Up From Slavery: An Autobiography | Page 4

was the strong personality of its famous
president. Every student does not profit by a great teacher; but perhaps no young man
ever came under the influence of Dr. Hopkins, whose whole nature was so ripe for profit
by such an experience as young Armstrong. He lived in the family of President Hopkins,
and thus had a training that was wholly out of the common; and this training had much to
do with the development of his own strong character, whose originality and force we are
only beginning to appreciate.
* For this interesting view of Mr. Washington's education, I am indebted to Robert C.
Ogden, Esq., Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Hampton Institute and the intimate
friend of General Armstrong during the whole period of his educational work.
In turn, Samuel Armstrong, the founder of Hampton Institute, took up his work as a
trainer of youth. He had very raw material, and doubtless most of his pupils failed to get
the greatest lessons from him; but, as he had been a peculiarly receptive pupil of Dr.
Hopkins, so Booker Washington became a peculiarly receptive pupil of his. To the
formation of Mr. Washington's character, then, went the missionary zeal of New England,
influenced by one of the strongest personalities in modern education, and the
wide-reaching moral earnestness of General Armstrong himself These influences are
easily recognizable in Mr. Washington to-day by men who knew Dr. Hopkins and
General Armstrong.
I got the cue to Mr. Washington's character from a very simple incident many years ago. I
had never seen him, and I knew little about him, except that he was the head of a school
at Tuskegee, Alabama. I had occasion to write to him, and I addressed him as "The Rev.
Booker T. Washington." In his reply there was no mention of my addressing him as a
clergyman. But when I had occasion to write to him again, and persisted in making him a
preacher, his second letter brought a postscript: "I have no claim to 'Rev.'" I knew most of
the coloured men who at that time had become prominent as leaders of their race, but I
had not then known one who was neither a politician nor a preacher; and I had not heard
of the head of an important coloured school who was not a preacher. "A new kind of man
in the coloured world," I said to myself--"a new kind of man surely if he looks upon his
task as an economic one instead of a theological one." I wrote him an apology for
mistaking him for a preacher.

The first time that I went to Tuskegee I was asked to make an address to the school on
Sunday evening. I sat upon the platform of the large chapel and looked forth on a
thousand coloured faces, and the choir of a hundred or more behind me sang a familiar
religious melody, and the whole company joined in the chorus with unction. I was the
only white man under the roof, and the scene and the songs made an impression on me
that I shall never forget. Mr. Washington arose and asked them to sing one after another
of the old melodies that I had heard all my life; but I had never before heard them sung
by a thousand voices nor by the voices of educated Negroes. I had associated them with
the Negro of the past, not with the Negro who was struggling upward. They brought to
my mind the plantation, the cabin, the slave, not the freedman in quest of education. But
on the plantation and in the cabin they had never been sung as these thousand students
sang them. I saw again all the old plantations that I had ever seen; the whole history of
the Negro ran through my mind; and the inexpressible pathos of his life found expression
in these songs as I had never before felt it.
And the future? These were the ambitious youths of the race, at work with an earnestness
that put to shame the conventional student life of most educational institutions. Another
song rolled up along the rafters. And as soon as silence came, I found myself in front of
this extraordinary mass of faces, thinking not of them, but of that long and unhappy
chapter in our country's history which followed the one great structural mistake of the
Fathers of the Republic; thinking of the one continuous great problem that generations of
statesmen had wrangled over, and a million men fought about, and that had so dwarfed
the mass of English men in the Southern States as to hold them back a hundred years
behind their fellows in every other part of the world--in England, in Australia, and in the
Northern