MY LARGER EDUCATION
A NEW PORTRAIT OF MR. WASHINGTON "When I had something to say about the white people I said it to the white people; when I had something to say about coloured people I said it to coloured people."
IY LARGER EDUCATION-
BEING CHAPTERS FROM MY EXPERIENCE
BY
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
Author of "Up From Slavery," "The Story of the Negro ''Character Building," etc.
ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
GARDEN CITY ;&£
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1911
N F V*
•MY LARGER EDUCATION-
BEING CHAPTERS FROM MY EXPERIENCE
BY
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
Author of "Up From Slavery," "The Story of the Negro," _ "Character Building," etc.
ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1911
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, I9IO, IQII, DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Learning from Men and Things .... 3
II. Building a School Around a Problem . . .« 21
III. Some Exceptional Men, and What I Have
Learned from Them ». . . . 51
IV. My Experience with Reporters ancl Newspapers 81 V. The Intellectuals and the Boston Mob . . 102
VI. A Commencement Oration on Cabbages . .128
VII. Colonel Roosevelt and What L Have Learned
from Him 158
My Educational Campaigns Through the South and What They Taught Me . . . .183
What I Have Learned from Black Men . . 205
X. Meeting High and Low in Europe ... . 239
XI. What I Learned About Education in Denmark 262
XII. The Mistakes and the Future of _Negro
Education 287
226705
ILLUSTRATIONS A new portrait of Mr. Washington . Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
A partial view of Hampton Institute ... 10
The site of Tuskegee Institute when it was
first bought .22
The house in Maiden, W. Va., in which Mr.
Washington lived when he began teaching 46
Hon. P. B. S. Pinchback, of Louisiana . . 104
Blanche K. Bruce, of Mississippi .... 104
Major John R. Lynch, U. S. A. . . . . 104
Charles Banks 104
A type of the unpretentious cabin which an Alabama Negro formerly occupied and the
modern home in which he now lives . . 124
The " Rising Star " schoolhouse .... 146
Two types of coloured churches . . . . 152
" Little Texas " schoolhouse, Alabama . . . 164
" Washington Model School," Alabama . . 164
vii
viii ILLUSTRATIONS
Mr. Washington addressing an audience of
Virginia Negroes 186
Rufus Herron, of Camp Hill, Ala 218
Major Robert Russa Moton * 218
Professor George Washington Carver . . . 218
Bishop George W. Clinton 218
A meeting of the Negro ministers of Macon
County, Alabama 234
Tompkins Memorial Hall, Hampton Institute 248
Trade School at Hampton Institute . . . 248
Bricklaying at Hampton Institute .... 268
Blacksmithing at Hampton Institute . . . 268
Collis P. Huntington Memorial Building,
Tuskegee Institute 300
The Office Building in which are located the
administrative offices of the school . . . 300
MY LARGER EDUCATION
My Larger Education
CHAPTER I
LEARNING FROM MEN AND THINGS
IT HAS been my fortune to be associated all my life with a problem — a hard, perplexing, but important problem. There was a time when I looked upon this fact as a great misfortune. It seemed to me a great hardship that I was born poor, and it seemed an even greater hardship that I should have been born a Negro. I did not like co admit, even to myself, that I felt this way about the matter, because it seemed to me an indication of weakness and cowardice for any man to complain about the condition he was born to. Later I came to the conclusion that it was not only weak and cow ardly, but that it was a mistake to think of the matter in the way in which I had done. I came to see that, along with his disadvantages, the Negro J.n. America had some advantages, and I made up my mind that opportunities that had been denied
3
4 MY LARGER EDUCATION
him from without could be more than made up by
7 3 1 • i •
greater concentration and power within.
Perhaps I can illustrate what I mean by a fact I learned while I was in school. I recall my teach er's explaining to the-elass one day how it was that steam or any other form of energy, if allowed to es cape and dissipate itself, loses its value as a motive power. Energy must be confined; steam must be locked in a boiler in order to generate power. The same thing seems to have been true in the case of the Negro. Where the Negro has met with dis criminations and with difficulties because of his ' race, he has invariably tended to get up more steam. When this steam has been rightly directed and con trolled, it has become a great force in the upbuikTirgi of the race. If, on the contrary, it merely spent itself in fruitless agitation and hot -air, no good ha.3/ come of it.
Paradoxical as it may seem, the difficulties that the Negro has met since emancipation have, in my opinion, not always, but on the whole, helped him more than they have hindered him. For ex ample, I think the progress which the Negro has made within less than half a century in the matter cf learning to read and write the English language ha ; been due in large part to the fact that, in slaver}', this knowledge was forbidden him. My experience
LEARNING FROM MEN AND THINGS 5
and observation have taught me that people who try to withhold the best things in civilization from any group of people, or race of people, not infre quently aid that people to the very things that they are trying to withhold from them. I am sure that, in my own case, I should never have made the ef forts that I did make in my early boyhood to get an education and still later to develop the Tus- kegee Institute in Alabama if I had not been con scious of the fact that there were a large number of people in tne world who did not believe that the Negro boy could learn or that members of the Negro race could build up and conduct a large institution of learning.
A wider acquaintance with men in all the dif ferent grades of life taught me that the Negro's case is not peculiar. The majority of successful men are persons who have had difficulties to over come, problems to master; and, in overcoming those difficulties and mastering those problems, they have gained strength of mind and a clearness of vision that few persons who have lived a life of ease have been able to attain. Experience has taught me, in fact, that no man should be pitied because, every day in his life, he faces a hard, stubborn problem, but rather that it is the man who has no problem to solve, no hardships to face, who is to be pitied.
6 MY LARGER EDUCATION
His misfortune consists in the fact that he has noth ing in his life which will strengthen and form his character; nothing to call out his latent powers, and deepen and widen his hold on life. It has come home to me more in recent years that I have had, just because my life has been connected with a problem, some unusual opportunities. I have had unusual opportunities for example in getting an education in the broader sense of the word.
If I had not been born a slave, for example, I never could have had the opportunity, perhaps, of associating day by day with the most ignorart people, so far as books are concerned, and thus com ing in contact with people of this class at first hand. The most fortunate part of my early experience was that which gave me the opportunity of getting into direct contact and of communing with and taking lessons from the old class of coloured people who have been slaves. At the present time few experiences afford me more genuine pleasure than to get a day or a half a day off and go out into the country, miles from town and railroad, and spend the time in close contact with a coloured farmer and his family.
And then I have felt for a long while that, if I had not been a slave and lived on a slave plantation, I never would have had the opportunity to learn
LEARNING FROM MEN AND THINGS 7
nature, to love the soil, to love cows and pigs and trees and flowers and birds and worms and creeping things. I have always been intensely fond of out door life. Perhaps the explanation for this lies partly in the fact that I was born nearly out of doors. I have also, from my earliest childhood, been very fond of animals and fowls. When I was but a child, and a slave, I had close and interesting acquaint ances with animals.
During my childhood days, as a slave, I did not see very much of my mother, since she was obliged to leave her children very early in the morning to begin her day's work. The early departure of my mother often made the matter of my securing break fast uncertain. This led to my first intimate ac quaintance with animals.
In those days it was the custom upon the planta tion to boil the Indian corn that was fed to the cows and pigs. At times, when I had failed to get any other breakfast, I used to go to the places where the cows and pigs were fed and make my breakfast off this boiled corn, or else go to the place where it was the custom to boil the corn, and get my share there before it was taken to the animals.
If I was not there at the exact moment of feeding, I could still find enough corn scattered around the fence or the trough to satisfy me. Some people
8 MY LARGER EDUCATION
may think that this was a pretty bad way in which to get one's food, but, leaving out the name and the associations, there was nothing very bad about it. Any one who has eaten hard-boiled corn knows it has a delicious taste. I never pass a pot D£ boiled corn now without yielding to the temptation to eat a few grains.
I think that I owe a great deal of my present strength and ability to work to my love of out-door life. It is true that the amount of time that I Cc.n spend in the open air is now very limited. Taken, on an average, it is perhaps not more than an hour a day, but I make the most of that hour. In ad dition to this I get much pleasure out of the antici pation and the planning for that hour.
When I am at my home at Tuskegee, I usually find a way, by rising early in the morning, to spend at least half an hour in my garden, or with my fowls, pigs, or cows. As far as I can get the time, I like to find the new eggs each morning myself, and when at home am selfish enough to permit no one else to do this in my place. As with the growing plants, there is a sense of freshness and newness and of restfulness in connection with the finding and hand ling of newly laid eggs that is delightful to me. Both the anticipation and the realization are most pleasing. I begin the day by seeing how many eggs
LEARNING FROM MEN AND THINGS 9
I can find, or how many little chickens there are that are just beginning to peep through the shells.
I am deeply interested in the different kinds of fowls, and, aside from the large number grown by the school in its poultry house and yards, I grow at my own home common chickens, Plymouth Rocks, Buff Cochins and Brahmas, Peking ducks, and fan- tailed pigeons.
The pig, I think, is my favourite animal. I do not know how this will strike the taste of my read ers, but it is true. In addition to some common bred pigs, I keep a few Berkshires and some Poland Chinas; and it is a real pleasure to me to watch their development and increase from month to month. Practically all the pork used in my family is of my own raising.
This will, perhaps, illustrate what I mean when I say that I have gotten a large part of my educa tion from actual contact with things, rather than through the medium of books. I like to touch things and handle them; I like to watch plants grow and observe the behaviour of animals. For the same reason, I like to deal with things, as far as possible, at first hand, in the way that the carpenter deals with wood, the blacksmith with iron, and the farmer with the earth. I believe that there is something gained by getting acquainted, in the way
io MY LARGER EDUCATION
which I have described, with the physical world about you that is almost indispensable.
A number of years ago, in a book called, "Up From Slavery," I told a story of my early life, de scribing the manner in which I got my early school ing and the circumstances under which I came to start the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. At the time that school was organized I had read very little, and, in fact, few books on the subject of teaching, and knew very little about the science of education and pedagogy. I had had the advan tage of going through an exceptional school at Hampton and of coming in contact with an inspired teacher in General Armstrong; but I had never at tempted to formulate the methods of teaching I used in that school, and I had very little experience in applying them to the new and difficult problems I met as soon as I attempted to conduct a school of my own. What I learned about the science of education I learned in my efforts in working out the plans for, and organizing and perfecting the educational methods at, Tuskegee.
The necessity of collecting large sums of money every year to carry on the work at Tuskegee com pelled me to travel much and brought me in contact with all kinds of people. As soon as I began to meet educated and cultivated people, people who had had
LEARNING FROM MEN AND THINGS n
the advantage of study in higher institutions of learning, as well as the advantages of much reading and travel, I soon became conscious of my own dis advantages. I found that the people I met were able to speak fluently and with perfect familiarity about a great many things with which I was ac quainted in only the vaguest sort of way. In speak ing they used words and phrases from authors whom I had never read and often never heard of. All this made me feel more keenly my deficiencies, and the more I thought about it the more it troubled and worried me. It made me feel all the more badly because I discovered that, if I were to carry on the work I had undertaken to do, if I was ever going to accomplish any of the things that it seemed to me important to do, I should never find time, no matter how diligent and studious I might be, to overtake them and possess myself of the knowl edge and familiarity with books for which I envied those persons who had been more highly educated than myself.
After a time, however, I found that while I was at a certain disadvantage among highly educated and cultivated people in certain directions, I had certain advantages over them in others. I found that the man who has an intimate acquaintance with some department of life through personal ex-
12 MY LARGER EDUCATION
perience has a great advantage over persons who have gained their knowledge of life almost entirely through books. I found also that, by using my per sonal experience and observation; by making use of the stories that I had heard, as illustrations; by relating some incident that happened in my own case or some incident that I had heard from some one else, I could frequently express what I had to say in a much clearer and more impressive way than if I made use of the language of books or the state ments and quotations from the authors of books. More than that, as I reflected upon the matter, I discovered that these authors, in their books, were after all merely making use of their own experiences or expressing ideas which they had worked out in actual life, and that to make use of their language and ideas was merely to get life second hand.
The result was that I made up my mind that I would try to make up for my defects in my knowl edge of books by my knowledge of men and things. I said I would take living men and women for my study, and I would give the closest attention pos sible to everything that was going on in the world about me. I determined that I would get my edu cation out of my work; I would learn about educa tion in solving the problems of the school as they arose from day to day, and learn about life by learn-
LEARNING FROM MEN AND THINGS 13
ing to deal with men. I said to myself that I would try to learn something from every man I met; make him my text-book, read him, study him, and learn something from him. So I began deliberately to try to learn from men. I learned something from big men and something from little men, from the man with prejudice and the man without prejudice. As I studied and understood them, I found that I began to like men better; even those who treated me badly did not cause me to lose my temper or patience, as soon as I found that I could learn something from them. '
For example, some years ago, I had an experience which taught me a lesson in politeness and liber ality which I shall long remember. I was in a large city making calls on wealthy people in order to interest them in our work at Tuskegee Institute. I called at the office of a man, and he spoke to me in the most abrupt and insulting manner. He not only refused to give any money but spoke of my race in a manner that no gentleman of culture ought ever to permit himself to speak of another race. A few minutes later I called on another gentleman in the same city, who received me politely, thanked me for calling upon him, but explained that he was so situated that he could not help me. My inter view with the first man occupied about twice as
I4 MY LARGER EDUCATION
much of his time and my time as was true of the second gentleman. I learned from this experience that it takes no more time to be polite to every one than it does to be rude.
During the later years of my experience I have had the good fortune to study not only white men and learn from them, but coloured men as well. In my earlier experiences I used to have sympathy with the coloured people who were narrow and bitter toward white people. As I grew older I began to study that class of coloured people, and I found that they did not get anywhere, that their bitterness and narrowness toward the white man did not hurt the white man or change his feeling toward the coloured race, but that, in almost every case, the cherishing of such feeling toward the white man reacted upon the coloured man and made him narrow and bitter.
In the chapters which follow, I have given some account of the way in which my work has brought me in contact, not so much with plants and animals and with physical objects, but rather with human institutions, with politics, with newspapers, with educational and social problems of various kinds and descriptions, and I have tried to indicate in every case the way in which I have been educated through them.
One of the purposes in writing these later chapters
LEARNING FROM MEN AND THINGS 15
from my experience is to complete the story of my education which I began in the book, "Up From Slavery"; to answer the questions I have fre quently been asked as to how I have worked out for myself the educational methods which we are now using at Tuskegee; and, finally, to illustrate, for the benefit of the members of my own race, some of the ways in which a people who are struggling upward may turn disadvantages into opportunities; how they may gain within themselves something that will compensate them for what they have been deprived of from without.
If I have learned much from things, I have learned more from men. The work that I started to do brought me early in contact with some of the most generous, high-minded and public-spirited persons in the country. In the chapters that follow I have tried to indicate what I have learned from contact with those men. Perhaps I can best indicate the way in which I have been educated by my contact with these men if I tell something of my relations with one man from whom, after General Armstrong, my first teacher, I learned, perhaps, more than from any other. I refer to the late William H. Baldwin, Jr.
I well remember my first meeting with Mr. Bald win, although the exact date has now slipped from
16 MY LARGER EDUCATION
my memory. He was at that time manager and vice-president of the Southern Railway, with head quarters in Washington, D. C. I had been given a letter to him by his father, in Boston. I found him one morning in his office and presented this letter, which he read over carefully, as was his custom in such matters. Then we began talking about the school at Tuskegee and its work. I had been in the room but a few minutes when the conviction forced itself upon me that I had met a man who could thor oughly understand me and whom I understood. Indeed, I had the feeling that I was in the presence of one in whose mind there was neither faltering nor concealment, and one from whom it would be impossi ble to hide a single thought or purpose. I never had occasion, during all the years that I knew Mr. Baldwin, to change the opinion formed of him at my first visit, or to feel that the understanding established between us then was ever clouded or diminished.
Mr. Baldwin did not at first manifest any definite interest in the work at Tuskegee. He said he would come down and "look us over" and if he found we were doing "the real thing," as he expressed it, he would do anything he could to help us.
Within a few weeks after this first meeting, Mr.
LEARNING FROM MEN AND THINGS 17
Baldwin fulfilled his promise to "look us over" and see if we were doing "the real thing." He spent a busy day on the grounds of the institution, going through every department with the thoroughness of an experienced executive. He found, as a matter of course, a great many deficiencies in the details of the management and organization of the school, but he saw what the institution was striving to do and at once determined to help. In fact, from that time he never lost an opportunity to serve the institution in every possible way. He was just as deeply and as practically interested in every thing that concerned the progress and reputation of the school and its work as any one connected with it. I think I never met any one who was more genuinely interested than Mr. Baldwin in the suc cess of the Negro people. During his last visit to Tuskegee I remember that Mrs. Washington said to me one day that she would be glad when he went away. She meant that he sympathized too deeply, felt too profoundly the bigness of the task and the lim itations under which the school was labouring. He was touched by everything he saw. The strug gles of individual students and teachers whom he came to know weighed heavily on him and he needed to get out of the atmosphere of the school and its work, and rest. None of us realized at that time
18 MY LARGER EDUCATION
trlat the disease that finally took him away was al ready doing its fatal work.
