Part 16 (1/2)
His willingness to hear the students' grievances was a characteristic not always appreciated by the officers and teachers. He was a firm believer in the right of pet.i.tion either for a group or an individual.
No matter how pressed and driven he was with business no student or group of students, and no teacher or group of teachers, was too humble or obscure in the school's life to win a personal hearing. He would without hesitation reopen and painstakingly review a case, already decided by the Executive Council, if he thought there was the slightest chance that an injustice had been done. He insisted upon giving the accused not only ”a square deal,” but the benefit of every doubt. On the other hand, when there was no reasonable doubt of guilt no one could be more stern and unrelenting than he in meting out justice.
Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton always encouraged and helped every ambitious student who came to Tuskegee to develop his capacities to the utmost no matter whether they were large or small. Years ago a student, William Sidney Pittman, showed a particular apt.i.tude for carpentry and draftsmans.h.i.+p.
After working his way through Tuskegee he was very anxious to take a course in architecture. Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton arranged to have the Inst.i.tute advance him the money for a three years' course at the Drexel Inst.i.tute of Philadelphia, on the understanding that he would return to Tuskegee as a teacher after his graduation and from his earnings pay back to the school all that had been advanced for his training at Drexel. Pittman's record at Drexel was wholly satisfactory. He returned to Tuskegee and repaid his loan in accordance with the agreement. He has since won the compet.i.tive award for the design of the Negro Building at the Jamestown Exposition, has built a large number of public and semi-public buildings throughout the South, including the Carnegie Library at Houston, Texas; a Pythian Temple at Dallas, Texas, where he lives, for the Negro members of the Knights of Pythias; the Collis P. Huntington Memorial Building at Tuskegee, and a number of Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation buildings for colored men.
In 1907 he married Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton's only daughter, Portia Marshall Was.h.i.+ngton, after her graduation from Bradford Academy, Ma.s.sachusetts.
He is now generally regarded as the foremost architect of his race.
Somewhat later Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton succeeded in securing some scholars.h.i.+ps which enabled promising Tuskegee graduates to take two years of post-graduate work in teaching methods at the Teachers' College of Columbia University. These scholars.h.i.+ps were given by John Crosby Brown, V. Everett Macy, and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. In each case these students were required to return to Tuskegee as teachers for two years--the same time as their course at Columbia. Dean Russell of the Teachers' College has testified to the earnestness and high character of these Tuskegee graduates.
As measured by the Tuskegee standard of success, which is service to others, perhaps the most successful of all Tuskegee's graduates is William H. Holtzclaw, the Princ.i.p.al of the Utica Normal and Industrial Inst.i.tute of Mississippi. There is no school that has better emulated the best there is in Tuskegee Inst.i.tute, and there is no graduate of Tuskegee that has followed more faithfully and effectively in Booker Was.h.i.+ngton's footsteps. Holtzclaw has told his own story in an admirably written and most interesting book ent.i.tled, ”The Black Man's Burden.” Starting in 1903 with a capital of seventy-five cents, no land and no buildings in a little one-room, ramshackle log cabin, which he did not own and in which he and his wife lived as well as taught, Holtzclaw now has an annual enrollment of nearly five hundred students and a faculty of thirty teachers. The school through its varied forms of extension work influences yearly about thirty thousand people. It owns seventeen hundred acres of land and conducts twenty different industries aside from its academic work. The buildings and property are valued at one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. It has also its own electric light plant and water-works and an endowment of over thirty-two thousand dollars. In concluding his book Mr. Holtzclaw says: ”I see more clearly than ever before the great task that is before me, and I propose to continue the struggle. It is an appalling task: a State with more than a million Negroes to be educated, with half a million children of school age, 35 per cent. of whom at the present time attend no school at all (only 36 per cent. in average attendance), a State whose dual school system makes it impossible to furnish more than a mere pittance for the education of each child--yet these children must be educated, must be unfettered, set free. That freedom for which Christian men and women, North and South, have worked and prayed so long must be realized in the lives of these young people. This, then, is my task, the war that I must wage; and I propose to stay on the firing-line and fight the good fight of faith.”
