|
EDUCATION AS A MEANS RATHER THAN AN
END - B.T.
WASHINGTON 1896
Democracy and Education
It follows the full text transcript of
Booker T. Washington's Democracy and
Education
speech, delivered at Brooklyn, New York — September 30, 1896.
 |
Mr. Chairman,
Ladies and
Gentlemen: |
It is said that
the strongest chain is no stronger than its
weakest link. In the Southern part of our
country there are 22 millions of your
brethren who are bound to you by ties which you
cannot tear asunder if you would. The most
intelligent man in your community has his
intelligence darkened by the ignorance of a
fellow citizen in the Mississippi bottoms. The
most wealthy in your city would be more wealthy
but for the poverty of a fellow being in the
Carolina rice swamps. The most moral and
religious among you has his religion and
morality modified by the degradation of the man
in the South whose religion is a mere matter of
form or emotionalism.
The vote in your state that is cast for the
highest and purest form of government is largely
neutralized by the vote of the man in Louisiana
whose ballot is stolen or cast in ignorance.
When the South is poor, you are poor; when the
South commits crime, you commit crime. My
friends, there is no mistake; you must help us
to raise the character of our civilization or
yours will be lowered.
No member of your
race in any part of our country can harm the
weakest and meanest member of mine without the
proudest and bluest blood in the city of
Brooklyn being degraded. The central ideal which
I wish you to help me consider is the reaching
and lifting up of the lowest, most unfortunate,
negative element that occupies so large a
proportion of our territory and composes so
large a percentage of our population. It seems
to me that there never was a time in the history
of our country when those interested in
education should more earnestly consider to what
extent the mere acquiring of a knowledge of
literature and science makes producers, lovers
of labor, independent, honest, unselfish, and,
above all, supremely good.
Call education by
what name you please, and if it fails to bring
about these results among the masses it falls
short of its highest end. The science, the art,
the literature that fails to reach down and
bring the humblest up to the fullest enjoyment
of the blessings of our government is weak, no
matter how costly the buildings or apparatus
used, or how modern the methods in instruction
employed.
The study of
arithmetic that does not result in making
someone more honest and self-reliant is
defective. The study of history that does not
result in making men conscientious in receiving
and counting the ballots of their fellow men is
most faulty. The study of art that does not
result in making the strong less willing to
oppress the weak means little. How I wish that
from the most humble log cabin schoolhouse in
Alabama we could burn it, as it were, into the
hearts and heads of all, that usefulness,
service to our brother, is the supreme end of
education. Putting the thought more directly as
it applies to conditions in the South:
Can you make your
intelligence affect us in the same ratio that
our ignorance affects you? Let us put a not
improbable case, one that involves peace or war,
the honor or dishonor of our nation — yea, the
very existence of the government. The North and
West are divided. There are five million votes
to be cast in the South, and of this number one
half are ignorant. Not only are one half the
voters ignorant, but, because of this ignorant
vote, corruption, dishonesty in a dozen forms
have crept into the exercise of the political
franchise, to the extent that the conscience of
the intelligent class is soured in its attempts
to defeat the will of the ignorant voters. Here,
then on the one hand you have an ignorant vote,
and on the other hand an intelligent vote minus
a conscience. The time may not be far off when
to this kind of jury we shall have to look for
the verdict that is to decide the course of our
democratic institutions.
When a great national calamity stares us in the
face, we are, I fear, too much given to
depending on a short campaign of education to do
on the hustings what should have been
accomplished in the schoolroom. With this
preliminary survey, let us examine with more
care the work to be done in the South before all
classes will be fit for the highest duties of
citizenship.
In reference to my own race I am confronted with
some embarrassment at the outset because of the
various and conflicting opinions as to what is
to be its final place in our economic and
political life. Within the last thirty
years — and, I might add, within the last three
months — it has been proven by eminent authority
that the Negro is increasing in numbers so fast
that it is only a question of a few years before
he will far outnumber the white race in the
South, and it has also been proven that the
Negro is fast dying out and it is only a
question of a few years before he will have
completely disappeared. It has also been proven
that crime among us is on the increase and that
crime is on the decrease; that education helps
the Negro, that education also hurts him; that
he is fast leaving the South and taking up his
residence in the North and West, and that the
tendency of the Negro is to drift to the
lowlands of the Mississippi bottoms. It has been
proven that as a slave laborer he produced less
cotton than a free man. It has been proven that
education unfits the Negro for work, and that
education also makes him more valuable as a
laborer; that he is our greatest criminal and
that he is our most law-abiding citizen.
