Up from Slavery: An Autobiography
Campbell, the white man to whom I have referred to as the one who
induced General Armstrong to send me to Tuskegee. Soon after I entered
upon the work Mr. Campbell said to me, in his fatherly way:
“Washington, always remember that credit is capital.”
At one time when we were in the greatest distress for money that we
ever experienced, I placed the situation frankly before General
Armstrong. Without hesitation he gave me his personal check for all the
money which he had saved for his own use. This was not the only time
that General Armstrong helped Tuskegee in this way. I do not think I
have ever made this fact public before.
During the summer of 1882, at the end of the first year’s work of the
school, I was married to Miss Fannie N. Smith, of Malden, W. Va. We
began keeping house in Tuskegee early in the fall. This made a home for
our teachers, who now had been increased to four in number. My wife was
also a graduate of the Hampton Institute. After earnest and constant
work in the interests of the school, together with her housekeeping
duties, my wife passed away in May, 1884. One child, Portia M.
Washington, was born during our marriage.
From the first, my wife most earnestly devoted her thoughts and time to
the work of the school, and was completely one with me in every
interest and ambition. She passed away, however, before she had an
opportunity of seeing what the school was designed to be.
Chapter X.
A Harder Task Than Making Bricks Without Straw
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 buildings. 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 efforts, 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. My plan was not to teach them to work in the old way, but
to show them how to make the forces of nature—air, water, steam,
electricity, horse-power—assist them in their labour.
At first many advised against the experiment of having the buildings
erected by the labour of the students, but I was determined to stick to
it. I told those who doubted the wisdom of the plan that I knew that
our first buildings would not be so comfortable or so complete in their
finish as buildings erected by the experienced hands of outside
workmen, but that in the teaching of civilization, self-help, and
self-reliance, the erection of buildings by the students themselves
would more than compensate for any lack of comfort or fine finish.
I further told those who doubted the wisdom of this plan, that the
majority of our students came to us in poverty, from the cabins of the
cotton, sugar, and rice plantations of the South, and that while I knew
it would please the students very much to place them at once in finely
constructed buildings, I felt that it would be following out a more
natural process of development to teach them how to construct their own
buildings. Mistakes I knew would be made, but these mistakes would
teach us valuable lessons for the future.
During the now nineteen years’ existence of the Tuskegee school, the
plan of having the buildings erected by student labour has been adhered
to. In this time forty buildings, counting small and large, have been
built, and all except four are almost wholly the product of student
labour. As an additional result, hundreds of men are now scattered
throughout the South who received their knowledge of mechanics while
being taught how to erect these buildings. Skill and knowledge are now
handed down from one set of students to another in this way, until at
the present time a building of any description or size can be
constructed wholly by our instructors and students, from the drawing of
the plans to the putting in of the electric fixtures, without going off
the grounds for a single workman.
Not a few times, when a new student has been led into the temptation of
marring the looks of some building by leadpencil marks or by the cuts
of a jack-knife, I have heard an old student remind him: “Don’t do
that. That is our building. I helped put it up.”
In the early days of the school I think my most trying experience was
in the matter of brickmaking. As soon as we got the farm work
reasonably well started, we directed our next efforts toward the
industry of making bricks. We needed these for use in connection with
the erection of our own buildings; but there was also another reason
for establishing this industry. There was no brickyard in the town, and
in addition to our own needs there was a demand for bricks in the
general market.
I had always sympathized with the “Children of Israel,” in their task
of “making bricks without straw,” but ours was the task of making
bricks with no money and no experience.
In the first place, the work was hard and dirty, and it was difficult
to get the students to help. When it came to brickmaking, their
distaste for manual labour in connection with book education became
especially manifest. It was not a pleasant task for one to stand in the
mud-pit for hours, with the mud up to his knees. More than one man
became disgusted and left the school.
We tried several locations before we opened up a pit that furnished
brick clay. I had always supposed that brickmaking was very simple, but
I soon found out by bitter experience that it required special skill
and knowledge, particularly in the burning of the bricks. After a good
deal of effort we moulded about twenty-five thousand bricks, and put
them into a kiln to be burned. This kiln turned out to be a failure,
because it was not properly constructed or properly burned. We began at
once, however, on a second kiln. This, for some reason, also proved a
failure. The failure of this kiln made it still more difficult to get
the students to take part in the work. Several of the teachers,
however, who had been trained in the industries at Hampton, volunteered
their services, and in some way we succeeded in getting a third kiln
ready for burning. The burning of a kiln required about a week. Toward
the latter part of the week, when it seemed as if we were going to have
a good many thousand bricks in a few hours, in the middle of the night
the kiln fell. For the third time we had failed.