't William H. Baldwin, Jr., understood, as few men have, the Negro people, and, understanding them as he did, he was in full sympathy with their ambi tion to rise to a position of usefulness as large and as honourable as that of any other race. Persons who knew him only slightly, after hearing him express himself on the race question, gained the impression that he was not in full sympathy with the deepest aspirations of the Negro people. But this impres sion was mistaken. He was, before all, anxious that the Negro people, in their struggle to go forward and succeed, should not mistake the appearance for the real thing. In his effort to have them avoid this danger he sometimes seemed to go too far.
But I would do injustice to the memory of Mr. Baldwin if, by anything I have written or said, I should leave the impression that, because he was interested in the welfare of the Negro, he was any the less interested in the progress of the white race in the South. He saw with perfect clearness that both races were, to a certain extent, hampered in their struggles upward by conditions which they had inherited and for which neither was wholly responsible. He saw, also, that in the long run the welfare of each was bound up with that of
LEARNING FROM MEN AND THINGS 19
the other. Much as he did for Negro education, he never overlooked an opportunity to get money and secure support for the education of the unfortunate white people of the South.
Mr. Baldwin's greatest service to Tuskegee In stitute was in the reorganization of the finances of the institution. When he first became one of the trustees, the business organization of the school, its finances, and the system of keeping the accounts were in a very uncertain and unsatisfactory condi tion. He began at once to look into our investments and to study the items of our annual budget. The school was growing rapidly. The number of pro ductive industries carried on by the school, the large amount of building we were engaged in, and the large amount of business carried on between the different departments made the accounts of the school particularly complicated and the prob lem of a proper business organization a most important one.
As I look back over the years in which he and I worked together, it seems to me that the most pleasant and profitable hours I have ever known were spent with Mr. Baldwin in his library in Brook lyn, while we studied out together the problems and discussed the questions which this work in volved. When I came to New York he would often
20 MY LARGER EDUCATION
invite me to his home and, as soon as dinner was over, we would spend three or four hours in his li brary, sometimes not breaking up our conference until after midnight.
Among other things I learned from Mr. Baldwin was that it is the smaller, the petty, things in life that divide people. It is the great tasks that bring men together. Any man who will take up his life in a broad spirit, not of class nor sect nor locality, but in the freer spirit which seeks to perform a work simply because it is good, that man can have the support and the friendship of the best and highest people in the world.
As I have said before, I do not regret that I was born a slave. I am not sorry that I found myself part of a problem; on the contrary, that problem has given direction and meaning to my life and has brought me friendships and comforts that I could have gotten in no other way.
CHAPTER II
BUILDING A SCHOOL AROUND A PROBLEM
ONE of the first questions that I had to answer for myself after beginning my work at Tuskegee was with pyblic gmjjion ^jb^Jffi
' It may seem strange that a man who had started out with the humble purpose of establishing a little Negro industrial school in a small Southern country town should find himself, to any great extent, either helped or hindered in his work by what the general public was thinking and saying about any of the large social or educational problems of the day. But such wasvthe case at that time in Alabama; and so it was that I had not gone very far in my work before I found myself trying to formulate clear and definite answers to some very fundamental ques tions.
The questions came to me in this way: Colourec people wanted to know why I proposed to teacl their children to work. They said that they anc
21
7, 22 MY LARGER EDUCATION
, their parents had been compelled to work for two hundred and fifty years, and now they wanted their children to go to school so that they might be free and live like the white folks — without working. That was the way in which the average coloured man looked at the matter.
Some of the Southern white people, on the con trary, were opposed to any kind of education of the Negro. Others inquired whether I was merely ^"••rtlg to train preachers and teachers, or whether I proposed to furnish them with trained servants.
Some of the people in the North understood that I proposed to train the Negro to be a mere " hewer of wood and drawer of water," and feared that my school would make no effort to prepare him to take his place in the community as a man and a citizen.
Of course all these different views about the kind of education that the Negro ought or ought not to have were deeply tinged with racial a. id sec tional feelings. The rule of the "carpe.t-bag" government had just come to an end in Alabama. The masses of the white people were very bitter against the Negroes as a result of the excitement and agitation of the Reconstruction period.
On the other hand, the coloured people — who had recently lost, to a very large extent, their place
BUILDING A SCHOOL 23
in the politics of the state — were greatly discouraged and disheartened. Many of them feared that they were going to be drawn back into slavery. At this time also there was still a great deal of bitterness between the North and the South in regard to any thing that concerned political matters.
I found ^myself, as it were, at the angle where these opposing forces met. I saw that, in carrying out the work I had planned, I was likely to be opposed or criticised at some point by each of these parties. On the other hand, I saw just as clearly that in order to succeed I must in some way secure the. support and sympathy of each of them.
I knew, for example, that the South was poor and the North was rich. I knew that Northern people believed, as the South at that time did not believe, in the power of education to inspire, to uplift, and to regenerate the masses of the people. I knew that the North was eager to go forward and com plete, with the aid of education, the work of lib eration which had been begun with the sword, and that Northern people would be willing and glad to give their support to any school or other agency that proposed to do this work in a really funda mental way.
It was, at the same time, plain to me that no effort put forth in behalf of the members of my
24 MY LARGER EDUCATION
own race who were in the South was going to succeed unless it finally won the sympathy and support of the best white people in the South. I knew also — what many Northern people did no : know or understand — that however much the}' might doubt the wisdom of educating the Negro, deep down in their hearts the Southern white people had a feeling of gratitude toward the Negro race; and I was convinced that in the long run any sound and sincere effort that was made to help the Negro was going to have the Southern white man's support.
Finally, I had faith in the good common-sense of the masses of my own race. I felt confident that, if I were actually on the right track in the kind of education that I proposed to give them and ar. the same time remained honest and sincere in all my dealings with them, I was bound to win their support, not only for the school that I had started, but for all that I had in my mind to do for them.
Still it was often a puzzling and a trying problem to determine how best to win and hold the respect of all three of these classes of people, each of which looked with such different eyes and from such widely different points of view at what I was attempting to do. The temptation which presented itself to me in my dealings with these three classes of people was to show each group the side of the sub-
BUILDING A SCHOOL 25
ject that it would be most willing to look at, and, at the same time, to keep silent about those matters in regard to which they were likely to differ with me. There was the temptation to say to the white man the thing that the white man wanted to hear; to say to the coloured man the thing that he wanted to hear; to say one thing in the North and another in the South.
Perhaps I should have yielded to this temptation if I had not perceived that in the long run I should be found out, and that if I hoped to do anything of lasting value for my own people or for the South I must first get down to bedrock.
There is a story of an old coloured minister, which I am fond of telling, that illustrates what I mean. The old fellow was trying to explain to a Sunday- school class how it was and why it was that Pharaoh and his party were drowned when they were trying to cross the Red Sea, and how it was and why it was that the Children of Israel crossed over dry- shod. He explained it in this wise:
"When the first party came along it was early in the morning and the ice was hard and thick, and the first party had no trouble in crossing over on the ice; but when Pharaoh and his party came along the sun was shining on the ice, and when they got on the ice it broke, and they went in and got drowned."
26 MY LARGER EDUCATION
Now there happened to be in this class a young coloured man who had had considerable schooling, and this young fellow turned to the old minister and said:
"Now, Mr. Minister, I do not understand that kind of explanation. I have been going to school and have been studying all these conditions, and my geography teaches me that ice does not freeze within a certain distance of the equator."
The old minister replied: "Now, Fse bee:i expecting something just like this. There's always some fellow ready to spile all the theology. Ths time I'se talkin' about was before they had anv jogerphies or 'quaters either."
Now this old man, in his plain and simple way, was trying to brush aside all artificiality and to get down to bedrock. So it was with me. There have always been a number of educated and clever persons among my race who are able to make plausible and fine-sounding statements about all the different phases of the Negro problem, but I saw clearly that I should have to follow the example of the old preacher and start on a solid basis in order to succeed in the work that I had undertaken. < So, after thinking the matter all out as I have described, I made up my mind definitely on one or two fundamental points. I determined:
BUILDING A SCHOOL 27
First, that I should at all times be perfectly frank and honest in dealing with each of the three classes of people that I have mentioned;
Second, that I should not depend upon any " short-cuts" or expedients merely for the sake of gaining temporary popularity or advantage, whether for the time being such action brought me popularity or the reverse. I With these two points clear before me as my creed, I began going forward.
One thing which gave me faith at the outset, and increased my confidence as I went on, was the in sight which I early gained into the actual relations of the races in the South. I observed, in the first place, that as a result of two hundred and fifty years of slavery the two races had become bound to gether in intimate ways that people outside of the South could not understand, and of which the white people and coloured people themselves were perhaps not fully conscious. More than that, I perceived that the two races needed each other and that for many years to come no other labouring class of people would be able to fill the place occu pied by the Negro in the life of the Southern white man.
I saw also one change that had been brought about as a result of freedom, a change which many Southern white men had, it seemed to me, failed
28 MY LARGER EDUCATION
to see. As long as slavery existed, the white man, for his own protection and in order to keep the Negro contented with his condition of servitude, was com pelled to keep him in ignorance. In freedom, how ever, just the reverse condition exists. Now the white man is not only free to assist the Negro in his effort to rise, but he has every motive of self- interest to do so, since to uplift and educate the Negro would reduce the number of paupers and criminals of the race and increase the number and efficiency of its skilled labourers.
Clear ideas did not come into my mind on this subject at once. It was only gradually that I gained the notion that there had been two races in slavery; that both were now engaged in a struggle to adjust themselves to the new conditions; that the progress of each meant the advancement of the other; and that anything that I attempted to do for the members of my own race would be of no real value to them unless it was of equal value to the members of the white race by whom they were surrounded.
As this thought got hold in my mind and I be gan to see further into the nature of the task that I had undertaken to perform, much of the political agitation and controversy that divided the North from the South, the black man from the white,
BUILDING A SCHOOL 29
began to look unreal and artificial to me. It seemed as if the people who carried on political campaigns were engaged to a very large extent in a battle with shadows, and that these shadows represented the prejudices and animosities of a period that was now past.
On the contrary, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that the kind of work that I had undertaken to do was a very real sort of thing. Moreover, it was a kind of work which tended not to divide, but to unite, all the opposing elements and forces, because it was a work of con struction.
Having gone thus far, I began to consider seriously how I should proceed to gain the sympathy of each of the three groups that I have mentioned for the work that I had in hand.
I determined, first of all, that as far as possible I would try to gain the active support and coopera tion, in all that I undertook, of the masses of my own race. With this in view, before I began my work at Tuskegee, I spent several weeks travelling about among the rural communities of Macon County, of which Tuskegee is the county seat. During all this time I had an opportunity to meet and talk individually with a large number of people representing the rural classes, which constitute
30 MY LARGER EDUCATION
80 per cent, of the Negro population in the South. I slept in their cabins, ate their food, talked to them in their churches, and discussed with them in their own homes their difficulties and their needs. In this way I gained a kind of knowledge which has been of great value to me in all my work since.
As years went on, I extended these visits to the adjoining counties and adjoining states. Then, as the school at Tuskegee became better known, I took advantage of the invitations that came to me to visit more distant parts of the country, where I had an opportunity to learn still more about the actual life of the people and the nature of the difficulties with which they were struggling.
In all this, my purpose was to get acquainted with the masses of the people — to gain their confidence so that I might work with them and for them.
In the course of travel and observation I became more and more impressed with the influence that the organizations which coloured people have formed among themselves exert upon the masses of the people.
The average man outside of the Negro race is likely to assume that the ten millions of coloured people in this country are a mere disorganized and heterogeneous collection of individuals, herded
BUILDING A SCHOOL 31
together under one statistical label, without head or tail, and with no conscious common purpose. This is far from true. There are certain common interests that are peculiar to all Negroes, certain channels through which it is possible to touch and influence the whole people. In my study of the race in what I may call its organized capacity, I soon learned that the most influential organization among Negroes is the Negro church. I question whether or not there is a group of ten millions of people anywhere, not excepting the Catholics, that can be so readily reached and influenced through their church organizations as the ten millions of Negroes in the United States. Of these millions of black people there is only a very small percen tage that does not have formal or informal connec tion with some church. The principal church groups are: Baptists, African Methodists, African Methodist Episcopal Zionists, and Coloured Metho dists, to which I might add about a dozen smaller denominations.
I began my work of getting the support of these organizations by speaking (or lecturing, as they are accustomed to describe it) to the coloured people in the little churches in the country surrounding the school at Tuskegee. When later I extended my journeys into other and more distant parts of
32 MY LARGER EDUCATION
the country, I began to get into touch with the leaders in the church and to learn something about the kind and extent of influence which these men exercise through the churches over the masses of the Negro people.
It has always been a great pleasure to me to meet and to talk in a plain, straightforward way with the common people of my own race wherever I have been able to meet them. But it is in the Negro churches that I have had my best opportunities for meeting and getting acquainted with them.
It has been my privilege to attend service in Trinity Church, Boston, where I heard Phillips Brooks. I have attended service in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, where I heard the late Dr. John Hall. I have attended service in Westminster Abbey, in London. I have visited some of the great cathedrals in Europe when service was being held. But not any of these services have had for me the real interest that certain services among my own people have had. Let me describe the type of the service that I have enjoyed more than any other in all my experience in attending church, whether in America or Europe.
In Macon County, Ala., where I live, the coloured people have a kind of church-service that is called an "all-day meeting." The ideal season for such
BUILDING A SCHOOL 33
meetings is about the middle of May. The church- house that I have in mind is located about ten miles from town. To get the most out of the " all-day meeting" one should make an early start, say eight o'clock. During the drive one drinks in the fresh fragrance of forests and wild flowers. The church building is located near a stream of water, not far from a large, cool spring, and in the midst of a grove or primitive forest. Here the coloured people begin to come together by nine or ten o'clock in the morning. Some of them walk; most of them drive. A large number come in buggies, but many use the more primitive wagons or carts, drawn by mules, horses, or oxen. In these conveyances a whole family, from the youngest to the eldest, make the journey together. All bring baskets of food, for the "all-day meeting" is a kind of Sunday picnic or festival. Preaching, preceded by much singing, begins at about eleven o'clock. If the building is not large enough, the services are held out under the trees. Sometimes there is but one sermon; sometimes there are two or three sermons, if visiting ministers are present. The sermon over, there is more plantation singing. A collection is taken — sometimes two collections — then comes recess for dinner and recreation.
Sometimes I have seen at these "all-day meet-
34 MY LARGER EDUCATION
ings" as many as three thousand people present. No one goes away hungry. Large baskets, filled with the most tempting spring chicken or fresh pork, fresh vegetables, and all kinds of pies and cakes, are then opened. The people scatter in groups. Sheets or table-cloths are spread on the grass under a tree near the stream. Here old acquaintances are renewed; relatives meet members of the family whom they have not seen for months. Strangers, visitors, every one must be invited by some one else to dinner. Kneeling on the fresh grass or on broken branches of trees surrounding the food, dinner is eaten. The animals are fed and watered, and then at about three o'clock there is another sermon or two, with plenty of singing thrown in; then another collection, or perhaps two. In between these sermons I am invited to speak, and am very glad to accept the invitation. At about five o'clock the benediction is pronounced and the thousands quietly scatter to their homes with many good-bys and well-wishes. This, as I have said, is the kind of church-service that I like best. In the opportunities which I have to speak to such gatherings I feel that I have done some of my best work.
In carrying out the policy which I formed early, of making use of every opportunity to speak to the
BUILDING A SCHOOL 35
masses of the people, I have not only visited country churches and spoken at such "all-day meetings" as I have just described, but for years I have made it a practice to attend, whenever it has been possible for me to do so, every important ministers' meeting. I have also made it a practice to visit town and city churches and in this way to get acquainted with the ministers and meet the people.
During my many and long campaigns in the North, for the purpose of getting money to carry on Tuskegee Institute, it has been a great pleasure and satisfaction to me, after I have spoken in some white church or hall or at some banquet, to go di rectly to some coloured church for a heart-to-heart talk with my own people. The deep interest that they have shown in my work and the warmth and enthusiasm with which coloured people invariably respond to any one who talks to them frankly and sincerely in regard to matters that concern the wel fare of the race, make it a pleasure to speak to them.
Many times on these trips to the North it has happened that coloured audiences have waited until ten or eleven o'clock at night for my coming. This does not mean that coloured people may not attend the other meetings which I address, but means simply that they prefer in most cases to have me to speak to them alone. When at last I have
36 MY LARGER EDUCATION
been able to reach the church or the hall where the audience was gathered, it has been such a pleasure to meet them that I have often found myself stand ing on my feet until after twelve o'clock. No one thing has given me more faith in the future of the race than the fact that Negro audiences will sit for two hours or more and listen with the utmost attention to a serious discussion of any subject that has to do with their interest as a people. This is just as true of the unlettered masses as it is of the more highly educated few.
Not long ago, for example, I spoke to a large au dience in the Chamber of Commerce in Cleveland, Ohio. This audience was composed for the most part of white people, and the meeting continued rather late into the night. Immediately after this meeting I was driven to the largest coloured church in Cleveland, where I found an audience of some thing like twenty-five hundred coloured people waiting patiently for my appearance. The church building was crowded, and many of those present, I was told, had been waiting for two or three hours.
