Up from Slavery (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading): An Autobiography

By James L. Robinson and Booker T. Washington

This autobiography of a slave’s rise to distinction asserts that a strong work ethic and excellence in whatever one is doing will be rewarded no matter what race or what position a person holds in life. As far as Washington was concerned, slavery only made the black person stronger. He argued that both blacks and whites would benefit more from giving blacks vocational training than from encouraging the “craze for Greek & Latin learning.” While this set him at odds with other black leaders of his time, such as W.E. B. Du Bois, it also set the groundwork for Washington’s Tuskegee Institute to be the best-funded black educational institution of its era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411428690

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

BORN A SLAVE ON A SMALL FARM IN THE VIRGINIA BACKCOUNTRY, Booker T. Washington recounts a very dismal and difficult childhood in Up from Slavery. He never knew his father, who he had heard was a white man; his mother, a cook on the plantation, suffered many hardships along with her family. What is remarkable about Washington’s narrative of this time is that he never expresses bitterness. In fact, throughout the entire book, he is conciliatory and forgiving toward southern whites and their system of racism and oppression. Plantation life, though harsh, taught valuable lessons regarding hard work and perseverance which Washington used in later life. He saw slavery as only another challenge to overcome and felt every obstacle could be conquered with the right attitude.

As far as Washington was concerned, slavery made the black race stronger. While he believed the system of slavery was wrong, Washington states that ex-slaves held no ill will toward their former slave masters. On the contrary, blacks had strong feelings of loyalty and devotion for their former masters. He describes one incident, During the Civil War one of my young masters was killed, and two were severely wounded. I recall the feeling of sorrow, which existed among the slaves when they heard of the death of ‘Mars’ Billy.’ It was no sham sorrow, but real. Some of the slaves had nursed ‘Mars’ Billy’; others had played with him when he was a child.

The loyal and devoted Negro is a recurring theme throughout Up from Slavery. It is a message he wants whites—particularly southern ix whites—to hear. The latter part of the nineteenth century was racially volatile for both whites and blacks, and southern whites felt northerners had abused them during the period directly after the Civil War. Blacks had been given the right to vote, courtesy of the Fifteenth Amendment, but whites that had rebelled against the Union (and that was most of the southern whites) had their vote taken away. Union soldiers, many of whom were black, enforced this upside-down arrangement until 1876, when they were withdrawn. After 1876, the white South reasserted itself with a vengeance by systematically removing blacks from the voting rolls. They used everything from instituting poll taxes to outright intimidation and violence—it was during this period that the Klu Klux Klan was organized and started operating—to keep blacks from voting. Lynching became a common occurrence and racial segregation the law of the land. Washington operated in this hostile climate and understood the prevailing belief many whites had regarding educating the Negro. Education, they felt, would ruin blacks and make them hard to handle. He tried to allay these fears and convince whites that educating Negroes only made them better able to serve white society for the mutual benefit of both blacks and whites.

After slavery ended, he moved with his family to West Virginia and went to work in the salt furnaces and coalmines. Working in the salt furnaces and coalmines was extremely hard on young Washington, but he persevered. He thirsted for knowledge and wanted to learn to read and write. From the time that I can remember having any thoughts about anything, I recall that I had an intense longing to learn to read. I determined, when quite a small child, that, if I accomplished nothing else in life, I would in some way get enough education to enable me to read common books and newspapers. He describes his educational journey as long and arduous. Education for blacks was not a high priority because it would sometimes interfere with earning a living. It was not long before I had to stop attending day-school altogether, and devote all of my time again to work. I resorted to the night school again. In fact, the greater part of the education I secured in my boyhood was gathered through the night school after my day’s work was done. . . . There was never a time in my youth, no matter how dark and discouraging the days might be, when one resolve did not continually remain with me, and that was a determination to secure an education at any cost.

