Booker T. Washington, Builder o - African American History

Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization. 132
24.03.2006
was injurious to the soil. Two-horse teams were seldom used. Sub-soiling, fall
plowing, fallowing, and rotation of crops were little known and less practised.
The county was producing per capita per year only about five pounds of butter,
four dozen eggs, and less than three chickens.
The Negroes were with few exceptions shiftless and improvident plantation
laborers and renters. Of the almost 13,000 Negroes in the county not more than
fifty or sixty owned land. They lived almost exclusively in one-room cabins.
Sometimes in addition to the immediate family there were relatives and friends
living and sleeping in this one room. The common diet of these Negroes was fat
pork, corn bread, and molasses. Many meals consisted of corn bread mixed with
salt water. This, then, was the raw material with which Booker Washington had
to work and from which has been developed, largely through his influence, one
of the most prosperous agricultural counties in the South--a county which has
been heralded in the press as feeding itself because of the great abundance and
variety of its products. In 1910 the per capita production for the county was: 40
gallons of milk, 11 pounds of butter, 7 dozen eggs, and 5 chickens. It must, of
course, do more than this before it will actually feed itself.
Mr. Washington was constantly drumming it into the
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consciousness of the Negro farmer that as long as he remained ignorant and
improvident he was sure to be exploited and imposed upon. He used to illustrate
this by the story of the ignorant Negro who after paying a white man fifty cents
a week for six months on a five-dollar loan cheerfully remarked: "Dat Mr.----
sho is one fine gen'lman, cause he never has ast me fo' one cent ob dat
principal." It may be surmised that this type of money lender is not enthusiastic
over Negro education.
It is significant of the importance which Booker Washington attached to
agriculture that the first great Federal official whom he invited to visit the
school was the National Secretary of Agriculture. In 1897 he got the Hon. James
Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture in President McKinley's Cabinet, to visit
Tuskegee and attend the dedication of the school's first agricultural building.
Secretary Wilson arrived at night accompanied by Dr. J. L. M. Curry, a
Southerner, a leader of the educational thought of the South, and the secretary of
the John F. Slater Fund Board. The students lined up on either side of the main
thoroughfare through the school grounds with back of them a great gathering of