The graduates, however, were the pride and concern of Washington's Tuskegee. Their careers and daily lives would be living symbols of the success or failure of the institution. So, as at Hampton, there was perhaps one graduate for every ten ex-students. There were others who received industrial certificates testifying to their mastery of their trade, but only those who proved their all-round worthiness became seniors and finally graduated. Graduation was almost an ordination as a minister of the Tuskegee gospel. It was Washington's frequent boast that not a single graduate of Tuskegee had been in jail. He did not say that no ex-student had been to jail, or even rarely a resident student whose crime went beyond the limits of the comman-

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dant's authority. He simply asked that Tuskegee be judged by the world on "its finished product rather than the raw material which sometimes spends a week, a month, or even a year at the school." 114

All over the South, and the North as well, were white skeptics of Washington's methods and true intentions, and they often focussed on what sort of people they imagined the graduates to be. In some, white supremacy doctrine was so ingrained that they could not believe education could make of a black person anything other than an inferior human being. Gordon Macdonald, for example, a white lawyer in Montgomery, created a stir when he claimed in 1903 that Tuskegee was miseducating its students. Though he later admitted under close questioning that he had never been on the Tuskegee campus, he wrote as though from certain knowledge that "for one genuine, hardworking husbandman, or artizan sent into the world by Washington's school, it afflicts this state with twenty soft-handed negro dudes and loafers, who earn a precarious living by 'craps' or petit larceny, or live on the hard-earned wages of cooks and washerwomen whose affections they have been able to ensnare." The women students, he asserted, learned to scorn hard work "while their poor mothers toil over the wash tubs and cook stoves that their daughters may be taught music and painting—God save the mark!—and to rustle in fine dresses in a miserable imitation of fine ladies." What really rankled Macdonald was Washington's dinner at the White House, which he said taught by example "that social equality is a possibility and that it is near." Washington's industrial education was merely "a blind"; his example was the real teacher. 115

Washington might have ignored Macdonald if his allegations had not appeared in the Washington Post and spread to many other papers. Washington assigned his white ghostwriter, Max B. Thrasher, to confront Macdonald with a demand for evidence. Macdonald offered to give Thrasher a court record of Tuskegee ex-students' misdemeanors and a list of Tuskegee girls who had studied music and painting while their mothers washed clothes, but he failed to produce either list and finally admitted that his informant on Tuskegee was William B. Paterson, Washington's longtime bitter rival as the white head of a black state college in Montgomery. 116 Thrasher died of appendicitis in the midst of his interviews with Macdonald, but before he died he made a personal investigation of each ex-student living in Montgomery and concluded "that Mr. Macdonald has failed to substantiate

172 Booker T. Washington

his statement that Tuskegee graduates are living by their 'wits' rather than by work." 117

Washington was both blessed and cursed by ambiguity, and a large part of the white public persisted in mistakenly believing that Tuskegee prepared its graduates or students for housework and other menial jobs. When scores of letters arrived each year asking for domestic servants, Washington's standard reply was that Tuskegee education was to "prepare them to be of service to their own people in the South." Girls in advanced classes, he wrote, "receive instruction in various branches of housekeeping, the expectation being that they will go back to their communities and by example, as well as by precept, aid in making their homes and those of their neighbors more nearly what they should be." 118 The demands, however, continued, particularly from the South. "If it be claimed that the whites are benefited by educating the negroes, then let us see some cooks come into white kitchens from the Tuskegee schools," one newspaper demanded. 119 Clark Howell of Atlanta also asked Washington: "Do you think sufficient attention is being paid to the education of negroes for housekeeping and domestic work?" The places were "ready and waiting for competent workers of this kind." 120 Washington made a few concessions. He sent Howell a servant from town, not a student. He once offered to send any white lodge or other organization in town planning a party a few students to serve without charge. 121 He even responded to a request for "a full negro, 'as black as possible,' " to go to France as a servant. 122 He considered but abandoned a plan to set up a domestic training school in Montgomery, and in 1914 as an extension service a domestic science teacher gave lessons to the black domestic servants of Tuskegee. 123

