A Contrast of Personalities.
Principal Booker T. Washington is a negro in every lineament, and not, one would say, of the most refined type. His skin is neither black nor copper-coloured, but rather of a sort of cloudy yellow, to which the other shades are, perhaps, æsthetically preferable. His hair, his ears, his nose, his jaw, all place his race beyond dispute; only his grave, candid, forceful eyes announce a leader of men. He is above middle height, and heavily built; seated, he is apt to sprawl. He has a curious trick of drawing back the corners of his mouth, so as to reveal almost the whole of his range of teeth. At first I took this for a slow smile, heralding some humorous remark; but humour is not Mr. Washington’s strong point. His grin is a nervous habit, and scarcely a pretty one.[[17]] Altogether, in talking with him, you have no difficulty in remembering the race of your interlocutor, and if you make an untactful remark—if you let the irrepressible instinct of race-superiority slip out—you have all the more reason to be ashamed.
With Mr. Du Bois the case is totally different. His own demonstration notwithstanding, I cannot believe that there is more of the negro in him than in (say) Alexandre Dumas fils. Meeting this quiet, cultivated, French-looking gentleman, with his pointed beard, olive complexion, and dark melancholy eyes, it is hard to believe that he is born, as he himself phrases it, “within the Veil.” In appearance he reminded me a good deal of Gabriele d’Annunzio, only that D’Annunzio happens to be fair, while Mr. Du Bois has something more like the average Italian complexion. In speaking to this man of fine academic culture—this typical college don, one would have said—the difficulty was to feel any difference of race and traditions, and not to assume, tactlessly, an identical standpoint.
These two men are unquestionably the leaders of their race to-day; but their ideals and their policy are as different as their physique. Mr. Washington leads from within; Mr. Du Bois from without. Should he read this phrase he will probably resent it; but it may be none the less true. Mr. Washington could never have been anything else than a negro; he represents all that is best in the race, but nothing that is not in the race. Mr. Du Bois is a negro only from outside pressure. I do not mean, of course, that there are no negro traits in his character, but that it is outside pressure—the tyranny of the white man—that has made him fiercely, passionately, insistently African. Had there been no colour question—had the negro had no oppression, no injustice to complain of—Mr. Du Bois would have been a cosmopolitan, and led the life of a scholar at some English, German, or perhaps even American University. As it was, he felt that to desert his race would be the basest of apostasies; but it was because he could have been disloyal that he became so vehemently—one might almost say fanatically—loyal.
I have heard a well-known New York publicist, the editor of an influential paper, express the opinion that Mr. Booker Washington is one of the greatest men at present alive in America. |“Up from Slavery.”| One of the others was President Eliot, of Harvard; the third I will not name—thus leaving the gate of hope ajar for many eminent persons. There was, perhaps, a spice of paradox in this appraisement of Mr. Washington; but a remarkable man he certainly is. Not, I think, a great intellect, but assuredly a strong and admirable character. His life, as related by himself in “Up from Slavery,” is a story of quiet heroism to rank with any in literature. Born a slave in a one-room cabin, with no glazed window and an earthen floor, he remained there until, when he was eight or nine, emancipation came. After that he worked in a salt-furnace and in a coal-mine, devoured all the time by a passion for knowledge which overcame what seemed almost incredible difficulties. At last he set forth for Hampton Institute, where General Armstrong was then just beginning his beneficent work. He had five hundred miles to travel and scarcely any money. He worked and even begged his way; for Mr. Washington has never been ashamed to beg when there was a good object to be served. Arriving at Richmond, Virginia, without a cent, he worked for several days unloading a ship, and slept at night in a hollow under a wooden side-walk.
