CHAPTER II Training for Conditions
The preliminary investigation of certain phases of the life of the people of my race led me to make a more thorough study of their needs in order that I might have more light on the problem of what the Tuskegee Institute could do to help them. Before beginning work at Tuskegee I had felt that too often in educational missionary effort the temptation was to try to force each individual into a certain mould, regardless of the condition and needs of the subject or of the ends sought. It seemed to me a mistake to try to fit people for conditions which may have been successful in communities a thousand miles away, or in times centuries remote, without paying attention to the actual life and needs of those living in the shadow of the institution and for whom its educational machinery must labour.
In the beginning of my work, when I thought it necessary to investigate at closer range the history and environment of the people around us, it soon became evident that this data was a valuable basis for the undertaking at Tuskegee. For it was demonstrated that we were about to take a share in the burden of educating a race which had had little or no need for labour in its native land, before being brought to America—a race which had never known voluntary incentives to toil.
The tropical climate had been generous to the inhabitant of Africa and had supplied him without effort with the few things needful for the support of the body. I had cause to recall the story of a native who went to sleep on his back in the morning under a banana tree with his mouth open, confident that before noon a providential banana would fall into his mouth. While the African had little occasion to work with his hands in the land of his nativity, by the end of his period of slavery in this country he had undergone two hundred and fifty years of the severest labour. Therefore, many friends of the race argued that the American Negro, of all people, ought to be released from further hand-training, especially while in school. Others said that the Negro had been worked for centuries, and now that the race was free there ought to be a change.
BREAKING UP NEW GROUND WITH AN EIGHT-OX TEAM
At Tuskegee we replied that it was true that the race had been worked in slavery, but the great lesson which the race needed to learn in freedom was to work. We said that as a slave the Negro was worked; as a freeman he must learn to work. There is a vast difference between working and being worked. Being worked means degradation; working means civilisation. This was the difference which our institution wished chiefly to emphasise. We argued that during the days of slavery labour was forced out of the Negro, and he had acquired, for this reason, a dislike for work. The whole machinery of slavery was not apt to beget the spirit of love of labour.
Because these things were true we promised to try to teach our students to lift labour out of drudgery and to place it on a plane where it would become attractive, and where it would be something to be sought rather than something to be dreaded and if possible avoided.
More than this, we wanted to teach men and women to put brains into the labour of the hand, and to show that it was possible for one with the best mental training to work with the hands without feeling that he was degraded. While we were considering our plans at Tuskegee, many persons argued with me, as they had done with General Armstrong years before, at Hampton, that all the Negro youth needed as education was mental and religious training, and that all else would follow of itself.
Partly in answer to this argument, we pointed to our people in the republic of Hayti, who were freed many years before emancipation came to our race in the Southern States. A large number of the leading citizens of Hayti during the long period of years had been given a most thorough mental training not only in Hayti but in France, and the Catholic Church had surrounded the population from birth with religious influences. Many Haytians had distinguished themselves in the study of philosophy and the languages, and yet the sad fact remained that Hayti did not prosper.
I wish to be entirely fair to the Haytians. Hayti exports annually from sixty to eighty million pounds of coffee and several hundred million pounds of precious woods. A French statistician says that "among the sixty countries of the globe which carry on regular commerce with France, Hayti figures in the seventeenth place. In amount of special duties received at the French Custom House upon the products imported from those sixty countries, Hayti comes in the fourth rank." It seems well to observe, then, that here is the foundation for the upbuilding of a rich and powerful country, with great natural resources. It seems all the more inexcusable that industrial conditions should be as unsatisfactory as they are.
The thoughtful and progressive men in the republics of Hayti and Santo Domingo now recognise the fact that while there has always been a demand for professional men and women of the highest type of scholarship, at the same time many of these scholars should have had such scientific and industrial education as would have brought them into direct contact with the development of the material resources of the country. They now see that their country would have been advanced far beyond its present condition, materially and morally, if a large proportion of the brightest youths had been given skilled handicrafts and had been taught the mechanical arts and practical methods of agriculture. Some of them should have been educated as civil, mining, and sanitary engineers, and others as architects and builders; and most important of all, agriculture should have been scientifically developed. If such a foundation had been laid it is probable that Hayti would now possess good public roads, streets, bridges, and railroads, and that its agricultural and mining resources would have made the country rich, prosperous, and contented.
It is a deplorable fact that one of the richest islands in natural resources in the world is compelled to import a large proportion of its food and clothing. It is actually true that many of the people of Hayti, some of them graduates of the best universities of France, content themselves with wearing clothes imported from Europe. It is also true that great quantities of canned meats and vegetables are brought from the United States, commodities which could easily be produced at their very doors. The Haytians claim, however, that most of the imported food is for the use of foreigners, as they, themselves, eat very little meat that is not freshly cooked. The people live almost wholly upon the primitive products of undisturbed nature, and the greater part of the harvesters and other workers are women.
I have been told, upon reliable authority, that the majority of the educated persons in the island take up the professions, and that because there is almost no industrial development of the country, the lawyer, naturally, finds himself without clients, and he, in common with others of the educated classes, spends much of his time in writing poetry, in discussing subjects in abstract science, or embroiling his country in revolutions.