In the midst of
these opinions, in the words of a modern
statesman, "I hardly know where I am at." I
hardly know whether I am myself or the other
fellow. But in the midst of this confusion there
are a few things of which I feel certain that
furnish a basis for thought and action. I know
that, whether in slavery or freedom, we have
always been loyal to the Stars and Stripes, that
no schoolhouse has been opened for us that has
not been filled; that 1,500,000 ballots that we
have the right to cast are as potent for weal
and woe as the ballot cast by the whitest and
most influential man in your commonwealth. I
know that wherever our life touches yours we
help or hinder; that wherever your life touches
ours you make us stronger or weaker. Further I
know that almost every other race that tried to
look the white man in the face has disappeared.
With all the conflicting opinions, and with the
full knowledge of all our weaknesses, I know
that only a few centuries ago this country we
went into slavery pagans: we came out
Christians; we went into slavery pieces of
property: we came out American citizens; we went
into slavery without a language: we came out
speaking the proud Anglo-Saxon tongue; we went
into slavery with the slave chains clanking
about our wrists: we came out with the American
ballot in our hands.
My friends, I
submit it to your sober and candid judgment, if
a race that is capable of such a test, such a
transformation, is not worth saving and making a
part, in reality as well as in name, of our
democratic government.
It is with an
ignorant race as it is with a child: it craves
at first the superficial, the ornamental, the
signs of progress rather than the reality. The
ignorant race is tempted to jump, at one bound,
to the position that it has required years of
hard struggle for others to reach. It seems to
me that the temptation in education and
missionary work is to do for a people a thousand
miles away without always making a careful study
of the needs and conditions of the people whom
we are trying to help. The temptation is to run
all people through a certain educational mold
regardless of the condition of the subject or
the end to be accomplished. Unfortunately for us
as a race, our education was begun, just after
the war, too nearly where New England education
ended. We seemed to overlook the fact that we
were dealing with a race that has little love
for labor in their native land and consequently
brought little love for labor with them to
America. Added to this was the fact that they
had been forced for two hundred and fifty years
to labor without compensation under
circumstances that were calculated to do
anything but teach them the dignity, beauty, and
civilizing power of intelligent labor. We forgot
the industrial education that was given the
Pilgrim Fathers of New England in clearing and
planting its cold, bleak, and snowy hills and
valleys, in providing shelter, founding the
small mills and factories, in supplying
themselves with home-made products, thus laying
the foundation of an industrial life that now
keeps going a large part of the colleges and
missionary effort of the world.
May I be tempted
one step further in showing how prone we are to
make our education formal, technical, instead of
making it meet the needs of conditions
regardless of formality and technicality?
At least eighty
per cent of my pupils in the South are found in
the rural districts, and they are dependent on
agriculture in some form for their support.
Notwithstanding in this instance we have a whole
race depending upon agriculture, and
notwithstanding thirty years have passed since
our freedom, aside from what we have done at
Hampton and Tuskegee and one or two other
institutions, not a thing has been attempted by
state or philanthropy in the way of educating
the race in this industry on which their very
existence depends.
Boys have been
taken from the farms and education in law,
theology, Hebrew, and Greek — educated in
everything else but the very subject they should
know the most about. I question whether or not
among all the educated colored people in the
United States you can find six, if we except the
institutions named, that have received anything
like a thorough training in agriculture. It
would have seemed, since self-support and
industrial independence are the first conditions
for lifting up any race, that education in
theoretical and practical agriculture,
horticulture, dairying, and stock-raising should
have occupied the first place in our system.
Some time ago when
we decided to make tailoring a part of our
training at the Tuskegee Institute, I was amazed
to find that it was almost impossible to find in
the whole country an educated colored man who
could teach the making of clothing. I could find
them by the score who could teach astronomy,
theology, Greek, or Latin, but almost none who
could instruct in the making of clothing,
something that has to be used by every one of us
every day in the year.
How often has my
heart been made to sink as I have gone through
the South and into the homes of the people and
found women who could converse intelligently on
Grecian history, who had studied geometry, could
analyze the most complex sentences, and yet
could not analyze the poorly cooked and still
more poorly served bread and fat meat that they
and their families were eating three times a
day.
It is little
trouble to find girls who can locate Peking and
the Desert of Sahara on an artificial globe; but
seldom can you find one who can locate on an
actual dinner table the proper place for the
carving knife and fork or the meat and
vegetables.
A short time ago,
in one of our Southern cities, a colored man
died who had received training as a skilled
mechanic during the days of slavery. By his
skill and industry he had built up a great
business as a house contractor and builder. In
this same city there are 35,000 colored people,
among them young men who have been well educated
in languages and literature, but not a single
one could be found who had been trained in
architectural and mechanical drawing that could
carry on the business which this ex-slave had
built up, and so it was soon scattered to the
wind.
