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

But with all the Negro is doing for himself, with all the white people in the South are doing for themselves, and despite all that one race is doing to help the other, the present opportunities for education are woefully inadequate for both races. In the year 1877-78 the total expenditure for education in the ex-slave States was a beggarly $2.61 per capita for whites and only $1.09 for blacks; on the same basis the U. S. Commissioner of Education calculates that for the year 1900-01, $35,400,000 was spent for the education of both races in the South, of which $6,000,000 went to Negroes, or $4.92 per capita for whites and $2.21 for blacks. On the same basis, each child in Massachusetts costs the taxpayers for its education $22.35, and each one in New York $20.53 yearly.

From both a moral and religious point of view, what measure of education the Negro has received has been repaid, and there has been no step backward in any State. Not a single graduate of the Hampton Institute or of the Tuskegee Institute can be found to-day in any jail or State penitentiary. After making careful inquiry, I cannot find a half-dozen cases of a man or woman who has completed a full course of education in any of our reputable institutions like Hampton, Tuskegee, Fisk or Atlanta, who are in prisons. The records of the South show that 90 per cent. of the coloured people in prisons are without knowledge of trades, and 61 per cent. are illiterate. This statement alone disproves the assertion that the Negro grows in crime as education increases. If the Negro at the North is more criminal than his brother at the South, it is because of the employment which the South gives him and the North denies him. It is not the educated Negro who has been guilty of or even charged with crime in the South; it is, as a rule, the one who has a mere smattering of education or is in total ignorance. While the Negro may succeed in getting into the State prison faster, the white man in some inexplainable manner has a way of getting out faster than the Negro. To illustrate: the official records of Virginia for a year show that one out of every three and one-half white men were freed from prison by executive clemency, and that only one out of every fourteen Negroes received such clemency. In Louisiana it is one to every four and one-half white men and one to every forty-nine Negroes. So that, when this feature is considered, matters are pretty well evened up between the races.

As bearing further upon the tendency of education to improve the morals of the Negro and therefore to prolong his life, no one will accuse the average New York insurance company of being guided by mere sentiment toward the Negro in placing its risks; with the insurance company it is a question of cold business. A few months ago the chief medical examiner for the largest industrial insurance company in America stated that, after twenty years' experience and observation, his company had found that the Negro who was intelligent, who worked regularly at a trade or some industry and owned his home, was as safe an insurance risk as a white man in the same station of life.

Not long ago, a Southern white man residing in the town of Tuskegee, who represents one of the largest and most wealthy accident and casualty companies in New York, wrote to his company to the effect that while he knew his company refused to insure the ordinary, ignorant coloured man, at the Tuskegee Institute there were some 150 officers and instructors who were persons of education and skill, with property and character, and that he, a Southern white man, advised that they be insured on the same terms as other races, and within a week the answer came back, "Insure without hesitation every Negro on the Tuskegee Institute grounds of the type you name." The fact is, that almost every insurance company is now seeking the business of the educated Negro. If education increased the risk, they would seek the ignorant Negro rather than the educated one. As bearing further upon the effect of education upon the morals of the Negro during the last forty years, let us go into the heart of the Black Belt of Mississippi and inquire of Alfred Holt Stone, a large and intelligent cotton planter, as to the progress of the race. Mr. Stone says: "The last census shows that the Negro constitutes 87.6 per cent. of the population of the Yazoo-Mississippi delta. Yet we hear of no black incubus; we have had few midnight assassinations, and fewer lynchings. The violation by a Negro of the person of a white woman is with us an unknown crime; nowhere else is the line marking the social separation of the two races more rigidly drawn; nowhere are the relations between the two more kindly. With us, race riots are unknown, and we have but one Negro problem—though that constantly confronts us—how to secure more Negroes."

There are few higher authorities on the progress of the Negro than Joel Chandler Harris, of the Atlanta Constitution. Mr. Harris had opportunity to know the Negro before the war, and he has followed his progress closely in freedom. In a statement published recently Mr. Harris says:

"In spite of all, however, the condition of the Negro has been growing better....

"We cannot fairly judge a race, or a country, or a religious institution, or a social organisation, or society itself, nay, not the republic in which we take pride, unless we measure it by the standard set up by the men who are its best representatives.

"We are in such a furious hurry. We are placed in a position of expecting a race but a few years from inevitable ignorance imposed on it by the conditions of slavery to make the most remarkable progress that the world has ever heard of, and when we discover that in the nature of things this is impossible, we shake our heads sadly and are ready to lose heart and hope.

"The point I desire to make is that the overwhelming majority of the Negroes in all parts of the South, especially in the agricultural regions, are leading sober and industrious lives. A temperate race is bound to be industrious, and the Negroes are temperate when compared with the whites. Even in the towns the majority of them are sober and industrious. The idle and criminal classes among them make a great show in the police court records, but right here in Atlanta the respectable and decent Negroes far outnumber those who are on the lists of the police as old or new offenders. I am bound to conclude from what I see all about me, and from what I know of the race elsewhere, that the Negro, notwithstanding the late start he has made in civilisation and enlightenment, is capable of making himself a useful member in the communities in which he lives and moves, and that he is becoming more and more desirous of conforming to all the laws that have been enacted for the protection of society."

Some time ago I sent out letters to representative Southern men, covering each ex-slave state, asking them, judging by their observation in their own communities, what effect education had upon the Negro. To those questions I received 136 replies as follows: