Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization

by Emmett J. Scott; Lyman Beecher Stowe

As is shown by these quotations Booker Washington used these Sunday night talks to crystalize, interpret, and summarize the meaning and significance of the kind of education which Tuskegee gives. He, the supreme head of the institution, reserved to himself this supremely important task. The heads of the manifold trades are naturally and properly concerned primarily with turning raw boys and girls into good workmen and workwomen. The academic teachers in the school are similarly interested in helping them as students to secure a mastery of their several subjects. The military commandants are concerned with their ability to drill, march, carry themselves properly, and take proper care of their persons and rooms. The physician is interested in their physical health and the chaplain in their religious training. Important as are all these phases of Tuskegee's training and closely as he watched each Mr. Washington realized that they might all be well done and yet Tuskegee fail in its supreme purpose: namely, the making of manly men and womanly women out of raw boys and girls. As he said in one of the passages quoted, "character is the only thing worth fighting for." Now, while the forming of character is the aim, and in some appreciable degree the achievement, of every worth-while educational institution, it is to a peculiar degree the aim and the achievement of Tuskegee. The ten million Negroes in the United States need trained leaders of their own race more than they need anything else. Whatever else they should or should not have these leaders must have character. Since Tuskegee is the largest of the educational institutions for Negroes, with the man at its head who was commonly recognized as the leader of leaders in his race, naturally the heaviest responsibility in the training of these leaders fell, and will continue to fall, upon Tuskegee. Consequently the task at Tuskegee is not so much to educate so many thousands of young men and women as to train as many leaders for the Negro people as can possibly be done and done well within a given space of time. These Tuskegee graduates lead by the power of example and not by agitation. One runs a farm and achieves so much more success than his neighbors, through his better methods, that they gradually adopt these methods and with his help apply them to their own conditions. Another teaches a country school and does it so much better than the average country school teacher that his or her school comes to be regarded as a model to be emulated by the other schools of the locality. When a Tuskegee girl marries and settles in a community she keeps her house so much cleaner and in every way more attractive than the rank and file of her neighbors that gradually her house and her methods of housekeeping become the standard for the neighborhood. There is, however, nothing of the "holier than thou" or the complaisant about the true Tuskegee graduate and neither is there anything monopolistic. They have had the idea of service thoroughly drilled into their consciousness—the idea that their advantages of education are, as it were, a trust which they are to administer for the benefit of those who have not had such advantages.

Now such leaders as these must not only be provided if the so-called race problem is to be solved, but they must be provided speedily. In every community in which the black people are ignorant and vicious and without trained leaders among themselves they are likely at any time to come into conflict with the dominant race, and every such conflict engenders bitterness on both sides and makes just so much more difficult the final solution of the race problem. This is why Booker Washington labored so incessantly to increase the quantity of Tuskegee's output as well as to maintain the quality. He brought Tuskegee to the point where it reached through all its courses including its summer courses, short courses, and extension courses, more than 4,000 people in a single year, not counting the well-nigh innumerable hosts he counseled with on his State educational tours. In short, Booker Washington's task at Tuskegee was not only to turn out good leaders for his people, but to turn them out wholesale and as fast as possible. He was, as it were, running a race with the powers of ignorance, poverty, and vice. This in part accounted for the sense of terrific pressure which one felt at Tuskegee, particularly when he was present and personally driving forward his great educational machine. This also may have accounted for the seeming lack of finesse in small matters which occasionally annoyed critical visitors who did not understand that the great institution was racing under the spur of its indomitable master, and that just as in any race all but essentials must be thrown aside.

Long before the University of Wisconsin had, through its extension courses, extended its opportunities in greater or less degree to the citizens of the entire State, Booker Washington, through similar means, had extended the advantages of Tuskegee throughout Macon County in particular and the State of Alabama and neighboring States in general.

