This famous speech, with its famous metaphor, was delivered, as I have said, at Atlanta, in 1895. At Atlanta in 1906 an outbreak of popular frenzy, excited by one or two real and several imaginary outrages, led to the slaughter in the streets of an unknown number of negroes (probably thirty or forty), not one of whom was even suspected of any crime. It does not seem as though the Atlanta Compromise had as yet borne much fruit, at any rate on its native soil.
Even more significant than Mr. Washington’s “Up from Slavery” is a book called “Tuskegee and its People,” to which he contributes a general introduction. |Tuskegee Ideals.| Two-thirds of the book consist of “Autobiographies by Graduates of the School,” with such titles as “A College President’s Story,” “A Lawyer’s Story,” “The Story of a Blacksmith,” “The Story of a Farmer,” “A Druggist’s Story,“ “A Negro Community Builder.” These stories are all interesting, many of them heroic and touching, and all permeated with the Booker-Washington spirit of indomitable self-help, unresentful acceptance of outward conditions, and unquestioning measurement of success by material standards. And yet not wholly material. The formation and maintenance of the “home” are the aspiration and ideal everywhere proclaimed—the home connoting, to the negro mind, not only pecuniary well-being, but decency, morality, education, a certain standard of refinement. Here is a characteristic passage from “The Story of a Farmer”:
Rev. Robert C. Bedford, Secretary of the board of trustees, Tuskegee Institute, some time ago visited us.... He wrote the following much-appreciated compliment regarding our homes and ourselves: “The homes of the Reid brothers are very nicely furnished throughout. Everything is well kept and very orderly. The bedspreads are strikingly white, and the rooms—though I called when not expected—were in the best of order.”
To this subject of the “home” I shall return later. I have seen few things more touching than the negro’s pride in the whiteness of his bedspreads.
Not less characteristic, however, is this further passage from the same “Story of a Farmer,” which follows, indeed, on the same page:—
Under the guidance of the Tuskegee influences ... the importance of land-buying was early brought to our attention, but because of the crude and inexperienced labourers about us, we found that we could, with advantage to all, rent large tracts of land, sub-rent to others, and in this way pay no rent ourselves, as these sub-renters did that for us. We could in this way also escape paying taxes, insurance, and other expenses that naturally follow.
It does not appear that “the Tuskegee influence” involves any economic idealism, or any doubt as to the legitimacy of capitalistic exploitation.
Principal Washington’s message, by his own admission, or, rather, insistence, might not unfairly be called “The Gospel of the Toothbrush.” |Washingtonian Optimism.| Again and again he uses this unpretending appliance as a symbol of the clean-living self-respect which he has made an ideal for his race. His policy, as he puts it in a remarkable passage, is to teach the negro to “want more wants.” It is the man with scarcely any wants who can satisfy them by working one day a week and loafing the other six. The man who wants many things “to make a happy fireside clime for weans and wife,” is the man who can be trusted to work steadily for six days out of the seven. This undeniable and (from the employer’s point of view) most salutary truth ought to put to silence the dwindling minority of Southerners who still object to the very idea and principle of negro education.
But suppose the majority of the race converted either into men of independent substance or satisfactory labourers for hire, will the problem be thereby solved? Principal Washington has no doubt on the subject. In the introduction to “Tuskegee and its People,” he proclaims his optimism in no uncertain voice:
The immeasurable advancement of the negro, manifested in character, courage, and cash ... is “confirmation strong as proofs of Holy Writ” that the gospel of industry, as exemplified by Tuskegee and its helpers, has exerted a leavening influence upon civilization wherever it has been brought within the reach of those who are struggling towards the heights. Under this new dispensation of mind, morals, and muscle, with the best whites and best blacks in sympathetic co-operation, and justice meaning the same to the weak as to the strong, the South will no longer be vexed by a race problem.