“I repeat that any work looking toward the permanent improvement of the Negro in the South, must have for one of its aims the fitting of him to live friendly and peaceably with his white neighbors, both socially and politically. In spite of all talk of exodus the Negro’s home is permanently in the South, for coming to the bread and meat side of the question the white man needs the Negro and the Negro needs the white man. His home being permanently in the South, it is our duty to help him prepare himself to live there, an independent, educated citizen. In order that there may be the broadest development of the colored man and that he may have an unbounded field in which to labor, the two races South must be brought to have faith in each other. The teachings of the Negro, in various ways, for the last twenty years, have tended too much to array him against his white brother rather than to put the races in co-operation with each other. Thus Massachusetts supports the Republican party because the Republican party supports Massachusetts with a protective tariff; but the Negro supports the Republican party simply because Massachusetts does. When the colored man is educated up to the point of seeing that Alabama and Massachusetts are a long way apart and the conditions of life in them very different, and that if free trade enables my white brother across the street to buy his plows at a cheaper rate it will enable me to do the same thing, he will act in a different way. More than once I have noticed that when the whites were in favor of prohibition, the blacks, led even by sober, upright ministers, voted against prohibition, simply because the whites were in favor of it, and for this reason the blacks said that they knew it was a ‘democratic trick.’ If the whites vote to lay a tax to build a school house it is a signal for the blacks to oppose the measure, simply because the whites favor it. I venture the assertion that the sooner the colored man, South, learns that one political party is not composed altogether of angels and the other altogether of devils, and that all his enemies do not live in his own town or neighborhood and all his friends in some other distant section of the country, the sooner will his educational advantages be enhanced many fold. But matters are gradually changing in this respect. The black man is beginning to find out that there are those even among the Southern whites who desire his elevation. The Negro’s new faith in the white man is being reciprocated in proportion as the Negro is rightly educated. The white brother is beginning to learn by degrees that all Negroes are not liars and chicken thieves.
“Now in regard to what I have said about the relations of the two races, there should be no unmanly cowering or stooping to satisfy unreasonable whims of Southern white men; but it is charity and wisdom to keep in mind the two hundred years of schooling in prejudice against the Negro which the ex-slaveholders are called on to conquer. A certain class of whites object to the general education of the colored man on the ground that when he is educated he ceased to do manual labor, and there is no avoiding the fact that much aid is withheld from Negro education in the South by the states on these grounds. Just here the great mission of Industrial Education, coupled with the mental, comes in. It kills two birds with one stone, viz., it secures the co-operation of the whites and does the best possible thing for the black man.”
After this address I began receiving invitations from a good many portions of the country to deliver addresses on the subject of educating the Negro. At the present time these applications have increased to such an extent, and they come in such large numbers, that, if I were to try to answer even one-third of the calls that come to me from all parts of the United States as well as other countries, to speak, I would scarcely spend a single day at Tuskegee.
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’S RESIDENCE, TUSKEGEE, ALABAMA.
FACULTY, TUSKEGEE NORMAL AND INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTE—88 OFFICERS AND TEACHERS.