BOOKER T. WASHINGTON.* Mn. ROOSEVELT has written a preface to
the Life of the great negro, Booker Washington, and thus assured the circulation of a book of immense interest. Booker Washington was a great man in the white man's sense of the word. He was not so much a man of genius as man of judgment—in a supreme degree. For a man in his ertvirerunent his lack of prejudice seems almost miraculous. Mr. Roosevelt says of him : " He did justice to every man. He did justice to those to whom it was a hard thing to do justice. He showed mercy ; and this meant that he showed mercy not only to the poor, and to those beneath him, but that he showed mercy by an understanding of the shortcomings of those who failed to do him justice, and failed to do his race justice." He appeared to be in complete sympathy with both races. In AmeeL a it is generally believed that ho belonged to both. The question is not discussed in the book before us. lie himself in his Autobiography alludes indecisively to the matter, and pointedly ascribes his ability to his mother. " Of my ancestry I know almost nothing," he says : "In the slave quarters, and even later, I heard whispered conversations among the coloured people of the tortures which the slaves, including, no doubt, my ancestors on my mother's side, suffered in the middle
• Booker T. Washington, Builder of a .Cisilization. By Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe. With a Preface by Theodore Roosevelt. Illustrated with notogravhs. London: T. Fisher I:we In. [6s. Gd. net.) passage of the slave ship." He knew nothing of her past before she " attracted the attention of the purchaser " who became her owner, and the reader is left uncertain whether she also came from Africa as a child. Of his father he tells us he knew nothing at all. "I do not even know his name. I have heard reports to the effect that he was a white man." The life of a slave boy on a Southern plantation was ono of ignorance, poverty, and misery. Booker Washington
never once in all his childish recollection sat down to a proper meaL Meals were gotten by the children very much as dumb animals get theirs." His only garment was a flax shirt.. He remembers that his mother would occasionally wake the children in the night to give them a feast when she had been able to creep out and steal a chicken. He remembers also the scene at the great house where his master lived upon the day of Emancipation, and the noisy delight of the slaves, dying down towards evening into silence and " deep gloom," as the sense of the strangeness and homelessness of the free future settled upon the slave quarters. Washington's mother was able by her work to keep her children. She had, he says, a fund of common-sense which nullified to some extent her total ignorance. Naturally her standard of life remained what it had been, but finding that her son desired ardently to learn to read, she managed to send him sometimes to a village school newly opened for the teaching of reading to black boys.
From such surroundings sprang this amazing man. The book before us does not tell this early history. It merely refers the reader to Booker Washington's Autobiography, and begins to record his life from when, as a young man, a student of Hampton Agricultural Institute in Virginia, he was offered the headship of a projected institution of the Sian kind at Tuskegee, a town in Alabama of about two thousand in- habitants, half of whom were " coloured people." It is in the midst of "the black belt of the South," and formed an admirable starting-point for a man whose influence was to spread from the town to the State and from the State to " The States." When Booker Washington first came to Tuskegee the school was being taught in a shanty. By his own efforts he had in a few years raised money to buy land, and by his influence had persuaded the black students who flocked round him to build a College and to farm an estate. He taught his students 0 work and to " live," but he made little of book education. For the most part they came from homes in which the same standard of life prevailed as had prevailed in Washington's. They were not accustomed to sit at table or to sleep in a bed. They regarded education as a means of avoiding manual work, and how Booker Washington contrived to make them give in to his idea that what was necessary for their development was skilled and voluntary labour it is impossible
to say ; but give in they did, and, what was more, their parents did, and middle-aged men came from long distances to learn new methods of farming and poultry-keeping and fruit-growing. It is often said that negroes will not obey a negro ; but Booker Washington was obeyed implicitly. If it be argued that he was not a pure negro, of how many more of the American negroes may not this be said ? As time went on more and more money was needed for the upkeep of the work, which had its centre at Tuskegee. Washington spent half his time in travelling about the North and South expounding his scheme of negro education and collecting funds for its prosecution. His eloquence, his originality, and his detachment entranced his hearers. The famous speech which he made before white men at the Atlanta Exhibition completely explained his attitude towards the race problem and assured his position in America. His desire was that the two races, while remaining socially separate, should be economically inter dependent. " In all things that are purely social," he said, " we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." We cannot forbear quoting again from the Autobiography, for the editors of the present Life do not give the speech in full. He reminded his own race that " it is at the bottom of life we must begin, not at the top, nor should we permit our
grievances to overshadow our opportunities." He reminded the white men of the past loyalty of the slaves :-
" As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defence of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interest of both races one."
