Booker T. Washington, Builder o - African American History

Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization. 234
24.03.2006
Page 321
them on the street and even looking at them without recognition. This naturally
was not intentional, nor was it because his mind was wool-gathering, but merely
because he was thinking out some idea with which the people and events
immediately about him had for the moment no connection and were
consequently totally obliterated from his consciousness.
Mr. Washington's strength of will and determination were never better shown
than in the closing hours of his life. When he was told by his doctors at St.
Luke's Hospital, New York, whither he had been taken by the New York
trustees of the Institute after his final collapse, that he had but a few hours to
live, he insisted upon starting for home at once. His physicians expostulated and
warned him that in his condition he could not reasonably expect to survive the
journey. He insisted that he must go and be true to his oft-repeated assertion, "I
was born in the South, I have lived and labored in the South, and I expect to die
and be buried in the South." This remark, when sent out in the Associated Press
dispatches announcing his death, touched the South as nothing else could have.
No Negro was ever eulogized in the Southern press as he was. Long accounts of
his career and death with sympathetic and appreciative editorial comments
appeared in most of the Southern papers.
One of the doctors who was called in to attend him at the time he was taken to
the hospital remarked that it was "uncanny to see a man up and about who ought
by all the laws of nature to be dead." In this condition,
Page 322
then, he set out upon the long journey from New York to Tuskegee. When the
party reached the Pennsylvania Station an invalid's chair was awaiting him, but
he declined to use it, and leaning on the arms of his companions walked or
rather tottered to his seat in the train. As soon as the train began to move
Southward a slight invigoration of triumph seemed to come over him which
increased as the journey continued, until at its close he seemed stronger than
when he started. All along the way he would inquire at frequent intervals what
point they had reached. The reaching and passing of each important station such
as Greensboro, Charlotte, and Atlanta he would seem to score up in his mind's
eye as a new triumph. And when finally he reached Chehaw, the little station
five miles from Tuskegee, he was fairly trembling with eager expectancy. As we
have said, he reached Tuskegee apparently stronger than when he left New York