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.