Mrs. Booker T. Washington.
Another incident of those days I have heard him tell of in these words: "Word was sent over the plantation for all 'the hands' to come up to the 'big house.' We went, and to us men, women, and children gathered in the yard some one standing on the veranda read a paper. I was too young to understand why the men and women around me should have begun to shout, 'Hallelujah! Praise de Lawd!' when the reading was finished, but my mother, bending down to where I was clinging to her dress, whispered to me that we were free."
Not long after the close of the war the Washingtons left the plantation and went to West Virginia, where, in the coal mines, work could be had which would pay money wages. At first Booker worked in the mines with his brothers, but he soon became dissatisfied with the chance for improvement which that work afforded. "The first thing that led me to study," he has said, "was seeing a young colored man slowly reading a newspaper to a group of colored people who surrounded him with open mouths and gaping eyes. He was almost a god to them." The chance to study was soon found. An energetic woman of kindly nature hired the young colored boy to work about her house as a general chore-boy. Finding that he was anxious to learn, she offered to teach him to read in the spare minutes of his work, and did so. One day he overheard a man talking about Hampton, where General Armstrong had already begun his noble work. This, the man said, was a place where black boys could go to school, and at the same time work to pay their way. "As soon as I heard that," Mr. Washington has said, "I made up my mind that Hampton was just the place for me, and that I would go there. I started, although I had no money and did not even know where Hampton was. I felt sure I could inquire the way as I went, and work my passage. I walked a good share of the way, begged some rides, and when I had earned any money which I could spare, paid my fare to ride on the trains. I reached Richmond, Virginia, one night too late to get any work, and I was entirely out of money. While I was walking about wondering where I would get a lodging, I happened to see a nice dry place under a stretch of plank sidewalk. Watching my chance when no one was looking, I crawled in and curled up to sleep. The next day I was so fortunate as to get work helping to unload a vessel, and, as the job lasted several days, I came back each night to my lodging under the sidewalk, thus saving all my wages except the little required for food. In this way I was able to get money enough to carry me the rest of the way to Hampton, and leave me fifty cents when I got there."
In these days of entrance examinations to various institutions of learning, it is interesting to read of the examination which young Washington was required to pass before he could enter Hampton. He tells us of it thus: "Of course," says he, "they knew nothing of me, and, after my long tramp, days of hard labor and nights of sleeping in barns and under sidewalks, I suppose I could not have presented a very prepossessing appearance. After looking me over in a not very encouraging manner, they gave me a broom and took me into a room, which they told me to sweep. I suppose I swept that room over three or four times before I was satisfied to call it done, when a teacher came in and took her handkerchief and wiped the walls to see if she could find any dust on them. After that they said I could come to the school. So you see I passed my examination.
"At Hampton I found the opportunity, in the way of buildings, teachers, and industries provided by the generous, to get training in the class room, and by practical touch with industrial life to learn thrift, economy, and push. I was surrounded by an atmosphere of business, Christian influence, and a spirit of self-help that seemed to have awakened every faculty within me, and caused me for the first time to realize what it meant to be a man instead of a piece of property.
"While there I resolved that, when I had finished my course of training, I would go into the far South, into the 'black belt' of the South, and give my life to providing the same kind of opportunity for self-reliance and self-awakening that I had found provided for me at Hampton. My work began at Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1881, in a small shanty and church, with one teacher and thirty students, without a dollar's worth of property. The spirit of work and of industrial thrift, with aid from the State and generosity from the North, has enabled us to develop an institution of a thousand students, gathered from twenty-six States, with eighty-one instructors and thirty-eight buildings.
"I am sometimes asked what is the object of all this outlay of energy and money. To that I would answer that the needs of the ten million colored people in the South may be roughly said to be food, clothing, shelter, education, proper habits, and a settlement of race relations. These ten million people can not be reached by any direct agency, but they can be reached by sending out among them strong selected young men and women, with the proper training of the head and hand and heart, who will live among these masses and show them how to lift themselves up. The problem that Tuskegee Institute keeps before itself is how to prepare these leaders."
The first time I went to Tuskegee I happened to ride for half a day through the State of Georgia in the same seat in the car with a man whose conversation showed him to be one of the class to whom the designation "unreconstructed" has sometimes been applied. An officer in the Confederate army, he had accepted the situation at the close of the war, but now, after thirty years, although he spoke of existing conditions without bitterness, he spoke of them with little or no sympathy. I had some doubt how he would comment on my errand, when I told him that I was on my way to attend the Negro Conference at Tuskegee. Imagine my surprise when he exclaimed: "Going to Tuskegee, are you, to see Booker Washington? Just let me tell you there's a man that's got the right idea of things. He's teaching the negroes to work. I wish the South had a thousand Booker Washingtons." This man, I learned afterward, when I was in Atlanta, was one of the most prominent and successful business men of that city.
The second day of my stay at Tuskegee, as I came out of the rude buildings where the conference had been held, a young colored man waiting at the door accosted me. "Is not this Mr. ——," he said, "and at the World's Fair were you not in charge of such an exhibit?" naming one of the educational exhibits. I said I was the man. "Don't you remember me?" he added, telling me where he had been working at the time. I did remember him perfectly, and asked how he happened to be so far removed from Chicago.