Booker T. Washington, Builder of a CivilizationScott, Emmett J. (Emmett Jay)
History
Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization
Scott, Emmett J. (Emmett Jay)
African Americans -- Biography; Educators -- United States -- Biography; Washington, Booker T., 1856-1915
First and last on these apparently aimless strolls with a stenographer
he visited not only the classrooms and shops but every corner of the
great institution. He would return to his office with a notebook full
of memoranda of matters to be followed up or changed, and of people to
be commended or censured for their efficient or inefficient handling
of this, that, or the other piece of work. Once after writing a series
of letters calling attention to ragged tablecloths, unclean napkins,
and uncleanliness in other forms in kitchens, bakery, and dining-rooms
without the desired result, he personally took charge of the
situation, organized a squad of workers, put things in proper
condition, and then insisted that they be kept in such condition.
His passion to utilize every fraction of time to its maximum advantage
led him even to smuggle a stenographer into the formal annual
exercises of the Bible Training School so that he might during the
exercises clandestinely dictate notes for the head of the Bible school
as to those features in which the program was weak, failed "to get
across," did not hold the interest of the people, seemed to be over
their heads, or whatever might be his diagnosis of the difficulty. He
was not interested in the program for and of itself, but was keenly
interested in its effect upon the people. If it interested and helped
them, it was a good program; if it did not, it was a poor program and
no amount of learning or technical perfection could redeem it. He
sometimes reduced his more scholarly teachers to the verge of despair
by his insistence that there should be nothing on the program at any
exercise to which the public was invited which the every-day man and
woman could not understand and appreciate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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