As I entered the building an unusual scene pre sented itself. Each member of the audience had been provided with a little American flag, and as I appeared upon the platform, the whole audience rose to its feet and began waving these flags. The
BUILDING A SCHOOL 37
reader can, perhaps, imagine the picture of twenty- five hundred enthusiastic people each of whom is wildly waving a flag. The scene was so animated and so unexpected that it made an impression on me that I shall never forget. For an hour and a half I spoke to this audience, and, although the building was crowded until there was apparently not an inch of standing room in it, scarcely a single person left the church during this time.
Another way in which I have gained the confi dence and support of the millions of my race has been in meeting the religious leaders in their various state and national gatherings. For example, every year, for a number of years past, I have been invited to deliver an address before the National Coloured Baptist Convention, which brings together four or five thousand religious leaders from all parts of the United States. In a "similar way I meet, once in four years, the leaders in the various branches of the Methodist Church during their general con ferences.
Invitations to address the different secret societies in their national gatherings frequently come to me also. Next to the church, I think it is safe to say that the secret societies or beneficial orders bring together greater numbers of coloured people and exercise a larger influence upon the race than any
38 MY LARGER EDUCATION
other kind of organization. One can scarcely shake hands with a coloured man without receiving some kind of grip which identifies him as a member of one or another of these many organizations.
I am reminded, in speaking of these secret societies, of an occasion at Little Rock, Ark., when, without meaning to do so, I placed my friends there in a very awkward position. It had been pretty widely advertised for some weeks before that I was to visit the city. Among the plans decided upon for my reception was a parade in which all the secret and beneficial societies in Little Rock were to take part. Much was expected of this parade, because secret societies are numerous in Little Rock, and the occasions when they can all turn out together are rare.
A few days before I reached that city some one began to make inquiry as to which one of these orders I belonged to. When it finally became known among the rank and file that I was not a member of any of them, the committee which was preparing for the parade lost a great deal of its enthusiasm, and a sort of gloom settled down over the whole proceeding. The leading men told me that they found it quite a difficult task after that to make the people understand why they were asked to turn out to honour a person who was not a member
BUILDING A SCHOOL 39
of any of their organizations. Besides, it seemed unnatural that a Negro should not belong to some kind of order. Somehow or other, however, matters were finally straightened out; all the organizations turned out, and a most successful reception was the result.
Another agency which exercises tremendous power among Negroes is the Negro press. Few if any persons outside of the Negro race understand the power and influence of the Negro newspaper. In all, there are about two hundred newspapers published by coloured men at different points in the United States. Many of them have only a small circulation and are, therefore, having a hard struggle for existence; but they are read in their local communities. Others have built up a national circulation and are conducted with energy and in telligence. With the exception of about three, these two hundred papers have stood loyally by me in all my plans and policies to uplift the race. I have called upon them freely to aid me in making known my plans and ideas, and they have always responded in a most generous fashion to all the demands that I have made upon them.
It has been suggested to me at different times that I should purchase a Negro newspaper in order that I might have an "organ" to make known my
40 MY LARGER EDUCATION
views on matters concerning the policies and in terests of the race. Certain persons have suggested also that I pay money to certain of these papeis in order to make sure that they support my view:;.
I confess that there have frequently been times when it seemed that the easiest way to combs t some statement that I knew to be false, or to correct some impression which seemed to me pecul iarly injurious, would be to have a paper of my own or to pay for the privilege of setting forth my own views in the editorial columns of some paper which I did not own.
I am convinced, however, that either of thes;e two courses would have proved fatal. The minute it should become known — and it would be known — that I owned an "organ," the other papers would cease to support me as they now do. If I should attempt to use money with some papers, I should soon have to use it with all. If I should pay for the support of newspapers once, I should have to keep on paying all the time. Very soon I should have around me, if I should succeed in bribing them, merely a lot of hired men and no sincere and earnest supporters. Although I might gain for myself some apparent and temporary advantage in this way, I should destroy the value and influence of the very papers that support me. I say this
BUILDING A SCHOOL 41
because if I should attempt to hire men to write what they do not themselves believe, or only half believe, the articles or editorials they write would cease to have the true ring; and when they cease to have the true ring, they will exert little or no influence.
So, when I have encountered opposition or criti cism in the press, I have preferred to meet it squarely. Frequently I have been able to profit by these criticisms of the newspapers. At other times, when I have felt that I was right and that those who criticised me were wrong, I have preferred to wait and let the results show. Thus, even when we differed with one another on minor points, I have usually succeeded in gaining the confidence and support of the editors of the different papers in regard to those matters and policies which seemed to me really important.
In travelling throughout the United States I have met the Negro editors. Many of them have been to Tuskegee. It has taken me twenty years to get acquainted with them and to know them intimately. In dealing with these men I have not found it necessary to hold tftem at arm's-length. On the contrary, I am in the habit of speaking with them frankly and openly in regard to my plans. A number of the men who own and edit Negro news^
42 MY LARGER EDUCATION
papers are graduates or former students of the Tuskegee Institute. I go into their offices and I go to their homes. We know one another; they are my friends, and I am their friend.
In dealing with newspaper people, whether they are white or black, there is no way of getting their sympathy and support like that of actually knowing the individual men, of meeting and talking with them frequently and frankly, and of keeping them in touch with everything you do or intend to do. Money cannot purchase or control this kind of friendship.
Whenever I am in a town or city where Negro newspapers are published, I make it a point to see the editors, to go to their offices, or to invite them to visit Tuskegee. Thus we keep in close, constant, and sympathetic touch with one another. When these papers write editorials endorsing any project that I am interested in, the editors speak with authority and with intelligence because of our close personal relations. There is no more generous and helpful class of men among the Negro race in America to-day than the owners and editors of Negro newspapers.
Many times I have been asked how it is that I have secured the confidence and good wishes of so large a number of the white people of the South.
BUILDING A SCHOOL 43
My answer in brief is that I have tried to be per fectly frank and straightforward at all times in my relations with them. Sometimes they have opposed my actions, sometimes they have not, but I have never tried to deceive them. There is no people in the world which more quickly recognizes and appreciates the qualities of frankness and sincerity, whether they are exhibited in a friend or in an opponent, in a white man or in a black man, than the white people of the South.
In my experience in dealing with men of my race I have found that there is a class that has gained a good deal of fleeting popularity for possessing what was supposed to be courage in cursing and abusing all classes of Southern white people on all possible occasions. But, as I have watched the careers of this class of Negroes, in practically every case their popularity and influence with the masses of coloured people have not been lasting. There are few races of people the masses of whom are endowed with more common-sense than the Negro, and in the long run these common people see things and men pretty much as they are.
On the other hand, there have always been in every Southern community a certain number of coloured men who have sought to gain the friend ship of the white people around them in ways that
44 MY LARGER EDUCATION
were more or less dishonest. For a number of years after the close of the Civil War, for example, it was natural that practically all the Negroes should be Republicans in politics. There were, however, in nearly every community in the South, one or two coloured men who posed as Democrats. They thought that by pretending to favour the Demo cratic party they might make themselves popular with their white neighbours and thus gain some temporary advantage. In the majority of cases the white people saw through their pretences and did not have the respect for them that they had for the Negro who honestly voted with the party to which he felt that he belonged.
I remember hearing a prominent white Democrat remark not long ago that in the old days whenever a Negro Democrat entered his office he always took a tight grasp upon his pocket-book. I mention these facts because I am certain that wherever I have gained the confidence of the Southern people I have done so, not by opposing them and not by truckling to them, but by acting in a straightfor ward manner, always seeking their good-will, but never seeking it upon false pretences.
I have made it a rule to talk to the Southern white people concerning what I might call their short comings toward the Negro rather than talk about
BUILDING A SCHOOL 45
them. In the last analysis, however, I have suc ceeded in getting the sympathy and support of so large a number of Southern white people because I have tried to recognize and to face conditions as they actually are, and have honestly tried to work with the best white people in the South to bring about a better condition.
From the first I have tried to secure the confi dence and good-will of every white citizen in my own county. My experience teaches me that if a man has little or no influence with those by whose side he lives, as a rule there is something wrong with him. The best way to influence the Southern white man in your community, I have found, is to convince him that you are of value to that community. For example, if you are a teacher, the best way to get the influence of your white neighbours is to convince them that you are teaching something that will make the pupils that you edu cate able to do something better and more useful than they would otherwise be able to do; to show, in other words, that the education which they get adds something of value to the community.
In my own case, I have attempted from the beginning to let every white citizen in my own town see that I am as much interested in the common, every-day affairs of life as himself I tried to let
46 MY LARGER EDUCATION
them see that the presence of Tuskegee Institute in the community means better farms and gardens, good housekeeping, good schools, law and order. As soon as the average white man is convinced that the education of the Negro makes of him a citizen who is not always "up in the air," but one who can apply his education to the things in which every citizen is interested, much of opposition, doubt, or indifference to Negro education will disappear.
During all the years that I have lived in Macon County, Ala., I have never had the slightest trouble in either registering or casting my vote at any elec tion. Every white person in the county knows that I am going to vote in a way that will help the county in which I live.
Many nights I have been up with the sheriff of my county, in consultation concerning law and order, seeking to assist him in getting hold of and freeing the community of criminals. More than that, Tuskegee Institute has constantly sought, directly and indirectly, to impress upon the twenty-five or thirty thousand coloured people in the surround ing county the importance of cooperating with the officers of the law in the detection and apprehension of criminals. The result is that we have one ot the most orderly communities in the state. I do not believe that there is any county in the state,
m
W <'M
> w
BUILDING A SCHOOL 47.
for example, where the prohibition laws are so strictly enforced as in Macon County, in spite of the fact that the Negroes in this county so largely outnumber the whites.
Whatever influence I have gained with the North ern white people has come about from the fact, I think, that they feel that I have tried to use their gifts honestly and in a manner to bring about real and lasting results. I learned long ago that in education as in other things nothing but honest work lasts; fraud and sham are bound to be detected in the end. I have learned, on the other hand, that if one does a good, honest job, even though it may be done in the middle of the night when no eyes see but one's own, the results will just as surely come to light.
My experience has taught me, for example, that if there is a filthy basement or a dirty closet any where in the remotest part of the school grounds it will be discovered. On the other hand, if every basement or every closet — no matter how remote from the centre of the school activities — is kept clean, some one will find it and commend the care and the thoughtfulness that kept it clean.
It has always been my policy to make visitors to Tuskegee feel that they are seeing more than they expected to see. When a person has con-
48 MY LARGER EDUCATION
tributed, say, $20,000 for the erection of a building, I have tried to provide a larger building, a better building, than the donor expected to see. This I have found can be brought about only by keeping one's eyes constantly on all the small details. I shall never forget a remark made to me by Mr. John D. Rockefeller when I was spending an even ing at his house. It was to this effect: "Always be master of the details of your work; never have too many loose outer edges or fringes."
Then, in dealing with Northern people, I have always let them know that I did not want to get away from my own race; that I was just as proud of being a Negro as they were of being white people. No one can see through a sham more quickly, whether it be in speech or in dress, than the hard- headed Northern business man.
I once knew a fine young coloured man who nearly ruined himself by pretending to be something that he was not. This young man was sent to England for several months of study. When he returned he seemed to have forgotten how to talk. He tried to ape the English accent, the English dress, the English walk. I was amused to notice sometimes, when he was off his guard, how he got his English pronunciation mixed with the ordinary American accent which he had used all of his life. So one
BUILDING A SCHOOL 49
day I quietly called him aside and said to him: "My friend, you are ruining yourself. Just drop all those frills and be yourself." I am glad to say that he had sense enough to take the advice in the right spirit, and from that time on he was a differ ent man.
The most difficult and trying of the classes of persons with which I am brought in contact is the % coloured man or woman who is ashamed of his or her colour, ashamed of his or her race and, because of this fact, is always in a bad temper. I have had opportunities, such as few coloured men have had, of meeting and getting acquainted with many of the best white people, North and South. This has never led me to desire to get away from my own people. On the contrary, I have always returned to my own -people and my own work with renewed interest.
I have never at any time asked or expected that any one, in dealing with me, should overlook or forget that I am a Negro. On the contrary, I have always recognized that, when any special honour was conferred upon me, it was conferred not in spite of my being a Negro, but because I am a Negro, and because I have persistently identified myself with every interest and with every phase of the life of my own people.
50 MY LARGER EDUCATION
Looking back over the twenty-five and more years that have passed since that time, I realize, as I did not at that time, how the better part of my education — the education that I got after leav ing school — has been in the effort to work out those problems in a way that would gain the interest and the sympathy of all three of the classes directly concerned — the Southern white man, the Northern white man, and the Negro.
In order to gain consideration from these three classes for what I was trying to do I have had to enter sympathetically into the three different points of view entertained by those three classes; I have had to consider in detail how the work that I was trying to do was going to affect the interests of all three. To do this, and at the same time continue to deal frankly and honestly with each class, has been indeed a difficult and at times a puzzling task. It has not always been easy to stick to my work and keep myself free from the distracting in fluences of narrow and factional points of view; but, looking back on it all after a quarter of a cen tury, I can see that it has been worth what it cost.
CHAPTER III
SOME EXCEPTIONAL MEN AND WHAT I HAVE LEARNED FROM THEM
THERE are some opportunities that come to the boy or girl who is born poor that the boy or girl who is born rich does not have. In the same way there are some advantages in belonging to a disadvantaged race. The individual or the race which has to face peculiar hardships and to overcome unusual difficulties gains an experience of men and things and gets into close and intimate touch with life in a way that is not possible to the man or woman in ordinary circumstances.
In the old slavery days, when any of the white folks were a little uncertain about the quality of a new family that had moved into the neighbourhood, they always had one last resource for determining the character and the status of the new family. When in doubt, they could always rely on old " Aunt Jenny." After "Aunt Jenny" had visited the new family and returned with her report, the question
51
52 MY LARGER EDUCATION
was settled. Her decision was final, because "Aunt Jenny" knew. The old-fashioned house servants gained, through their peculiar experiences, a keen sense for what was called the "quality."
In freedom also the Negro has had special oppor tunities for finding out the character and the quality of the white people among whom he lives. I: there is a man in the community who is habitually kind and considerate to the humblest people abou ; him, the coloured people know about that man. On the contrary, if there is a man in that community who is unfair and unjust in his dealings with them, the coloured people know that man also.
In their own way and among themselves th? coloured people in the South still have the habit of weighing and passing judgment on the white people in their community; and, nine times out of ten, their opinion of a man is pretty accurate. A man who can always be counted on to go out of his way to assist and protect the members of an un popular race, and who is not afraid or ashamed to show that he is interested in the efforts of the col oured people about him to improve their condition, is pretty likely to be a good citizen in other respects.
In the average Southern community, also, it is almost always the best people, those who are most highly cultured and religious, who know the col-
SOME EXCEPTIONAL MEN 53
oured people best. It is the best white people who go oftenest into the Negro churches or teach in the Negro Sunday-schools. It is to individual white men of this better class that the average coloured people go most frequently for counsel and advice when they are in trouble
The fact that I was born a Negro, and the further fact that I have all my life been engaged in a kind of work that was intended to uplift the masses of my people, has brought me in contact with many exceptional persons, both North and South. For example, it was because I was a poor boy and a Negro that I found my way to Hampton Institute, where I came under the influence of General Armstrong, who, as teacher and friend, has had a larger influence upon my life than any other person I have ever known, except my mother. As it was in my boy hood, so it has been in a greater degree in my later life; because of the work I was trying to do for the Negro race I have constantly been brought into con tact with men of the very highest type, generous, high-minded, enlightened, and free. As I have already suggested, a large part of my education has been gained by my personal contact with these exceptional men.
There have been times in my life when I fear that I should have lost courage to go forward if I had
54 MY LARGER EDUCATION
not had constantly before me the example of other men, some of them obscure and almost unknow.i outside of the communities in which they lived, whose patient, unwavering cheerfulness and good will, in spite of difficulties, have been a continued inspiration to me.
On my way to Tuskegee for the first time I met one of the finest examples of the type of man I have tried to describe. He was a railroad con ductor and his name was Capt. Isaiah C. Howard. For many years he had charge of a. train on the Western Railroad of Alabama, between Mont gomery and Atlanta. I do not know where Captain Howard got his education, or how much he had studied books. I do know that he was born in the South and had spent all his life there. During a period of twenty years I rarely, if ever, met a higher type of the true gentleman, North or South.
I recall one occasion in particular when I was on his train between Atlanta and Montgomery during the Christmas holiday season, when the rougher and more ignorant of my race usually travel in large numbers, and when owing to the general license that has always prevailed during the holiday season, a certain class of coloured people are likely to be more or less under the in fluence of whiskey.
SOME EXCEPTIONAL MEN 55
After a time a disturbance arose in the crowd at the lower end of the car. When Captain Howard appeared, some of the men who had been drinking spoke to him in a way that most men, white or black, would have resented. In the case of some men, the language these Negroes used might easily have furnished an occasion for a shooting, the con sequences of which it was not difficult for me to picture to myself. I was deeply touched to see how, like a wise and patient father, Captain Howard handled these rough fellows. He spoke to them calmly, without the least excitement in his voice or manner, and in a few moments he had obtained almost complete order in the car. After that he gave them a few words of very sensible advice which at once won their respect and gratitude, because they understood the spirit that prompted it.
