Commentary
Labor Day has just passed, which calls for a remembrance of a great apostle of dignified work. I mean Booker T. Washington, a man born into slavery and who became by 1900 perhaps the most famous American in the world. His life story is told in “Up from Slavery,” which is still an assignment in U.S. history and literature courses in high school, as it should be. His message has never been more timely.
For all his fame and travels, Washington devoted most of his life to education. After the Reconstruction Era ended in 1876, he devised an education plan that would bring freed blacks and their children into U.S. society as productive citizens leading honorable and happy lives in spite of Jim Crow regulations hindering their progress and denying equal access to services and public spaces. The South was a caste society, not only divided into black and white, but with whites subdivided into a fading plantation aristocracy, a merchant class, a working class, and “poor white trash.” How would blacks find a practical place to build their lives?
Black intellectuals, ministers, journalists, and teachers pondered ways of coping. What approach would most support black uplift? Washington’s answer proved the most influential at the turn of the century and beyond. He recognized social and political inequality as well as anyone, and he loathed it. But he argued that political agitation wouldn’t help; it would only inspire hostility among whites and resentment among blacks.
Not only that, but Washington understood that political activism succeeds only if the activists have some economic clout to back up their efforts. Only when blacks had made themselves financially useful—or better, financially necessary—to whites would they acquire political power and use it well.
To that end, Washington spent 30 years advocating the Protestant work ethic in his teaching at Tuskegee Institute, in articles and columns in the press, in meetings with dignitaries—including President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House—and in speeches such as the renowned “Atlanta Compromise” of 1895.
The plan came down to a lifestyle for blacks, not a direct political strategy. Work hard, learn a trade (carpenter, cooper, etc.), keep a neat house, be thrifty, go to church, and avoid drink, loitering, and consumerism. What will happen, he assured them, is that whites will notice and further employ and pay you. They will observe you in public well-dressed and well-mannered, just as they do whites who behave well in front of others. Your handsome property will raise real estate values, too. Whites will continue to regard you as inferior, but they’ll still hire you and even befriend you out of their own self-interest. A man who builds a sturdy and attractive fence will be wanted by anyone who needs a fence himself, and he won’t care about the color of the man who erects it.
That’s Washington’s faith. Economic gain will overcome racial animus, although the animus may linger. Whites will profit from blacks—and blacks will profit, too. As more and more blacks prosper, the ultimate aim of political power will get closer.
However, as Washington set about spreading the word of work ethic, he faced an unexpected problem—not with whites, but with blacks. Apart from all its other sufferings, slavery planted a terrible idea in the heads of the enslaved. It told them that work itself was an indignity, that enslavement and labor went together in a scheme of dehumanization. Washington heard this distorted belief expressed often when he toured black communities and spoke with young and old.
The first instruction, then, was to instill a work mindset. At Tuskegee, kids read the classics and learned to make bricks. They studied math and worked in the gardens and kitchen. Washington wrote a book called “The Negro in Business,” which profiled successful blacks who created and ran thriving firms, thus proving the outcome of hard work and savvy investment. Moreover, to Washington, the 25-year-old in Atlanta who made a modest living as a carpenter was just as ennobled by his labor as were those black entrepreneurs by theirs.
To read Washington today is to encounter lessons every 21st-century American youth ought to hear. He was a true believer in the American way, a nonstop fan of free enterprise, a fervent patriot. He told the young that if they work hard and keep to the straight and narrow in private affairs, they will rise. The fact of racial bigotry did not blunt his trust.
He is a worthy antidote to the negativity that students hear in U.S. history and civics classes, where instruction often emphasizes past and present discrimination, exploitation, conquest, and imperialism. The curriculum tells them that the big world they’re about to enter is unjust and unfair, that the old virtues go unrewarded.
This is one reason why pessimism and social mistrust run high among millennials and Generation Z. It’s an awful catechism for the young, a formula for doubt and despair. Washington’s words are an inspiration. Recently, the Texas State Board of Education included “Up from Slavery” in a list of readings that all public school students must study. This is a very good thing.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