Washington attended Hampton Institute, but his journey to the school and admissions is another tale of monumental struggle against the odds. He had little money for travel from West Virginia to Virginia and, after reaching one town, talks about sleeping . . . under the sidewalk and lay for the night upon the ground, with my satchel of clothing for a pillow. Nearly all night I could hear the tramp of feet over my head. When he arrived at Hampton, he presented himself before the head teacher for an assignment to a class. But Washington thought he probably looked like a bum or hobo because having been so long without proper food, a bath, and a change of clothing, I did not, of course, make a very favorable impression. He noticed other students being admitted while he waited; after some hours had passed, the head teacher told him, The adjoining recitation-room needs sweeping. Take the broom and sweep it.

In the classic Washington style he saw this as his opportunity to prove himself worthy and . . . never did I receive an order with more delight. I knew that I could sweep. . . . I swept the recitation-room three times. Then I got a dusting cloth and dusted it four times. All the woodwork around the walls, every bench, table, and desk, I went over four times with my dusting cloth. Besides, every piece of furniture had been moved and every closet and corner in the room had been thoroughly cleaned. . . . When the teacher was unable to find one bit of dirt on the floor, or a particle of dust on any of the furniture, she told him, I guess you will do to enter this institution. Hard work and excellence are major themes in Washington’s formula for success in life. These are also lessons he wished to teach members of his race. In Up From Slavery, Washington believed that true excellence in whatever one is doing will be rewarded no matter what race or what position a person holds in life.

After completing secondary education at Hampton Institute, he accepted a teaching position. Education and teaching became his career goal; in 1881, he founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute on the Hampton model in the Black Belt of Alabama. The students who attended the school built Tuskegee from the ground up. Washington believed in vocational education and felt that educating blacks in what he called textbooks was a waste of time. Black boys should be trained as bricklayers or carpenters and girls, in laundering or cooking, so they could earn a living. He criticized the craze for Greek and Latin learning and believed one of the saddest things he ever saw was a young man sitting down in a one-room cabin, with grease on his clothing, filth all around him, and weeds in the yard and garden, engaged in studying French grammar. Such education for blacks was frivolous and of little use. And some blacks, says Washington, felt that an education meant no more manual labor. Not at Tuskegee, however, where students were given a vocational education and taught the dignity of hands-on manual labor.

He was particularly critical of the academic and political education championed by his contemporary black rival leader W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois, a preeminent black educator and scholar, together with many other northern black leaders, believed Washington’s opposition to political agitation would slow the advance of the black race. Washington felt political agitation would not save the Negro, that ‘property, industry, skill, intelligence, and character’ would prove necessary to black Americans’ success. But these views were controversial, even in the late nineteenth century, and many considered him too accommodating and apologetic to segregationists for the racism of late nineteenth century America. When criticized for limiting the educational horizons of blacks by emphasizing agricultural and vocational subjects at Tuskegee, Washington declared that these were the true basis of black economic development.

Washington revealed a political adroitness by emphasizing an accommodationist philosophy that convinced southern white employers and governors that Tuskegee offered an education that would keep blacks down on the farm and in the trades. To prospective northern donors and particularly the new self-made millionaires, such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Huntington, he promised the inculcation of the Protestant work ethic. To blacks living in the segregationist South, Washington held out industrial education as the means of escape from the web of sharecropping and debt and the achievement of attainable self-employment, landownership, and small business. Washington cultivated local white approval and secured a small state appropriation, but it was northern donations that made Tuskegee Institute, by 1900, the best-supported black educational institution in the country.

The Atlanta Compromise Address, delivered before the Cotton States Exposition in 1895, enlarged Washington’s influence into the arena of race relations and black leadership. In this address, he offered black acquiescence in disfranchisement and social segregation if whites would encourage black progress in economic and educational opportunity. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, nursing your children, watching by the sickbed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

After this famous speech, he was regarded as the chief spokesman for blacks in America and acquired enormous political influence. And when his widely read autobiography Up From Slavery was published in 1901, he further increased his influence by founding the National Negro Business League. In the same year, Washington was invited to dinner at the White House, which was unprecedented for a black man in that day. As an advisor to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, he exercised considerable control over patronage politics. Washington maintained his white following through conservative policies and moderate speeches, but faced growing black and white opposition to his accommodationist views.

