Part 4 (2/2)
[Footnote 2: From ”Putting the Most Into Life,” by Booker T.
Was.h.i.+ngton. Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., Publishers.]
The idea that education is a matter of personal habits of cleanliness, industry, integrity, and right conduct while of course not original with Booker Was.h.i.+ngton was perhaps further developed and more effectively emphasized by him than by any other American educator.
Just as Matthew Arnold insisted that religion was a matter of conduct rather than forms and dogmas so Booker Was.h.i.+ngton held that education is a matter of character and not forms. He concluded one of his Sunday night talks to his students with these words: ”I want every Tuskegee student as he finds his place in the surging industrial life about him to give heed to the things which are 'honest and just and pure and of good report,' for these things make for character, which is the only thing worth fighting for....” In another of these talks he said: ”A student should not be satisfied with himself until he has grown to the point where, when simply sweeping a room, he can go into the corners and crevices and remove the hidden trash which, although it should be left, would not be seen. It is not very hard to find people who will thoroughly clean a room which is going to be occupied, or wash a dish which is to be handled by strangers; but it is hard to find a person who will do a thing right when the eyes of the world are not likely to look upon what has been done. The cleaning of rooms and the was.h.i.+ng of dishes have much to do with forming characters.”[3]
[Footnote 3: ”Sowing and Reaping,” by Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton. L.C. Page & Co., Boston, Publishers.]
This recalls Booker Was.h.i.+ngton's own experience when as a ragged and penniless youth he applied for admission to Hampton and was given a room to sweep by way of an entrance examination. Indeed, one of Booker Was.h.i.+ngton's greatest sources of strength as a teacher lay in the fact that his own life not only ill.u.s.trated the truth of his a.s.sertions, but ill.u.s.trated it in a striking and dramatic manner. His life was, in fact, an epitome of the hards.h.i.+ps, struggles, and triumphs of the successful members of his race from the days of slavery to the present time. A great believer in the power of example he lived a life which gave him that power in its highest degree. Because of his inherent modesty and good taste he never referred to himself or his achievements as examples to be emulated, and this merely further enhanced their power.
In concluding another Sunday night talk he said: ”As a race we are inclined, I fear, to make too much of the day of judgment. We have the idea that in some far-off period there is going to be a great and final day of judgment, when every individual will be called up, and all his bad deeds will be read out before him and all his good deeds made known. I believe that every day is a day of judgment, that we reap our rewards daily, and that whenever we sin we are punished by mental and physical anxiety and by a weakened character that separates us from G.o.d. Every day is, I take it, a day of judgment, and as we learn G.o.d's laws and grow into His likeness we shall find our reward in this world in a life of usefulness and honor. To do this is to have found the kingdom of G.o.d, which is the kingdom of character and righteousness and peace.”[4]
[Footnote 4: From ”Putting the Most Into life,” by Booker T.
Was.h.i.+ngton. Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., Publishers.]
To quote once more from these Sunday night talks, in another he said: ”There is, then, opportunity for the colored people to enrich the material life of their adopted country by doing what their hands find to do, minor duties though they be, so well that n.o.body of any race can do them better. This is the aim that the Tuskegee student should keep steadily before him. If he remembers that all service, however lowly, is true service, an important step will have been taken in the solution of what we term 'the race problem.'”
As is shown by these quotations Booker Was.h.i.+ngton used these Sunday night talks to crystalize, interpret, and summarize the meaning and significance of the kind of education which Tuskegee gives. He, the supreme head of the inst.i.tution, reserved to himself this supremely important task. The heads of the manifold trades are naturally and properly concerned primarily with turning raw boys and girls into good workmen and workwomen. The academic teachers in the school are similarly interested in helping them as students to secure a mastery of their several subjects. The military commandants are concerned with their ability to drill, march, carry themselves properly, and take proper care of their persons and rooms. The physician is interested in their physical health and the chaplain in their religious training.
