Booker T. Washington, Builder o - African American History

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Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization. 18 farm was used as a means of education and was not allowed to degenerate into a mere farm and nothing more. It was even more difficult to persuade the students that the hard, heavy, dirty work of the brickyard was education than it had been to persuade them that farm work was education. Mr. Washington wasted no time in arguing this point, however, but merely insisted that without bricks they could not put up proper buildings, and that without buildings they could not have such a school as they must have not only for themselves but for their race. So this originally landless, buildingless, studentless, and teacherless school came eventually to have all four of these obvious requisites, but it still lacked a fundamental requirement for the effective fulfillment of its purpose. It lacked a boarding department where the students might learn to live. In his tours among the people Mr. Washington had found the great majority in the plantation 24.03.2006 Tuskegee Institute students laying the foundation of one of the four Emery buildings--boys' dormitories Page 15 districts living on fat pork and corn bread, and sleeping in one-room cabins. They planted nothing but cotton, bought their food at the nearest village or town market instead of raising it, and lived under conditions where the fundamental
Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization. 19 24.03.2006 laws of hygiene and decent social intercourse were both unknown and impossible of application. The young men and women from such homes must be taught how to live in houses with more than one room, how to keep their persons and their surroundings clean, how to sleep in a bed between sheets, how not only to raise but to prepare, serve, and eat a healthful variety of proper food at regular and stated intervals, to say nothing of a trade by which to maintain themselves both during their course and after graduation as well as the usual book learning of the ordinary school. Obviously they could not be taught these things unless they lived day and night on the school grounds instead of boarding about with people whose standards of living were very little if at all higher than those of their homes. Accordingly volunteers were called for, and the students made an excavation under their new brick building which was made into a basement kitchen and dining-room. As Mr. Washington says in "Up from Slavery," "We had nothing but the students and their appetites with which to begin a boarding department." As soon as this boarding department was established it became possible to influence directly the lives of the students during the entire twenty-four hours of the day. From then on each student was required to have and to use a toothbrush. Mr. Washington has since remarked that, in his Page 16 opinion, the toothbrush is the most potent single instrument of civilization. Then, too, it was possible for him to begin to enforce this injunction taken from one of his now well-known Sunday night talks, "Make a study of the preparation of food. See to it that a certain ceremony, a certain importance, be attached to the partaking of the food----" This exhortation sounds so commonplace as to be scarcely noticed by the average reader, but just put yourself in the place of one of these boys or girls who came from a one-room cabin and realize what a profoundly revolutionary, even sensational, injunction it is! To the boy or girl who had snatched a morsel of food here, there, or anywhere when prompted by the gnawings of hunger, who had never sat down to a regular meal, who had never partaken of a meal placed upon a table with or without ceremony--imagine what it meant to such a boy or girl "to see to it that a certain ceremony, a certain importance, be attached to the partaking of the food"--not on special occasions but at each one of the three meals of each day! Finally it came about that this school which had started with a paltry $2,000 a year, a great need, and the invincible determination of one man, came to have land, buildings, teachers, students, and even a boarding department. But in Mr.
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Booker T. Washington, Builder o - African American History

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