Up from Slavery

Up from Slavery

Booker T. Washington

UP FROM SLAVERY:

This volume is the outgrowth of a series of articles, dealing with

incidents in my life, which were published consecutively in the

Outlook. While they were appearing in that magazine I was constantly

surprised at the number of requests which came to me from all parts of

the country, asking that the articles be permanently preserved in book

form. I am most grateful to the Outlook for permission to gratify these

requests.

I have tried to tell a simple, straightforward story, with no attempt

at embellishment. My regret is that what I have attempted to do has

been done so imperfectly. The greater part of my time and strength is

required for the executive work connected with the Tuskegee Normal and

Industrial Institute, and in securing the money necessary for the

support of the institution. Much of what I have said has been written

on board trains, or at hotels or railroad stations while I have been

waiting for trains, or during the moments that I could spare from my

work while at Tuskegee. Without the painstaking and generous assistance

of Mr. Max Bennett Thrasher I could not have succeeded in any

satisfactory degree.

chapter in the history of the Negro, and in the history of the

knottiest problem we have ever faced. It not only makes “a carpenter of

a man; it makes a man of a carpenter.” In one sense, therefore, it is

of greater value than any other institution for the training of men and

women that we have, from Cambridge to Palo Alto. It is almost the only

one of which it may be said that it points the way to a new epoch in a

large area of our national life.

To work out the plan on paper, or at a distance—that is one thing. For

a white man to work it out—that too, is an easy thing. For a coloured

man to work it out in the South, where, in its constructive period, he

was necessarily misunderstood by his own people as well as by the

whites, and where he had to adjust it at every step to the strained

race relations—that is so very different and more difficult a thing

that the man who did it put the country under lasting obligations to

him.

It was not and is not a mere educational task. Anybody could teach boys

trades and give them an elementary education. Such tasks have been done

since the beginning of civilization. But this task had to be done with

the rawest of raw material, done within the civilization of the

dominant race, and so done as not to run across race lines and social

lines that are the strongest forces in the community. It had to be done

for the benefit of the whole community. It had to be done, moreover,

without local help, in the face of the direst poverty, done by begging,

and done in spite of the ignorance of one race and the prejudice of the

other.

No man living had a harder task, and a task that called for more wisdom

to do it right. The true measure of Mr. Washington’s success is, then,

not his teaching the pupils of Tuskegee, nor even gaining the support

of philanthropic persons at a distance, but this—that every Southern

white man of character and of wisdom has been won to a cordial

recognition of the value of the work, even men who held and still hold

to the conviction that a mere book education for the Southern blacks

under present conditions is a positive evil. This is a demonstration of

the efficiency of the Hampton-Tuskegee idea that stands like the

demonstration of the value of democratic institutions themselves—a

demonstration made so clear in spite of the greatest odds that it is no

longer open to argument.

Consider the change that has come in twenty years in the discussion of