Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization. Emmett J. Scott
studying books so constantly, how I wish that our schools and colleges might learn to study men and things!"
When the young man imbued with these ideas and fresh from these influences found himself responsible for the destinies of a studentless, teacherless, buildingless, and landless school it is significant how he went to work to supply these manifold deficiencies. First, he found a place in which to open the school—a dilapidated shanty church, the A.M.E. Zion Church for Negroes, in the town of Tuskegee. Next he went about the surrounding countryside, found out exactly under what conditions the people were living and what their needs were, and advertised the school among the class of people whom he wanted to have attend it. After returning from these experiences he said: "I saw more clearly than ever the wisdom of the system which General Armstrong had inaugurated at Hampton. To take the children of such people as I had been among for a month, and each day give them a few hours of mere book education, I felt would be almost a waste of time."
Six weeks after the school was opened, on July 4, 1881, in the shanty Methodist Church with thirty students, Miss Olivia A. Davidson entered the school, the enrollment of which had already grown to fifty, as assistant teacher. She subsequently became Mrs. Washington. The school then had students, a teacher, and a building such as it was, but it had no land. It was succeeding in so far as teaching these eager and knowledge hungry young people what could be learned from books, but little more. Mr. Washington found that about 85 per cent. of the Negroes of the Gulf States lived on the land and were dependent upon agriculture for their livelihood. Hence, he reasoned that it was of supreme importance to teach them how to live on the land to the best advantage. In order to teach the students how to live on the land the school itself must have land. About this time an old plantation near the town of Tuskegee came upon the market. The school had no money. Mr. Washington had no money, and the $2,000 a year from the State Treasury could be used only for the payment of teachers. Accordingly Mr. Washington personally borrowed the $250, from a personal friend, necessary to secure title to the land, and moved the school from the shanty church to the comparative comfort of four aged cabins formerly used as the dining-room, kitchen, stable, and hen-house of the plantation.
Tuskegee in the making. Nothing delighted Mr. Washington more than to see his students doing the actual work of erecting the Tuskegee Institute buildings. A group of students raising the roof on one of the buildings.
And as soon as they were established in their new quarters he organized the "chopping bee" already described and cleared some of the land so that it could be used for crops. He did not clear and plant this land to give his students agricultural training. He did it for the purpose that all land was originally cleared and planted—to get food. He, of course, realized that the educational content of this work was great—greater than any possible textbook exercises in the classroom. He then and there began the long and difficult task of teaching his people that physical work, and particularly farm work, if rightly done was education, and that education was work. To secure the acceptance of this truth by a race only recently emancipated from over two hundred years of unrequited toil—a race that had always regarded freedom from the necessity for work as an indication of superiority—was not a hopeful task. To them education was the antithesis of work. It was the magic elixir which emancipated all those fortunate enough to drink of it from the necessity for work.
He also began to emphasize at this time his familiar dictum that learning to do the common things of life in an uncommon way was an essential part of real education. Probably the reverse of this dictum, namely, learning to do the uncommon things of life in a common way—would have more nearly corresponded to the popular conception of education among most Negroes and many whites.
Mr. Washington later developed a brickyard where, after a series of failures sufficient to convince any ordinary man of the hopelessness of the enterprise, they finally succeeded in baking creditable bricks which were used by the students in the construction of buildings for the school. He did not start this brickyard for the purpose of vocational training any more than he started the farm for agricultural training. He started it because they needed bricks with which to build buildings in which to live, just as he started the farm to raise food upon which to live. He saw to it, however, that the brickyard was used as an instrument of education and was never allowed to degenerate into a mere brickyard and nothing more, just as he saw to it that the farm was used as a means of education and was not allowed to degenerate into a mere farm and nothing more. It was even more difficult to persuade the students that the hard, heavy, dirty work of the brickyard was education than it had been to persuade them that farm work was education. Mr. Washington wasted no time in arguing this point, however, but merely insisted that without bricks they could not put up proper buildings, and that without buildings they could not have such a school as they must have not only for themselves but for their race.
Tuskegee Institute students laying the foundation for one of the four Emery buildings—boys' dormitories.
So this originally landless, buildingless, studentless, and teacherless school came eventually to have all four of these obvious requisites, but it still lacked a fundamental requirement for the effective fulfillment of its purpose. It lacked a boarding department where the students might learn to live. In his tours among the people Mr. Washington had found the great majority in the plantation districts living on fat pork and corn bread, and sleeping in one-room cabins. They planted nothing but cotton, bought their food at the nearest village or town market instead of raising it, and lived under conditions where the fundamental laws of hygiene and decent social intercourse were both unknown and impossible of application. The young men and women from such homes must be taught how to live in houses with more than one room, how to keep their persons and their surroundings clean, how to sleep in a bed between sheets, how not only to raise but to prepare, serve, and eat a healthful variety of proper food at regular and stated intervals, to say nothing of a trade by which to maintain themselves both during their course and after graduation as well as the usual book learning of the ordinary school. Obviously they could not be taught these things unless they lived day and night on the school grounds instead of boarding about with people whose standards of living were very little if at all higher than those of their homes. Accordingly volunteers were called for, and the students made an excavation under their new brick building which was made into a basement kitchen and dining-room. As Mr. Washington says in "Up from Slavery," "We had nothing but the students and their appetites with which to begin a boarding department." As soon as this boarding department was established it became possible to influence directly the lives of the students during the entire twenty-four hours of the day. From then on each student was required to have and to use a toothbrush. Mr. Washington has since remarked that, in his opinion, the toothbrush is the most potent single instrument of civilization. Then, too, it was possible for him to begin to enforce this injunction taken from one of his now well-known Sunday night talks, "Make a study of the preparation of food. See to it that a certain ceremony, a certain importance, be attached to the partaking of the food——" This exhortation sounds so commonplace as to be scarcely noticed by the average reader, but just put yourself in the place of one of these boys or girls who came from a one-room cabin and realize what a profoundly revolutionary, even sensational, injunction it is! To the boy or girl who had snatched a morsel of food here, there, or anywhere when prompted by the gnawings of hunger, who had never sat down to a regular meal, who had never partaken of a meal placed upon a table with or without ceremony—imagine what it meant to such a boy or girl "to see to it that a certain ceremony, a certain importance, be attached to the partaking of the food"—not on special occasions but at each one of the three meals of each day!
Finally it came about that this school which had started with a paltry $2,000 a year, a great need, and the invincible determination of one man, came to have land, buildings, teachers, students, and even a boarding department. But in Mr. Washington's view there was still a great fundamental lack in their work. They were doing nothing directly to help those less fortunate than themselves—those about them who could not come and enjoy the advantages of the school. Mr. Washington held that as soon as an individual got hold of anything as useful