At last with prophetic fervour he announced :- " There is no escape through law of God or man from the inevitable- ' The laws of changeless justice bind Oppressor with the oppressed, And close as sin and suffering joined, We march to fate abreast.'
Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third of its intelligence and progress, we shall constitute one-third of the business and industrial prosperity of the South or we shall prove a veritable body of death—stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic."
Such a man must make some enemies. A small minority of negroes hated him. He pandered, they said, to the white man. They resented his lack of resentment. It seemed to them a want of dignity that lie should not care that he was excluded from the white man's hotel and dinner-table ; that ho spoke of the black man's disabilities as " customs " which it was a waste of time to combat ; that he urged his friends to spend less time in talking about the quarters of the town where they might not lire, and more in improving the one where they might. But though even around Tuskegee Booker Washington would never accept from a white man a purely social invitation, though no white student or teacher was ever an actual member of his College, he yet was often in a position to teach the white man who came to hear him speak, attracted by his eloquence. The following description of a lecture to a mixed audience is striking : " He would, for instance, turn to the white men and tell them that he had never known a particularly successful black man who could not trace his original success to the aid or encouragement he had received in one form or another from a white friend." Then he would suddenly alter his tone and " ask them why they should mar this splendid record by dis- criminating against the weaker race in matters of education, by destroying their confidence in the justice of the Courts, through mob violence," Ste., &c. Again, he would address his own people and remind them of " the essential part they had played in the building up of the South." But suddenly "he would shift the tone of his comments and tell them how sadly those of them who were indolent, and shiftless, and unreliable, and vicious were retarding the upward struggles of the industrious and self-respecting majority." Our editors give a pathetic picture of how a glow of pride would " gradually wilt " from the black faces.
What did Boohsr Washington think about the future of the race for whose good he wore himself to death, yet whom he invariably treated as children ? It is impossible to say. He did not look to their final amalgamation with the mass of white America. Here is what he said to a correspondent who suggested it " The negroes of America are, as you know, a mixed race. If that is an adlantage, we have it. If it is a disadvantage, it is still ours, for the simple reason that the product of every sort of racial mixture between the black man and any other race is always a negro." Did he look to any great future for them ? He was a man who would hardly ever look beyond the present. He discouraged the habit of the negroes of dwelling upon Heaven, yet he was a deeply though not an emotionally religious man. Mr. Roosevelt says that as much as any man he ever knew he " walked humbly with Cod." He never seems to have alluded definitely to his racial ambitions, but this story which he told casts a light upon his inner mind. He met " old Aunt Caroline one evening striding along with her basket on her head. Where are you going, Aunt Caroline ? ' And she replied : Lor' bless yer, Mister Washin'ton, I dun bin where
I's er goin'.' And so,' he concluded, ' some of the races of the earth have dun bin where dey was er goin' !' but, fortunately, the negro race was not among them."
This book leaves the reader asking one unanswerable question— Was Booker Washington in any sense whatever typical of his race ? If so, the race is as yet unknown by the white man. Another question arises out of the first—Did Washington, in his own mind, identify himself with his race ? We should say that while he loved them intensely and understood them completely, he did not feel himself to be of them in the least. He speaks to them always from the outside, and because he was not of them he was not their interpreter. There is something tragic about his figure. If a being from another world could have come among the emancipated negroes to help them, we can imagine such a being in the likeness of Booker Washington. There is a great subject ready to the hand of the great American dramatist that is to be.
Previous page