Important as are all these phases of Tuskegee's training and closely as he watched each Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton realized that they might all be well done and yet Tuskegee fail in its supreme purpose: namely, the making of manly men and womanly women out of raw boys and girls. As he said in one of the pa.s.sages quoted, ”character is the only thing worth fighting for.” Now, while the forming of character is the aim, and in some appreciable degree the achievement, of every worth-while educational inst.i.tution, it is to a peculiar degree the aim and the achievement of Tuskegee. The ten million Negroes in the United States need trained leaders of their own race more than they need anything else. Whatever else they should or should not have these leaders must have character. Since Tuskegee is the largest of the educational inst.i.tutions for Negroes, with the man at its head who was commonly recognized as the leader of leaders in his race, naturally the heaviest responsibility in the training of these leaders fell, and will continue to fall, upon Tuskegee. Consequently the task at Tuskegee is not so much to educate so many thousands of young men and women as to train as many leaders for the Negro people as can possibly be done and done well within a given s.p.a.ce of time. These Tuskegee graduates lead by the power of example and not by agitation. One runs a farm and achieves so much more success than his neighbors, through his better methods, that they gradually adopt these methods and with his help apply them to their own conditions. Another teaches a country school and does it so much better than the average country school teacher that his or her school comes to be regarded as a model to be emulated by the other schools of the locality. When a Tuskegee girl marries and settles in a community she keeps her house so much cleaner and in every way more attractive than the rank and file of her neighbors that gradually her house and her methods of housekeeping become the standard for the neighborhood. There is, however, nothing of the ”holier than thou” or the complaisant about the true Tuskegee graduate and neither is there anything monopolistic. They have had the idea of service thoroughly drilled into their consciousness--the idea that their advantages of education are, as it were, a trust which they are to administer for the benefit of those who have not had such advantages.
Now such leaders as these must not only be provided if the so-called race problem is to be solved, but they must be provided speedily. In every community in which the black people are ignorant and vicious and without trained leaders among themselves they are likely at any time to come into conflict with the dominant race, and every such conflict engenders bitterness on both sides and makes just so much more difficult the final solution of the race problem. This is why Booker Was.h.i.+ngton labored so incessantly to increase the quant.i.ty of Tuskegee's output as well as to maintain the quality. He brought Tuskegee to the point where it reached through all its courses including its summer courses, short courses, and extension courses, more than 4,000 people in a single year, not counting the well-nigh innumerable hosts he counseled with on his State educational tours. In short, Booker Was.h.i.+ngton's task at Tuskegee was not only to turn out good leaders for his people, but to turn them out wholesale and as fast as possible. He was, as it were, running a race with the powers of ignorance, poverty, and vice. This in part accounted for the sense of terrific pressure which one felt at Tuskegee, particularly when he was present and personally driving forward his great educational machine. This also may have accounted for the seeming lack of finesse in small matters which occasionally annoyed critical visitors who did not understand that the great inst.i.tution was racing under the spur of its indomitable master, and that just as in any race all but essentials must be thrown aside.
Long before the University of Wisconsin had, through its extension courses, extended its opportunities in greater or less degree to the citizens of the entire State, Booker Was.h.i.+ngton, through similar means, had extended the advantages of Tuskegee throughout Macon County in particular and the State of Alabama and neighboring States in general.
The extension work of Tuskegee began in a small way over twenty years ago. It preceded even the work of the demonstration agents of the United States Department of Agriculture. There was first only one man who in his spare time went out among the farming people and tried to arouse enthusiasm for better methods of farming, better schools, and better homes. He was followed by a committee of three members of the Tuskegee faculty, which committee still directs the work. One of the first efforts of this committee was to get the farmers to adopt deep plowing. There was not a two-horse plow to be found. There was a strong prejudice against deep plowing which was thus expressed by a Negro preacher farmer whom one of the committee tried to persuade: ”We don't want deep plowing. You're fixin' for us to have no soil. If we plow deep it will all wash away and in a year or two we will have to clear new ground.” Not long after this a member of the committee with a two-horse plow was practising what he had been preaching when a white planter who was pa.s.sing stopped and said: ”See here, its none of my business of course, but you're new here and I don't want to see you fail. But if you plow your land deep like that you'll ruin it sure. I know. I've been here.”