During all the time that I travelled with him I never saw Captain Howard, even under the most trying circumstances, lose his temper or grow im patient with any class of coloured people that he had to deal with. During the long trips that I used to make with him, whenever he had a little leisure time, he would drop down into the seat by by my side and we would talk together, sometimes for an hour at a time, on the condition and pros pects of the Negro in the South. I remember
56 MY LARGER EDUCATION
that he had very definite ideas in regard to the white man's duty and responsibility, and more than once he expressed to me his own reasons for believing that the Negro should be treated with patience and with justice. He used frequently to express the fear that, by allowing himself to get into the habit of treating Negroes with harshness, the white man in the South would be injured more than the Negro.
I have spoken of Captain Howard at some lengt i because he represents a distinct class of white people in the South, of whom an increasing number may be found in nearly every Southern community. He possessed in a very high degree those qualities of kindness, self-control, and general good breeding which belong to the real aristocracy of the South. In his talks with me he frequently explained that he was no "professional" lover of the Negro; that, in fact, he had no special feeling for the Negro or against him, but was interested in seeing fair play for every race and every individual. He said that his real reason for wanting to give the Negro the same chance that other races have was that he loved the South, and he knew that there could be no permanent prosperity unless the lowest and poorest portion of the community was treated with the same justice as the highest and most powerful.
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I count it a part of my good fortune to have been thrown, early in my life in Alabama, in contact with such a man as Captain Howard. After knowing him I said to myself: "If, under the circumstances, a white man can learn to be fair to my race instead of hating it, a black man ought to be able to re turn the compliment."
In connection with my work in Alabama, I early made the acquaintance of another Southern white man, also an Alabamian by birth but of a different type, a man of education and high social and official standing — the late J. L. M. Curry.
It was my privilege to know Doctor Curry well during the last twenty years of his life. He had fought on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War, he had served as a college professor and as United States Minister to Spain, and had held other high public positions. More than that, he represented, in his personal feelings and ways of thinking, all that was best in the life of the Southern white people.
Notwithstanding the high positions he had held in social and official life, Doctor Curry gave his latter years to the cause of education among the masses of white and coloured people in the South, and was never happier than when engaged in this Work.
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I met Doctor Curry for the first time, in a busi ness way, at Montgomery, Ala. While I was in the Capitol building I happened to be, for a few moments, in a room adjoining that in which Dbctor Curry and some other gentlemen were talking, and could not avoid overhearing their conversation. They were speaking about Negro education. One of the state officials expressed some doubt abott the propriety of a Southern gentleman taking an active part in the education of the Negro. While I am not able to give his exact words, Doctor Curry replied in substance that he did not believe that he or any one else had ever lost anything, socially or in any other way, on account of his connection with Negro education.
"On the other hand," Doctor Curry continued, "I believe that Negro education has done a great deal more for me than I have ever been able to do for Negro education."
Then he went on to say that he had never visited a Negro school or performed a kindly act for a Negro man, woman, or child, that he himself was not made stronger and better for it.
Immediately after the Civil War, he said, he had been bitterly opposed to every movement that had been proposed to educate the Negro. * After he came to visit some of the coloured schools, how-
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ever, and saw for himself the struggles that the coloured people were making to get an education, his prejudice had changed into sympathy and admiration.
As far as my own experience goes — and I have heard the same thing said by others — there is no gentler, kindlier, or more generous type of man anywhere than those Southern white men who, born and bred to those racial and sectional differences which, after the Civil War, were mingled with and intensified by the bitterness of poverty and defeat, have struggled up to the point where they feel nothing but kindness to the people of all races and both sections. It is much easier for those who shared in the victory of the Civil War — I mean the Northern white man and the Negro — to emancipate themselves from racial and sectional narrowness.
There is another type of white man in the South who has aided me in getting a broader and more practical conception of my work. I refer to the man who has no special sentiment for or against the Negro, but appreciates the importance of the Negro race as a commercial asset — a man like Mr. John M. Parker, of New Orleans. Mr. Parker is the president of the Southern Industrial Congress, and is one of the largest planters in the Gulf states.
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His firm in New Orleans, I understand, buys and sells more cotton than any other firm in the world. Mr. Parker sees more clearly than any white man in the South with whom I have talked, the fact that it is important to the commercial progress of the country that the Negro should be treated with justice in the courts, in business, and in all the affairs of life. He realizes also that, in order that the Negro may have an incentive to work regularly, he must have his wants increased; and this can be brought about only through education.
I have heard many addresses to coloured people in all parts of the country, but I have never heard words more sensible, practical, and to the point from the lips of any man than those of an address which Mr. Parker delivered before nearly a thousand Negro farmers at one of the annual Negro Con ferences at the Tuskegee Institute. Mr. Parker has for years been a large employer of Negro labour on his plantation. He was thus able to speak to the farmers simply and frankly, and, even though he told them some rather unpleasant truths, the audience understood and appreciated not only what was said, but the spirit in which it was uttered.
The hope of the South, so far as the interests of the Negro are concerned, rests very largely upon men like Mr. Parker, who see the close connection
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between labour, industry, education, and political institutions, and have learned to face the race prob lem in a large and tolerant spirit, and are seeking to solve it in a practical way.
A quite different type of man with whom I have been thrown in frequent contact is Col. Henry Watterson, of the Louisville Courier- Journal. Colonel Watterson seems to me to represent the Southern gentleman of the old school, a man of generous impulses, high ideals, and gracious manner. I have had frequent and long conversations with him about the Negro and about conditions in the South. If there is anywhere a man who has broader or more liberal ideas concerning the Negro, or any undeveloped race, I have not met him.
A few years ago, when a meeting had been ar ranged at Carnegie Hall, New York, in order to in terest the public in the work of our school at Tus- kegee, we were disappointed in securing a distin guished speaker from the South who had promised to be present. At the last moment the committee in charge telegraphed to Colonel Watterson. Although (because of the death of one of his children) he had made up his mind not to speak again in public for some time, Colonel Watterson went to New York from Louisville and made one of the most eloquent speeches in behalf of the Negro that
62 MY LARGER EDUCATION
I have ever heard. He told me at the time that nothing but his interest in the work that we were trying to do at Tuskegee would have induced him to leave home at that time.
Whenever I have been tempted to grow embit tered or discouraged about conditions in the South, my acquaintance with such men as Mr. Parker and Colonel Watterson has given me new strength and increased my faith.
I have been fortunate also in the coloured men with whom I have been associated. There is a class of Negroes in the South who are just as much interested as the best white people in the welfare of the communities in which they live. They are just as much opposed as the best white people to anything that tends to stir up strife between the races. But there are two kinds of coloured people, just as there are two kinds of white people.
There is a class of coloured people who are narrow in their sympathies, short-sighted in -their views, and bitter in their prejudices against the white people. When I first came to Alabama I had to decide whether I could unite with this class in a general crusade of denunciation against the white people of the South, in order to create sympathy in the North for the work that I was seeking to carry on, or whether I would consider the real
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interests of the masses of my race, and seek to preserve and promote the good relations that al ready existed between the races.
I do not deny that I was frequently tempted, during the early years of my work, to join in the general denunciation of the evils and injustice that I saw about me. But when I thought the matter over, I saw that such a course would accomplish no good and that it would do a great deal of harm. For one thing, it would serve only to mislead the masses of my own race in regard to the opportunities that existed right about them. Besides that, I saw that the masses of the Negro people had no disposition to carry on any general war against the white people. What they wanted was the help and encouragement of their white neighbours in their efforts to get an education and to improve themselves.
Among the coloured men who saw all this quite as clearly as myself was Rufus Herron, of Camp Hill, Ala. He was born in slavery and had had almost no school advantages, but he was not lacking in practical wisdom and he was a leader in the community in which he lived. Some years ago, after he had harvested his cotton crop he called to see me at the Tuskegee Institute. He said that he had sold all of his cotton, had got a good price
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for it, had paid all his debts for the year, and had twenty dollars remaining. He handed me ten dol lars and asked me to use it in the education of a student at Tuskegee. He returned to his home and gave the other ten to the teacher of the white school in his vicinity, and asked him to use it in the education of a white student.
Since that day I have come to know Rufus Her- ron well. He never misses a session of the annual Tuskegee Negro conference. He is the kind of man that one likes to listen to because he always says something that goes straight to the point, and after he has covered the subject he stops. I do not think that I have ever talked with him that he did not have something to suggest in regard to the material, educational, and moral improvement of the people, or something that might promote better relations between white people and black people. If there is a white man, North or South, that has more love for his community or his country than Rufus Herron, it has not been my good for tune to meet him. In his feelings and ambitions he also is what I have called an aristocrat. ,
I have no disposition to deny to any one, black or white, the privilege of speaking out and pro testing against wrong and injustice, whenever and wherever they choose to do so. I would do
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injustice to the facts and to the masses of my people in the South, however, if I did not point out how much more useful a man like Rufus Herron has made his life than the man who spends his time and makes a profession of going about talking about his "rights" and stirring up bitterness between the white people and coloured people. The salvation > of the Negro race in America is to be worked out, for the most part, not by abstract argument and not by mere denunciation of wrong, but by actual achievement in constructive work.
In Nashville there is another coloured man — a banker, a man of education, wealth, and culture. James C. Napier is about the same age as Rufus Herron. I have been closely associated with him for twenty years. I have been with him in the North and in the South; I have worked with him in conventions, and I have talked with him in private in my home and in his home. During all the years that I have known him I have never heard Mr. Napier express a narrow or bitter thought toward the white race. On the contrary, he has shown him self anxious to give publicity to the best deeds of the white people rather than the worst. During the greater part of my life I have done my work in association with such men as he. There is no part of the United States in which I have not met some
66 MY LARGER EDUCATION
of this type of coloured men. I honour such men all the more because, had they chosen to do so, they could easily have made themselves and those about them continually miserable by dwelling upon the mean things which people say about the race or the injustices which are so often a part of the life of the Negro.
Let me add that, so far as I have been able to see, there is no real reason why a Negro in this country should make himself miserable or unhappy. The average white man in the United States has the idea that the average Negro spends most of his time in bemoaning the fact that he is not a white man, or in trying to devise some way by which he will be permitted to mingle, in a purely social way, with white people. This is far from the truth. In my intercourse with all classes of the Negro, North and South, it is a rare occurrence when the matter of getting away from the race, or of social intermingling with the white people, is so much as mentioned. It is especially true that intelligent Negroes find a satisfaction in social intercourse among themselves that is rarely known or understood by any one outside of the Negro race. In their family life, in the secret societies and churches, as well as other organizations where coloured people come together, the most absorbing
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topic of conversation invariably relates to some en terprise for the betterment of the race.
Among coloured farmers, as among white farmers, the main topic of discussion is naturally the farm. The Negro is, in my opinion, naturally a farmer, and he is at his very best when he is in close con tact with the soil. There is something in the atmos phere of the farm that develops and strengthens the Negro's natural common-sense. As a rule the Negro farmer has a rare gift of getting at the sense of '^things and of stating in picturesque language what he has learned. The explanation of it is, it seems to me, that the Negro farmer studies nature. In his own way he studies the soil, the deyelopment of plants and animals, the streams, the birds, and the changes of the seasons. He has a chance of getting the kind of knowledge that is valuable to him at first-hand.
In a visit some years ago to a Negro farmers' institute in the country, I got a lesson from an un lettered coloured farmer which I have never for gotten. I had been invited by one of the Tuskegee graduates to go into the country some miles from Tuskegee to be present at this institute. When I entered the room the members of the institute were holding what they called their farmers' expe rience meeting. One coloured farmer was asked
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to come up to the platform and give his experience. He was an old man, about sixty-five years of age. He had had no education in the book, but the teacher had reached him, as he had others in the community, and showed him how to improve his methods of farming.
When this old man came up to the front of the room to tell his experience, he said: "I'se never had no chance to study no science, but since dis teacher has been here Fse been trying to make some science for myself."
Thereupon he laid upon the table by his side six stalks of cotton and began to describe in detail how, during the last ten years, he had gradually enriched his land so as to increase the number of bolls of cotton grown upon each individual stalk. He picked up one stalk and showed it to the audience; before the teacher came to the community, he said, and before he began to improve his land, his cotton produced only two bolls to the stalk. The second year he reached the point where, on the same land, he succeeded in producing four bolls on a stalk. Then he showed the second stalk to the audience. After that he picked up the third and fourth stalks, saying that during the last few years he had reached a point where a stalk produced eight bolls.
Finally he picked up the last stalk and said:
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"This year I made cotton like dis" - and he showed a stalk containing fourteen bolls. Then the old fellow took his seat.
Some one in the audience from a distance arose and said: "Uncle, will you tell us your name?"
The old fellow arose and said: "Now, as you ask me for my name, I'll tell you. In de old days, before dis teacher come here, I lived in a little log-cabin on rented land, and had to mortgage my crop every year for food. When I didn't have nothin', in dem days, in my community dey used to call me 'Old Jim Hill.' But now I'se out o' debt; I'se de deeds for fifty acres of land; and I lives in a nice house wid four rooms that's painted inside and outside; Fse got some money in de bank; I'se a taxpayer in my community; I'se edicated my children. And now, in my community, dey calls me ' Mr. James Hill.' "
The old fellow had not only learned to raise cot ton during these ten years, but, so far as he was concerned, he had solved the race problem.
As one travels through the Southland, he is con tinually meeting old Negro farmers like the one that I have described. It has been one of the great satisfactions of my life to be able from time to time to go out into the heart of the country, on the plantations and on the farms where the masses of
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the coloured people live. I like to get into the fields and into the woods where they are at work and talk with them. I like to attend their churches and Sunday-schools and camp-meetings and revival meetings. In this way I have gotten more material which has been of service to me in writing and speaking than I have ever gotten by reading books. There are no frills about the ordinary Negro farmer, no pretence. He, at least, is himself and no one else. There is no type of man that I more enjoy meeting and knowing.
A disadvantaged race has, too, the advantage of coming in contact with the best in the North, and this again has been my good fortune. There are two classes of people in the North — one that is just as narrow and unreasonable toward the white man at the South as any Southern white man can be toward the Negro or a Northern white man. I have always chosen to deal with the other white man at the North — the man with large and liberal views.
In saying this I make an exception of the "pro fessional " friend of the Negro. I have little patience with the man who parades himself as the "pro fessional" friend of any race. The "professional" friend of the Chinese or Japanese or Filipino is frequently a well-meaning person, but he is always
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tiresome. I like to meet the man who is interested in the Negro because he is a human being. I like to talk with the man who wants to help the Negro because he is a member of the human family, and because he believes that, in helping the Negro, he is helping to make this a better world to live in.
During the twenty-five years and more that I have been accustomed to go North every year to obtain funds with which to build up and support the Tuskegee Institute, I have made the acquaintance of a large number of exceptional people in that part of the country. Because I was seeking aid for Negro education, seeking assistance in giving op portunities to a neglected portion of our population, I had an opportunity to meet these people in a different and, perhaps, more intimate way than the average man. I had an opportunity to see a side of their lives of which many of their business acquaintances, perhaps, did not know the existence.
Few people, I dare say, who were acquainted with the late Mr. H. H. Rogers, former head of the Standard Oil Company, knew that he had any special interest or sympathy for the Negro. I re member well, however, an occasion when he showed this interest and sympathy. I was showing him one day the copy of a little Negro farmers' news paper, published at Tuskegee, containing an account
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of the efforts the people in one of our country com munities were making to raise a sum of money among themselves in order that they might receive the aid he had promised them in building a school- house. As Mr. Rogers read the account of this school "rally," as it was called, and looked down the long list of names of the individuals who in order to make up the required sum, had contributed out of their poverty, some a penny, some five cents, some twenty-five, some a dollar and a few as much as five dollars, his eyes filled with tears. I do not think he ever before realized, as he did at that moment, the great power — and the great power for good — which his money gave them.
During the last years of his life, Mr. Rogers was greatly interested in the building of the Virginian Railway, which was constructed upon his own plans and almost wholly with his own capital, from Nor folk, Va., to Deep Water, W. Va. One of the first things he did, after this new railway was com pleted, was to make arrangements for a special train in order that I might travel over and speak at the different towns to the coloured people along the line and, at the same time, study their situation in order that something might be done to improve their condition. From his point of view, these people were part of the resources of the country
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which he wanted to develop. He desired to see the whole country through which this railway passed, which, up to that time, had remained in a some what backward condition, made prosperous and flourishing and filled with thriving towns and with an industrious and happy people. He died, how ever, just as he seemed on the eve of realizing this dream.
For a number of years before his death, I knew Mr. H. H. Rogers intimately. I used to see him frequently in his office in New York; sometimes I made trips with him on his yacht. At such times I had opportunity to talk over in detail the work that I was trying to do. Mr. Rogers had one of the most powerful and resourceful minds of any man I ever met. His connection with large business affairs had given him a broad vision and practical grasp of public and social questions, and I learned much from my contact with him.
In this connection I might name another individ ual who represents another and entirely different type of man, with whom I have frequently come in contact during my travels through the Northern states. I refer to Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the New York Evening Post. Mr. Villard is not primarily a business man in the sense that Mr. Rogers was, and his interest in the education
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and progress of the Negro is of a very different kind from that of Mr. Rogers; at least he approaches the matter from a very different point of view.