Though Tuskegee graduates almost without exception brought credit to their alma mater and themselves, one exception proved the rule. Albert G. Davis of the class of 1889 came to be listed in the catalogs as "present occupation unknown." Davis was "simply a drinking, worthless character," according to Washington's nephew, who frequently saw him in Birmingham. 124 He was always in some kind of trouble. The state superintendent of education accused Davis of impersonating another man at a teachers' examination and revoked his certificate. Davis denied the charge, claimed he had been denied due process, and asked Washington to help pay his legal expenses for a test case. When Washington refused but wished Davis well, Davis

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threatened to denounce Washington in the Boston Guardian, and to write a letter there every week until Washington relented. "Your New England friends and worshippers can form an idea of what many of your graduates think of you," he wrote his former principal. "All of my energies are now bent on tearing away your mask." 125 Washington ignored this attempt at blackmail, but when he gave a speech in Birmingham soon afterward his friends kept "a sharp lookout on Mr. Albert Davis." 126

In 1906 Davis was accused of impersonating another man at a letter carriers' examination. "No graduate of your school is a convict," he wrote Washington, "and I cannot bring myself to believe that you will instead of helping me get out of jail write me a nice unctious letter with sugar-coated words." 127 The charges were dropped, maybe through Washington's influence. 128 Soon, however, Davis was convicted on another charge and sentended to thirty days in the coal mines, plus court costs. The prison chaplain urged Washington to pay the court costs, but Washington said, "he has been doing wrong and acting carelessly for a long while, and I cannot help but feel that perhaps the lesson he learned in prison will help him rather than hurt him." 129 Washington soon relented and tried without success to intercede, and Davis had to work out his $58 court costs at 30^ a day. 130 After this, Washington had to modify his boast of Tuskegee graduates to say: "With one exception, no graduate of Tuskegee Institute has ever been lodged in jail." 131

CHAPTER 8

Other People's Schools

While Mr. Washington has of late thrown in a parenthetical expression about higher education, his main influence has been on the other side and has at times poked fun at the college-bred Negro. How far a word from Mr. Washington goes!

J. MAX BARBER, 1906

This matter of defending and explaining these so-called higher institutions makes me tired. The sooner these institutions can learn that they are simply making a contribution to the general education of the people, the better it is going to be for all concerned.

btw, 1910

THERE were major differences of social philosophy and racial strategy that polarized Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois and the Bookerites and Niagarites who followed them. Higher education versus industrial education, however, was not one of those polarizing differences. Just as Du Bois recognized the need for industrial training and a class of black artisans, Washington acknowledged the appropriateness of higher education. Sharing honors with the president of Harvard at a black banquet in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1904, Washington stated a truism about black education: "We need not only the industrial school, but the college and professional school as well, for a people so largely segregated, as we are, from the main

*74

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body of our people must have its own professional leaders who shall be able to measure with others in all forms of intellectual life. It is well to remember, however, that our teachers, ministers, lawyers and doctors will prosper just in proportion as they have about them an intelligent and skillful producing class." 1

Though the differences were not fundamental, they were considerable. Du Bois and his coterie of college men who somewhat hyper-bolically called themselves the Talented Tenth of the black race—more accurately the one-hundredth—scathingly criticised the materialism and incompleteness of industrial education. They also blamed Washington for the decline of northern white philanthropy for black colleges, though Tuskegee, Hampton, and other industrial schools had no direct responsibility for this except by being themselves. Washington, as we shall see, actually steered philanthropic funds toward rather than away from the black colleges. Nevertheless, from time to time, he could not resist the urge to poke fun at the airs of black college graduates, an urge that may have stemmed from his own lack of a college degree, as well as from the fact that these jibes played into the caricature his white listeners and many of his black ones wanted to hear. One of his faculty members at Tuskegee, a Harvard graduate, took issue with his remarks to Tuskegee students that, so far, the college men of the race had not shown themselves successful in "economic, constructive work." Washington said: "I make that statement, first, because I consider it a fact, and, second, because I hope to spur that class of men to that kind of endeavor." He wanted men to judge themselves by what they did rather than what class they belonged to, and illustrated this by saying of Robert E. Park, his white ghostwriter, that he did not "know "whether Dr. Park is a graduate of any college or what college." His only consideration in collaborating with Park was "that he is a broad, sympathetic, strong, helpful man." 2