Aside from the
work done in the institutions that I have
mentioned, you will find no colored men who have
been trained in the principles of architecture,
notwithstanding the vast majority of the race is
without homes. Here, then, are the three prime
conditions for growth, for civilization — food,
clothing, shelter — yet we have been the slaves
of form and custom to such an extent that we
have failed in a large measure to look matters
squarely in the face and meet actual needs. You
cannot graft a fifteenth-century civilization
onto a twentieth-century civilization by the
mere performance of mental gymnastics.
Understand, I speak in no fault-finding spirit,
but with a feeling of deep regret for what has
been done; but the future must be an improvement
on the past.
I have endeavored
to speak plainly in regard to the past, because
I fear that the wisest and most interested have
not fully comprehended the task which American
slavery has laid at the doors of the Republic.
Few, I fear, realize what is to be done before
the seven million of my people in the South can
be made a safe, helpful, progressive part of our
institutions. The South, in proportion to its
ability, has done well, but this does not change
facts.
Let me illustrate
what I mean by a single example. In spite of all
that has been done, I was in a county in Alabama
a few days ago where there are some thirty
thousand colored people and about seven thousand
whites; in this county not a single public
school for Negroes has been open this year
longer than three months, not a single colored
teacher has been paid more than fifteen dollars
a month for his teaching. Not one of these
schools was taught in a building worthy of the
name of schoolhouse. In this county the state or
public authorities do not own a dollar's worth
of school property — not a schoolhouse, a
blackboard, or a piece of crayon.
Each colored child had spent on him this year
for his education about fifty cents, while one
of your children had spent on him this year for
education not far from twenty dollars. And yet
each citizen of this county is expected to share
the burdens and privileges of our democratic
form of government just as intelligently and
conscientiously as the citizens of your beloved
Kings County. A vote in this county means as
much to the nation as a vote in the city of
Boston. Crime in this county is as truly an
arrow aimed at the heart of the government as
crime committed in your own streets. Do you know
that a single schoolhouse built this year in a
town near Boston to shelter about 300 students
has cost more for building alone than will be
spent for the education, including buildings,
apparatus, teachers, of the whole colored school
population of Alabama?
The commissioner
of education for the state of Georgia recently
reported to the state legislature that in the
state there were 200,000 children that had
entered no school the past year, and 100,000
more who were in school but a few days, making
practically 300,000 children between six and
sixteen years of age that are growing up in
ignorance in one Southern state.
The same report
state that outside of the cities and towns,
while the average number of schoolhouses in a
county is 60, all of these 60 schoolhouses are
worth in a lump sum less than $2,000, and the
report further adds that many of the
schoolhouses in Georgia are not fit for horse
stables. These illustrations, my friends, as far
as concerns the Gulf states, are not exceptional
cases or overdrawn.
I have referred to
industrial education as a means of fitting the
millions of my people in the South for the
duties of citizenship. Until there is industrial
independence it is hardly possible to have a
pure ballot. In the country districts of the
Gulf states it is safe to say that not more than
one black man in twenty owns the land he
cultivates. Where so large a proportion of the
people are dependent, live in other people's
houses, eat other people's food, and wear
clothes they have not paid for, it is a pretty
hard thing to tell how they are going to vote.
My remarks thus
far have referred mainly to my own race. But
there is another side. The longer I live and the
more I study the question, the more I am
convinced that it is not so much a problem as to
what you will do with the Negro as what the
Negro will do with you and your civilization.
In considering
this side of the subject, I thank God that I
have grown to the point where I can sympathize
with a white man as much as I can sympathize
with a Southern white man as much as I can
sympathize with a Northern white man. To me "a
man's a man for a' that and a' that." As bearing
upon democracy and education, what of your white
brethren in the South, those who suffered and
are still suffering the consequences of American
slavery for which both you and they are
responsible? You of the great and prosperous
North still owe to your unfortunate brethren of
the Caucasian race in the South, not less than
to yourselves, a serious and uncompleted duty.
What was the task you asked them to perform?
Returning to their destitute homes after years
of war to face blasted hopes, devastation, a
shattered industrial system, you asked them to
add to their own burdens that of preparing in
education, politics, and economics in a few
short years, for citizenship, four millions of
former slaves. That the South, staggering under
the burden, made blunders, and that in a measure
there has been disappointment, no one need be
surprised.
