The Future of the American NegroWashington, Booker T.
History
The Future of the American Negro
Washington, Booker T.
African Americans
carpentry or mechanical or architectural drawing. We had trained many
in Latin, but almost none as engineers, bridge-builders, and
machinists. Numbers were taken from the farm and educated, but were
educated in everything else except agriculture. Hence they had no
sympathy with farm life, and did not return to it.
This last that I have been saying is practically a repetition of what
I have said in the preceding paragraph; but, to emphasise it,--and
this point is one of the most important I wish to impress on the
reader,--it is well to repeat, to say the same thing twice. Oh, if
only more who had the shaping of the education of the Negro could
have, thirty years ago, realised, and made others realise, where the
forgetting of the years of manual training and the sudden acquiring
of education were going to lead the Negro race, what a saving it would
have been! How much less my race would have had to answer for, as well
as the white!
But it is too late to cry over what might have been. It is time to
make up, as soon as possible, for this mistake,--time for both races
to acknowledge it, and go forth on the course that, it seems to me,
all must now see to be the right one,--industrial education.
As an example of what a well-trained and educated Negro may now do,
and how ready to acknowledge him a Southern white man may be, let me
return once more to the plantation I spoke of in the first part of
this chapter. As the years went by, the night seemed to grow darker,
so that all seemed hopeless and lost. At this point relief and
strength came from an unexpected source. This Southern white man's
idea of Negro education had been that it merely meant a parrot-like
absorption of Anglo-Saxon civilisation, with a special tendency to
imitate the weaker elements of the white man's character; that it
meant merely the high hat, kid gloves, a showy walking cane, patent
leather shoes, and all the rest of it. To this ex-master it seemed
impossible that the education of the Negro could produce any other
results. And so, last of all, did he expect help or encouragement from
an educated black man; but it was just from this source that help
came. Soon after the process of decay began in this white man's
estate, the education of a certain black man began, and began on a
logical, sensible basis. It was an education that would fit him to see
and appreciate the physical and moral conditions that existed in his
own family and neighbourhood, and, in the present generation, would
fit him to apply himself to their relief. By chance this educated
Negro strayed into the employ of this white man. His employer soon
learned that this Negro not only had a knowledge of science,
mathematics, and literature in his head, but in his hands as well.
This black man applied his knowledge of agricultural chemistry to the
redemption of the soil; and soon the washes and gulleys began to
disappear, and the waste places began to bloom. New and improved
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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