Another Tuskegee graduate in whom Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton was especially interested is Isaac Fisher. Fisher has been awarded the following prizes for his writings:
”What We've Learned About the Rum Question,” $500; ”German and American Methods of Regulating Trusts,” $400 (in order to write this paper Mr. Fisher had to acquire a reading knowledge of German which he did alone and unaided in a few months' time); ”Ten of the Best Reasons Why People Should Live in Missouri,” $100; ”A Plan to Give the South a System of Highways Suited to Its Needs,” $100; ”The Most Practicable Method of Beginning a Tariff Reduction,” honorable mention. (Upon the request of the chief examiner of the United States Tariff Board this essay was sent to that body for its use.) Besides these, Mr. Fisher has taken several minor prizes for compositions on various subjects.
It would be difficult to say, however, whether Booker Was.h.i.+ngton showed greater interest in the most brilliant or the most backward students. Certain it is that the most backward students won his special attention and encouragement.
In the early days of the school there was a student by the name of Jailous Perdue whom Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton constantly encouraged and in whom he never lost faith in spite of his almost total failure to master his cla.s.sroom work. Monroe N. Work, the statistician of the Inst.i.tute and the editor of ”The Negro Year Book,” under the t.i.tle ”The Man Who Failed,” has thus told Perdue's story:
”Back in the days when the cooking for students at Tuskegee was done out of doors in pots and the princ.i.p.al entrance requirement was a 'desire to make something of himself' a young man, Jailous Perdue, came to Tuskegee to get an education. He was financially poor and intellectually dull. Examinations he could not pa.s.s. After struggling along for several years and acc.u.mulating a lot of examination failures, he decided to quit school, go out to work and help educate his sisters. Although he had failed in his literary subjects, he had nevertheless got an education in how to use his hands. He had learned to be a carpenter. Out in the world he went and began to work at his trade. As soon as he had earned a little money he placed three of his sisters in school at Tuskegee, and with the help of his brother Augustus, who had graduated some time before, supported two of them there for three years and one for four years.
”In the meantime he had succeeded at his trade and gone into business for himself at Montgomery, Ala., as a contractor and builder. Here also he was successful and did thousands of dollars' worth of work. No job was too small nor too large for him to make a bid on. If he did not have a contract of his own he was not above working for some other contractor, and as a result he was always busy. He has superintended the construction of some of the largest buildings in Montgomery. Among the buildings the erection of which he has superintended are the Exchange Hotel, at a cost of $150,000; the First Baptist Church, at a cost of $175,000; the First National Bank Building, at a cost of $350,000; and the Bell Building, at a cost of $450,000. Perdue also a.s.sisted as foreman or a.s.sistant foreman in erecting many of the important buildings at Tuskegee Inst.i.tute, such as the Princ.i.p.al's house, the chapel, the library, Rockefeller Hall, the Academic Building, and the Millbank Agricultural Building.
”It is hardly necessary to say that Mr. Perdue has acc.u.mulated property or that he owns a good home in Montgomery, for in these progressive days every black man in the South with any foresight is investing some part of his earnings in property. The most interesting and somewhat remarkable thing about the career of Perdue and the greatest measure of his success is that twenty-three years after he had left Tuskegee a literary failure he was asked to come back and become a member of the faculty as an instructor in carpentry. Thus it was that the man who failed succeeded and returned to the scene of his failure a success. Perdue was constantly encouraged by Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton.
He came under the type of those who were not brilliant, but who were always in his opinion worthy of help and encouragement.”
Was.h.i.+ngton A. Tate was even duller in books than Perdue. During his early years at Tuskegee he seemed unable to grasp the most rudimentary information. His native dullness was made unpleasant and aggressive by a combative disposition. He was constantly trying to prove to his exasperated teachers that he knew what he did not know.
