2. [Industrial Education: Booker T. Washington]
Such were the tendencies of life in the South as affecting the Negro thirty years after emancipation. In September, 1895, a rising educator of the race attracted national attention by a remarkable speech that he made at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta. Said Booker T. Washington: "To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man who is their next door neighbor, I would say, 'Cast down your bucket where you are'—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.... To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' Cast it down among 8,000,000 Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your fire-sides.... In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."
The message that Dr. Washington thus enunciated he had already given in substance the previous spring in an address at Fisk University, and even before then his work at Tuskegee Institute had attracted attention.[207] The Atlanta Exposition simply gave him the great occasion that he needed; and he was now to proclaim the new word throughout the length and breadth of the land. Among the hundreds of addresses that he afterwards delivered, especially important were those at Harvard University in 1896, at the Chicago Peace Jubilee in 1898, and before the National Education Association in St. Louis in 1904. Again and again in these speeches one comes upon such striking sentences as the following: "Freedom can never be given. It must be purchased."[208] "The race, like the individual, that makes itself indispensable, has solved most of its problems."[209] "As a race there are two things we must learn to do—one is to put brains into the common occupations of life, and the other is to dignify common labor."[210] "Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the State Legislature was worth more than real estate or industrial skill."[211] "The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house."[212] "One of the most vital questions that touch our American life is how to bring the strong, wealthy, and learned into helpful contact with the poorest, most ignorant, and humblest, and at the same time make the one appreciate the vitalizing, strengthening influence of the other."[213] "There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all."[214]
The time was ripe for a new leader. Frederick Douglass had died in February, 1895. In his later years he had more than once lost hold on the heart of his people, as when he opposed the Negro Exodus or seemed not fully in sympathy with the religious convictions of those who looked to him. At his passing, however, the race remembered only his early service and his old magnificence, and to a striving people his death seemed to make still darker the gathering gloom. Coming when he did, Booker T. Washington was thoroughly in line with the materialism of his age; he answered both an economic and an educational crisis. He also satisfied the South of the new day by what he had to say about social equality.
The story of his work reads like a romance, and he himself has told it better than any one else ever can. He did not claim the credit for the original idea of industrial education; that he gave to General Armstrong, and it was at Hampton that he himself had been nurtured. What was needed, however, was for some one to take the Hampton idea down to the cotton belt, interpret the lesson for the men and women digging in the ground, and generally to put the race in line with the country's industrial development. This was what Booker T. Washington undertook to do.
He reached Tuskegee early in June, 1881. July 4 was the date set for the opening of the school in the little shanty and church which had been secured for its accommodation. On the morning of this day thirty students reported for admission. The greater number were school-teachers and some were nearly forty years of age. Just about three months after the opening of the school there was offered for sale an old and abandoned plantation a mile from Tuskegee on which the mansion had been burned. All told the place seemed to be just the location needed to make the work effective and permanent. The price asked was five hundred dollars, the owner requiring the immediate payment of two hundred and fifty dollars, the remaining two hundred and fifty to be paid within a year. In his difficulty Mr. Washington wrote to General J.F.B. Marshall, treasurer of Hampton Institute, placing the matter before him and asking for the loan of two hundred and fifty dollars. General Marshall replied that he had no authority to lend money belonging to Hampton Institute, but that he would gladly advance the amount needed from his personal funds. Toward the paying of this sum the assisting teacher, Olivia A. Davidson (afterwards Mrs. Washington), helped heroically. Her first effort was made by holding festivals and suppers, but she also canvassed the families in the town of Tuskegee, and the white people as well as the Negroes helped her. "It was often pathetic," said the principal, "to note the gifts of the older colored people, many of whom had spent their best days in slavery. Sometimes they would give five cents, sometimes twenty-five cents. Sometimes the contribution was a quilt, or a quantity of sugarcane. I recall one old colored woman, who was about seventy years of age, who came to see me when we were raising money to pay for the farm. She hobbled into the room where I was, leaning on a cane. She was clad in rags, but they were clean. She said, 'Mr. Washington, God knows I spent de bes' days of my life in slavery. God knows I's ignorant an' poor; but I knows what you an' Miss Davidson is tryin' to do. I knows you is tryin' to make better men an' better women for de colored race. I ain't got no money, but I wants you to take dese six eggs, what I's been savin' up, an' I wants you to put dese six eggs into de eddication of dese boys an' gals.' Since the work at Tuskegee started," added the speaker, "it has been my privilege to receive many gifts for the benefit of the institution, but never any, I think, that touched me as deeply as this one."
It was early in the history of the school that Mr. Washington conceived the idea of extension work. The Tuskegee Conferences began in February, 1892. To the first meeting came five hundred men, mainly farmers, and many woman. Outstanding was the discussion of the actual terms on which most of the men were living from year to year. A mortgage was given on the cotton crop before it was planted, and to the mortgage was attached a note which waived all right to exemptions under the constitution and laws of the state of Alabama or of any other state to which the tenant might move. Said one: "The mortgage ties you tighter than any rope and a waive note is a consuming fire." Said another: "The waive note is good for twenty years and when you sign one you must either pay out or die out." Another: "When you sign a waive note you just cross your hands behind you and go to the merchant and say, 'Here, tie me and take all I've got.'" All agreed that the people mortgaged more than was necessary, to buy sewing machines (which sometimes were not used), expensive clocks, great family Bibles, or other things easily dispensed with. Said one man: "My people want all they can get on credit, not thinking of the day of settlement. We must learn to bore with a small augur first. The black man totes a heavy bundle, and when he puts it down there is a plow, a hoe, and ignorance."
It was to people such as these that Booker T. Washington brought hope, and serving them he passed on to fame. Within a few years schools on the plan of Tuskegee began to spring up all over the South, at Denmark, at Snow Hill, at Utica, and elsewhere. In 1900 the National Negro Business League began its sessions, giving great impetus to the establishment of banks, stores, and industrial enterprises throughout the country, and especially in the South. Much of this progress would certainly have been realized if the Business League had never been organized; but every one granted that in all the development the genius of the leader at Tuskegee was the chief force. About his greatness and his very definite contribution there could be no question.
3. [Individual Achievement: The Spanish-American War]
It happened that just at the time that Booker T. Washington was advancing to great distinction, three or four other individuals were reflecting special credit on the race. One of these was a young scholar, W.E. Burghardt DuBois, who after a college career at Fisk continued his studies at Harvard and Berlin and finally took the Ph.D. degree at Harvard in 1895. There had been sound scholars in the race before DuBois, but generally these had rested on attainment in the languages or mathematics, and most frequently they had expressed themselves in rather philosophical disquisition. Here, however, was a thorough student of economics, and one who was able to attack the problems of his people and meet opponents on the basis of modern science. He was destined to do great good, and the race was proud of him.