Booker T. Washington understood value of hard work and education
A heritage and a hope
Peter Johnston

I have never regretted a side trip my family made off the beaten path returning from Florida to southeast Texas in the early 1990s.

Having read about two great African Americans I wanted to visit Tuskegee, Ala. where Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver established and taught at a school for African Americans at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

Who was Booker T. Washington? In short: a former slave, a teenager who labored in the mines in West Virginia and a young man who would work 10 hour days to be able to receive two hours of instruction at night after leaving home to travel 500 miles to Hampton Normal and Agricultural School in Virginia.

He was a young man who learned the value of hard work and developing skills related to manual labor as well as academic intellectual knowledge. More than anything else he credited his time at Hampton with two lessons: learn from a mentor as he did and learn to love labor - not just for financial reasons but "for labour's own sake and for the independence and self-reliance which the ability to do something which the world wants done brings."

His efforts paid off with the opportunity of his life: an invitation to help establish a school similar to Hampton in Tuskegee. At age 25, he was appointed principal at "Tuskegee Normal School for colored teachers."

But to his chagrin, upon his arrival he found no buildings. Their first classes were held in a shanty and an abandoned African Methodist Episcopal Zion church! Refusing to complain, Washington began with what he had and made plans to improve. Not only would the students learn academic knowledge, they would also be required to put half days of labor in - they helped to construct the buildings that eventually became the campus and provided other forms of labor, whether agricultural or other industrial skills - in order to have a half day of instruction.

Their days were scheduled from the 5 a.m. rising bell to the 9:30 p.m. retiring bell. In Washington's words: "From the very beginning at Tuskegee, I was determined to have the students do not only the agricultural and domestic work, but to have them erect their own building. My plan was to have them while performing this service, taught the latest and best methods of labour, so that the school would not only get the benefit of their effort, but the students themselves would be taught to see not only utility in labour, but beauty and dignity, would be taught, in fact how to lift labour up from mere drudgery and toil and would learn to love work for its own sake."

To be sure, Washington had his critics. Some students left because of the labor they disdained. Other vocal critics such as W.E.B. DuBois criticized the emphasis on vocational skills, preferring to move immediately to arts and sciences as a means to train future educators within their race. But Washington persevered.

He firmly believed that, "any individual who learned to do something better than anybody else - learned to do a common thing in an uncommon manner - had solved his problem, regardless of the colour of his skin."

And ultimately he succeeded in training thousands of leaders and in getting the attention of the world, not because he sought it, but because he selflessly gave of his talents to help others. At the end of his life in 1915, the school had "over one hundred well-equipped buildings, a faculty of almost two hundred teaching nearly forty trades and professions to more than fifteen hundred students, an endowment of some two million dollars."

The back cover to his autobiography, Up From Slavery, summarizes: "If the American dream is now a thing of the past, at least it once existed. And Booker Taliaferro Washington, born a slave, a Negro, the humblest of the humble, once made that dream come true. And he did it by devotion to virtues which no longer are extolled so highly as they once were - the virtues of cleanliness, godliness, thrift, perseverance, hard work, and honesty."

Peter Johnston, an East Bernard resident, earned a history degree from Cornell University and is a former high school history teacher. He established WORD Dynamics in 2003.