Then Darkness Fled: The Liberating Wisdom of Booker T. Washington

By Stephen Mansfield

At a time when Booker T. Washington is being rediscovered by African Americans today, the author offers a compelling look at the man and the qualities of leadership he embodied in his life and work. The result is a timeless message of hope, empowerment, and responsibility, which Washington himself characterized as the training of head, heart, and hand"".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cumberland House Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9781620453629

Stephen Mansfield

Stephen Mansfield is the New York Times bestselling author of Lincoln's Battle with God, The Faith of Barack Obama, Pope Benedict XVI, Searching for God and Guinness, and Never Give In: The Extraordinary Character of Winston Churchill. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife, Beverly.

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PART 1

THE CHARACTER OF FREEDOM

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.

—Booker T. Washington

A life is not worth much of which it cannot be said, when it comes to its close, that it was helpful to humanity.

—Booker T. Washington

PROLOGUE

THEY CAME in 1619 … one year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, a century and a half before Jefferson proclaimed, All men are created equal, and more than two centuries before Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg.

They were only twenty and odd Negroes who sailed into Jamestown Harbor on a Dutch man-of-war captained by a man named Jope and piloted by an Englishman named Marmaduke.¹ Their story is as murky as the James River must have been the day they dropped anchor. Somewhere on the high seas, Captain Jope had apparently decided to attack and rob a Spanish vessel making for the West Indies with a cargo of Africans. Little more is known, except that to the Jamestown of John Smith and Pocahontas came weary blacks with names like Pedro, Isabella, and Antoney. It was the beginning of black America.

In a broader sense, though, it was but one small event in the agonizing four-hundred-year drama called the Black Holocaust. In these years as many as forty million Africans were callously uprooted from their homes and violently harnessed to dreams of arrogant power. It was the continuation of what began with the Moslem Arabs in the 700s and exploded with the Portuguese in 1442. Although it is true that slavery was old when Moses was young, this more modern version was different from anything known to the ancients: it was based on race, not on military conquest or even religion, as it had been in Greece and Rome and dozens of other civilizations.² It was based on the supposed inferiority of black skin and African culture, and to justify this fallacy and its enormous economic benefits men distorted their faiths and perverted their souls.

Thus, Pedro, Isabella, and Antoney, along with the rest of the Jamestown blacks, were the first of a million or so Africans to be planted in what later became the United States of America. What distinguishes their story, though, is that they were not slaves. While in time almost all blacks in the American colonies were classified as slaves, this was not so in the first forty years of their history. Instead, they became part of English society just as most of the white settlers did—as indentured servants.

Looking upon it from the other side of centuries of slavery and oppression, the initial equality they enjoyed is astonishing. These early black settlers voted, testified in court, owned property, and even purchased other black servants. They also bore children, just as Antoney and Isabella bore young William, the first black child born in America, and these children, like William, were often baptized in the Church of England. And some of the Africans even became quite wealthy, as did Anthony Johnson, who owned servants both black and white, 250 acres of land, and a large portion of America’s first black community on the banks of the Pungoteague River.³

Then the years of equality came to a tragic end. By the 1660s, world demand for sugar and tobacco became too much temptation for the white rulers of the American colonies. Hungry for the huge profits to be made and needing cheap labor at any moral price, colonial growers and merchants seized upon their black servants and made them slaves in perpetuity. Maryland and Virginia led the way both in outlawing intermarriage and making blacks slaves for life. Changing the law was easy; changing religious principle was another matter. Needing some theological justification for their deeds, slavers rationalized that since blacks were heathen their chains were tools of conversion. But heathens can change and when slaves converted, owners were confronted with their own hypocrisy. This reached its apex in 1667 when a Virginia law stated, The conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom.⁴

So began the horrors that were American slavery. So began the kidnappings and betrayals and murders in Africa. So began the dreaded Middle Passage across the Atlantic with its suffocating coffinlike confines, its disease and stench and madness and death. So began the screaming and the haunting clank of chains and the sound of dead black bodies splashing into midocean with such frequency that even the sharks learned to follow ships departing the coast of Africa. So began the markets and the humiliating inspections and the whippings. So began the dehumanizing of both black and white and the woven fabric of lies required to protect the illusion of Christian civilization.

Yet through all the dreary decades, something unintended happened. A people cannot live long in a land without it in some way becoming theirs, without its promise and its poetry entering their hearts, no matter how much their neighbors seek to prevent it. And so it was with blacks in America, for America became theirs, too. Despite their chains and illiteracy, their hearts, too, drank in the hope and the dream of the new land and in silence they took possession by faith of an inheritance yet unfulfilled.