Mr. Villard is the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist. He is a literary man and idealist, and he cherishes all the intense zeal for the rights of the Negro which his grandfather before him displayed. He is anxious and determined that the Negro shall have every right and every opportunity that any other race of people has in this country. He is the outspoken opponent of every institution and every individual who seeks to limit in any way the freedom of any man or class of men anywhere. He has not only con tinued in the same way and by much the same methods that his grandfather used, to fight the battles for human liberty, but he has interested him self in the education of the Negro. It is due to the suggestion and largely to the work of Mr. Villard that Tuskegee, at the celebration of its twenty-fifth anniversary received the $150,000 memorial fund to commemorate the name and service of Mr. William H. Baldwin to Tuskegee and Negro educa tion in the South. Mr. Villard has given much of his time and personal service to the work of helping and building up some of the smaller and struggling Negro schools in the South. He is a trustee of at least
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two of such institutions, being president of the board of trustees in one case, and takes an active part in the direction and control of their work. He has recently been active and, in fact, is largely responsible for the organization of the National Association for the Advancement of the Coloured People, a sort of national vigilance committee, which will watch over and guard the rights and interests of the race> and seek through the courts, through legislation, and through other public and private means, to redress the wrongs from which the race now suffer^** in different parts of the country.
Perhaps I ought to add in fairness that, while I sympathize fully with Mr. Villard's purposes, I have frequently differed with him as to the methods he has used to accomplish them. Sometimes he has criticised me publicly in his newspaper and privately in conversation. Nevertheless, during all this time, I have always felt that I retained his friendship and good-will. I do not think there has ever been a time when I went to him with a request of any kind either for myself personally or to obtain his help in any way in the work in which I was engaged that he has not shown himself willing and anxious to do everything in his power to' assist me. While I have not always been able to follow his suggestions, or agree with him as to the methods
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I should pursue, I have, nevertheless, I think, profited by his criticism and have always felt and appreciated the bracing effect upon public sentiment of his vigorous and uncompromising spirit.
I have learned also from Mr. Villard the lesson that persons who have a common purpose may still maintain helpful, friendly relations, even if they do differ as to details and choose to travel to the common goal by different roads.
Another man who has exercised a deep influence upon me is Robert C. Ogden. Some months after I became a student at Hampton Institute, Mr. Robert C. Ogden, in company with a number oi other gentlemen from New York, came to Hampton on a visit. It was the first time I ever saw him and the first sight of a man of the physical, mental, and moral build of Mr. Ogden — strong, fresh, clean, vigorous — made an impression upon me that it is hard for any one not in my situation to appreciate. The thing that impressed me most was this: Here was a man, intensely earnest and practical, a man who was deeply engrossed in business affairs, who still found time to turn aside from his business and give a portion of his time and thought to the ele vation of an unfortunate race.
Mr. Ogden is a man of a very different type from either Mr. Rogers or Mr. Villard. He does not
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look at the question of uplifting the Negro as a question of rights and liberty exclusively: he does not think of it merely as a means of developing one of the neglected resources of the South. He looks upon it, if I may venture to say so, as a question of humanity. Mr. Ogden is intensely interested in human beings; he cannot think of an unfortunate individual or class of individuals without feeling a strong impulse to help them. He has spent a large portion of his time, energy, and fortune in inspiring a large number of other people with that same sentiment. I do not believe any man has done more than Mr. Odgen to spread, among the masses of the people, a spirit of unselfish service to the interests of humanity, irrespective of geo graphical, sectarian or racial distinction.
Perhaps I can in no better way give an idea of what Mr. Ogden has accomplished in this direction than by giving a list of some of the activities in which he has been engaged. Mr Ogden is:
President and only Northern member of the Conference for Southern Education,
President of the Southern Education Board,
President of the Board of Trustees of Hampton Institute,
Trustee of Tuskegee Institute,
Trustee of the Anna T. Jeans Fund for Improvement of the Negro Common School,
Member of the General Education Board.
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From this it will be seen that Mr. Ogden i? directly connected with almost every important movement for education in the South, whether fo - white people or for black people. In addition to that he is president of the Board of Directors of the Union Theological Seminary of New York, member of the Sage Foundation Board, and of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions. In all these different directions he has worked quietly, steadily, without stinting himself, for the good of the whole country. Many of the sentiments which he has expressed in his annual addresses at the meetings of these different organizations have in them the breadth of view of a real statesman. His idea was that in giving an equal opportunity for education to every class in the community lit? was laying the foundation for a real democracy. He spoke of the educational conference, for instance, as "a congress called by the voice of democracy' "; and again he said of this same institution, " Its foundation is the proposition that every American child is entitled to an education."
In spite of what he has done in a multitude of ways to advance education, I have heard Mr. Ogden say, both in public and in private, that he was not an educated man. Perhaps he has not got ten so much education in the usual, formal, tech-
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nical matter out of books as some other people. But through the study of books, or men, or things, Mr. Ogden has secured the finest kind of education, and deserves to be classed with the scholars of the world. So far as I have studied Mr. Ogden's career, it is of interest and value to the public in three directions:
First: He has been a successful business man.
Second: More than any other one individual except Gen. S. C. Armstrong, he has been the leader in a movement to edu cate the whole South, regardless of race or colour.
Third: In many important matters relating to moral and religious education in the North, Mr. Ogden is an important leader.
I know of few men in America whose life can be held up before young people as a model as can Mr. Ogden's life.
It would be difficult for me to describe or define the manner and extent to which I have been in fluenced and educated by my contact with Mr. Ogden. It was characteristic of him, that the only reason I came to know him is because I needed him, needed him in the work which I was trying to do. Had I not been a Negro I would probably never have had the rare experience of meeting and know ing intimately a man who stands so high in every walk of life as Mr. Robert C. Ogden. Had Mr.
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Ogden been a weak man, seeking his own peace oi mind and social position, he would not have been brave enough and strong enough to ignore adverse criticism in his efforts to serve the unfortunate of both races in the South, and in that case I should probably not have made his acquaintance.
The men that I have mentioned are but types of many others, men intellectually and spiritually great, who, directly and indirectly, have given comfort, help, and counsel to the ten millions of my race in America.
CHAPTER IV
MY EXPERIENCE WITH REPORTERS AND NEWSPAPERS
I HAVE learned much from reporters and news papers. Seldom do I go into any city, or even step out on the platform between trains, but that it seems to me some newspaper reporter finds me. I used to be surprised at the unex pected places in which these representatives of the press would turn up, and still more surprised and sometimes embarrassed by the questions they would ask me. It seemed to me that, if there was any particular thing that I happened to know and did not feel at liberty to talk about, that would be the precise thing that the reporter who met me wanted to question me about. In such cases, too, the reporter usually got the information he wanted, or, if he didn't, I was sorry afterward, because if the actual facts had been published they would have done less damage than the half truths which he did get hold of.
81
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I confess that when I was less experienced I used to dread reporters. For a long time I used to look upon a reporter as a kind of professional pry, a sort of social mischief-maker, who was constantly trying to find out something that would make trouble. The consequence was that when I met reporters I was likely to find myself laying plans to circumvent them and keep them in the dark in regard to my purposes and business.
A wide acquaintance with newspapers and news paper men has completely changed my attitude toward them. In the first place I have discovered that reporters usually ask just the questions that the average man in the community in which the newspapers are located would ask if he had the courage to do so. The only difference is that the reporter comes out squarely and plumply and asks you the question that another person would ask indirectly of some one else.
For my part, I have found it both interesting and important to know what sort of questions the average man in the community was asking, for example about the progress of the Negro, or about my work. The sort of questions the reporters in the different parts of the country ask indicate pretty clearly, not only what the people in the com munity know about my work, but they tell me a great
MY EXPERIENCE WITH NEWSPAPERS 83
deal, also, about the feeling of the average man toward the members of my race in that community and toward the Negro generally. Not only do the newspaper reporters keep me informed, in the way I have described, in regard to a great many things I want to know, but frequently, by the questions that they ask, they enable me to correct false im pressions and to give information which it seems im portant the public should have, in regard to the condition and progress of the Negro.
One other consideration has changed my attitude toward the reporters. As I have become better acquainted with newspapers I have come to under stand the manner and extent to which they represent the interests and habits of thought of the people who read and support them. Any man who is en gaged in any sort of work that makes constant de mands upon the good-will and confidence of the public knows that it is important that he should have an opportunity to reach this public directly and to answer just the sort of questions the news papers ask of him. As I have said, these inquiries represent the natural inquiries of the average man. If the newspaper did not ask and answer these ques tions, they would remain unanswered, or the public would get the information it wanted from some more indirect and less reliable source.
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Several times, during the years that I have been at Tuskegee, a representative from some Southern paper or magazine has come to me to inquire in regard to some rumour or report that has got abroad in regard to conditions inside our school. In such cases I have simply told the reporter to take as much time as he chose and make as thorough an examination of the school and everything about it as he cared to. At the same time, I have assured him that he was perfectly free to ask any questions on any subject, of any person that he met on the grounds. In other words, I have given him every opportunity to go as far as he wanted, and to make his investigation as thorough as he desired.
Of course, in every institution as large as ours, there is abundant opportunity for a malicious or ill-disposed person to make injurious criticism, or to interpret what he learns in a way that would injure the institution. But in every such case, in stead of printing anything derogatory to the school, the newspaper investigation has proved the most valuable sort of advertisement, and the rumours that had been floating about have been silenced. There is no means so effectual in putting an end to gossip as a newspaper investigation and report. On the other hand, I have found that there is no way of so quickly securing the good-will of a newspaper
MY EXPERIENCE WITH NEWSPAPERS 85
reporter as by showing him that you have nothing to conceal.
Frequently I have heard people criticise the news papers because they print and give currency to so much that is merely trivial; in other words, what we commonly speak of as gossip. What I know of the newspapers convinces me that they do not print one tenth of the reports that are sent in to them, and that a large part of the time of every newspaper man is spent in running down and proving the falsity of stories and rumours that have gained cur rency in the community as a result of the natural disposition of mankind to accept and believe any kind of statement that is sufficiently circumstantial and interesting. My own experience leads me to believe that if the newspaper performed no other ser vice for the community but that of rooting out of the public mind the malice and prejudice that rest upon misinformation and gossip, it would justify its existence in this way alone.
In saying this, I do not overlook the fact that daily papers are responsible for giving currency to many statements that are false and misleading: that too frequently the emphasis is placed upon the things that are merely exciting, while important matters — or, at least, matters that seem important to some of us who are on the outside — are passed
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over in silence. To a very large extent the daily newspapers have merely taken up the work that was formerly performed by the village gossip, or by the men who sat around in the village store, talked pol itics, and made public opinion. The newspaper, however, does that work on a higher plane. It gives us a world-wide outlook, and it makes a com mendable effort to get the truth. Even if, like the village gossip, it puts the emphasis sometimes on the wrong things and spends a lot of time over personal and unimportant matters, it at least brings all classes of people together in doing so. People who read the same newspaper are bound to feel neighbourly, even though they may never meet one another, even though they live thousands of miles apart.
I have learned much from newspapers and from newspaper men. I think I have met all kinds of news paper reporters, not only those who work on the con servative, but also those on the so-called "yellow" journals, and what I have seen of them convinces me that no class of men in the community work harder or more faithfully to perform the difficult tasks to which they are assigned or, considering all the circumstances, perform their work better. I confess that I have grown to the point where I always like to meet and talk with newspaper men,
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because they know the world, they know what is going on, and they know men. I have frequently been amazed, in talking with newspaper men, to learn the amount of accurate, intimate, and inside information that they had about public and even private matters, and at the insight they showed in weighing and judging public men and their actions.
One thing that has interested me in this connec tion has been the discovery that practically every large newspaper in the country has in its office a vast array of facts which, out of charity for the in dividuals concerned or because some public interest ^ould be injured by their publication, never get into print. I am convinced that much more fre quently than is supposed newspaper men show their interest in individuals and in the public welfare by what they withhold from publication rather than by what they actually do print. Considering that, under the conditions in which mod ern newspapers are conducted, any fact which would interest and excite the community has become a kind of commodity which it is the business of the newspaper to gather up and sell, it is surprising that these publications are as dis criminating and as considerate as they are.
It seems to me, also, that there has been a notice able improvement, in recent years, in the method
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of getting and preparing newspaper reports. I am not sure whether this is due more to the improve ment in the class of men who represent the papers or whether it is due to a better understanding on the part of the public as to the methods of dealing with reporters; to a more definite recognition on the part of both the public and the newspapers of the re sponsible position which the modern newspaper occupies in the complex organization of modern social life. Both private individuals and public men seem to have recognized the fact that, in a country where the life of every individual touches so closely the life of every other, it is in the interest of all that each should work, as it were, in the open, where all the world may know and understand what he is doing.
On the other hand, newspapers have discovered that the only justification for putting any fact in a newspaper is that publication will serve some sort of public interest, and that, in the long run, the value of a piece of news and the repu tation of a newspaper that prints it depend upon the absolute accuracy and trustworthiness of its reports.
I have learned something about newspapers and newspaper men from my own experience with them, but I have learned much, also, from the manner in
MY EXPERIENCE WITH NEWSPAPERS 89
which some of the best known men in this country have been accustomed to deal with them.
On several occasions when I was at the White House, during the time that Colonel Roosevelt was President, I saw him surrounded by half a dozen reporters — representing great daily papers. I was greatly surprised on those occasions to observe that the President would talk to these reporters just as frankly and freely about matters pertaining to the government, and his plans and policies, as one partner in business would talk to another part ner. While these men, as a result of the interview, would telegraph long despatches to their papers, I am sure I am safe in saying that the President's confidence was rarely, if ever, betrayed.
It was largely through such frank interviews, taking the whole country into his confidence, as it were, that President Roosevelt was able, in so large a degree, to carry the whole country along with him. Ever since I have known Colonel Roosevelt, one of the things that I have observed in his career has been his ability and disposition to keep in close personal touch with the brightest newspaper men and magazine writers of the country. The news paper men like him because he understands the conditions under which they work and at the same time recognizes the important part that they and
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their reports play in the actual, if not in the official3 government in a democratic country like ours.
Another noted man whom it has been my priv ilege to see a good deal of, in connection with news papers, is Mr. Andrew Carnegie. Not long ago I heard the question asked why it was that, while so many rich men were unpopular, Andrew Carnegie held the love and respect of the common people. From what I have seen of Mr. Carnegie I ascribe a good deal of his popularity to the candour and good sense with which he deals with reporters and news papers. Mr. Carnegie has something of Mr. Roose velt's disposition to take reporters into his confidence. Both Colonel Roosevelt and Mr. Carnegie have known how to use newspapers as a means of letting the world know what they are doing and, in both cases, I believe that the popularity of these men is due, in very large part, to their ability to get into a sort of personal touch with the masses of the peo ple through the newspapers.
In saying this I do not mean that either Colonel Roosevelt or Mr. Carnegie has made use of the newspapers merely for the sake of increasing their personal popularity. The man who is known, and has the confidence of the public, can, if he does not allow himself to be fooled by his own popularity, accomplish a great deal more, perform a much
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greater public service, than the man whose name is unknown.
In the case of both Colonel Roosevelt and Mr. Carnegie, the names of private individuals have, in each case, become associated in the public mind with certain large public interests. They have come to be, in a very real sense, public men because they have embodied in their persons and their lives certain important public interests. Although, so far as I know, he has never held public office of any kind, Mr. Carnegie is nevertheless a public man. Mr. Roosevelt has not ceased to be identified with cer tain important public interests; nor has he lost, to any great extent, political power because he is no longer President of the United States. The power which these men exercise upon the minds and hearts of the masses of their fellow countrymen is largely due to the fact that they were able to make the ac quaintance of the public through the newspapers.
I have always counted it a great privilege that my name became associated, comparatively early in my life, with what has always seemed to me a great and important public interest, namely, a form of education which seems to me best suited to fit a re cently enfranchised race for the duties and respon sibilities of citizenship in a republic. The fact that I have been compelled to raise the larger part of the
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money for establishing this kind of education by direct appeals to the public has made my name pretty generally known. I am glad that this is true, for through the medium of the newspapers I have been able to get in touch with many hundreds and thousands of persons that I would never have been able to reach with my voice. All this has multiplied my powers for service a hundredfold.
Of course it is just as true that a man who has become well known and gained the confidence of the public through the medium of the press can use that power for purely selfish purposes, if he chooses, as that he can use it for the public welfare. I have no doubt that nearly every man who has in any way gained the confidence of the public has every year many opportunities for turning his pop ularity to private account.
Several times in the course of a year, for example, some one makes me a present of shares of stock in some new concern, and, on several occasions, I have had deeds of lots in some land scheme or new town presented to me. I have made it a rule to promptly return every gift of that kind, first of all for the good business reason that it would not pay me to have my name connected with any enterprise, no matter how legitimate it might be, for which I could not be personally responsible, and the use of my name,
MY EXPERIENCE WITH NEWSPAPERS 93
under such circumstances, so far as it influenced any one to invest in the scheme, would be a fraud.
A second reason is my desire to keep faith with the public, if I may so express it. In order to do that, I have never been able to see how I could afford to give any of my time or attention to any enter prise or any kind of work that did not have to do specifically and directly with the work of Negro education, in the broad spirit in which I have interpreted it.
