(Ed is my "significant other")
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in
writing a poem.
- Booker T. Washington
(Up from Slavery)
In all things that are purely social we [black and white] can be as separate as the
fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.
- Washington
(speech at the Cotton States and International
Exposition, Atlanta, 18 September 1895)
No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual, and moral
well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.
- Washington
(attributed)
As nearly as any man I have ever met, Booker T. Washington lived up to Micah's
verse, "What more doth the Lord require of thee than to do justice, have mercy, and
walk humbly with thy God."
- Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
(quoted in Stokes, A Brief Biography of
Booker T. Washington)
(Today is the 155th anniversary of the birth of Afro-American educator Booker T[aliaferro]
Washington (1856-1915), born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia. Washington worked
in salt furnaces and coal mines after the Civil War before gaining an education at the
Hampton Institute and becoming an instructor there. In 1881, he founded the normal and
industrial school for Afro-Americans at Tuskegee, Alabama that later became the Tuske-
gee Institute, at one time the leading educational institution for black Americans. An able
orator, Washington believed fervently in economic independence as a necessary precursor
to achieving full racial equality, and for this reason he was often criticized as what would
now be called an "Uncle Tom" by other early black leaders. Sadly, he seems largely for-
gotten today, although I recall that during my youth he was revered as a leading exemplar
of the power of education for African-American progress. He is supposed to have noted,
"No man can hold another man down in the ditch
without remaining down in the ditch with him.")
Booker T. Washington:
No comments:
Post a Comment