In recent years I have received most urgent appeals from both Hayti and Santo Domingo for advice and assistance in the direction of educating industrial and scientific leaders. The best friends of Hayti and Santo Domingo now realise that tremendous mistakes have been made. They see that if the people had been taught in the beginning of their freedom that all forms of idleness were disgraceful and that all forms of labour, whether with the head or with the hand, were honourable, the country to-day would not be in such stress of poverty. They would have fewer revolutions, because the people would have industries to occupy their time, their thoughts, and their energies. I ought to add that, in such deficiencies as these, Hayti is perhaps not worse off than some South American republics which have made the same mistakes.
The situation in these countries which have overlooked the value of industrial training remind me of a story told by the late Henry W. Grady about a country funeral in Georgia. The grave was dug in the midst of a pine forest, but the pine coffin that held the body was brought from Cincinnati. Hickory and other hard woods grew in abundance nearby, but the wagon on which the coffin was drawn came from South Bend, Indiana, and the mule that drew the wagon came from Missouri. Valuable minerals were close to the cemetery, but the shovels and picks used in digging the grave came from Pittsburg, and their handles from Baltimore. The shoes in which the dead man was buried came from Lynn, Massachusetts, his coat and trousers from New York, his shirt from Lowell, Massachusetts, and his collar and tie from Philadelphia. The only things supplied by the county, with its wealth of natural resources, was the corpse and the hole in the ground, and Mr. Grady added that the county probably would have imported both of these if it could have done so.
When any people, regardless of race or geographical location, have not been trained to habits of industry, have not been given skill of hand in youth, and taught to love labour, a direct result is the breeding of a worthless idle class, which spends a great deal of its time in trying to live by its wits. If a community has been educated exclusively on books and has not been trained in habits of applied industry, an unwholesome tendency to dodge honest productive labour is likely to develop. As in the case of Hayti, the people acquire a fatal fondness for wasting valuable hours in discussing politics and conspiring to overthrow the government. I have noted, too, that when the people of a community have not been taught to work intelligently with their hands, or have not learned habits of thrift and industry, they are likely to be fretting continually for fear that no one will be left to earn a living for them.
There are few more dismal and discouraging sights than the men of a community absorbed in idle gossip and political discussion. I have seen more than a dozen white men in one small town take their seats under a tree or on the shady side of the street as early as eight o'clock in the morning and talk politics until noon. Then they would go home for dinner, and return at one o'clock to spend the remainder of the day threshing out the same threadbare topics. Their greatest exertion during the whole long day would be in moving from the sunny side of the street or tree to the shady side and back again. A curious trait of such parasites is that they are always wondering why "times are hard," and why there is so little money in circulation in their communities.
An argument handed down from Reconstruction times was once urged by many people, both white and coloured, against industrial education. It was to the effect that because the white South had from the first opposed what is popularly called "higher education" for the Negro, this must be the only kind good for him. I remember that when I was trying to establish the Tuskegee Institute, nearly all the white people who talked with me on the subject took it for granted that instruction in Greek, Latin, and modern languages would be main features in our curriculum; and I heard no one oppose what it was thought our course of study would embrace. In fact, there are many white people in the South at the present time who do not know that the dead languages are not taught at Tuskegee.
Further proof of what I have said will be furnished by the catalogs of the schools maintained by the Southern States for Negro people, and managed by Southern white people; it will be found that in almost every instance instruction in the higher branches is given with the consent and approval of white officials. This was true as far back as 1880. It is not unusual to meet even at this time Southern white people who are as emphatic in their belief in the value of classical education as a certain element of the coloured people themselves. But the bulk of opinion in the South had little faith in the efficacy of the "higher" or any other kind of education for the Negro. They were indifferent, but did not openly oppose. Not all have been indifferent, however, for there has always been a potent element of white people in all the Southern States who have stood up openly and bravely for the education of all the people, regardless of race. This element has had considerable success thus far in shaping and leading public opinion, and I believe it will become more and more influential. This does not mean that there is as yet an equitable division of the school funds raised by common taxation.
While the education which we proposed to give at the Tuskegee Institute was not spontaneously welcomed by the white South, it was this training of the hands that furnished the first basis for anything like united and sympathetic interest and action between the two races at the South and the whites at the North and those at the South. Aside from its direct benefits to the Negro race, industrial education, in providing a common ground for understanding and coöperation between the North and South, has meant more to the South and to the cause of education than has been realised.