I have already said that, in my early experience with newspaper reporters, I used to think it was necessary to be very careful in letting them know what my ambitions and aims in regard to my work were. But I have learned that it is pretty hard to keep anything from the newspapers that the news papers think the public wants to know. As a result of what I have learned I try to be perfectly frank with newspaper men. For some years I have made it my custom to talk with them concerning all my plans and everything of a public nature in which I am interested. I talk with them just the same as I would with one of my friends or business acquaint ances. When a reporter comes to interview me I tell him what I wish he might publish, and what I wish he would not publish. Frequently I have discovered that the newspaper man understood
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better than I how to state things in a way that should give the right impression to the public. This seems to be especially true of the Washington correspondents of the great dailies, who, considering the many important matters which they have to handle, exercise, it seems to me, a remarkable dis cretion as to what should, and should not, be printed. Let me give an illustration: When Colonel Roosevelt was President, he invited me to come to the White House to read over an important part of one of his annual messages to Congress. The passage of his message in regard to which he con sulted me referred to a subject upon which there was great interest at that time, and the newspaper report ers in Washington, and especially those on duty at the White House, had some inkling as to the sub ject that the President wished to discuss with me. I was with the President for a considerable time. When I came out of the President's office I was at once surrounded by half a dozen newspaper men who wished me to tell them, in detail, just what I had discussed with the President. After some hes itation I made up my mind to try the experiment of being perfectly frank with them. I gave them an outline of what was in the message and went into some detail in regard to our discussion of it. After I had given them the facts, I said to them: "Now,
MY EXPERIENCE WITH NEWSPAPERS 95
gentlemen, do you think that this is a subject that I ought to give out to the public at this time through the newspapers?"
Each one of them promptly replied that he did not think it was a matter that I ought to give out to the public. The result was that the next day not a single newspaper represented in this conversa tion had a line concerning the matter which had called me to the White House. This is an example of an experience which I have frequently had in dealing with reporters. If I had tried to hide some thing from them, or to deceive them, I suspect that some garbled report or misstatement of the facts would have been given to the public in regard to the matter.
There is always a question with me, and I presume there is with most public speakers, as to what is the best form of preparing and delivering a public ad dress, and of getting the gist of it correctly and prop erly reported through the newspapers. When I first began speaking in public I used to follow the plan to a great extent of committing speeches to memory. This plan, however, I soon gave up. At present I do not commit speeches to memory, except on very important occasions, or when I am to speak on an entirely new subject.
The plan of writing out one's speech and reading
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it has its advantages, but it also has its disadvan tages. A written speech is apt to sound stiff and formal; besides, if one depends upon a manuscript, he will not be able to adapt himself to the occasion. Writing out a speech, however, has the advantage of enabling one to give out something to the news papers that will be absolutely accurate.
After trying both the plan of committing to mem ory and of writing out my addresses, I have struck upon a compromise which I find, in my case, an swers the purpose pretty well. The plan which I now follow is this : I think out what I want to say pretty carefully. After having done that, I write head lines, or little suggestions that will call my at tention to the points that I wish to make in covering my speech. After having thought out the general line of my speech, and then having prepared my head lines, I have for a number of years been accus tomed to dictate my speech to a stenographer. By long practice, I have found that, after dictating my speech, I can take my head lines or memorandum sheet and follow the dictation almost exactly when I deliver my address. I give out all or a portion of the dictated address to the newspapers in advance. This the reporters consider an accommodation to them. It insures accuracy and at the same time leaves me free while speaking to throw aside the
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stiffness and formality that would naturally be nec essary in reading an address or in delivering an ad dress that had been committed to memory, and to take advantage of any local interests that would give a more lively colour to what I have to say.
Another disadvantage of a written address, or of one committed to memory, is that it is difficult to adapt it to the interests of the immediate audi ence. To me, talking to an audience is like talking to an individual. Each audience has a personality of its own, and one can no more find two audiences that are exactly alike than he can find two individuals that are exactly alike. The speaker who fails to adapt himself to the conditions, sur roundings, and general atmosphere of his audience in a large degree fails, I think, as a speaker. I have found that the best plan is, as I have stated, to study one's subject through and through, to saturate himself with it so that he is master of every detail, and then use head lines as a memorandum.
One of the questions which I suppose, every man who deals with the public has to meet sooner or later is how to deal with a false newspaper report. I have made it a rule never to deny a false report, except under very exceptional cir cumstances. In nine cases out of ten the denying of the report simply calls attention to the original
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statement in a way to magnify it. Many people who did not see the original false report will see the denial and will then begin to search for the original report to find out what it was. And then, unfor tunately, there are always some newspapers that will spread a report that is not justified by facts, for the purpose of securing a denial or of exciting a discussion. My experience is that it always gives a certain dignity and standing to a slander or a false hood to deny it. Every one likes a fight, and a con troversy will frequently lend a fictitious interest and importance to comparatively trivial circumstances. During a long period of years in dealing with the public I have been deceived only once in recent years by a newspaper reporter. This was the case of a man on a New York paper who got aboard a train with me, took a seat by my side, and began the discussion of a question which was much before the public at that time. He gave me the impression that he was a man engaged in business and was only incidentally interested in the subject under discus sion. I talked with him pretty freely and frankly, as I would with any gentleman. My suspicions were not aroused until I noticed that suddenly and unceremoniously he left the train at a way station. I at once made up my mind that I had been talking, not to an individual, but to the public. The next
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morning a long report of this interview appeared in his paper. I at once informed the managing editor of what had occurred.
I am not sure that anything definite came of my letter, but I believe that one way to improve the methods of the newspapers in dealing with individ uals is to protest when you think you have been badly treated.
The important thing, it seems to me, about the newspaper is that it represents the interest and reflects the opinions and intelligence of the average man in the community where the paper is published. The local press reflects the local prejudice. Its failings are the common human failings. Its faults are the faults of the average man in the community, and on the whole it seems to me best that it should be so. If the newspapers were not a reflex of the minds of their readers, they would not be as inter esting or as valuable as they are. We should not know the people about us as well as we do. As long as the newspaper exists we not only have a means of understanding how the average man thinks and feels, but we have a medium for reaching and influ encing him. People who profess to have no respect for the newspapers as a rule, I fear, have very little understanding or respect for the average man.
The real trouble with the newspapers is that while
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they frequently exhibit the average man at his; worst, they rarely show him at his best. In order to read the best about the average man we must still go to books or to magazines. The newspaper has the advantage that it touches real things anc real persons, but it touches them only on the surface For that reason I have found it safe never to give too much weight to what a newspaper says about a man either good or bad.
Nevertheless I have learned more from newspapers than I have from books. In fact, aside from what I have learned from actual contact with men and with things, I believe I have gained the greatest part of my education from newspapers. I am sure this is so if I include among the newspapers those magazines which deal with current topics. Cer tainly I have been stimulated in all my thinking more by news than I have by the general statements I have met in books. In this, as in other matters, I like to deal at first-hand with the raw material and this I find in the newspapers more than in books.
Frequently I have heard persons speak of the newspaper as if its only purpose in making its reports was to tear down rather than build up. It is cer tainly true that newspapers are rather ruthless in the way in which they seem to bring every man, particularly every public man, to the bar
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of public opinion and make him explain and justify his work.
Nevertheless it is important that every man who is in any way engaged, directly or indirectly, in performing any kind of public service should never be permitted to forget that the only title to place or privilege that any man enjoys in the com munity is ultimately based on the service that he performs. I believe that any man, public or private, who meets newspaper men and deals with the news paper in that spirit will find himself helped im mensely in his work by the press rather than injured.
For my own part I feel sure that I owe much of such success as I have been able to achieve to the sympathy and interest which the newspaper press, North and South, has shown in the work that I have been trying to do. Largely through the me dium of the newspapers I have been able to come into contact with the larger public outside of my com munity and the circle of my immediate friends and, by this means, to make the school at Tuskegee, not merely a private philanthropy, but in the truest sense of that word a public institution, supported by the public and conducted not in the interest of any one race or section, merely, but in the interest of the whole country.
CHAPTER V
THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE BOSTON MOB
IT MAKES a great deal of difference in the life of a race, as it does in the life of an individual, whether the world expects much or little of that individual or of that race. I suppose that every boy and every girl born in poverty have felt at some time in their lives the weight of the world against them. What the pec- pie in the communities did not expect them to do it was hard for them to convince themselves that they could do.
After I got so that I could read a little, I used to take a great deal of satisfaction in the lives of men who had risen by their own efforts from poverty to success. It is a great thing for a boy to be able to read books of that kind. It not only inspires him with the desire to do something and make some thing of his life, but it teaches him that success de pends upon his ability to do something useful, to perform some kind of service that the world wants.
102
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The trouble in my case, as in that of other col oured boys of any age, was that the stones we read in school were all concerned with the success and achievements of white boys and men. Occasionally I spoke to some of my schoolmates in regard to the characters of whom I had read, but they in variably reminded me that the stories I had been reading had to do with the members of another race. Sometimes I tried to argue the matter with\ them, saying that what others had done some of \ us might also be able to do, and that the lack of a past in our race was no reason why it should noty have a future.
They replied that our case was entirely different. They said, in effect, that because of our colour and because we carried in our faces the brand of a race that had been in slavery, white people did not want us to succeed.
In the end I usually wound up the discussion by recalling the life of Frederick Douglass, reminding them of the high position which he had reached and of the great service which he had performed for his own race and for the cause of human freedom in the long anti-slavery struggle.
Even before I had learned to read books or news papers, I remember hearing my mother and other coloured people in our part of the country speak
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about Frederick Douglass's wonderful life and achievements. I heard so much about Douglass when I was a boy that one of the reasons why ] wanted to go to school and learn to read was thai: I might read for myself what he had written anc said. In fact, one of the first books that I remember reading was his own story of his life, which Mr. Douglass published under the title of "My Life and Times." This book made a deep impression ipon me, and I read it many times.
After I became a student at Hampton, unde • Gen. Samuel C. Armstrong, I heard a great deal more about Frederick Douglass, and I followed all his movements with intense interest. At the same time I began to learn something about other prom inent and successful coloured men who were at that time the leaders of my race in the United States. These were such men as Congressman John M. Langston, of Virginia; United States Senator Blanche K. Bruce, of Mississippi; Lieut.-Gov. P. B. S. Pinchback, of Louisiana; Congressman John R. Lynch, of Mississippi; and others whose names were household words among the masses of the coloured people at that time. I read with the greatest eagerness everything I could get hold of regarding the prominent Negro characters of that period, and was a faithful student of their lives and deeds.
HON. P. B. S. PINCHBACK OF LOUISIANA
Lieutenant-Governor 1871-72, and afterward Congressman
BLANCHE K. BRUCE
OF MISSISSIPPI
Who was born a slave, but was the first Negro to become a member of the United States Senate
MAJOR JOHN R. LYNCH, U. S. A. Who served as a member of Con gress from Mississippi
CHARLES BANKS ' He has taught me the value of com mon-sense in dealing with conditions as they exist in the South "
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Later on I had the privilege of meeting and knowing all of these men, but at that time I little thought that it would ever be my fortune to meet and know any of them.
On one occasion, when I happened to be in Wash ington, I heard that Frederick Douglass was going to make a speech in a near-by town. I had never seen him nor heard him speak, so I took advantage of the opportunity. I was profoundly impressed both by the man and by the address, but I did not dare approach even to shake hands with him. Some three or four years after I had organized the Tuske- gee Institute I invited Mr. Douglass to make a visit to the school and to speak at the commencement exercises of the school. He came and spoke to a great audience, many of whom had driven thirty or forty miles to hear the great orator and leader of the race. In the course of time I invited all of the prominent coloured men whose names I have men tioned, as well as others, to come to Tuskegee and speak to our students and to the coloured people in our community.
As a matter of course, the speeches (as well as the writings) of most of these men were concerned for the most part with the past history, or with the present and future political problems, of the Negro race. Mr. Douglass's great life-work had been
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in the political agitation that led to the destruc tion of slavery. He had been the great defender of the race, and in the struggle to win from Congress and from the country at large the recognition of the Negro's rights as a man and a citizen he had played an important part. But the long and bitter political struggle in which he had engaged against slavery had not prepared Mr. Douglass to take up the equally difficult task of fitting the Negro for the opportunities and re sponsibilities of freedom. The same was true to «a large extent of other Negro leaders. At the time when I met these men and heard them speak I was invariably impressed, though young and insx- jperienced, that there was something lacking in their public utterances. I felt that the millions of Negroes needed something more than to be reminded of their sufferings and of their political frights; that they needed to dcLSomething more than iinerely to defend themselves.
Frederick Douglass died in February, 1895. In September of the same year I delivered an address in Atlanta at the Cotton States Exposition.
I spoke in Atlanta to an audience composed of leading Southern white people, Northern white people, and members of my own race. This seemed to me to be the time and the place, without condemn-
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ing what had been done, to emphasize what ought to be done. I felt that we needed a policy, not of destruction, but of construction; not of defence, but of aggression; a policy, not of hostility or sur render, but of friendship and advance. I stated, \ as vigorously as I was able, that usefulness in the •community where we resided was our surest and most j potent protection.
One other point which I made plain in this speecH/ was that, in my opinion, the Negro should seek constantly in every manly, straightforward manned to make friends of the white man by whose sidfcv he lived, rather than to content himself with seek-ty ing the good-will of some man a thousand miles away.
While I was fully convinced, in my own mind, that the policy which I had outlined was the cor rect one, I was not at all prepared for the wide spread interest with which my words were re ceived.
I received telegrams and congratulations from all parts of the country and from many persons whose names I did not know or had heard of only indirectly through the newspapers or otherwise. Very soon invitations began to come to me in large numbers to speak before all kinds of bodies and on all kinds of subjects. In many cases I was offered for my
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addresses what appeared to me almost fabulous sums. Some of the lecture bureaus offered me as high as $300 and $400 a night for as long a period as I would speak for them. Among other things which came to me was an offer from a prominent Western newspaper of $1000 and all expenses for my services if I would describe for it a famous prize-fight.
I was invited, here and there, to take part in political campaigns, especially in states where the Negro vote was important. Lecture bureaus not. only urged upon me the acceptance of their offer*, through letters, but even sent agents to Tuskegee Newspapers and magazines made generous offen; to me to write special articles for them. I decided, however, to wait until I could get my bearings. Apparently the words which I had spoken at At lanta, simple and almost commonplace as they were, had touched a deep and responsive chord in the public mind.* This gave me much to think about.
*The following is copied from the official history of the exposition:
" Then came Booker T. Washington, who was destined to make a national reputation in the next fifteen minutes. He appeared on the programme by invitation of the directors as the representative of the Negro race. This would appear to have been a natural arrangement, if not a matter of course, and it seems strange now that there should have been any doubt as to the wisdom or propriety of giving the Negro a place in the opening exercises. Neverthe less, there was, and the question was carefully, even anxiously, considered before it was decided. There were apprehensions that the matter would encourage social equality and prove offensive to the white people, and in the end unsatis-
THE INTELLECTUALS 109
In the meantime I determined to stick close to my work at Tuskegee.
One of the most surprising results of my Atlanta speech was the number of letters, telegrams, and newspaper editorials that came pouring in upon me from all parts of the country, demanding that I take the place of "leader of the Negro people,'1 left vacant by Frederick Douglass's death, or assum ing that I had already taken this place. Until these suggestions began to pour in upon me, I never had the remotest idea that I should be selected or looked upon, in any such sense as Frederick Doug lass had been, as a leader of the Negro people. I was at that time merely a Negro school teacher in a rather obscure industrial school. I had devoted all my time and attention to the work of organizing and bringing into existence the Tuskegee Institute, and I did not know just what the functions and
factory to the coloured race. But the discussion satisfied the board that this course was right, and they resolved to risk the expediency of doing right. The sequel showed the wisdom of their decision. The orator himself touched upon the subject with great tact, and the recognition that was given has greatly tended to promote good feeling between the races, while the wide and self- respecting course of the Negroes on that occasion has raised them greatly in the estimation of their white fellow-citizens."
In introducing the speaker, Governor Bullock said: "We have with us to-day the representative of Negro enterprise and Negro civilization. I have the honour to introduce to you Prof. Booker T. Washington, principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial College, who will formally present the Negro exhibit."
Professor Washington was greeted with applause, and his speech received marked attention.
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duties of a leader were, or what was expected of him on the part of the coloured people or of the rest of the world. It was not long, however, before I began to find out what was expected of me in the new position into which a sudden newspaper noto riety seemed to have thrust me.
I was not a little embarrassed, when I first began to appear in public, to find myself continually re ferred to as "the successor of Frederick Douglass." Wherever I spoke — whether in the North or in the South — I found, thanks to the advertising I had received, that large audiences turned out tc hear me.
It has been interesting, and sometimes amusing, to note the amount and variety of disinterested advice received by a man whose name is to any extent before the public. During the time that my Atlanta address was, so to speak, under discussion, and almost every day since, I have received one or more letters advising me and directing my course in regard to matters of public interest.
One day I receive a letter, or my attention is called to some newspaper editorial, in which I am advised to stick to my work at Tuskegee and put aside every other interest that I may have in the advancement of my race. A day or two later I may receive a letter, or read an editorial in a news-
THE INTELLECTUALS in
paper, saying that I am making a mistake in confin ing my attention entirely to Tuskegee, to Negro education, or even to the Negro in the United States. It has been frequently urged upon me, for example, that I ought, in some way or other, to extend the" work that we are trying to do at Tuskegee to Africaj or to the West Indies, where Negroes are a larger part of the population than in this country.