The failure of this last kiln left me without a single dollar with
which to make another experiment. Most of the teachers advised the
abandoning of the effort to make bricks. In the midst of my troubles I
thought of a watch which had come into my possession years before. I
took the watch to the city of Montgomery, which was not far distant,
and placed it in a pawn-shop. I secured cash upon it to the amount of
fifteen dollars, with which to renew the brickmaking experiment. I
returned to Tuskegee, and, with the help of the fifteen dollars,
rallied our rather demoralized and discouraged forces and began a
fourth attempt to make bricks. This time, I am glad to say, we were
successful. Before I got hold of any money, the time-limit on my watch
had expired, and I have never seen it since; but I have never regretted
the loss of it.
Brickmaking has now become such an important industry at the school
that last season our students manufactured twelve hundred thousand of
first-class bricks, of a quality suitable to be sold in any market.
Aside from this, scores of young men have mastered the brickmaking
trade—both the making of bricks by hand and by machinery—and are now
engaged in this industry in many parts of the South.
The making of these bricks taught me an important lesson in regard to
the relations of the two races in the South. Many white people who had
had no contact with the school, and perhaps no sympathy with it, came
to us to buy bricks because they found out that ours were good bricks.
They discovered that we were supplying a real want in the community.
The making of these bricks caused many of the white residents of the
neighbourhood to begin to feel that the education of the Negro was not
making him worthless, but that in educating our students we were adding
something to the wealth and comfort of the community. As the people of
the neighbourhood came to us to buy bricks, we got acquainted with
them; they traded with us and we with them. Our business interests
became intermingled. We had something which they wanted; they had
something which we wanted. This, in a large measure, helped to lay the
foundation for the pleasant relations that have continued to exist
between us and the white people in that section, and which now extend
throughout the South.
Wherever one of our brickmakers has gone in the South, we find that he
has something to contribute to the well-being of the community into
which he has gone; something that has made the community feel that, in
a degree, it is indebted to him, and perhaps, to a certain extent,
dependent upon him. In this way pleasant relations between the races
have been stimulated.
My experience is that there is something in human nature which always
makes an individual recognize and reward merit, no matter under what
colour of skin merit is found. I have found, too, that it is the
visible, the tangible, that goes a long ways in softening prejudices.
The actual sight of a first-class house that a Negro has built is ten
times more potent than pages of discussion about a house that he ought
to build, or perhaps could build.
The same principle of industrial education has been carried out in the
building of our own wagons, carts, and buggies, from the first. We now
own and use on our farm and about the school dozens of these vehicles,
and every one of them has been built by the hands of the students.
Aside from this, we help supply the local market with these vehicles.
The supplying of them to the people in the community has had the same
effect as the supplying of bricks, and the man who learns at Tuskegee
to build and repair wagons and carts is regarded as a benefactor by
both races in the community where he goes. The people with whom he
lives and works are going to think twice before they part with such a
man.
The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in
the end, make his way regardless of race. One man may go into a
community prepared to supply the people there with an analysis of Greek
sentences. The community may not at the time be prepared for, or feel
the need of, Greek analysis, but it may feel its need of bricks and
houses and wagons. If the man can supply the need for those, then, it
will lead eventually to a demand for the first product, and with the
demand will come the ability to appreciate it and to profit by it.
About the time that we succeeded in burning our first kiln of bricks we
began facing in an emphasized form the objection of the students to
being taught to work. By this time it had gotten to be pretty well
advertised throughout the state that every student who came to
Tuskegee, no matter what his financial ability might be, must learn
some industry. Quite a number of letters came from parents protesting
against their children engaging in labour while they were in the
school. Other parents came to the school to protest in person. Most of
the new students brought a written or a verbal request from their
parents to the effect that they wanted their children taught nothing
but books. The more books, the larger they were, and the longer the
titles printed upon them, the better pleased the students and their
parents seemed to be.
I gave little heed to these protests, except that I lost no opportunity