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Two Special Men:

By Willie Gaffer:

February 25, 2008:

This is an essay I have been wanting to write for a long time. There are two special men in American history, Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. To be sure there are a large number of special men in our history, but these men stand out because they overcame some fair sized barriers to manage what they did. I have had these two confused in my mind ever since I first learned about them. I did not learn about them in my K-12 history classes. In my history classes, I was made to believe there were no great American Negroes. Consequently, I came upon them rather late in life through independent reading.

My problem was I could never get straight which one did what. I decided to resolve my confusion by looking them up and writing about them. Then, all I will need to do is read the first two paragraphs of this essay. I will relearn that Booker T. Washington was an educator who became the principal of Tuskegee Institute and George Washington Carver was a botanist who I like to think of as the peanut guy. This was before Jimmy Carter’s time and Carver did not grow peanuts. He developed hundreds of uses for them. He probably did more good for the economy of the south than any southern political hack. Another way, suggested by Mrs. Gaffer, to remember which of these men did what is a mental crutch. I can associate Booker with book. The rest just follows.

I’ll start with Booker T. because he was born first. It will take a follow up essay to do justice to George Washington Carver. Booker T. lived from 1856 to 1915 a mere 59 years. That seems to be a short life to us, but was probably quite long for a Negro in that time frame. Especially considering that he was born into slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation technically freed him in 1863, but it took a long bloody civil war and the Thirteenth Amendment to make it stick. After that, in a short time, he managed a great deal. To be sure, he had some benefactors along the way.

His father was a white plantation owner who he never knew. However, he did have a name, which became Booker’s middle name, Taliaferro. His mother was a black slave in Southwest Virginia. Technically, Booker was half-white, but that mattered even less then than it does now. American custom classifies any person with African blood as Negro. It was a principle of social custom that once had the force of law and was sometimes called the One Drop Rule. Of course, he grew up as a black person. In 1865 Booker’s mother took the family to Malden where Booker acquired the surname of his stepfather, Washington. He worked as a salt packer and coalminer in West Virginia for several years.

Later, he made a break for himself as a houseboy by satisfying the stringent demands of the wife of the coalmine’s owner, Viola Ruffin. She became his first benefactor. With her encouragement, he went to school where he learned to read and write. That first learning gave him a thirst for knowledge, which he could not satisfy locally.

At age sixteen, he left Malden and moved to Hampton. Hampton is a city in Virginia at the mouth of the James River. There Booker enrolled in Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. Normal school means teachers college. The main purpose of this school was to train black teachers. Founded in 1868, Hampton Normal was one of the first colleges for Negroes in America. When he entered the school, Booker could not pay his way, but he could work for his tuition, which he did. He got through, and in 1878 he went to study at Wayland seminary in Washington, D.C. In 1879 he moved back to Hampton and became a teacher at Hampton Normal.

Then he acquired another benefactor. The Hampton president, Samuel C, Armstrong recommended him as the first principle of another school just being formed in Alabama. We can be sure his diligent scholarship earned him that recommendation. The school was the now famous Tuskegee University. At that time it was founded as Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. Until that time, the position of principle was reserved for white men. The founders took a bit of a risk by appointing Washington, but they did. As a result, he became the first principle of that school and the first Negro principle of any school. He remained in that position until his death in 1915.

While it remained a teacher’s school, Booker insisted on teaching young Negro boys useful skills such as masonry and carpentry. Although a man of vision, he also had the fools dream that Negroes could earn acceptance and a place in society by proving their worth in the economy. He did not perceive the depth of fear and hatred in American society. While he was principle the schools endowments rose from $2,000.00 to over 1.5 million dollars.

In 1895 he gave the famed Atlanta Compromise Address at the International Exposition in Atlanta. In that speech he articulated and refined his idea that Negroes could gain economic security and a modicum of acceptance if they were given vocational training. He essentially accepted the separate but equal doctrine of Negro White relations of the time. He added the caveat that whites must accept responsibility for improving the social and economic conditions of all people in exchange for Negroes acceptance of the status quo. This idea became known as the Atlanta Compromise.

White people, North and South, hailed the speech as a milestone in race relations. However, the black intellectual community took exception. In particular, W.E.B. Du Bois objected as the same old attitude of acceptance and submission. Du Bois, born in 1868, was a Harvard educated teacher and intellect. In 1909 Du Bois was the co-founder of the National Negro Committee, which later became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He insisted that Washington’s ideas accepted the white supremacist philosophy of the inferiority of Negroes. Du Bois had previously supported Washington, but this disagreement ended their relationship.

However, Washington became, for most purposes, the spokesman for blacks in the southern border states and the north where blacks retained their voting rights. After 1890, most blacks lost their rights in the Deep South through political manipulation by the southern racists. Washington continued to maintain his pipe dream of blacks gaining acceptance and equal rights through diligence patience, industry, and etcetera. It was a Ben Franklin philosophy that did not really fit the facts of the black man’s situation.

On the positive side, Washington managed to associate with many of the rich and powerful of his time, such as Carnegie, Taft, and Rosenwald. With that he was able to channel large donations from these sponsors into Negro causes. Many schools were founded as a result of his effort. These things continued after his death and became part of his legacy. It was largely due to this effort with the rich and the powerful that Tuskegee became the outstanding university it is today.

If you want more on Booker T. Washington, seek out his autobiography, “Up From Slavery.”