There has been a small number of white people and an equally small number of coloured people who felt, after my Atlanta speech, that I ought to branch out and discuss political questions, putting emphasis upon the importance of political activity and success for the members of my race. Others, who thought it quite natural that, while I was in the South, I should not say anything that would be offensive, expected that I would cut loose in the North and denounce the Southern people in a way to keep alive and intensify the sectional differences which had sprung up as a result of slavery and the Civil War. Still others thought that there was something lacking in my style of defending the Negro. I went too much into the facts and did not say enough about the Rights of Man and the Declaration of Independence.
When these people found that I did not change my policy as a result of my Atlanta speech, but
H2 MY LARGER EDUCATION
stuck to my old line of argument, urging the im portance of education of the hand, the head, and the heart, they were thoroughly disappointed. So far as my addresses made it appear that the race troubles in the South could be solved by education rather than by political measures, they felt that I was putting the emphasis in the wrong place.
I confess that all these criticisms and suggestions were not without effect upon my mind. But, after thinking the matter all over, I decided that, pleas ant as it might be to follow the programme that was laid out for me, I should be compelled to stick to my original job and work out my salvation along the lines that I had originally laid down for myself.
My determination to stand by the programme which I had worked out during the years that I had been at Tuskegee and which I had expressed in my Atlanta speech, soon brought me into conflict with a small group of coloured people who sometimes styled themselves "The Intellectuals," at other times "The Talented Tenth." As most of these men were graduates of Northern colleges and made their homes for the most part in the North, it was natural enough, I suppose, that they should feel that leadership in all race matters should remain, as heretofore, in the North. At any rate, they were opposed to any change from the policy of uncom-
THE INTELLECTUALS 113
promising and relentless antagonism to the South so long as there seemed to them to be anything in Southern conditions wrong or unjust to the Negro)
My life in the South and years of study and effort [ in connection with actual and concrete problems of Southern life had given me a different notion, andj I believed that I had gained some knowledge and some insight which they were not able to obtain in the same degree at a distance and from the study of books.
The first thing to which they objected was my plan for the industrial education of the Negro. It seemed to them that in teaching coloured people to work with the hands I was making too great a concession to public opinion in the South. Some of them thought, probably, that I did not really be lieve in industrial education myself; but in any case they were opposed to any " concession, " no matter whether industrial education was good or bad.
According to their way of looking at the matter, the Southern white man was the natural enemy of the Negro, and any attempt, no matter for what purpose, to gain his sympathy or support must be regarded as a kind of treason to the race.
All these matters furnished fruitful subjects for controversy,, in all of which the college graduates
ii4 MY LARGER EDUCATION
that I have referred to were naturally the leaders. The first thing that such a young man was tempted to do after leaving college was, it seems, to start out on a lecturing tour, travelling about from one town to another for the purpose of discussing what are known as "race" subjects.
I remember one young man in particular who graduated from Yale University and afterward took a post-graduate course at Harvard, and who began his career by delivering a series of lectures on "The Mistakes of Booker T. Washington." It was not long, however, before he found that he could not live continuously on my mistakes. Then he discovered that in all his long schooling he had not fitted himself to perform any kind of useful and productive labour. After he had failed in several other directions he appealed to me, and I tried to find something for him to do. It is pretty hard, however, to help a young man who has started wrong. Once he gets the idea that — because he has crammed his head full with mere book knowl edge — the world owes him a living, it is hard for him to change. The last I heard of the young man in question, he was trying to eke out a miserable existence as a book agent while he was looking about for a position somewhere with the Government as a janitor or for some other equally humble occupation.
THE INTELLECTUALS 115
When I meet cases, as I frequently do, of such unfortunate and misguided young men as I have described, I cannot but feel the most profound sympathy for them, because I know that they are not wholly to blame for their condition. I know that, in nine cases out of ten, they have gained the idea at some point in their career that, because they are Negroes, they are entitled to the special sympathy of the world, and they have thus got into the habit of relying on this sympathy rather than on their own efforts to make their way.
In college they gave little thought or attention to preparing for any definite task in the world, but started out with the idea of preparing themselves to solve the race problem. They learned in college a great deal about the history of New England free dom; their minds were filled with the traditions of, the anti-slavery struggle; and they came out of college with the idea that the only thing necessary to solve at once every problem in the South was to apply the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. They had learned in their studies little of the actual present-day conditions in the South and had not considered the profound difference between the political problem and the educational problem, between the work of destruction and of
n6 MY LARGER EDUCATION
construction, as it applies to the task of race building.
Among the most trying class of people with whom I come in contact are the persons who have bee:i educated in books to the extent that they are able, upon every occasion, to quote a phrase or a senti ment from Shakespeare, Milton, Cicero, or some other great writer. Every time any problem arises they are on the spot with a phrase or a quotatior. No problem is so difficult that they are not able, with a definition or abstraction of some kind, to solve it. I like phrases, and I frequently find then useful and convenient in conversation, but I hav^ not found in them a solution for many of the actual problems of life.
In college they studied problems and solved them on paper. But these problems had already been solved by some one else, and all that they had to do was to learn the answers. They had never faced any unsolved problems in college, and all that they had learned had not taught them the patience and persistence which alone solve real problems.
I remember hearing this fact illustrated in a very apt way by a coloured minister some years ago. After great sacrifice and effort he had constructed in the South a building to be used for the purpose of sheltering orphans and aged "coloured women.
THE INTELLECTUALS 117
After this minister had succeeded in getting his building constructed and paid for, a young coloured man came to inspect it and at once began pointing out the defects in the building. The minister listened patiently for some time and then, turning to the young man, he said: "My friend, you have an advantage over me.'* Then he paused and looked at the young man, and the young man looked inquiringly at the minister, who continued: "I am not able to find fault with any building which you have constructed."
Perhaps I ought to add, in order that my state ments may not be misleading, that I do not mean to say that the type of college man that I have de scribed is confined to the members of my own race. Every kind of life produces its own peculiar kind of failures, and they are not confined to one race. It would be quite as wrong for me to give the impres sion that the description which I have given applies to all coloured graduates of New England or other colleges and to none others. As a matter of fact, almost from the beginning we have had men from these colleges at Tuskegee; I have come into contact with others at work in various institutions of the South; and I have found that some of the sanest and most useful workers were those who had graduated at Harvard and other New England
n8 MY LARGER EDUCATION
colleges. Those to whom I have referred are the exception rather than the rule.
There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrong:?, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not wart the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do do not want to lose their jobs.
A story told me by a coloured man in South Caro lina will illustrate how people sometimes get into situations where they do not like to part with their grievances. In a certain community there was a coloured doctor of the old school, who knew little about modern ideas of medicine, but who in some way had gained the confidence of the people and had made considerable money by his own peculiar meth ods of treatment. In this community there was an old lady who happened to be pretty well provided with this world's goods and who thought that she had a cancer. For twenty years she had enjoyed the luxury of having this old doctor treat her for that cancer. As the old doctor became — thanks to the cancer and to other practice — pretty
THE INTELLECTUALS 119
well-to-do, he decided to send one of his boys to a medical college. After graduating from the medical school, the young man returned home, and his father took a vacation. During this time the old lady who was afflicted with the "cancer" called in the young man, who treated her; within a few weeks the cancer (or what was supposed to be the cancer) disappeared, and the old lady declared herself well.
When the father of the boy returned and found the patient on her feet and perfectly well, he was outraged. He called the young man before him and said: "My son, I find that you have cured that cancer case of mine. Now, son, let me tell you something. I educated you on that cancer. I put you through high school, through college, and finally through the medical school on that cancer. And now you, with your new ideas of practising medicine, have come here and cured that cancer. Let me tell you, son, you have started all wrong. How do you expect to make a living practising medicine in that way?"
I am afraid that there is a certain class of race- problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through
/\
120 MY LARGER EDUCATION
which to make themselves prominent before the public.
My experience is that people who call themselves "The Intellectuals" understand theories, but they do not understand things. I have long been con-
Avinced that, if these men could have gone into the South and taken up and become interested in sorre practical work which would have brought them in touch with people and things, the whole world would have looked very different to them. Bad as conditions might have seemed at first, when they saw that actual progress was being made, they would have taken a more hopeful view of the situation.
But the environment in which they were raised had cast them in another world. For them there was nothing to do but insist on the application of the abstract principles of protest. Indignation meetings in Faneuil Hall, Boston, became at one time so frequent as to be a nuisance. It would not have been so bad if the meetings had been confined to the subjects for which they were proposed; but when "The Intellectuals" found that the Southern people rarely, if ever, heard of their protests and, if they did hear of them, paid no attention to them, they began to attack the persons nearer home. They began to attack the people of Boston because
THE INTELLECTUALS 121
they said that the people of Boston had lost interest in the cause of the Negro. After attacking the friends of the Negro elsewhere, particularly all those who happened to disagree with them as to the exact method of aiding the Negro, they made me a "fre quent and favourite object of attack — not merely for the reasons which I have already stated, bui because they felt that if they attacked me in som< particularly violent way it would surprise peopl< and attract attention. There is no satisfaction in holding meetings and formulating protests unless you can get them into the newspapers. I do not really believe that these people think as badly of the person whom they have attacked at different times as their words would indicate. They are merely using them as a sort of sounding-board or mega phone to make their own voices carry farther. The persistence and success with which these men sought this kind of advertising has led the general public to believe the number of my opponents among the Negro masses to be much larger than it actually is.
A few years ago when I was in Boston and the subject of those who were opposing me was under discussion, a coloured friend of mine, who did not belong to the so-called "Talented Tenth," used an illustration which has stuck in my mind. He was
X
122 MY LARGER EDUCATION
originally from the South, although he had lived in Boston for a number of years. He said that he had once lived in Virginia, near a fashionable hotd. One day a bright idea struck him and he went :o the proprietor of the hotel and made a bargain to furnish him regularly with a large number of frogs, which were in great demand as a table delicacy. The proprietor asked him how many he could fur nish. My friend replied that he felt quite sure that he could furnish him with a cart-load, if nec essary, once a week. The bargain was concluded. The man was to deliver at the hotel the following day as large a number of frogs as possible.
When he appeared, my friend had just six frogs. The proprietor looked at the frogs, and then at my friend.
"Where are the others?" he said.
"Well, it is this way," my friend replied; "for months I had heard those bull-frogs in a pond near my house, and they made so much noise that I supposed there were at least a million of them there. When I came to investigate, however, I found that there were only six. "
Inspired by their ambition to "make themselves heard," and, as they said, compel the public to pay attention to their grievances, this little group kept up their agitation in various forms and at differ-
THE INTELLECTUALS 123
ent places, until their plans culminated one night in Boston in 1903. To convince the public how deep and sincere they were in their peculiar views, and how profoundly opposed they were to every one who had a different opinion, they determined to do something desperate. The coloured citizens of Boston had asked me to deliver an address be fore them in one of their largest churches. The meeting was widely advertised, and there was a large audience present. Unknown to any of my coloured friends in Boston, this group,' who, as I have stated, were mostly graduates of New England colleges, organized a mob to disturb the meeting and to break it up if possible. The presiding officer at the meeting was the Hon. William H. Lewis, a graduate of Amherst College and of the Harvard Law School. Various members of the group were scattered in different parts of the church. In addition to themselves there were present in the audience — and this, better than anything else, shows how far they had been carried in their fa naticism — some of the lowest men and women from vile dens in Boston, whom they had in some way or other induced to come in and help them disturb the meeting.
As soon as I began speaking, the leaders, stationed in various parts of the house, began asking questions.
124 MY LARGER EDUCATION
In this and in a number of other ways they tried to make it impossible for me to speak. Naturally the rest of the audience resented this, and eventually it was necessary to call in the police and arrest the disturbers.
Of course, as soon as the disturbance was over, most of those who had participated in it were ashamed of what they had done. Many of those who had classed themselves with "The Intellectuals" before, hastened to disavow any sympathy with the methods of the men who had organized the disturbance. Many who had before been luke warm in their friendship became my closest friend;;. Of course the two leaders, who were afterward convicted and compelled to serve a sentence in the Charles Street Jail, remained unrepentant. They tried to convince themselves that they had been made martyrs in a great cause, but they did not get much encouragement in this notion from other coloured people, because it was not possible for them to make clear just what the cause was for which they had suffered.
/ The masses of coloured people in Boston and in ; the United States indorsed me by resolution and condemned the disturbers of the meeting. The Negro newspapers as a whole were scathing in their criticism of them. For weeks afterward my mail
A type of the unpretentious cabin which an Alabama Negro
formerly occupied and the modern home
in which he now lives
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-•was filled with letters from coloured people, asking me to visit various sections and speak to the people.
I was intensely interested in observing the results of this disturbance. For one thing I wanted to find out whether a principle in human nature that I had frequently observed elsewhere would prove true in this case.
I have found in my dealings with the Negro race\ — and I believe that the same is true of all races — 1 that the only Way to hold people together is by means of a constructive^ progressive programme. It is not argument, nor criticism^ nor hatred, ^ut work. - in constructive effort, that gets hold of men and binds them together in a way to make them rally/ to the support of a common cause.
Before many weeks had passed, these leaders began to disagree among themselves. Then they began to quarrel, and one by one they began to drop away. The result is that, at the present time, the group has been almost completely dispersed and scattered. Many of "The Intellectuals" to day do not speak to one another.
The most surprising thing about this disturbance, I confess, is the fact that it was organized by the very people who have been loudest in condemning the Southern white people because they had sup-
126 MY LARGER EDUCATION
pressed the expression of opinion on public questions and denied the Negro the right of free speech.
As a matter of fact, I have talked to audiences
in every part of this country; I have talked to
coloured audiences in the North and to white
audiences in the South; I have talked to audiences
of both races in all parts of the South; everywhere
I have spoken frankly and, I believe, sincerely
on everything that I had in my mind and heart to
(say. When I had something to say about the white
4 people I said it to the white people; when I had
/something to say about coloured people I said it
1 to coloured people. In all these years — that is
the curious thing about it — no effort has been
made, so far as I can remember, to interrupt or
to break up a meeting at which I was present until
it was attempted by "The Intellectuals" of my own
race in Boston.
. I have gone to some length to describe this inci dent because it seems to me to show clearly the defects of that type of mind which the so-called " Intellectuals" of the race represent.
I do not wish to give the impression by what I have said that, behind all the intemperance and extravagance of these men, there is not a vein of genuine feeling and even at times of something like real heroism. The trouble is that all this fervour
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.^and intensity is wasted on side issues .and trivial . matter's. It does not connect itself with anything that is helpful and constructive. These crusaders, as nearly as I can see, are fighting windmills.
The truth is, I suspect, as I have already suggested, that "The Intellectual" live top .rriuckin ike past. They know books but they do not k-now men. They i know a great deal about the slavery controversy,- for example, but they know almost nothing about* the Negro. Especially are they ignorant in regard to the actual needs of the masses of the coloured people in the South to-day.
There are some things that one individual can do for another, and there are some things that one race can do for another. But^ on the whole, every individual and every race must work out its own salvation. Let me add that if one thing more than another has taught me to have confidence in the masses of my own people it has been their willingness (and even eagerness) to learn and their disposi tion to help themselves and depend upon them selves as soon as they have learned how to do so.
CHAPTER VI
A COMMENCEMENT ORATION ON CABBAGES
ONE of the advantages of a new people or a new race — such as, to a very large extent, the American Negroes are — consists in the fact that they are not hampered, as other peoples sometimes are, by tradition. In the matter of education, for example, Negroes in the South are not hampered by tradition, because they have never had any worth speaking of. As a race we are free, if we so choose, to adopt at once the very latest and most approved methods of education, because we are not held back by any wornout tradition; and we have few bad educational habits to be got rid of before we can start in to employ newer and better methods.
I have sometimes regarded it as a fortunate cir cumstance that I never studied pedagogy. If I had done so, every time I attempted to do anything in a new way I should have felt compelled to reckon with all the past, and in my case that would have
128
ORATION ON CABBAGES 129
taken so much time that I should never have got anywhere. As it was, I was perfectly free to go ahead and do whatever seemed necessary at the time, without reference to whether that same thing had ever been done by any one else at any previous time or not.
As an illustration of the way in which too much learning will hamper a man who finds himself in the presence of a new problem — one not in the books — I recall the fate of the young Harvard graduate who was a teacher at Tuskegee for one or two sessions several years ago. This young man had very little practical experience as a teacher, but he had made a special study of the subject of education while he was in college; largely because of his high scholarship, he was given a position as teacher of education at Tuskegee.
I am afraid that, until he arrived, we knew very little about pedagogy at Tuskegee. He proceeded to enlighten us, however. He lectured and preached to us about Comenius, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and all the others, and what he said was very interesting. The trouble was that he made a complete failure in his own classes. But that was not all. We were trying to fit our students to go out as teachers in the rural districts. I pointed out to him that if he were going to help them to any great extent it would
i3o MY LARGER EDUCATION
be necessary for him to study the conditions of the country people and to get acquainted with some of the actual problems of a small, rural Negro com munity. He did not seem to regard that as impor tant, because, as he said, the principles were the same in every case and all that was necessary was to apply them.
