thus prevent them from becoming a burden and a menace.”

DuBois’s attitude toward Washington was inconsistent. He first endorsed Washington’s Atlanta Compromise speech, then denounced it in his book The Souls of Black Folk (possibly as part of his successful attempt to woo Washington’s white patrons). He then accepted some of Washington’s programs in 1909, but later resigned from the integrationist N.A.A.C.P.; DuBois opposed this philosophy by advocating segregation for blacks. Washington, as revealed in Up From Slavery, was consistent. Focused. His main goal was the growth and sustenance of the Tuskegee Institute, micro-managing every detail of the operation. A group of photos that appears in a report by Washington entitled, “Twenty-Five Years of Tuskegee, the Building Up of the Negro as Shown by the Growth and Work of this School Managed Wholly by Negroes,” tells the story. The photographs show the rise of Tuskegee from a few shacklike buildings to a building with Greek columns twenty-five years later. There are photos of African-American students running a high-speed machine, testing milk, working in a harness shop, and in a sewing class. Photographs in a 1903 report entitled, “The Successful Training of the Negro,” show students building the foundation for the C. P. Huntington Memorial Building and the Girls’ Dormitory, building roads, and attending repair, carpentry, blacksmithing, shoemaking, dressmaking, and tailoring shops. Students are shown printing the school paper and attending a class in mechanical drawing. Tuskegee opened on July 4, 1881, with one teacher and thirty pupils. Twenty-five years later, it comprised eighty-three buildings, 22,000 acres of land, and boasted an endowment of $1,275,664.

So successful have DuBois’s followers and their intellectual descendants been in defining Booker T. Washington’s reputation that he has been characterized by many as an accommodationist and worse. A more careful examination of the educator’s career, however, reveals that Washington was more complicated than his critics would have us believe. As Louis R. Harlan says, “by private action [Booker T. Washington] fought lynching, disenfranchisement, peonage, educational discrimination, and segregation.”

DuBois and his supporters would later accuse Washington of appeasing whites, but one could argue that DuBois had to bend to the pressure of whites more than Washington. Indeed, there is evidence that DuBois, when attacking Washington, sometimes did the bidding of whites who believed that they should be the arbiters of who should be the political, cultural, and intellectual leaders of black Americans, an arrogant attitude that exists to this day. When Booker T. Washington traveled to Europe, John Mulholland put DuBois up to attacking Washington in an “Appeal to England and Europe,” undermining Washington’s visit and accusing him of painting too rosy a picture of American race relations. Some of the whites were hypocrites, too. Oswald Villard, a white philanthropist and board member of the N.A.A.C.P., the organization devoted to integration, refused to socialize with DuBois. “He [Villard] had married a wife from Georgia, a former slave state, and consequently I could never step foot in his house as a guest, nor could any other of his colored associates,” DuBois said in his Autobiography, a book ignored by the DuBois cult.

*   *   *

While the 1960s may have belonged to W.E.B. DuBois, the 1990s are definitely Bookerite. W.E.B. DuBois criticized Washington for turning away from politics in favor of economic development. This turning away from politics toward economic development and self-sufficiency seems to be the trend among a growing African-American middle class, who’ve found that electing mayors and other officials to government hasn’t changed the lives of the masses of African-Americans. In a speech made before the Union League Club of Brooklyn, Feb. 12, 1896, Washington said, “We have spent time and money making political stump speeches and in attending political conventions that could better have been spent starting a dairy farm, or a truck garden, and thus have laid a material foundation on which we could have stood and demanded our rights.” In a number of manifestos, articles, and op-ed pieces, African-Americans are announcing that political power without economic power is meaningless.

Separatism and entrepreneurship seem to have captured the imagination of the hip-hoppers like Sister Souljah. Spike Lee, also. His contracts include Nike, a sneaker manufacturing concern, and the United States Navy, and his film Jungle Fever, a tract that warns against race mixing, was the cinematic version of Washington’s “separate in all things purely social.” Even the Highlander Center, in Tennessee, which boasts of having trained Rosa Parks and others on Civil Rights strategies, is now emphasizing “economic justice.” When asked by a Pacifica radio interviewer for her assessment of the future of activism, black economist Julianne Malveaux said that activism would take the form of “economic activism” and “economic boycotts.” She mentioned putting pressure on the Fortune Five Hundred to hire more blacks, and called for blacks to invest in the system, even though she described herself as anti-capitalist. Jesse Jackson who, as a young man, was campaigning in the South for the black right to vote, by 1999, was challenging Wall Street, and accompanying President Clinton to areas that had missed the economic good times and urging corporate investment in these areas

Many blacks have decided that wasting energy on integrating with whites, the majority of whom seem to want to remain separate from everybody, is a useless enterprise. A recent study entitled “Resegregation in American Schools” by Gary Orfield concludes that “We are clearly in a period when many policymakers, courts, and opinion makers assume that desegregation is no longer necessary.” Orlando Patterson, a Harvard sociologist, is the African-American scholar to whom the New York Times opens its pages to promote its position that the cause of the problems of “the black underclass” is their personal behavior. In July 1999, Patterson responded in a Times op-ed to the Boston School Committee’s decision to end busing. He wrote “There has been a return to the old Southern doctrine of separate and equal, as long as it is truly equal. . . .” A poll released by Hamilton College, in Clinton, N.Y., found that fifty percent of young adults approved of racial separation “as long as everyone has equal opportunities.”

And in what may be the greatest irony of all, an institute named for DuBois has become a center for the creation and promotion of multimillion-dollar cultural products based upon DuBois’s ideas. In the manner that it handles its dissidents, “The Tuskegee Machine” of the turn of the century has become “The Harvard Machine” at the end of the century. This new Talented Tenth, which blames the black “underclass” for its problems, is making deals with mega-capitalists like Microsoft while the DuBois museum in Accra, Ghana, is running out of resources. Though they may be DuBoisian in literary style, their leader, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., described himself as an “intellectual entrepreneur” during an interview with Black Issues magazine.

How would DuBois feel about such collaboration between his intellectual descendants and an outfit that might be convicted of monopolistic practises? In a speech in Accra, DuBois urged Africans to “Boycott the export of big capital from the exploiting world, led by America.” Polls show that most blacks are opposed to busing, the technique that liberal reformers believed would bring about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream. Though his separatist stance angered Washington’s elitist critics, the notion of segregation has always appealed to a segment of blacks and has been commodified in recent years (Kwanzaa stamps and X products). Indeed, among younger African-American intellectuals of the 1990s, segregation is in vogue even though some of its popularizers continue to socialize with whites as Washington did, for his preaching of social separation did not keep him from spending a good deal of time in the company of white men and women. He took tea with white women in a segregated railroad car and dined with President Roosevelt, an event that inspired the very fears that he had sought to allay in his Atlanta Compromise Speech, stirring up the ancient Southern psychosis. About the dinner, The Richmond Times wrote: “It means that the president is willing that Negroes shall mingle freely with whites in the social circle—that white women may receive attentions from Negro men.”

But unlike DuBois, the idealist, and visionary (he sincerely believed that Russia was the hope of mankind, that if blacks fought in American wars that whites would respect them, and that white and black workers would unite in common cause), Washington foresaw that segregation would always exist in a country with a white majority, because whites would always insist upon it. Orlando Patterson, a member of the Harvard Talented Tenth, writing in the New York Times, suggested that it was the fault of blacks that integration didn’t work. He argued that middle-class whites fled the cities because of the personal behavior of black students

