Up From Slavery: An Autobiography | Page 6

local help, in the face of the
direst poverty, done by begging, and done in spite of the ignorance of one race and the
prejudice of the other.
No man living had a harder task, and a task that called for more wisdom to do it right.
The true measure of Mr. Washington's success is, then, not his teaching the pupils of
Tuskegee, nor even gaining the support of philanthropic persons at a distance, but
this--that every Southern white man of character and of wisdom has been won to a
cordial recognition of the value of the work, even men who held and still hold to the
conviction that a mere book education for the Southern blacks under present conditions is
a positive evil. This is a demonstration of the efficiency of the Hampton-Tuskegee idea
that stands like the demonstration of the value of democratic institutions themselves--a
demonstration made so clear in spite of the greatest odds that it is no longer open to
argument.

Consider the change that has come in twenty years in the discussion of the Negro
problem. Two or three decades ago social philosophers and statisticians and
well-meaning philanthropists were still talking and writing about the deportation of the
Negroes, or about their settlement within some restricted area, or about their settling in all
parts of the Union, or about their decline through their neglect of their children, or about
their rapid multiplication till they should expel the whites from the South--of every sort
of nonsense under heaven. All this has given place to the simple plan of an indefinite
extension among the neglected classes of both races of the Hampton-Tuskegee system of
training. The "problem" in one sense has disappeared. The future will have for the South
swift or slow development of its masses and of its soil in proportion to the swift or slow
development of this kind of training. This change of view is a true measure of Mr.
Washington's work.
The literature of the Negro in America is colossal, from political oratory through
abolitionism to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Cotton is King"--a vast mass of books which
many men have read to the waste of good years (and I among them); but the only books
that I have read a second time or ever care again to read in the whole list (most of them
by tiresome and unbalanced "reformers") are "Uncle Remus" and "Up from Slavery"; for
these are the great literature of the subject. One has all the best of the past, the other
foreshadows a better future; and the men who wrote them are the only men who have
written of the subject with that perfect frankness and perfect knowledge and perfect poise
whose other name is genius.
Mr. Washington has won a world-wide fame at an early age. His story of his own life
already has the distinction of translation into more languages, I think, than any other
American book; and I suppose that he has as large a personal acquaintance among men of
influence as any private citizen now living.
His own teaching at Tuskegee is unique. He lectures to his advanced students on the art
of right living, not out of text-books, but straight out of life. Then he sends them into the
country to visit Negro families. Such a student will come back with a minute report of the
way in which the family that he has seen lives, what their earnings are, what they do well
and what they do ill; and he will explain how they might live better. He constructs a
definite plan for the betterment of that particular family out of the resources that they
have. Such a student, if he be bright, will profit more by an experience like this than he
could profit by all the books on sociology and economics that ever were written. I talked
with a boy at Tuskegee who had made such a study as this, and I could not keep from
contrasting his knowledge and enthusiasm with what I heard in a class room at a Negro
university in one of the Southern cities, which is conducted on the idea that a college
course will save the soul. Here the class was reciting a lesson from an abstruse text-book
on economics, reciting it by rote, with so obvious a failure to assimilate it that the waste
of labour was pitiful.
I asked Mr. Washington years ago what he regarded as the most important result of his
work, and he replied:
"I do not know which to put first, the effect of Tuskegee's work on the Negro, or the

effect on the attitude of the white man to the Negro."
The race divergence under the system of miseducation was fast getting wider. Under the
influence of the