He was almost twenty-five years of age when he reached the Inst.i.tute and entered the lowest primary grade. He had the greatest difficulty in pa.s.sing any examinations and never succeeded in pa.s.sing all that were required. Motions were constantly made and pa.s.sed in faculty meetings to drop Tate, and were as constantly vetoed by Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton on the plea of giving him one more chance. Finally when Tate's time to graduate came the teachers in a body protested against giving him a diploma. Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton argued that a man who had made all the sacrifices Tate had made at his age to stay in school, a man who had worked early and late in fair weather and foul for the school, a man who had stuck to his task in the face of repeated failures and discouragements, had in him something better than the mere ability to pa.s.s examinations. Through Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton's intercession for him Tate got his diploma. The next day Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton had him employed to take charge of the school's piggery. Because of his hard, conscientious, and effective work in this capacity he was afterward recommended to the United States Department of Agriculture at Was.h.i.+ngton as the proper man to take charge of the United States demonstration work in Macon County, Ala. Tate proved to be one of the Government's most successful demonstration agents. He is now farming successfully on his own account in an adjoining county.
Booker Was.h.i.+ngton, as previously pointed out, saw very much more clearly than most educators that education's only purpose and sole justification lies in preparation for right living. A man who has pa.s.sed all manner of examinations may not be prepared to live rightly and hence may not justly claim to be educated. A man who has failed to pa.s.s examinations may be prepared for right living and hence may justly be called an educated man. In other words, Booker Was.h.i.+ngton realized that education was primarily a matter of the development of character and only secondarily a matter of the acquisition of information.
CHAPTER TEN
RAISING HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS A YEAR
During recent years the expenses of Tuskegee Inst.i.tute have run to between $250,000 and $300,000 a year. Of this sum Booker Was.h.i.+ngton had to raise over $100,000 annually aside from the large sums constantly demanded for new equipment such as the great central heating and power plant which was installed in 1915 at a cost of more than $245,000.
At the ceremonies commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Tuskegee Inst.i.tute President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard was one of the speakers. He said that one of his ”first impressions of Tuskegee Inst.i.tute,” after just a glimpse, was ”that the oldest and now largest American Inst.i.tution of learning was more than 200 years arriving at the possession of much less land, fewer buildings, and a smaller quick capital than Tuskegee had come to possess in twenty-five years. That's just a fact,” he said, ”Harvard University was not as rich after living two hundred years among the people of Ma.s.sachusetts as Tuskegee is to-day, after having lived twenty-five years among the people of Alabama. And that's the first impression that I have received here.
[Ill.u.s.tration: In 1906, the Tuskegee Inst.i.tute celebrated its 25th anniversary. In the group above appear such well-known American characters as Dr. William J. Schieffelin, New York; Dr. H.B. Frissell, Hampton Inst.i.tute, Va.; J.G. Phelps Stokes, philanthropist, New York; Isaac N. Seligman, banker, New York; Dr. Lyman Abbott, editor of the _Outlook_; Dr. Wallace b.u.t.trick, Secretary General Education Board; William G. Willc.o.x, now President of the New York Board of Education; Robert C. Ogden, philanthropist, New York; Andrew Carnegie, and Miss Clara Spence of the Spence School, with numbers of their friends.]
”This evening I have received another impression from your Princ.i.p.al.
He said that the great need of Tuskegee, to-day, was a considerable sum of money, which could be used at the discretion of the Trustees, to fill gaps, to make improvements, and to enlarge and strengthen the different branches of the inst.i.tution. Now I should not find it possible to state in more precise terms the present needs of Harvard University. The needs of these two inst.i.tutions, situated, to be sure, in very different communities, and founded on very different dates, are precisely the same.” This comparison is the more striking when we realize that President Eliot had at the time been at the head of Harvard University for thirty years, five years longer than Tuskegee had been in existence--President Eliot of whom it was said, ”When he goes to rich men they just throw up their hands and say, 'Don't shoot!
How much do you want?'”
The magnitude of Booker Was.h.i.+ngton's financial task is indicated in his last annual report which he made to his Trustees in 1915. He reported: