After the close of the war, while working in the coal-mines of West Virginia for the support of my mother, I heard in some accidental way of the Hampton Institute. When I learned that it was an institution where a black boy could study, could have a chance to work for his board, and at the same time be taught how to work and to realize the dignity of labor, I resolved to go there. Bidding my mother good-by, I started out one morning to find my way to Hampton, though I was almost penniless and had no definite idea where Hampton was.
By walking, begging rides, and paying for a portion of the journey on the steam-cars, I finally succeeded in reaching the city of Richmond, Virginia. I was without money or friends. I slept under a sidewalk, and by working on a vessel next day I earned money to continue my way to the institute, where I arrived with a surplus of fifty cents. At Hampton I found the opportunity—in the way of buildings, teachers, and industries provided by the generous—to get training in the class-room and by practical touch with industrial life, to learn thrift, economy, and push.
I was surrounded by an atmosphere of business, Christian influence, and a spirit of self-help that seemed to have awakened every faculty in me, and caused me for the first time to realize what it meant to be a man instead of a piece of property. While there I resolved that when I had finished the course of training I would go into the far South, into the Black Belt of the South, and give my life to providing the same kind of opportunity for self-reliance and self-awakening that I had found provided for me at Hampton.
What is the object of all this outlay? First, it must be borne in mind that we have in the South a peculiar and unprecedented state of things. It is of the utmost importance that our energy be given to meeting conditions that exist right about us rather than conditions that existed centuries ago or that exist in countries a thousand miles away. What are the cardinal needs among the colored people in the South, most of whom are to be found on the plantations?
Roughly, these needs may be stated as food, clothing, shelter, education, proper habits, and a settlement of race relations. The seven millions of colored people of the South cannot be reached directly by any missionary agency, but they can be reached by sending out among them strong selected young men and women, with the proper training of head, hand, and heart, who will live among these masses and show them how to lift themselves up.
The problem that the Tuskegee Institute keeps before itself constantly is how to prepare these leaders. From the outset, in connection with religious and academic training, it has emphasized industrial or hand training as a means of finding the way out of present conditions. First, we have found the industrial teaching useful in giving the student a chance to work out a portion of his expenses while in school. Second, the school furnishes labor that has an economic value, and at the same time gives the student a chance to acquire knowledge and a skill while performing the labor.
Most of all, we find the industrial system valuable in teaching economy, thrift, and the dignity of labor, and in giving moral backbone to students. The fact that a student goes out into the world conscious of his power to build a house or a wagon, or to make a harness, gives him a certain confidence and moral independence that he would not possess without such training. A more detailed example of our methods at Tuskegee may be of interest. For example, we cultivate by student labor six hundred and fifty acres of land.
The object is not only to cultivate the land in a way to make it pay our boarding department, but at the same time to teach the students, in addition to the practical works, something of the chemistry of the soil, the best methods of drainage, dairying, the cultivation of fruit, the care of livestock and tools, and scores of other lessons needed by a people whose main dependence is on agriculture.
Notwithstanding that eighty-five per cent of the colored people in the South live by agriculture in some form, aside from what has been done by Hampton, Tuskegee, and one or two other institutions practically nothing has been attempted in the direction of teaching them about the very industry from which the masses of our people must get their subsistence.
Friends have recently provided means for the erection of a large new chapel at Tuskegee. Our students have made the bricks for this chapel. A large part of the timber is sawed by students at our own sawmill, the plans are drawn by our teacher of architecture and mechanical drawing, and students do the brick-masonry, plastering, painting, carpentry work, tinning, slatting, and make most of the furniture.
Practically, the whole chapel will be built and furnished by student labor; in the end the school will have the building for permanent use, and the students will have a knowledge of the trades employed in its construction. In this way all but three of the thirty buildings on the grounds have been erected. While the young men do the kinds of work I have mentioned, the young women to a large extent make, mend, and launder the clothing of the young men, and thus are taught important industries.
One of the objections sometimes urged against industrial education for the negro is that it aims merely to teach him to work on the same plan that he was made to follow when in slavery. This is far from being the object at Tuskegee. At the head of each of the twenty-five industrial departments we have an intelligent and competent instructor, just as we have in our history classes, so that the student is taught not only practical brick-masonry, for example, but also the underlying principles of that industry, the mathematics and the mechanical and architectural drawing.
Or he is taught how to become master of the forces of nature so that, instead of cultivating corn in the old way, he can use a corn cultivator, that lays off the furrows, drops the corn into them, and covers it, and in this way he can do more work than three men by the old process of corn-planting; at the same time much of the toil is eliminated and labor is dignified.
In a word, the constant aim is to show the student how to put brains into every process of labor; how to bring his knowledge of mathematics and the sciences into farming, carpentry, forging, foundry work; how to dispense as soon as possible with the old form of ante-bellum labor. In the erection of the chapel just referred to, instead of letting the money which was given us go into outside hands, we make it accomplish three objects: first, it provides the chapel; second, it gives the students a chance to get a practical knowledge of the trades connected with building; and third, it enables them to earn something toward the payment of board while receiving academic and industrial training.
Having been fortified at Tuskegee by education of mind, skill of hand, Christian character, ideas of thrift, economy, and push, and a spirit of independence, the student is sent out to become a centre of influence and light in showing the masses of our people in the Black Belt of the South how to lift themselves up.