At Hampton he found the system in operation which he has since adopted at Tuskegee—namely, that tuition is covered by endowment, while the student is enabled to pay (in part, at any rate) by work, for his board and clothing. He soon distinguished himself, not by great attainments, but by the thoroughness of his work and the sincerity and elevation of his character. Then, in 1881, it occurred to the State of Alabama to start a normal school for coloured people at a little village named Tuskegee, some forty miles from the capital, Montgomery. It did not, however, occur to the State of Alabama to provide any buildings or apparatus; it simply allotted £400 a year to be applied to the salaries of the teachers. On General Armstrong’s recommendation, Mr. Washington, then a youth of some five-and-twenty, was entrusted with the organization and management of the school; and the account of how, with practically no resources at all, he built up the great and beneficent institution which has now made the name of Tuskegee world-famous, is indeed a remarkable story of indomitable courage and perseverance. Mr. Washington felt that his personal failure would be reckoned a failure for his race. Out of the nettle, danger, he plucked the flower, safety; and Tuskegee now represents perhaps the greatest individual triumph his race has ever achieved.
Of course it has been achieved largely through philanthropic help from the North—Mr. Washington, as I have said, is an unashamed, though very tactful, beggar. |Statesman or Time-Server?| It is precisely that tactfulness, in its largest sense, with which the fierier spirits of his race reproach him. In their milder moods they call him an opportunist and time-server; in moments of irritation they call him a betrayer of his people, and a pitiful truckler to the white man. He is, in fact, nothing of the sort; on the wrongs of his race he has spoken with no uncertain voice, when he felt it to be in season; but he has not harped upon them in and out of season. While he has plenty of race-pride, he has no race-vanity, and realizes that the negro has yet to conquer his place among the fully-developed and civilized races of the world. To help in this conquest is the mission and glory of his life; and he feels, rightly or wrongly, that material progress must precede and serve as a basis for intellectual progress. Therefore what is called the academic course—the course of language, literature, and abstract science—plays only a secondary part at Tuskegee. The curriculum is mainly industrial and agricultural, though the chemical and mechanical theory which lies behind agriculture and the handicrafts is by no means neglected. The fostering of aptitudes and the upbuilding of character—these are the two great aims of Tuskegee. The negro, says Mr. Washington, must render himself necessary to the American Commonwealth before he can expect to take a highly esteemed place in it, and the best way to claim a vote is to show that you are capable of using it wisely. Such are the maxims which he inculcates on his students—thereby earning the contumely of the fierier spirits aforesaid. They broke up one of his meetings in Boston, not long ago, with red pepper, and with the racial weapon—the razor.
But if any one imagines that Mr. Washington is a saint-like spirit in whom the wrongs of his race awaken no bitterness, he is very much mistaken. He has, when he cares to show it, a quiet contempt for the pettinesses of Southern policy which is rendered all the more scathing by his acceptance of them as matters of course.
It was at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895 that Mr. Booker Washington made his first great success—the success which brought him national renown as a speaker and a leader of his race. |The Atlanta Compromise.| In an address delivered at the opening ceremony, he formulated what has since become famous as the Atlanta Compromise, in this oft-quoted sentence: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
Mr. Washington has himself described with dignified simplicity the enthusiasm which this speech aroused among an audience which, if not hostile at the outset, was at least sceptical of the policy of allowing a negro to speak on such an occasion. The chairman—the Governor of Georgia—rushed across the platform and shook him by the hand, and the country was soon ringing with the fame of his tactful eloquence. But though it is the phrase above quoted that has become classic, there was another, which, if I am not greatly mistaken, did more to conciliate his audience. Speaking of the progress of his race, as manifested in their department of the Exposition, he reminded his hearers that the negro had “started thirty years ago with ownership here and there in a few quilts and pumpkins and chickens (gathered from miscellaneous sources).” I would wager a good deal that it was this parenthesis, this genial allusion to the tender topic of chicken-stealing, that finally won the hearts of his white hearers. It is impossible to imagine Mr. Du Bois thus playing, not to the gallery, but rather to the stalls. And Mr. Washington no doubt deliberately calculated his effect, for he is certainly not by nature an irrepressibly facetious personage.