Up From Slavery

Booker T. Washington’s primary goals throughout his life as an educator are to improve the standard of living for all Black Southerners and to improve relationships between Black and white people. He argues that both these goals are best pursued through industrial education, teaching people skilled trades that will allow them to find practical work in an industrializing economy. In his travels throughout the South during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era, he finds that many Black people value education primarily as a way to escape manual labor. Booker T. Washington describes this trend as dangerous, reporting that many people become teachers, ministers, or government officials with little knowledge about the world around them and no practical skills to fall back on. Part of Washington’s philosophy stems from seeing how white people lived during and shortly after slavery. After hundreds of years of enslaving other people to do all their labor for them, Washington contends that wealthy white Southerners were often left with no ability to care for themselves. Meanwhile, Black people who were able to learn useful trades while enslaved were often able to improve their condition fairly quickly.

In the Reconstruction years, Washington worries that Black people have come to view manual labor as undignified. Through his work at Hampton and Tuskegee, he hopes to teach necessary skills while also imparting his students with the idea that working hard and doing a task well is noble, no matter what that task is. Washington does not hold this position early in his life. While working in the Malden mines as a teenager, he can only focus on leaving work as fast as possible to spend as much time as he can studying books. He sees his fellow laborers as stilted in their development. As Washington begins to interact with upper-class society, he notices that many of the people who are most successful and respected do not shy away from hard work. Sometimes, such as when Miss Mackie cleans the Hampton buildings, they even seem to enjoy it.

Washington is not opposed to Black people taking professional jobs, and he admits that there are many Black politicians, teachers, and ministers who are excellent in their roles. As he ages, though, he becomes more and more convinced that industrial education should be favored over academics for Black students, at least for the time being. He believes that by building their skill sets and making themselves indispensable tradespeople, the Black community will slowly and naturally gain social standing and move closer to racial equality. This outlook has gained Washington many critics, both during his lifetime and since, who view that his prioritization of manual labor betrayed a capitulation to white supremacy. His supporters believed that his approach was the most practical and least controversial way for Black people to succeed on a large scale. Washington himself, in Up From Slavery, sees no racial element in his call for dignified labor. He believes that all people will be able to serve both their own families and their larger communities more successfully if they learn how to do “real” jobs.