How can this be done? I give but one or two examples. Ten years ago a young colored man came to the institute from one of the large plantation districts; he studied in the class-room a portion of the time, and received practical and theoretical training on the farm the remainder of the time.
At the close of the Civil War , all the enslaved people owned by James and Elizabeth Burroughs—including 9-year-old Booker, his siblings, and his mother—were freed. Jane moved her family to Malden, West Virginia. Soon after, she married Washington Ferguson, a free Black man. In Malden, Washington was only allowed to go to school after working from AM each morning in a local salt works before class.
It was at a second job in a local coalmine where he first heard two fellow works discuss the Hampton Institute, a school for formerly enslaved people in southeastern Virginia founded in by Brigadier General Samuel Chapman. Chapman had been a leader of Black troops for the Union during the Civil War and was dedicated to improving educational opportunities for African Americans.
In , Washington walked the miles to Hampton, where he was an excellent student and received high grades. He went on to study at Wayland Seminary in Washington, D. Washington assumed the role in at age 25 and would work at The Tuskegee Institute until his death in Carver would go on to be a celebrated figure in Black history in his own right, making huge advances in botany and farming technology.
Life in the post- Reconstruction era South was challenging for Black people. Discrimination was rife in the age of Jim Crow Laws.
Exercising the right to vote under the 15 Amendment was dangerous, and access to jobs and education was severely limited. With the dawn of the Ku Klux Klan , the threat of retaliatory violence for advocating for civil rights was real.
The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than to spend a dollar in an opera house. His speech was sharply criticized by W. Washington, a famed public speaker known for his sense of humor , was also the author of five books:.
Washington became the first African American to be invited to the White House in , when President Theodore Roosevelt invited him to dine with him. While he lived through an epic sea change in the lives of African Americans, his public views supporting segregation seem outdated today.
His emphasis on economic self-determination over political and civil rights fell out of favor as the views of his largest critic, W. Du Bois, took root and inspired the civil rights movement. We now know that Washington secretly financed court cases that challenged segregation and wrote letters in code to defend against lynch mobs. His work in the field of education helped give access to new hope for thousands of African Americans. Teaching African Americans to use education to promote economic progress was a key issue in the late nineteenth century.
Washington taught many people who came from destitute backgrounds "how to improve their lives by cleanliness, industry, thrift, diversified farming, painting and mending, family budgeting, and better planning" Toppin , Washington's ideals set forth many practical concepts that helped the African American community to move from slavery toward integration in the greater society's economic system.
His founding of Tuskegee Institute as a leading college for African Americans further solidified the role of vocational training or vocational education for the underclass. It was said that Frederick Douglass believed his own best advice to a young black man was to "agitate! Washington's advice similar to the Protestant work ethic , was "work! It was this focus on individual pursuit to promote group economic progress, and not directly challenging the social institutions that caused oppression and injustice, which caused critics to label Washington's viewpoints as accommodationalism accepting the status quo.
Toward the end of his life, Booker T. Washington is attributed to saying, "more and more, we must learn to think not in terms of race or color, or language, or religion, or political boundaries, but in terms of humanity" Black Americans of Achievement Video Collection He believed in equality, but differed on the manner in which it would be achieved. Frederick Douglass was the clear leader of his race from the end of the Civil War until his death.
Unlike Booker T. Washington, "his unceasing militancy inspired blacks of his day and of today to fight against slavery, segregation, discrimination, and all forms of oppression" Toppin , Douglass escaped from a life of slavery to later influence President Abraham Lincoln's views on the subject. Du Bois also opposed Booker T. Washington's approaches to education and accommodation.
He believed that education was much more than industrial training and strongly advocated for equal rights. Today, Tuskegee University exists because of the leadership first brought to the campus by Booker T. Carver went on to invent many items based on peanut and soy synthetic by-products. He also created the dehydration process that vastly improved the longevity of certain foods. The campus was chosen because it had an excellent aeronautics engineering program.
Over one thousand pilots trained at Tuskegee and many went on to have distinguished tours of duty in the war. An infamous legacy of Tuskegee Institute is its involvement in a medical study that began in under the direction of the Public Health Service. During this study, near African American males who had syphilis were studied without disclosing to them the knowledge of their disease.
It was not until that President Clinton formally apologized for the government's grave misconduct. Washington lived. Du Bois and others. The organization's founders had deep philosophical differences, which have been labeled anti-Washington, regarding the role of African Americans in society during the time. The NAACP grew into a strong and instrumental institution in keeping African Americans organized during the tenuous struggles of the Civil Rights movement that culminated in the s.
Produced and directed by Rhonda Fabian and Jerry Baber. Schlessinger Video Productions, Mackintosh, Barry. Department of the Interior, McKissack, Patricia C.
Washington: Leader and Educator. ISBN: X. McLoone, Margo. Washington: A Photo-Illustrated Biography. Mankato, Minnesota: Capstone Press, ISBN: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. National Park Service. Washington National Monument.
Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site. National Public Radio. Toppin, Edgar A. This paper was developed by a student taking a Philanthropic Studies course taught at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. Grade Level:. One of the most influential and controversial African Americans in history, Booker T. Washington was raised the son of a slave mother.
0コメント