I told him, then, that I thought we had worked out at Tuskegee a number of definite methods of dealing with the problems of these rural commu nities, and suggested to him that if he wanted to teach the general principles he ought to work out a theory for these methods, so that the teachers and students might understand the principles under which they were actually working. He did not seem to take this suggestion seriously. It seemed absurd to him that any one should come down to the Black Belt of Alabama to look for anything new in the matter of education. In short, his mind was so burdened with the traditions and knowledge of other systems of education that he could not see anything in any kind of education that seemed to break with these traditions. In fact, he seemed to feel, whenever he did discover anything new or strange about the methods that we employed, that there must be something either wrong or dangerous about them.
ORATION ON CABBAGES 131
My own early experience was, I suppose, like that of most other teachers; I picked up quite naturally those methods of teaching that were in vogue around me or that seemed to be prescribed by the text books. My method consisted in asking pupils to learn what was in the book, and then requiring them to recite it.
I shall long remember the time when the folly and uselessness of much of the old-time method of teaching first fairly dawned upon me. I was teaching a country school near my old home in West Virginia. This school was located near a piece of land that was wet and marshy, but never theless beautiful in appearance. It was June and the day was hot and sultry; when the usual recess or playtime came, I was as anxious as the children were to get outside of the close and stuffy school room into the open air. That day I prolonged the playtime to more than twice the usual period.
The hour previous to recess had been employed by me in trying to get a class of children interested in what proved to be a rather stupid geography lesson. I had been asking my pupils a lot of dull and tiresome questions, getting them to define and name lakes, capes, peninsulas, islands, and so forth. Naturally the answers of the children were quite as dull and stupid as the questions.
i3 2 MY LARGER EDUCATION
As soon as the children were out of doors a~ playtime, however, they all, as if by common in stinct, scampered off into the marshes. In a few seconds they were wading in the cool water, jumping about in the fragrant grass, and enjoying themselves in a way that was in striking contrast to the dull labour of the geography lesson. I soon became infected with the general fever; and in a few minutes I found myself following the children at a rapid rate and entering into the full enjoyment of the contrast between the dull, dead atmosphere of the school room and the vivid tingling sense of the living out-doors.
We had not been out of the school house and away from the old geography lesson long before one of the boys who had been among the dullest in his recitation in the school room became the leader of a sort of exploring party. Under his leadership we began to discover, as we waded along the stream, dozens of islands, capes, and peninsulas, with here and there a little lake or bay, which, as some of the pupils pointed out, would furnish a safe harbour for ships if the stream were only large enough. Soon every one of the children was busy pointing out and naming the natural divisions of land and water. And then, after a few days, we got pieces of wood and bark and let them float down the
ORATION ON CABBAGES 133
stream; we imagined them to be great ships carry ing their cargoes of merchandise from one part of the world to another. We studied the way the stream wandered about in the level land, and noticed how the little sand bars and the corresponding harbours were formed by the particles of sand and earth which were rolled down by the stream. We located cities on these harbours, and tried to find water-power where we might build up manufac turing centres.
Before long I discovered that, quite unconsciously, we had taken up again the lessons in the school room and were studying geography after a new fashion. This time, however, we found a real joy and zest in the work, and I think both teacher and pupils learned more geography in that short period than they ever learned in the same space of time before or since.
For the first time the real difference between studying about things through the medium of books, and studying things themselves without the medium of books, was revealed to me. The children in this recess period had gained more ideas in regard to the natural divisions of the earth than they would have gained in several days by merely studying geog raphy inside the school room. To be sure, they had not learned the names, the locations, nor the
134 MY LARGER EDUCATION
definitions of the capes, bays, and islands, but tv they had learned what was more important — to think capes, islands, and peninsulas. From that time on they found no difficulty and were really greatly interested in recognizing the natural divi sions of land and water wherever they met them.
The lesson that I learned thus early in my experi ence as a teacher I have never forgotten. In all my work at Tuskegee Institute I have lost no oppor tunity to impress upon our teachers the importance of training their students to study, analyze, and compare actual things, and to use what they have learned in the school room and in the text-book, to enable them to observe, think about, and deal with the objects and situations of actual life.
Not long ago I visited the class room of a new teacher at Tuskegee, who was conducting a class in measurements. This teacher had insisted that each member of the class should commit to memory the tables of measurement, and when I came in they were engaged in reciting, singsong, something that sounded like a sort of litany composed of feet, yards, rods, acres, gills, pints, quarts, ounces, pounds, and the rest. I looked on at this pro ceeding for a few minutes; then a happy thought occurred to me and I asked the teacher to let me take the class in hand. I begaa by asking if any
ORATION ON CABBAGES 135
one in the class had ever measured the class room in which they were sitting. There was a dumb silence. Then I asked if any one had ever marked off an acre of actual land, had ever measured a gill of water, or had ever weighed an ounce or a pound of sugar. Not a hand was raised in reply.
Then I told the teacher that I would like to take charge of the class for a few days. Before the week was over I had seen to it that every member of the class had supplied himself with a rule or a measure of some sort. Under my direction the students measured the class room and found what it would cost to paint the walls of the room.
From the class room we went to a part of the farm where the students were engaged in planting sweet potatoes. Soon we had an acre of sweet potatoes measured off. We computed the number of bushels raised on that acre and calculated the cost and profit of raising them.
Before the week was over the whole class had been through the boarding department, where they had an opportunity to weigh actual sugar. From the steward we obtained some interesting figures as to how much sugar was used a day; then we computed how much was used by each student. We went to the farm again and weighed a live pig, and I had the class find out the selling price of pork
136 MY LARGER EDUCATION
on that particular day, not in Chicago, but in Alabama. I had them calculate the amount that
- not an imaginary pig or a pig in Chicago - the pig that they had weighed would bring that day in the local market. It took some time to go through all these operations, but I think that it paid to do so. Besides, it was fun. It was fun for me, and it was a great deal more fun for tie students. Incidentally the teacher got an awaken ing and learned a lesson that I dare say he has never forgotten.
At the present time all teachers in the academic studies are expected to make a careful study of the work carried on by the students in the industries. Nearly every day, for example, some class in mathe matics, goes under the charge of a teacher, into the shops or the dairy or out on the farm to get its problems in mathematics at first hand. Students are sent from the English classes to look up the history of some trade, or some single operation performed by students in the shop, and to write out an account of that trade or that operation for the benefit of the other members of the class. In such cases attention is paid not merely to the form in which the report is written, but more espec ially to the accuracy and clearness of the statement. The student who prepares that kind of paper is
ORATION ON CABBAGES 137
writing something in which other students have a practical interest, and if students are not accurate there are always one or more students in the class who know enough about the subject to criticise and correct the statements made. The student in this case finds himself dealing with live matters, and he naturally feels responsibility for the statements that he makes — a responsibility that he would not feel if he were merely, putting together facts that he had gathered from some encyclopaedia or other second-hand source of information.
In emphasizing the importance of studying things rather than books, I do not mean to underrate the importance of studying history, general literature, or any of the other so-called cultural studies. I do think, however, that it is important that young men and young women should first of all get clear and definite ideas of things right about them, because these are the ideas by which they are going to measure and interpret things farther removed from their practical interests. To young, inex perienced minds there seems to be a kind of fatal charm about the vague, the distant, and the mysterious.
In the early days of freedom, when education was a new thing, the boy who went away to school had a very natural human ambition to be able to
138 MY LARGER EDUCATION
come back home in order to delight and astonish the old folks with the new and strange things that he had learned. If he could speak a few words in some strange tongue that his parents had never heard before, or read a few sentences out of a book with strange and mysterious characters, he was able to make them very proud and happy. There was a constant temptation therefore for schools and teachers to keep everything connected with education in a sort of twilight realm of the mys terious and supernatural. Quite unconsciously they created in the minds of their pupils the impres sion that a boy or a girl who had passed through certain educational forms and ceremonies had been initiated into some sort of secret knowledge that was inaccessible to the rest of the world. Con nected with this was the notion that because a man had passed through these educational forms and ceremonies he had somehow become a sort of superior being set apart from the rest of the world - a member of the "Talented Tenth" or some other ill-defined and exclusive caste.
Nothing, in my opinion, could be more fatal to the success of a student or to the cause of educa tion than the general acceptance of any such ideas. In the long run it will be found that neither black people nor white people want such an education
ORATION ON CABBAGES 139
for their children, and they will not support schools that give it.
My experience has taught me that the surest way to success in education, and in any other line for that matter, is to stick close to the common and familiar things — things that concern the greater part of the people the greater part of the time.
I want to see education as common as grass, and as free for all as sunshine and rain.
The way to open opportunities of education for every one, however, is to teach things that every one needs to know. I venture to say that anything in any school, taught with the object of fitting students to produce and serve food, for example, will win approval and popularity for the school. The reason is simple: every human being is interested, several times a day, in the subject of food; and a large part of the world is interested, either directly or indirectly, in its production and sale.
Not long ago I attended the closing exercises of a high school in a community composed mainly of people in the humble walks of life. The general theme of the graduating addresses was "An Imagi nary Trip to Europe." Of course the audience was bored, and I was not surprised that a number of people went to sleep. As a matter of fact, I do
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not think that the parents of a single student who delivered one of these addresses had ever been to Europe or will have an opportunity to go at any time in the near future. The thing did not touch a common chord. It was too far removed from aK the practical, human interests of which they had any experience. The average family in America is not ordinarily engaged in travelling through Europe for any large part of the time. Besides that, non<; of the members of this graduating class had eve:' been to Europe; consequently they were not writing about something of which they had any real knowledge.
Some years ago, in an effort to bring our rhetorical and commencement exercises into a little closer touch with real things, we tried the experiment at Tuskegee of having students write papers on some subject of which they had first-hand knowledge. As a matter of fact, I believe that Tuskegee was the first institution that attempted to reform its com mencement exercises in this particular direction.
Ordinarily, at the closing exercises of a high school, graduates are expected to stand up on the platform and, out of all their inexperience, instruct their elders how to succeed in life. We were for tunate at Tuskegee, in the thirty-seven industries carried on there and in the thousand acres of land
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that are cultivated, to be able to give our students, in addition to their general education, a pretty good knowledge of some one of the familiar trades or vocations. They have, therefore, something to talk about in their essays in which all of the audience are interested and with which all are more or less familiar.
Instead of having a boy or girl read a paper on some subject like "Beyond the Alps Lies Italy," we have them explain and demonstrate to the audience how to build a roof, or the proper way to make cheese, or how to hatch chickens with an incu bator. Perhaps one of the graduates in the nurses' training school will show how to lend "first aid to the injured." If a girl is taking the course in dairying, she will not only describe what she has learned but will go through, on the platform, the various methods of operating a modern dairy.
Instead of letting a boy tell why one ought to do right, we ask him to tell what he has learned about the feeding of pigs, about their diseases, and the care of them when they are sick. In such a case the student will have the pig on the platform, in order to illustrate the methods of caring for it, and demonstrate to the audience the points that he is trying to make.
One of our students, in his commencement ora-
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tion last May, gave a description of how he planted and raised an acre of cabbages. Piled high upon the platform by his side were some of the largest and finest cabbages that I have ever seen. He told how and where he had obtained the seed; he de scribed his method of preparing and enriching the soil, of working the land, and harvesting the crop; and he summed up by giving the cost of the whole operation. In the course of his account of this, comparatively simple operation, this student hac made use of much that he had learned in composi tion, grammar, mathematics, chemistry, and agricul ture. He had not merely woven into his narrative all these various elements that I have referred to, but he had given the audience (which was made up largely of coloured farmers from the surrounding country) some useful and practical information in regard to a subject which they understood and were interested in. I wish that any one who does not believe it possible to make a subject like cabbages interesting in a commencement oration could have heard the hearty cheers which greeted the speaker when, at the close of his speech, he held up one of the largest cabbages on the platform for the audience to look at and admire. As a matter of fact, there is just as much that is interesting, strange, mys terious, and wonderful; just as much to be learned
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that is edifying, broadening, and refining in a cabbage as there is in a page of Latin. There is, however, this distinction: it will make very little difference to the world whether one Negro boy, more or less, learns to construe a page of Latin. On the other hand, as soon as one Negro boy has been taught to apply thought and study and ideas to the growing of cabbages, he has started a process which, if it goes on and continues, will eventually ' transform the whole face of things as they exist in the South to-day.
I have spoken hitherto about industrial educa tion as a means of connecting education with life. The mere fact that a boy has learned in school to handle a plane or that he has learned something about the chemistry of the soil does not of itself insure that he has gained any new and vital grip upon the life about him. He must at the same time learn to use the knowledge and the training that he has received to change and improve the condi tions about him.
In my travels I have come across some very interesting and amusing examples of the failures of teachers to connect their teaching with real things, even when they had a chance right at hand to do so. I recall visiting, not long since, a somewhat noted school which has a department for industrial
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or hand training, concerning which the officers of the school had talked a great deal. Almost directly in front of the building used for the so-called industrial training — I noticed a large brick building in process of erection. In the construction of this building every principle of mechanics taught in the manual-training department of this institution was being put into actual use. Notwithstanding this fact, I learned upon inquiry that the teacher had made no attempt to connect what was taught in the manual-training department with the work on the brick building across the way. The students had no opportunity to work on this building; they had not visited it with their teacher; they had made no attempt to study the actual problems that had arisen in the course of its construction. As far as they were concerned, there was no relation whatever between the subjects discussed in the class room or the operations carried on in the school shopc and the work that was going on outside. All that they were getting in the school was, as far as I was able to learn, just as formal in its charac ter, just as much an educational ceremony, as if they were engaged in diagraming a sentence in English or reciting the parts of a Latin verb.
My experience in the little country school in West Virginia first taught me that it was possible to take
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teaching outside of the text-book and deal with real things. I have learned from later experience that it is just as important to carry education outside of the school building and take it into the fields, into the homes, and into the daily life of the people surrounding the school.
One of the most important activities of our school at Tuskegee is what we call our Extension Work, in which nearly all the departments of the Institute cooperate. In fact, at the present time more atten tion, energy, and effort are directed to this work outside the school grounds than to any other branch of work in which the school is engaged.
It would be impossible to describe here all the ramifications or all the various forms which this extension work has taken in recent years. The thing that I wish to emphasize, however, is that we are seeking in this work less to teach (according to the old-fashioned notion of teaching) than to im prove conditions. We are trying to improve the methods of farming in the country surrounding the school, to change and improve the home life of the farming population, and to establish a model school system — not only for Macon but for several other counties in the state.
Perhaps I can best illustrate what I mean when I say that education should connect itself with life,
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by describing a type of rural school which we have worked out and are seeking to establish in Macon County. There are several schools in our county which might be called, in a certain sense, model country schools. There are nearly fifty communi ties in which, during the last four or five years, new school buildings have been erected and the school terms lengthened to eight and nine months, largely with funds collected from the Negro farmers under the direction and inspiration of the Tuskegee Institute.
The school that I have in mind is known as the "Rising Star." That is the name that the coloured people gave to their church, and that is now the name which has become attached to the little farm ing community surrounding it. The "Rising Star" community is composed of some score or more of hard-working, thrifty, successful Negro farmers, the larger number of whom own their land. There is no wealth in this community; neither is there much, if any, actual want. When I first made the acquaintance of "Rising Star," soon after beginning my work in Alabama, the church which gave the neighbourhood its name was an old, dilapidated building, located in a wornout field. It was about the worst looking building that I had ever seen, up to that time, in which to carry on the
THE "RISING STAR" SCHOOLHOUSE With which the community was once satisfied
THE "RISING STAR" SCHOOLHOUSE That the changed conditions have produced
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work of saving men's souls. The condition of the farmhouses, the farms, and the school was in keeping with the condition of the church. This was true also of the minister. He was run down and dilapi dated. I used frequently to go Sunday afternoons to hear him preach. His sermons usually held on for about an hour and a half. I remember that I used to study them carefully from week to week in the hope that I might hear him utter, at some time or other, a single sentence that seemed to me to have any practical value to any man, woman, or child in his congregation. I was always disap pointed, however. Almost without exception, his ser mons related to something that is supposed to have taken place two or three thousand years ago, or else they were made up of a vivid discription of the horrors of hell and of the glories of heaven.
Nor far from the church, in another old field, there was a little broken-down, unsightly building which had never been touched by paint or white wash. This was the school. The teacher went with the minister. He had about fifty or sixty children in his school, but the things that he taught them had no more relation to the life of that com munity than the preacher's sermons had. The weakness and poverty of this little Negro settlement gave me, however, the chance that I wanted. I
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determined to try there the experiment of building up a model school, one that should actually see^ to articulate school life into every-day life. I cannot give here a detailed history of this experiment, but I will briefly describe conditions as they exist to-day.
In place of the old building to which I have re ferred, there is now a comfortable five- room house, resembling in style and general appearance the cottages of the more prosperous farmers of the neighbourhood. In this building, surrounded by its garden, with its stable and outbuildings ad joining, the teachers (a man and his wife) live and teach school. All of the rooms, as well as the gar den and the stable, are used at different times in the day for teaching pupils the ordinary household duties of a farmer and his wife in that part of the country. Here the children learn to make the beds and to clean, dust, and arrange the sitting room. At noon they go into the kitchen, where they are taught to cook, and into the dining room, where they are taught to lay the table and serve a farmer's meal. The flowers in the front yard are cared for by the children of the school. The vegetables in the garden are those which have been found best adapted to the soil and the needs of the community, and all are planted and cared for by the teachers
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and students.