The extension work of Tuskegee began in a small way over twenty years ago. It preceded even the work of the demonstration agents of the United States Department of Agriculture. There was first only one man who in his spare time went out among the farming people and tried to arouse enthusiasm for better methods of farming, better schools, and better homes. He was followed by a committee of three members of the Tuskegee faculty, which committee still directs the work. One of the first efforts of this committee was to get the farmers to adopt deep plowing. There was not a two-horse plow to be found. There was a strong prejudice against deep plowing which was thus expressed by a Negro preacher farmer whom one of the committee tried to persuade: "We don't want deep plowing. You're fixin' for us to have no soil. If we plow deep it will all wash away and in a year or two we will have to clear new ground." Not long after this a member of the committee with a two-horse plow was practising what he had been preaching when a white planter who was passing stopped and said: "See here, its none of my business of course, but you're new here and I don't want to see you fail. But if you plow your land deep like that you'll ruin it sure. I know. I've been here."

After a time, however, the committee persuaded a few colored farmers to try deep plowing on a small scale as an experiment. One of the first of these was a poor man who had had the hardest kind of a struggle scraping a scant existence out of the soil for himself and his large family. He was desperate and agreed to try the new method. He got results the first year, moved on to better land and followed instructions. In a few years he bought 500 acres of land, gave each of his four sons 100 acres, and kept 100 acres for himself. Since then father and sons alike have been prosperous and contented and have added to their holdings.

In short, these Negro farmers were no more eager to be reformed and improved in their methods than are any normal people. There is a shallow popular sentiment that unless people are eager for enlightenment and gratefully receive what is offered them they should be left unenlightened. Booker Washington never shared this sentiment. His agent reported that in response to their appeals for the raising of a better grade of cattle, hogs, and fowl the farmers replied that the stock they had was good enough. One of their favorite comments was, "When you eat an egg what difference does it make to you whether that egg was laid by a full-blooded fowl or a mongrel?" Instead of being discouraged or disgusted by this attitude on the part of the people he merely regarded it as what was to be expected and set about devising means to overcome it. As always he placed his chief reliance upon the persuasive eloquence of the concrete. He decided to send blooded stock and properly raised products around among the farmers so that they might compare them with their inferior stock and products and see the difference with their own eyes. This plan was later carried out through the Jesup Wagon contributed by the late Morris K. Jesup of New York. This wagon was a peripatetic farmers' school. It took a concentrated essence of Tuskegees' agricultural department to the farmers who could not or would not come to Tuskegee.

The wagon was drawn by a well-bred and well-fed mule. A good breed of cow was tied behind. Several chickens of good breeds, well-developed ears of corn, stalks of cotton, bundles of oats and seeds, and garden products, which ought at the time to be growing in the locality, together with a proper plow, for deep plowing, were loaded upon the wagon. The driver would pull up before a farmhouse, deliver his message, and point out the strong points of his wagonload and would finally request a strip of ground for cultivation. This request granted he would harness the mule to the plow, break the ground deep, make his rows, plant his seeds, and move on to the next locality. With a carefully planned follow-up system he would return to each such plot for cultivation and harvest, and, most important of all, to demonstrate the truths he had sought to impress upon the people by word of mouth. Where the first driver sent out was a general farmer, the second would be, let us say, a dairyman, the third a truck gardener, and finally a poultry raiser would go; usually a woman, since in the South women, for the most part, handle this phase of farming. These agents also distribute pamphlets prepared by the Agricultural Research Department of Tuskegee on such subjects as school gardening, twenty-one ways to cook cowpeas, improvement of rural schools, how to fight insect pests, cotton growing, etc. The constant emphasis upon practice by no means entails any neglect of theory.

Besides this work there is each January for two weeks at Tuskegee the regular Farmers' Short Course. Many of the country schools adjourn for this period so that both teachers and pupils may attend. In this course not only teachers and pupils, but fathers and mothers, sons and daughters sit side by side in the classrooms receiving instruction in stock raising, canning, poultry raising, and farming in all its branches. There are special courses for the women and girls in the care of children and in housekeeping. The following breezy announcement is taken from the prospectus of this course for the year 1914:

"A creation of the farmer, by the farmers and for the farmer."

"It meets the crying needs of thousands of our boys and girls, fathers and mothers.