Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization

by Emmett J. Scott; Lyman Beecher Stowe

Then comes a letter from a poor woman who wants him in the course of his travels to look up her husband who abandoned her some years before. For purposes of identification she says: "This is the hith of him 5-6 light eyes dark hair unwave shave and a Suprano Voice his age 58 his name Steve...." Even though Mr. Washington did not agree to spend his spare time looking for a disloyal husband with a soprano voice, he sent the poor woman a kind reply and suggested some means of tracing her recreant spouse.

We come next upon a long letter written to a man who wishes to quote for publication in a magazine Booker Washington's opinion on the relation between crime and education. In the concluding paragraphs of his reply Mr. Washington says: "In nine cases out of ten the crimes which serve to unite and give an excuse for mob violence are committed by men who are without property, without homes, and without education except what they have picked up in the city slums, in prisons, or on the chain gang. The South is spending too much money in giving the Negro this kind of education that makes criminals and not enough on the kind of schools that turn out farmers, carpenters, and blacksmiths. Other things being equal, it is true not only in America, in the South, but throughout the world, that there is the least crime where there is the most education. This is true of the South and of the Negro, just the same as it is true of every other race. Particularly is it true that the individuals who commit crimes of violence and crimes that are due to lack of self-control are individuals who are, for the most part, ignorant. The decrease in lynching in the Southern States is an index of the steady growth of the South in wealth, in industry, in education, and in individual liberty."

Then comes a letter to an individual who desires to know what proportion of the American Negroes can read and write now, and what proportion could at the time of the Civil War. The reply again quotes the 1910 census to the effect that 69.5 per cent. can now read and write as compared with only 3 per cent. at the close of the war. The letter also points out that the rate of illiteracy among American Negroes is now lower than the rate for all the peoples of Russia, Portugal, Brazil, and Venezuela, and almost as low as that of Spain.

There follows a sheaf of correspondence in which Mr. Washington agreed to speak at the unveiling of a tablet in Auburn, New York, to the memory of "Aunt Harriet" Tubman Davis, the black woman, squat of stature and seamed of face, who piloted three or four hundred slaves from the land of bondage to the land of freedom. While there he also agreed to speak at Auburn prison in response to the special request of some of the prisoners.

Then we find a courteous but firmly negative reply to a long-winded bore who writes a six-page letter urging Mr. Washington to secure the acceptance by the Negro race of a flag which he has designed as their racial flag.

After this follows a group of letters which passed between him and the late Edgar Gardiner Murphy, author of "The Present South," "The Basis of Ascendency," and other important books. In one of these letters Mr. Washington agrees, as requested, to read the proofs of "The Basis of Ascendency," and in another he thus characteristically comments upon Mr. Murphy's fears that a pessimistic book on the status of the Negro written by a supposed authority (a colored man) would do wide-reaching harm: "Of course among a certain element it will have an influence for harm, but human nature, as I observe it, is so constructed that it does not take kindly to a description of a failure. It is hard to get up enthusiasm in connection with a funeral procession. No man, in my opinion, could write a history of the Southern Confederacy that would be read generally because it failed. I am not saying, of course, that the Negro race is a failure. Mr. —— writes largely from that point of view, hence there is no rallying point for the general reader."

In reply to a Western university professor who had asked his opinion of amalgamation as a solution of the race problem he wrote: "I have never looked upon amalgamation as offering a solution of the so-called race problem, and I know very few Negroes who favor it or even think of it, for that matter. What those whom I have heard discuss the matter do object to are laws which enable the father to escape his responsibility, or prevent him from accepting and exercising it, when he has children by colored women. I think this answers your question, but since there seems to be some misunderstanding as to how colored people feel about this subject, I might say in explanation of what I have already said: The Negroes in America are, as you know, a mixed race. If that is an advantage we have it; if it is a disadvantage, it is still ours, and for the simple reason that the product of every sort of racial mixture between the black man and any other race is always a Negro and never a white man, Indian, or any other sort of man.

"The Negro in America is defined by the census as a person who is classed as such in the community in which he or she resides. In other words, the Negro in this country is not so much of a particular color or particular racial stock as one who shares a particular condition. It is the fact that they all share in this condition which creates a cause of common sympathy and binds the members of the race together in spite of all differences."

To an embarrassing question put by the society editor of some paper Mr. Washington replied by merely telling a funny story the application of which to the impertinent inquiry was obvious. In another letter he summed up his opinion of the much-mooted question of the franchise in these two sentences: "There is no reason why every Negro who is not fitted to vote should not be disfranchised. At the same time, there is no good reason why every white man who is not fitted to vote should not also be disfranchised."

From the foregoing correspondence it will be seen that one of Booker Washington's many rôles was to act as a kind of plenipotentiary and interpreter between his people and the dominant race. For this part he was peculiarly fitted by his thorough understanding of and sympathy for each race.