The educators, the
statesmen, the philanthropists have never
comprehended their duty toward the millions of
poor whites in the South who were buffeted for
two hundred years between slavery and freedom,
between civilization and degradation, who were
disregarded by both master and slave. It needs
no prophet to tell the character of our future
civilization when the poor white boy in the
country districts of the South receives one
dollar's worth of education and your boy twenty
dollars' worth, when one never enters a library
or reading room and the other has libraries and
reading rooms in every ward and town. When one
hears lectures and sermons once in two months
and the other can hear a lecture or sermon every
day in the year.
When you help the
South you help yourselves. Mere abuse will not
bring the remedy. The times has come, it seems
to me, when in this matter we should rise above
party or race or sectionalism into the region of
duty of man to man, citizen to citizen,
Christian to Christian, and if the Negro who has
been oppressed and denied rights in a Christian
land can help you North and South to rise, can
be the medium of your rising into this
atmosphere of generous Christian brotherhood and
self-forgetfulness, he will see in it a
recompense for all that he has suffered in the
past.
Not very long ago
a white citizen of the South boastingly
expressed himself in public to this effect: "I
am now 46 years of age, but have never polished
my own boots, have never saddled my own horse,
have never built a fire in my own room, have
never hitched a horse." He was asked a short
time since by a lame man to hitch his horse, but
refused and told him to get a Negro to do it.
Our state law requires that a voter be required
to read the constitution before voting, but the
last clause of the constitution is in Latin and
the Negroes cannot read Latin, and so they are
asked to read the Latin clause and are thus
disfranchised, while the whites are permitted to
read the English portion of the constitution. I
do not quote these statements for the purpose of
condemning the individual or the South, for
though myself a member of a despised and
unfortunate race, I pity from the bottom of my
heart any of God's creatures whence such a
statement can emanate. Evidently here is a man
who, as far as mere book training is concerned,
is educated, for he boasts of his knowledge of
Latin, but, so far as the real purpose of
education is concerned — the making of men
useful, honest, and liberal — this man has never
been touched. Here is a citizen in the midst of
our republic, clothed in a white skin, with all
the technical signs of education, but who is as
little fitted for the highest purpose of life as
any creature found in Central Africa.
My friends, can we
make our education reach down far enough to
touch and help this man? Can we so control
science, art, and literature as to make them to
such an extent a means rather than an end; that
the lowest and most unfortunate of God's
creatures shall be lifted up, ennobled and
glorified; shall be a freeman instead of a slave
of narrow sympathies and wrong customs?
Some years ago a
bright young man of my race succeeded in passing
a competitive examination for a cadetship at the
United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. Says
the young man, Mr. Henry Baker, in describing
his stay at this institution: "I was several
times attacked with stones and was forced
finally to appeal to the officers, when a marine
was detailed to accompany me across the campus
and from the mess hall at meal times. My books
were mutilated, my clothes were cut and in some
instances destroyed, and all the petty
annoyances which ingenuity could devise were
inflicted upon me daily, and during seamanship
practice aboard the Dale attempts were
often made to do me personal injury while I
would be aloft in the rigging. No one ever
addressed me by name. I was called the Moke
usually, the Nigger for variety. I was shunned
as if I were a veritable leper, and received
curses and blows as the only method my
persecutors had of relieving the monotony."
Not once during the two years, with one
exception, did any one of the more than 400
cadets enrolled ever come to him with a word of
advice, counsel, sympathy, or information, and
he never held conversation with any one of them
for as much as five minutes during the whole
course of his experience at the academy, except
on occasions when he was defending himself
against their assaults.
The one exception
was in the case of a Pennsylvania boy, who
stealthily brought him a piece of his birthday
cake at twelve o'clock one night. The act so
surprised Baker that his suspicions were
aroused, but these were dispelled by the donor,
who read to him a letter which he had received
from his mother, from whom the cake came, in
which she requested that a slice be given to the
colored cadet who was without friends.
I recite this incident not for the purpose
merely of condemning the wrong done a member of
my race; no, no, not that. I mention the case,
not for the one cadet, but for the sake of the
400 cadets, for the sake of the 400 American
families, the 400 American communities whose
civilization and Christianity these cadets
represented. Here were 400 and more picked young
men representing the flower of our country, who
had passed through our common schools and were
preparing themselves at public expense to defend
the honor of our country. And yet, with grammar,
reading, and arithmetic in the public schools,
and with lessons in the arts of war, the
principles of physical courage at Annapolis,
both systems seemed to have utterly failed to
prepare a single one of these young men for real
life, that he could be brave enough, Christian
enough, American enough, to take this poor
defenseless black boy by the hand in open
daylight and let the world know that he was his
friend.