But the personal behavior of black students, or blacks in general for that matter, doesn’t explain why whites desire to separate from other groups. White leaders are the ones who passed laws in 1924 excluding Japanese from California (resulting in yet another form of white affirmative action since one of the motivations behind this measure was to prevent Japanese farmers from competing with white ones). White leaders also backed the exclusion of the Chinese and deportation of Mexican-American citizens, and they passed resolutions banning the arrival of new people from Mexico. Segregation accompanies some whites wherever they go. Quoted in the New York Times of July 12, 1999, Desa Jaconsson, a Native-American, complained about the treatment of her people by the white majority in Alaska. “Apartheid is alive and well and it lives in the Arctic, it lives in our schools, and I’m sad to say it lives in the halls of the state legislature,” she wrote. All the way up there near the North Pole! Whites are the ones who are most likely to commit hate crimes against Asian-Americans, blacks, gays, and others who are different from them. They’re the ones who engage in white flight, not only from the blacks, but from such “model minorities” as Asian-Americans and Cuban-Americans. Though it’s become fashionable among some white authors to blame black separatism for the dissolution of the Civil Rights movement, whites are the true separatists, and Washington knew it.

He was prescient in other matters also. He was a media critic who accused the newspapers of his day of stressing the “weaknesses” of African-Americans. In those days, the newspapers often behaved as lynch mob leaders against African-Americans, a role that the American media haven’t abandoned. Newspapers like the New York Times attach a black face to all social problems—welfare, crime, drug addiction, A.I.D.S, fatherless households—when these problems can be also found among other ethnic groups. The Bell Curve, which argues the genetic inferiority of African-Americans, was received favorably by The New York Times Book Review, and one columnist, Sam Roberts, wrote that blacks were “prone to violence.”

Washington said that the South is the African-American’s best friend, a notion that is being echoed by the thousands of African-Americans who are returning to the South after having experienced the racist hatred in the North. After all, though Booker T. Washington was vulnerable to the kind of violence that often came to Southern African-Americans of his stature, it was in the North that he was attacked by a New York mob for being in the wrong neighborhood.

*   *   *

As we enter a new millennium, Booker T. Washington deserves a reassessment, unfettered by the biases of Northern elitist African-American intellectuals and comfortable white radicals who would only have been satisfied if Washington had engaged in a wild suicidal shoot-out with whites—who outnumbered the black population three to one—so that they might use his martyr’s photo to further their causes. He was opposed by those who disagreed with his economic theories. Yet one hundred years later, theirs remain untested.

His critics said that he was soft on lynching, but his statement on lynching, released to Southern newspapers, was forceful and eloquent. They said that he was for disenfranchisement of black men, yet he opposed disenfranchisement with his personal funds. (They also neglect to mention that when he appeared before the House Committee on Appropriations in 1894, seeking funds for the Atlanta Exposition, Washington urged that the right of black men to vote not be taken away.) They said that he blamed African-Americans for their problems when, in a strong reply to a “black pathology” mercenary of the time, an ancestor of the pundits, academics, and intellectuals who’ve made a career from attacking blacks, he traced African-American anti-social behavior to the institution of slavery, one hundred years before the editors at the New York Times and the New York Review of Books were giving credit to the Harvard Talented Tenth for what, in their minds, was a new theory.

Rather than being viewed as an “Uncle Tom,” a “Coward” and an “Accommodationist” (the strangest charge of all since Tuskegee graduates were competitive with whites), Washington should be judged as someone who, despite his shortcomings, rose from humble circumstances to the building of one of the world’s centers of learning, literally with his bare hands, and training thousands of African-Americans in matters of both the hands and the head.

His was more than a Horatio Alger story. Alger’s heroes were usually white and free; Washington was black and a slave. That he has been maligned for these many years is not only wrongheaded, but perverse.

Washington was a motivational speaker and a fundraiser so persuasive that he was able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for his school. W.E.B. DuBois was a scholar, a prolific author, a magazine editor, one of the founders of the Pan African movement, and a man whose demand for respect led to less humiliation for African-Americans in everyday life.

Instead of Washington and DuBois being pitted against each other, both should be celebrated. What Washington said applied to both: “I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. Looked at it from this standpoint, I almost reach the conclusion that often the Negro boy’s birth and connection with an unpopular race is an advantage, so far as real life is concerned. With few exceptions, the Negro youth must work harder and must perform his tasks even better than a white youth in order to secure recognition. But out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets strength, a confidence that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of birth and race.”

