Up From Slavery: Chapters 8–11

After consultation with the citizens of Tuskegee, I set July 4, 1881, as the day for the opening of the school in the little shanty and church which had been secured for its accommodation.

In the midst of all the difficulties which I encountered in getting the little school started, and since then through a period of nineteen years, there are two men among all the many friends of the school in Tuskegee upon whom I have depended constantly for advice and guidance; and the success of the undertaking is largely due to these men, from whom I have never sought anything in vain.

I soon learned that most of them had the merest smattering of the high-sounding things that they had studied.

Miss Davidson was born in Ohio, and received her preparatory education in the public schools of that state.

I confess that the securing of this money in this way was a great surprise to me, as well as a source of gratification.

She made a personal canvass among the white and coloured families in the town of Tuskegee, and got them to agree to give something, like a cake, a chicken, bread, or pies, that could be sold at the festival.

There was a widespread hilarity, and a free use of guns, pistols, and gunpowder generally.

In the school we made a special effort to teach our students the meaning of Christmas, and to give them lessons in its proper observance.

My plan was to have them, while performing this service, taught the latest and best methods of labour, so that the school would not only get the benefit of their efforts, but the students themselves would be taught to see not only utility in labour, but beauty and dignity; would be taught, in fact, how to lift labour up from mere drudgery and toil, and would learn to love work for its own sake.

I told those who doubted the wisdom of the plan that I knew that our first buildings would not be so comfortable or so complete in their finish as buildings erected by the experienced hands of outside workmen, but that in the teaching of civilization, self-help, and self-reliance, the erection of buildings by the students themselves would more than compensate for any lack of comfort or fine finish.

The supplying of them to the people in the community has had the same effect as the supplying of bricks, and the man who learns at Tuskegee to build and repair wagons and carts is regarded as a benefactor by both races in the community where he goes.

It was the first service of the kind that the coloured people there had ever observed, and what a deep interest they manifested in it!

The complaints that morning were especially emphatic and numerous, because the whole breakfast had been a failure.

It is now long ago that I learned this lesson from General Armstrong, and resolved that I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.

I have noted time and time again that when an individual perjures himself in order to break the force of the black man’s ballot, he soon learns to practise dishonesty in other relations of life, not only where the Negro is concerned, but equally so where a white man is concerned.