Many white people of the South saw in the movement to teach young Negroes the necessity and honour of work with the hands a means of leading them gradually and sensibly into their new life of freedom, without too sudden a transition from one extreme to the other. They perceived, too, that the Negroes who were master carpenters and contractors under the guidance of their owners could greatly further the development of the South if their children were not too suddenly removed from the atmosphere and occupations of their fathers, but taught to use the thing in hand as a foundation for still higher growth. Some were far-sighted enough to see that industrial education would enable one generation to secure economic independence, and the next, on this foundation, to obtain a more abstract education, if desired. The individual and community interest of the white people was directly appealed to by industrial education. They perceived that intelligence, coupled with skill, would add wealth, in which both races would increasingly share, to the community and to the State. While crude labour could be managed and made to some degree profitable under the methods of slavery, it could not be so utilised in a state of freedom. Almost every white man in the South was directly interested in agricultural, mechanical, or other manual labour; in the cooking and serving of food, laundering and dairying, poultry-raising, and everything related to housekeeping in general. There was no family whose interest in intelligent and skillful nursing was not now and then quickened by the presence of a trained nurse.
Therefore there came to be growing appreciation of the fact that industrial education of the black people had a practical and vital bearing on the life of every white family in the South. There was little opportunity for such appreciation of the results of mere literary education. If a black man became a lawyer, a doctor, a minister, or an ordinary teacher, his professional duties would not ordinarily bring him in touch with the white portion of the community, but rather confine him to his own race. While professional education was not opposed by the white South as a whole, it aroused little or no interest, beyond a confused hope that it would produce a better and higher type of Negro manhood. Industrial education, however, soon recommended itself to the white South, when they saw the Negro not only studying chemistry, but its applications to agriculture, cooking, and dairying; not merely geometry and physics, but their application to blacksmithing, brickmaking, farming, and what not. A common bond at once appeared between the two races and between the North and the South.
CUTTING SUGAR-CANE ON THE SCHOOL'S FARM
A class of people in the South also favoured industrial education because they saw that as long as the Negro kept abreast in intelligence and skill with the same class of workmen elsewhere, the South, at present free from the grip of the trade union, would continue free from its restrictive influences. I should like to make a diversion here to call attention to the fact that official records show that within one year about one million foreigners came into the United States, yet practically none of the immigration went into the Southern States. The records show that in 1892 only 2,278 all told went into the States of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. One ship sometimes brings as many as these to New York in one trip. Foreigners avoid the South. It must be frankly recognised by the people of that section that for a long period they must depend upon the black man to do for it what the foreigner is doing for the Great West, and that they cannot hope to keep pace with the progress of people in other sections if one-third of the population is ignorant and without skill. If the South does not help the Negro up, it will be tying itself to a body of death. If by reason of his skill and knowledge one man in Iowa can produce as much corn in a season as four men can produce in Alabama, it requires little reasoning to see that Alabama will buy most of her corn from Iowa.
An instance which illustrates most interestingly the value of education that concerns itself with the common things about us, is furnished by Professor Geo. W. Carver, the Director of our Agricultural Department. For some time it has been his custom to prepare articles containing information concerning the condition of local crops, and warning the farmers against the ravages of certain diseases and insects. Some months ago a white landholder in Montgomery County asked Mr. Carver to inspect his farm. While doing so, Mr. Carver discovered traces of what he thought was a valuable mineral deposit used in making a certain kind of paint. The interests of the agricultural expert and the landholder at once became mutual. Mr. Carver analysed specimens of the deposits in the laboratory at Tuskegee and sent the owner a report of the analysis, with a statement of the commercial application and value of the mineral. It is an interesting fact that two previous analyses had been made by chemists who had tabulated the constituents with greatest accuracy, but failed to grasp any idea of value in the deposits. I need not go into the details of this story, except to say that a stock company, composed of some of the best white people in Alabama, has been organised, and is now preparing to build a factory for the purpose of putting the product on the market. I hardly need add that Mr. Carver has been freely consulted at every step, and that his services have been generously recognised in the organisation of the concern.
Now and then my advocacy of industrial education has been interpreted to mean that I am opposed to what is called "higher" or "more intellectual" training. This distorts my real meaning. All such training has its place and value in the development of a race. Mere training of the hand without mental and moral education would mean little for the welfare of any race. All are vital factors in a harmonious plan. But, while I do not propose that every individual should have hand training, I do say that in all my contact with men I have never met one who had learned a trade in youth and regretted it in manhood, nor have I ever seen a father or mother who was sorry that his children had been taught trades.
There is still doubt in many quarters as to the ability of the Negro, unguided, and unsupported, to hew out his own path, and put into visible, tangible, indisputable forms the products and signs of civilisation. This doubt cannot be extinguished by mere abstract arguments, no matter how ingeniously and convincingly advanced. Quietly, patiently, doggedly, through summer and winter, sunshine and shadow, by self-sacrifice, by foresight, by honesty and industry, we must re-enforce arguments with results. One farm bought, one house built, one home neatly kept, one man the largest tax-payer and depositor in the local bank, one school or church maintained, one factory running successfully, one truck-garden profitably cultivated, one patient cured by a Negro doctor, one sermon well preached, one office well filled, one life cleanly lived—these will tell more in our favour than all the abstract eloquence that can be summoned to plead our cause. Our pathway must be up through the soil, up through swamps, up through forests, up through the streams and rocks; up through commerce, education, and religion!
In my opinion we cannot begin at the top to build a race, any more than we can begin at the top to build a house. If we try to do this, we shall reap in the end the fruits of our folly.