After a time, however, the committee persuaded a few colored farmers to try deep plowing on a small scale as an experiment. One of the first of these was a poor man who had had the hardest kind of a struggle sc.r.a.ping a scant existence out of the soil for himself and his large family. He was desperate and agreed to try the new method.
He got results the first year, moved on to better land and followed instructions. In a few years he bought 500 acres of land, gave each of his four sons 100 acres, and kept 100 acres for himself. Since then father and sons alike have been prosperous and contented and have added to their holdings.
In short, these Negro farmers were no more eager to be reformed and improved in their methods than are any normal people. There is a shallow popular sentiment that unless people are eager for enlightenment and gratefully receive what is offered them they should be left unenlightened. Booker Was.h.i.+ngton never shared this sentiment.
His agent reported that in response to their appeals for the raising of a better grade of cattle, hogs, and fowl the farmers replied that the stock they had was good enough. One of their favorite comments was, ”When you eat an egg what difference does it make to you whether that egg was laid by a full-blooded fowl or a mongrel?” Instead of being discouraged or disgusted by this att.i.tude on the part of the people he merely regarded it as what was to be expected and set about devising means to overcome it. As always he placed his chief reliance upon the persuasive eloquence of the concrete. He decided to send blooded stock and properly raised products around among the farmers so that they might compare them with their inferior stock and products and see the difference with their own eyes. This plan was later carried out through the Jesup Wagon contributed by the late Morris K.
Jesup of New York. This wagon was a peripatetic farmers' school. It took a concentrated essence of Tuskegees' agricultural department to the farmers who could not or would not come to Tuskegee.
The wagon was drawn by a well-bred and well-fed mule. A good breed of cow was tied behind. Several chickens of good breeds, well-developed ears of corn, stalks of cotton, bundles of oats and seeds, and garden products, which ought at the time to be growing in the locality, together with a proper plow, for deep plowing, were loaded upon the wagon. The driver would pull up before a farmhouse, deliver his message, and point out the strong points of his wagonload and would finally request a strip of ground for cultivation. This request granted he would harness the mule to the plow, break the ground deep, make his rows, plant his seeds, and move on to the next locality. With a carefully planned follow-up system he would return to each such plot for cultivation and harvest, and, most important of all, to demonstrate the truths he had sought to impress upon the people by word of mouth. Where the first driver sent out was a general farmer, the second would be, let us say, a dairyman, the third a truck gardener, and finally a poultry raiser would go; usually a woman, since in the South women, for the most part, handle this phase of farming. These agents also distribute pamphlets prepared by the Agricultural Research Department of Tuskegee on such subjects as school gardening, twenty-one ways to cook cowpeas, improvement of rural schools, how to fight insect pests, cotton growing, etc. The constant emphasis upon practice by no means entails any neglect of theory.
Besides this work there is each January for two weeks at Tuskegee the regular Farmers' Short Course. Many of the country schools adjourn for this period so that both teachers and pupils may attend. In this course not only teachers and pupils, but fathers and mothers, sons and daughters sit side by side in the cla.s.srooms receiving instruction in stock raising, canning, poultry raising, and farming in all its branches. There are special courses for the women and girls in the care of children and in housekeeping. The following breezy announcement is taken from the prospectus of this course for the year 1914:
”_A creation of the farmer, by the farmers and for the farmer._”
”It meets the crying needs of thousands of our boys and girls, fathers and mothers.
”_It's free to all--no examination nor entrance fee is required._
”It started 7 years ago with 11 students; the second year we had 17, the third year we had 70, the fourth year we had 490, and last year we had nearly 2,000. It is the only thing of its kind for the betterment of the colored farmers. It lasts for only 12 days. It comes at a time when you would be celebrating Christmas.[5] In previous years the farmers have walked from 3 to 6 miles to attend; many have come on horseback, in wagons, and in buggies. You who live so that you cannot come in daily can secure board near the school for $2.50 per week. We expect 2,000 to 2,500 to enter this year.”
[Footnote 5: There is a custom among the colored people, inherited from the days of slavery, which is fortunately now drying out, to celebrate Christmas for a period of a week or ten days by stopping work and giving themselves over to a round of sprees.]
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