While Washington’s accommodationist views toward racism cause many current black civil rights leaders to minimize his legacy, he still presents a positive model for success. He overcame enormous odds in his achievements and started the tradition of black higher education. Historically, most educated blacks got their start at black colleges and these institutions still train many African Americans today. In a sense, it is unfair to judge Washington’s accommodationist views by today’s political standards.

During his time, southern whites oppressed blacks, taking away their political rights, and there was very little Washington could have done about it. What he did do, being a pragmatist, is try to salvage something out of this ongoing oppression by getting whites to help him build educational institutions for blacks. To this end, starting as an ex-slave, he was quite successful and leaves a lasting legacy presented in Up from Slavery.

James Robinson teaches Politics & Race and Change in South Africa and the U.S. and has written for National Minority Politics Magazine.

PREFACE

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.

004 CHAPTER ONE 005

A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES

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 sometime. As nearly as I have been able to learn, I was born near a crossroads post office called Hale’s Ford, and the year was 1858 or 1859. I do not know the month or the day. The earliest impressions I can now recall are of the plantation and the slave quarters—the latter being the part of the plantation where the slaves had their cabins.

My life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings. This was so, however, not because my owners were especially cruel, for they were not, as compared with many others. I was born in a typical log cabin, about fourteen by sixteen feet square. In this cabin I lived with my mother and a brother and sister till after the Civil War, when we were all declared free.

Of my ancestry I know almost nothing. In the slave quarters, and even later, I heard whispered conversations among the colored people of the tortures which the slaves, including, no doubt, my ancestors on my mother’s side, suffered in the middle passage of the slave ship while being conveyed from Africa to America. I have been unsuccessful in securing any information that would throw any accurate light upon the history of my family beyond my mother. She, I remember, had a half-brother and a half-sister. In the days of slavery not very much attention was given to family history and family records—that is, black family records. My mother, I suppose, attracted the attention of a purchaser who was afterward my owner and hers. Her addition to the slave family attracted about as much attention as the purchase of a new horse or cow. Of my father I know even less than of my mother. 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 anyway for my rearing. But I do not find especial fault with him. He was simply another unfortunate victim of the institution which the Nation unhappily had engrafted upon it at that time.

The cabin was not only our living-place, but was also used as the kitchen for the plantation. My mother was the plantation cook. The cabin was without glass windows; it had only openings in the side which let in the light, and also the cold, chilly air of winter. There was a door to the cabin—that is, something that was called a door—but the uncertain hinges by which it was hung, and the large cracks in it, to say nothing of the fact that it was too small, made the room a very uncomfortable one. In addition to these openings there was, in the lower right-hand corner of the room, the cat-hole, a contrivance which almost every mansion or cabin in Virginia possessed during the ante-bellum period. The cat-hole was a square opening, about seven by eight inches, provided for the purpose of letting the cat pass in and out of the house at will during the night. In the case of our particular cabin I could never understand the necessity for this convenience, since there were at least a half-dozen other places in the cabin that would have accommodated the cats. There was no wooden floor in our cabin, the naked earth being used as a floor. In the center of the earthen floor there was a large, deep opening covered with boards, which was used as a place in which to store sweet potatoes during the winter. An impression of this potato-hole is very distinctly engraved upon my memory, because I recall that during the process of putting the potatoes in or taking them out I would often come into possession of one or two, which I roasted and thoroughly enjoyed. There was no cooking-stove on our plantation, and all the cooking for the whites and slaves my mother had to do over an open fireplace, mostly in pots and skillets. While the poorly built cabin caused us to suffer with cold in the winter, the heat from the open fireplace in summer was equally trying.

