Making It New: 1900–1945 321explained; of his mother, he knew little and of his father, even less – indeed, he did
not “even know his name.” Yet, despite that, Washington was curiously ambivalent
about slavery in his adult years. Thanks to their “kindly and generous nature,”
Washington declared, slaves felt “tenderness and sympathy” toward their masters.
“The slaves would have laid down their lives,” he insisted, for “the women and
children who were left on the plantations when the white males went to war.” Not
only that, “there are many instances of Negroes tenderly caring for their former
masters and mistresses who for some reason have become poor and dependent since
the war.” Washington left his readers and audiences in no doubt that slaves wanted
freedom: “I have never seen one who did not want to be free,” he pointed out in Up
From Slavery, “or one who would return to slavery.” Yet he tended to emphasize its
positive, ameliorative, or less offensive features, as the white Southern apologists had
once done. Frederick Douglass, whose biography Washington wrote and published
in 1906, saw the slave system as hell. So did the authors of other slave narratives. For
Washington, however, it was educative, helping to prepare African-Americans for
the role they had to assume after the Civil War. Thanks to “the school of American
slavery,” he averred, “Negroes ... are in a stronger and more hopeful condition,
materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously, than is true of an equal number of
black people in any other portion of the globe.”
Eventually, after the Civil War, Washington went to school. Entering Hampton
Normal Agricultural Institute in Virginia in 1872, he felt, he said, that he was starting
“a new life” and “had reached the promised land.” There he met and won the favor
of one of many whites who were to assist him with his career: the college president,
Samuel Armstrong, whom Washington referred to in Up From Slavery as “a great
man,” typical of “that Christlike body of men and women who went into Negro
schools at the close of the war ... to assist in lifting up my race.” It was Armstrong
who recommended that Washington should found the Tuskegee Institute, a school
for black teachers funded by the Alabama legislature. Washington moved to Tuskegee
in 1881. From then until his death, he divided his time between developing the
Institute, pursuing his career as a national black leader, and publicizing his program
of education and advancement for his people. In a few years he had assumed national
prominence as a thinker, educator, and public orator. He organized the National
Negro Business League in Boston in 1901; the Tuskegee Institute received
endorsement and support from such influential figures as the millionaire Andrew
Carnegie; and, after he gave an address at the opening of the Cotton States and
International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, he received a letter of congratulation
from President Grover Cleveland, who also visited the institute. The Atlanta address,
which Cleveland declared to Washington could not “fail to delight and encourage all
who wish well for your race,” was a brief summation of its author’s ideas on black
education and progress. In it, Washington emphasized the importance of a
vocational, utilitarian education for African-Americans. “It is at the bottom of life
we must begin,” he declared; “we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify
and glorify common labor and put brains and skill into the common occupations of
life.” “Cast down your bucket where you are,” was the repeated refrain of the speech.GGray_c04.indd 321ray_c 04 .indd 321 8 8/1/2011 7:53:46 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 46 AM