Education, whether
of black man or white man, that gives one
physical courage to stand in front of the cannon
and fails to give him moral courage to stand up
in defense of right and justice is a failure.
With all that the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and
Sciences stands for in its equipment, its
endowment, its wealth and culture, its
instructors, can it produce a mother that will
produce a boy that will not be ashamed to have
the world know that he is a friend to the most
unfortunate of God's creatures?
Not long ago a
mother, a black mother, who lived in one of your
Northern states, had heard it whispered around
in her community for years that the Negro was
lazy, shiftless, and would not work. So when her
boy grew to sufficient size, at considerable
expense and great self-sacrifice, she had her
boy thoroughly taught the machinist's trade. A
job was secured in a neighboring shop. With
dinner bucket in hand and spurred on by the
prayers of the now happy mother, the boy entered
the shop to begin his first day's work. What
happened? Had any one of the 20 white Americans
been so educated that he gave this stranger a
welcome into their midst? No, not this. Every
one of the 20 white men threw down his tools and
deliberately walked out, swearing that he would
not give a black man an opportunity to earn an
honest living. Another shop was tried, with the
same result, and still another and the same.
Today this promising and ambitious black man is
a wreck, a confirmed drunkard, with no hope, no
ambition.
My friends, who
blasted the life of this young man? On whose
hands does his blood rest? Our system of
education, or want of education, is responsible.
Can our public schools and colleges turn out a
set of men that will throw open the doors of
industry to all men everywhere, regardless of
color, so all shall have the same opportunity to
earn a dollar that they now have to spend a
dollar? I know a good many species of cowardice
and prejudice, but I know none equal to this. I
know not who is the worst, the ex-slaveholder
who perforce compelled his slave to work without
compensation, or the man who perforce compels
the Negro to refrain from working for
compensation.
My friends, we are
one in this country. The question of the highest
citizenship and the complete education of all
concerns nearly 10 million of my own people and
over 60 million of yours. We rise as you rise;
when we fall you fall. When you are strong we
are strong; when we are weak you are weak. There
is no power that can separate our destiny. The
Negro can afford to be wronged; the white man
cannot afford to wrong him. Unjust laws or
customs that exist in many places regarding the
races injure the white man and inconvenience the
Negro. No race can wrong another race simply
because it has the power to do so without being
permanently injured in morals.
The Negro can
endure the temporary inconvenience, but the
injury to the white man is permanent. It is for
the white man to save himself from his
degradation that I plead. If a white man steals
a Negro's ballot it is the white man who is
permanently injured. Physical death comes to the
one Negro lynched in a county, but death of the
morals — death of the soul — comes to the
thousands responsible for the lynching. We are a
patient, humble people. We can afford to work
and wait. There is plenty in this country for us
to do. Away up in the atmosphere of goodness,
forbearance, patience, long-suffering, and
forgiveness the workers are not many or
overcrowded. If others would be little we can be
great. If others would be mean we can be good.
If others would push us down we can help push
them up. Character, not circumstances, makes the
man.
It is more
important that we be prepared for voting than
that we vote, more important that we be prepared
to hold office than that we hold office, more
important that we be prepared for the highest
recognition than that we be recognized.
Those who fought
and died on the battlefield performed their duty
heroically and well, but a duty remains for you
and me. The mere fiat of law could not make an
ignorant voter an intelligent voter; could not
make one citizen respect another; these results
come to the Negro, as to all races, by beginning
at the bottom and working up to the highest
civilization and accomplishment. In the economy
of God, there can be but one standard by which
an individual can succeed, there is but one for
a race. This country demands that every race
measure itself by the American standard. By it a
race must rise or fall, succeed or fail, and in
the last analysis mere sentiment counts but
little. During the next half-century and more my
race must continue passing through the severe
American crucible.
We are to be
tested in our patience, in our forbearance, our
power to endure wrong, to withstand temptation,
to succeed, to acquire and use skill, our
ability to compete, to succeed in commerce; to
disregard the superficial for the real, the
appearance for the substance; to be great and
yet the servant of all. This, this is the
passport to all that is best in the life of our
republic, and the Negro must possess it or be
debarred. In working out our destiny, while the
main burden and center of activity must be with
us, we shall need in a large measure the help,
the encouragement, the guidance that the strong
can give the weak. Thus helped, we of both races
in the South shall soon throw off the shackles
of racial and sectional prejudice and rise above
the clouds of ignorance, narrowness, and
selfishness into that atmosphere, that pure
sunshine, where it will be our highest ambition
to serve man, our brother, regardless of race or
past conditions.
More History
|
|
