VII

THE ROAD UP FROM SLAVERY

FOR BOOKER T. WASHINGTON AND HIS PEOPLE

"THY people shall be my people": so, to an extent unknown in other races, says the possessor of any appreciable infusion of Negro blood to the ancestor, even of the third and fourth preceding generation, from whom that blood is derived. His separation from the rest of the American population is a matter not only of custom, but in Southern states, also of law. The native Indians far less numerous, to be sure, than the Negroes have presented no problems comparable with the Negro Problem. The amalgamation of European and other stocks has been rapid and general throughout the United States. Even as I write these words, I remind myself that a witness no more remote than my father used to relate the coming of the first Irishman to the New England town in which he and I were born, and to tell how the visitant was drummed, immediately and actually, out of the place. Ships that sailed from that very town bore their part in the slave-trade, which,

however respectable in its day, has stained the name of state and people. The Irishman, drummed out of town, came back, and merged into the general problem of American life. The Negro is still with us — a problem by himself.

All this is at once patent and readily explicable. The introduction of the Negro into the country as a slave, his continuance, in rapidly growing numbers, in that estate, for more than two centuries, his enfranchisement resulting from a civil war, place him in a position entirely unique. After some sixty years of freedom -years that began with many misguided steps towards "reconstruction" the wonder is not so much that he remains a problem, as that his advance, in many of the fields of citizenship and civilization, has been so marked.

If there was ever a cause that needed a champion, it has been that of the Negro. At a definite time in Booker Washington's life, he became the acknowledged "leader of his race." This was upon the death of Frederick Douglass, who had borne that unofficial title for many years. Both of these men were born slaves Douglass early enough to gain his freedom by an actual escape from his owners. All the slaves were set free while Washington was still a mere boy, but the emancipation

secured to him by his own lifetime of effort was something greater than a physical deliverance. It was his constant thought that in saving himself he must save others also. No more truly of the famous Master of Rugby than of Booker Washington could it be said:

Therefore to thee it was given

Many to save with thyself;
And, at the end of the day,
O faithful shepherd! to come,

Bringing thy sheep in thy hand.

The story of this champion is therefore to a peculiar degree the story of his cause.

I

The first items to be recorded with regard to the usual subject of biography are the date and place of his birth, the names of his parents, and the backgrounds of inheritance. Although Booker Washington stands apart from nearly all eminent men in this particular, in that no such records are in existence, he stands with multitudes of his own race born in slavery. There were plantations on which the births of slave children were recorded. On others they were not, and on one of these Booker Washington was born. The opening

words of Up from Slavery, that classic of autobiography, tell the stark story:

I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any rate I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time. As nearly as I have been able to learn, I was born near a cross-roads post-office called Hale's Ford, and the year was 1858 or 1859. I do not know the month or the day.

Of his mother, to whom he was devotedly attached, little is recorded but that she was a cook for the slaves on her master's plantation, went by the name of Jane, extended on occasion into Jane Ferguson, and that her master's name was Burroughs. Of his father Booker Washington

wrote:

I do not even know his name. I have heard reports to the effect that he was a white man who lived on one of the nearby plantations. Whoever he was, I never heard of his taking the least interest in me or providing in any way for my rearing. But I do not find especial fault with him. He was simply an unfortunate victim of the institution which the nation unhappily had engrafted upon it at that time.

It was enough for the child of these parents to go through his earliest years with no name but "Booker." When he went to school and found that the other pupils had at least two "entitles,"

he calmly gave himself, in answer to the teacher's inquiry about his second name, the august designation of "Washington." Learning later that his mother had named him "Booker Taliaferro" while he was still a child, he took to himself the full name of "Booker Taliaferro Washington." It was a name and nothing more, and for that very reason one of those disadvantages which its bearer came to look upon as advantages. With no family record to sustain, but merely a personal name to make, Washington and his like in handicap and incentive have succeeded again and again in turning these gravest losses to gains. This he was so constantly doing through tact of word and deed that, however he may have relished recording Frederick Douglass's words about his marriage to a white wife, it is hard to imagine Washington expressing himself in corresponding terms. "I am strongly of the opinion," said Douglass to a large assemblage of white and colored hearers, "that you will want me to say something concerning my second marriage. I will tell you: My first wife, you see, was the color of my mother and my second wife, the color of my father. You see I wanted to be perfectly fair to both races.'

Pleasantries of this sort were quite out of keeping with Washington's early contacts with life. It