Though a bad experience at a theological seminary in his youth had warped Washington's attitudes toward the more abstract and less functional aspects of higher education, he directed his ablest graduates and his own children to colleges. He supported the principle of the career open to talent, while at the same time, living in the poverty and quasi-illiteracy of the rural South, he believed both industrial school graduates and college graduates had obligations to the unskilled masses. Yet, he felt trapped in the world's stereotype of him. T. Thomas Fortune proposed to Washington in 1903 that he simply

176 Booker T. Washington

put himself on record unequivocally as supporting higher education. Washington replied that he had already done so. "Would it be possible for me to place myself on record in any more forceful and plain manner than I have already done in my books, 'The Future of the American Negro' and 'Up from Slavery'? I have discussed fully every one of these questions in these two volumes, and ... in the October number of the Atlantic Monthly. You will note that not one of the papers that are opposing me has dared to print a single line from the Atlantic Monthly, neither did these papers print my Louisville address. They systematically avoid publishing anything that defines my position on all these vital questions." 3

What Washington said on higher education in The Future of the American Negro, his most systematic statement of his views on many subjects, was: "I would say to the black boy what I would say to the white boy, Get all the mental development that your time and pocket-book will allow of,—the more, the better; but the time has come when a larger proportion—not all, for we need professional men and women—of the educated coloured men and women should give themselves to industrial or business life. The professional class will be helped in so far as the rank and file have an industrial foundation, so that they can pay for professional service." Nevertheless, his endorsement of higher education for blacks was often studiedly ambiguous. In this same book he also said: "Boys have been taken from the farms and educated in law, theology, Hebrew and Greek,—educated in everything else except the very subject that they should know most about." He said: "It is little trouble to find girls who can locate Pekin or the Desert of Sahara on an artificial globe, but seldom can you find one who can locate on an actual dinner table the proper place for the carving knife and fork or the meat and vegetables." And he cited the southern white man's idea of black education in a way that might have been misread as his own, that it was merely "a parrot-like absorption of Anglo-Saxon civilisation, with a special tendency to imitate the weaker elements of the white man's character; that it meant merely the high hat, kid gloves, a showy walking cane, patent leather shoes, and all the rest of it." So, while it was Washington's purpose to exhort the educated to contribute to the improvement of the lot of all blacks, it is easy to understand how his words could be construed as indictment. 4

There is a certain irony in the fact that Booker T. Washington, the

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man so many black college men considered their enemy, became a trustee of two of the leading black universities, Howard and Fisk. The irony cuts even deeper in the case of Howard University, where he became a trustee in 1907 at the behest of its white president, Wilbur P. Thirkield, for Thirkield owed his position to the fact that his predecessor had two years earlier tried to introduce industrial education and had been ousted by a near-revolt of students and faculty. 5 Thirkield came from a different tradition, of liberal arts and home missionary activity, but he was hardly installed in office when he showed a willingness to embrace Washington for both his practical help and his ideas. After a long interview with Washington and Frissell, Thirkield wrote the Tuskegean that he had drastically revised the Howard curriculum: "Manual work is required of all our students and the course for A. B. can be completed with honor without either Greek or Latin." He projected Howard's future development in civil, mechanical, and sanitary engineering. Then he mentioned Washington's half of a tacit bargain, "I trust that you have borne in mind my suggestion, in which you concurred, that you write to Mr. Carnegie with reference to a library for Howard University." 6 Soon afterward, Washington was unanimously elected a trustee, and he accepted the offer as an opportunity to "build up a great Negro university," one "abreast with the best institutions of the kind in the country." 7

As news spread of Washington's election, not all of the letters were congratulatory. The black radical William A. Sinclair wrote from Philadelphia that Washington should decline. He had heard from other alumni and said: "I notice that your selection has already divided the graduates and friends of the University into hostile camps. I fear that the struggle will be even more bitter and acrimonious than that of two years ago, and thus the peace of the University will be undermined and its prosperity imperilled." 8 "This fellow is a cheeky cuss," Scott noted on the margin of the incoming letter, and he himself answered it. 9 Whitefield McKinlay, Washington's friend and lieutenant, however, saw the invitation as "an end to the foolish 'higher education' criticism." 10 As matters turned out, Washington's appointment was neither the beginning nor the end of strife.