The early years of my life, which were spent in the little cabin, were not very different from those of thousands of other slaves. My mother, of course, had little time in which to give attention to the training of her children during the day. She snatched a few moments for our care in the early morning before her work began, and at night after the day’s work was done. One of my earliest recollections is that of my mother cooking a chicken late at night, and awakening her children for the purpose of feeding them. How or where she got it I do not know. I presume, however, it was procured from our owner’s farm. Some people may call this theft. If such a thing were to happen now, I should condemn it as theft myself. But taking place at the time it did, and for the reason that it did, no one could ever make me believe that my mother was guilty of thieving. She was simply a victim of the system of slavery. I cannot remember having slept in a bed until after our family was declared free by the Emancipation Proclamation. Three children—John, my older brother, Amanda, my sister, and myself—had a pallet on the dirt floor, or, to be more correct, we slept in and on a bundle of filthy rags laid upon the dirt floor.

I was asked not long ago to tell something about the sports and pastimes that I engaged in during my youth. Until that question was asked it had never occurred to me that there was no period of my life that was devoted to play. From the time that I can remember anything, almost everyday of my life has been occupied in some kind of labor; though I think I would now be a more useful man if I had had time for sports. During the period that I spent in slavery I was not large enough to be of much service, still I was occupied most of the time in cleaning the yards, carrying water to the men in the fields, or going to the mill, to which I used to take the corn, once a week, to be ground. The mill was about three miles from the plantation. This work I always dreaded. The heavy bag of corn would be thrown across the back of the horse, and the corn divided about evenly on each side; but in some way, almost without exception, on these trips, the corn would so shift as to become unbalanced and would fall off the horse, and often I would fall with it. As I was not strong enough to reload the corn upon the horse, I would have to wait, sometimes for many hours, till a chance passerby came along who would help me out of my trouble. The hours while waiting for someone were usually spent in crying. The time consumed in this way made me late in reaching the mill, and by the time I got my corn ground and reached home it would be far into the night. The road was a lonely one, and often led through dense forests. I was always frightened. The woods were said to be full of soldiers who had deserted from the army, and I had been told that the first thing a deserter did to a Negro boy when he found him alone was to cut off his ears. Besides, when I was late in getting home I knew I would always get a severe scolding or a flogging.

I had no schooling whatever while I was a slave, though I remember on several occasions I went as far as the schoolhouse door with one of my young mistresses to carry her books. The picture of several dozen boys and girls in a schoolroom engaged in study made a deep impression upon me, and I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.

So far as I can now recall, the first knowledge that I got of the fact that we were slaves, and that freedom of the slaves was being discussed, was early one morning before day, when I was awakened by my mother kneeling over her children and fervently praying that Lincoln and his armies might be successful, and that one day she and her children might be free. In this connection I have never been able to understand how the slaves throughout the South, completely ignorant as were the masses so far as books or newspapers were concerned, were able to keep themselves so accurately and completely informed about the great National questions that were agitating the country. From the time that Garrison, Lovejoy, and others began to agitate for freedom, the slaves throughout the South kept in close touch with the progress of the movement. Though I was a mere child during the preparation for the Civil War and during the war itself, I now recall the many late-at-night whispered discussions that I heard my mother and the other slaves on the plantation indulge in. These discussions showed that they understood the situation, and that they kept themselves informed of events by what was termed the grape-vine telegraph.

During the campaign when Lincoln was first a candidate for the Presidency, the slaves on our far-off plantation, miles from any railroad or large city or daily newspaper, knew what the issues involved were. When war was begun between the North and the South, every slave on our plantation felt and knew that, though other issues were discussed, the primal one was that of slavery. Even the most ignorant members of my race on the remote plantations felt in their hearts, with a certainty that admitted of no doubt, that the freedom of the slaves would be the one great result of the war, if the Northern armies conquered. Every success of the Federal armies and every defeat of the Confederate forces was watched with the keenest and most intense interest. Often the slaves got knowledge of the results of great battles before the white people received it. This news was usually gotten from the colored man who was sent to the post office for the mail. In our case the post office was about three miles from the plantation, and the mail