They were there, then, when the new nation was born and they played their role as heroically as any. Even before the promise of a nation of equals was voiced in a Declaration, black men stood with their white neighbors and owners for the vision of freedom. As early as 1676 blacks fought alongside whites in the now famous Bacon’s Rebellion, which protested British land policy, captured Williamsburg, and forced the governor to flee the capital. Although hardly ever mentioned, black minutemen also fought at Lexington and Concord. Schoolchildren rarely hear the name of Prince Easterbrooks, who was among the wounded at Concord, or Barzillai Lew, who joined the Twenty-seventh Massachusetts Regiment, fought at Bunker Hill, and served for seven years in the Continental army. But they were there. In fact it could be said that the first man killed in the American Revolution was a black man. When British soldiers fired on an angry, taunting Boston crowd in 1770, they killed the man who led the riot with their first volley. His name was Crispus Attucks, a sailor, a runaway slave, and a black man. He died in what is now known as the Boston Massacre, the first martyr of the revolutionary cause.

So in 1776, when Thomas Jefferson elevated the meaning of hostilities from matters like taxation and the housing of troops to matters like human equality and inalienable rights, blacks believed. Little did they know that even within the Declaration, which most could not read but whose sentiments they cherished, a compromise already hinted at their betrayal. Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration included the charge that King George had maliciously foisted slavery upon the American colonists. The Continental Congress rejected this statement, partially because it wasn’t true, but also because it painted slavery as too much of an evil for many of the slaveholding Founding Fathers. It was a warning that the language of the Declaration was not necessarily to be the reality of the Republic.

Still, blacks rallied to the cause. They crossed the Delaware with Washington and were with him at Valley Forge. It was a black man named Prince who captured British General Prescott, commander of the Royal Army at Newport, Rhode Island. It was another black man, Salem Poor, who distinguished himself so gallantly in battle that fourteen American officers praised him before Congress. A memorial dedicated to him at Cambridge, Massachusetts, reports that under our own observation, we declare that a negro man called Salem Poor, of Colonel Frye’s regiment, Captain Ame’s company, in the late battle at Charlestown, behaved like an experienced officer, as well as an excellent soldier.⁵ In fact more than five thousand blacks fought in defense of liberty at battles like Monmouth, Saratoga, Princeton, and Yorktown. Their valor made such an impression on their enemies that one Hessian officer reported, No regiment is to be seen in which there are not Negroes in abundance, and among them there are able bodied, strong and brave fellows.⁶

Their sacrifices notwithstanding, the Spirit of 76 was not one the black man was allowed to enjoy. True, liberty had been promised and some took this seriously. As soon as the Declaration of Independence was made public, eager slaves organized and sued unsuccessfully for their freedom. In 1777 Vermont became the first state to abolish slavery and other northern states quickly followed. Throughout the war, blacks hoped that when the dust of conflict settled, freedom would be theirs. In fact, as late as 1787, the Free African Society was founded in Philadelphia, a move that W. E. B. Du Bois called the first wavering step of a people toward organized social life.⁷

Nevertheless, the social compact of the nation was not to include blacks. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Framers concluded that a black man counted as only three-fifths of a human being in determining representation. In 1793 Congress passed the first Fugitive Slave Law, which made helping a runaway slave a crime and capturing him a business. The hope of the Revolution was fading. Even good laws were ignored. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 forbade slavery in the territories that were becoming states, but Tennessee welcomed slavery anyway and the floodgates were opened. Then in 1808 Congress passed a law prohibiting the importation of African slaves, but it, too, was ignored everywhere. Before long, with the advent of the plantation system, the enthronement of cotton, and the protection of the courts, the cruel subjugation of some four million Africans became an established fact of American society.

This entrenched system of evil bore no resemblance to the tempting illusions of Gone with the Wind. Human beings were bred like cattle. Advertisements for slaves often spoke of how pleasing a slave girl was and how much delight she might bring her master. The children of slave women were routinely taken from their arms, never to be seen again. Whippings and beatings, even to the point of death, were not unknown. Even religion among the slaves, irrationally feared by some plantation owners, was opposed and sometimes outlawed. It was illegal to teach a slave to read and illegal in some quarters even to read to him from the Bible. Perhaps worst of all, there was serious debate about whether black people had souls and many slave owners, having concluded the matter for themselves, simply impressed upon their human property the dehumanizing, dispiriting lie that they were but animals, made for the very abuse they were enduring.

The often unmentioned irony is that slavery was not as productive as promised. In fact, there were regions where it was dying out. Some owners had even begun paying their slaves because they had learned the hard way that a beaten, starved man with no promise of a better tomorrow does not work as well as one who gains at least some small benefit from his labors. Men spoke convincingly of the natural end of slavery and the many abolitionist societies, most of which were in the South, sought to speed its