Working With the Hands / Being a Sequel to "Up from Slavery," Covering the Author's Experiences in Industrial Training at Tuskegee

by Booker T. Washington

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