—Ishmael Reed  
   Oakland, Cal.

NOTE ON THE TEXT

The text used here is that of the first book edition, published by Doubleday, Page and Company, of New York, in 1901. It differed from the serial version in the Outlook, LXVII (Nov. 3, 1900–Feb. 23, 1901) only in employing the English spelling of such words as “labour” and “coloured” and, at Washington’s insistence, capitalizing the word “Negro.”

PREFACE

THIS volume is the outgrowth of a series of articles, dealing with incidents in my life, which were published consecutively in the Outlook. While 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. I am most grateful to the Outlook for permission to gratify these requests.

I have tried to tell a simple, straightforward story, with no attempt at embellishment. My regret is that what I have attempted to do has been done so imperfectly. The 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. Much 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. Without the painstaking and generous assistance of Mr. Max Bennett Thrasher I could not have succeeded in any satisfactory degree.

CHAPTER I

A Slave Among Slaves

I WAS born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any rate I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time. As nearly as I have been able to learn, I was born near a crossroads post-office called Hale’s Ford, and the year was 1858 or 1859.1 I do not know the month or the day. The earliest impressions I can now recall are of the plantation and the slave quarters—the latter being the part of the plantation where the slaves had their cabins.

My life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings. This was so, however, not because my owners were especially cruel, for they were not, as compared with many others. I was born in a typical log cabin, about fourteen by sixteen feet square. In this cabin I lived with my mother and a brother and sister till after the Civil War, when we were all declared free.

Of my ancestry I know almost nothing. In the slave quarters, and even later, I heard whispered conversations among the coloured people of the tortures which the slaves, including, no doubt, my ancestors on my mother’s side, suffered in the middle passage of the slave ship while being conveyed from Africa to America. I have been unsuccessful in securing any information that would throw any accurate light upon the history of my family beyond my mother. She, I remember, had a half-brother and a half-sister. In the days of slavery not very much attention was given to family history and family records—that is, black family records. My mother, I suppose, attracted the attention of a purchaser who was afterward my owner and hers. Her addition to the slave family attracted about as much attention as the purchase of a new horse or cow. Of my father I know even less than of my mother. I do not even know his name. I have heard reports to the effect that he was a white man who lived on one of the nearby plantations. Whoever he was, I never heard of his taking the least interest in me or providing in any way for my rearing. But I do not find especial fault with him. He was simply another unfortunate victim of the institution which the Nation unhappily had engrafted upon it at that time.

The cabin was not only our living-place, but was also used as the kitchen for the plantation. My mother was the plantation cook. The cabin was without glass windows; it had only openings in the side which let in the light, and also the cold, chilly air of winter. There was a door to the cabin—that is, something that was called a door—but the uncertain hinges by which it was hung, and the large cracks in it, to say nothing of the fact that it was too small, made the room a very uncomfortable one. In addition to these openings there was, in the lower right-hand corner of the room, the “cat-hole,”—a contrivance which almost every mansion or cabin in Virginia possessed during the ante-bellum period. The “cat-hole” was a square opening, about seven by eight inches, provided for the purpose of letting the cat pass in and out of the house at will during the night. In the case of our particular cabin I could never understand the necessity for this convenience, since there were at least a half-dozen other places in the cabin that would have accommodated the cats. There was no wooden floor in our cabin, the naked earth being used as a floor. In the centre of the earthen floor there was a large, deep opening covered with boards, which was used as a place in which to store sweet potatoes during the winter. An impression of this potato-hole is very distinctly engraved upon my memory, because I recall that during the process of putting the potatoes in or taking them out I would often come into possession of one or two, which I roasted and thoroughly enjoyed. There was no cooking-stove on our plantation, and all the cooking for the whites and slaves my mother had to do over an open fireplace, mostly in pots and “skillets.” While the poorly built cabin caused us to suffer with cold in the winter, the heat from the open fireplace in summer was equally trying.