Washington as a trustee managed to serve both Howard's needs and his own political purposes. He helped Howard get its Carnegie library building, 11 and was the school's liaison with the General Education Board and the U. S. Congress. His greatest service to the uni-

178 Booker T. Washington

versity, however, was during the hostile, southern-oriented atmosphere of the Wilson years, when in 1915 a southern congressman removed from the appropriation bill the entire Howard appropriation which had been regularly approved for the past quarter-century. Washington enlisted the trustees of Tuskegee Institute in an appeal to the President and key members of Congress for fair treatment for Howard University. 12 Guided by the larger mind and campaign promises of President Wilson, the White House interceded with the Democratic leadership in the Senate, which restored the cut and gained concurrence of the House. 13

Despite Thirkield's early gestures toward industrial education, there is no evidence that Washington as a trustee succeeded or even tried to change the character of Howard. In his inaugural address, Thir-kield took the middle ground. He emphasized that, "while efficient, industrial training alone is not sufficient for the rounded and complete life of any people," and that "there must be a body of elect men and women trained to large knowledge" to lead the people—"But may this 'elect tenth' never forget that education involves obligation; that their election is not to privilege alone or to mere place and power above men, but rather to service and sacrifice for the downmost man." 14

Washington used sparingly but significantly his powers as a trustee, most notably in 1909 when Du Bois made plans to leave Atlanta University to join the NAACP staff and begin editing its journal, the Crisis. Du Bois was reluctant to leave the academic world altogether, since it had been his home for his entire adult life, and a movement developed at Howard to try to attract him there as a professor of sociology. The movement was led by Kelly Miller among the faculty and by John R. Francis among the trustees, and it had considerable support. Thir-kield asked Washington his opinion in a private interview, and Washington advised against it, as did two other trustees. Thirkield then put the quietus on the appointment on the ground that Washington objected to it. The last thing in the world Washington wanted was to be exposed as exercising a veto on Du Bois, so he hastily sent a letter to Thirkield stating his own version of their interview. He had, he conceded, opposed Du Bois as more a hindrance than a help to Howard, and as unlikely anyhow to come at the salary Howard could afford, but he had promised to stand by Thirkield if he decided in favor of the appointment. It was the kind of question, he insisted, that only

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the president should decide. "In the last analysis," he said, "he [the president] bears the burden and should have the credit or censure for success or failure." 15 Trustee Francis tried to save the situation by eliciting from Du Bois a statement that his organization, the NAACP, was not "an organization for personal abuse." 16 Washington meanwhile covered his own tracks by sending Francis and others copies of his letter to Thirkield as a vindication of his own behavior and thrusting the burden of judgment on Thirkield. As Emmett Scott explained to a friend, Thirkield had "sought to block the selection on the ground of the Doctor's opposition." Instead, Thirkield should have had the backbone to decide for himself, and not "take refuge behind somebody else." 17

In a final effort to persuade Washington himself to nominate Du Bois, Francis wrote to the Tuskegean: "A recent interview with him has convinced me that his location at Howard will do more to eliminate from his efforts the offensively abusive & unscrupulous fellows who contaminate his career than anything else in sight." 18 In other words, as another commented, the appointment would be "a good way to squelch him." 19 Washington stood firm, however. Howard did not make the offer, and in view of Washington's letter to Thirkield it could not be said exactly that he had vetoed the appointment.

Learning a year later that a local candidate for Howard trustee had "a part of the Du Bois crowd working for him," Washington took steps to interfere. 20 He wrote to Thirkield that, being a national institution, Howard needed a broad-based board of trustees. "I have noted in connection with several institutions," he wrote, "that wherever they have a large number of local Trustees, trouble is likely to brew sooner or later." Local trustees would be influenced in their votes and actions by personal friends. As for the local candidate in question, if his name should come up, he was not the right man for the place. "Aside from his vile habit of getting intoxicated, he has other qualities which wholly unfit him for being a Trustee." 21 The local man was passed over in favor of Washington's lawyer-banker friend from Nashville, J. C. Napier, recently appointed to the high Washington post of register of the Treasury. 22 Washington also helped his lieutenant, Judge Robert H. Terrell, become a Howard law professor over "tooth and toe-nail" opposition. 23

Washington missed an opportunity, however, to participate in the choosing of the first black president of Howard. Thirkield resigned

180 Booker T. Washington

suddenly in 1912 after becoming a Methodist bishop. Washington's first thought was of Thomas Jesse Jones, a white Hampton faculty member, as a suitable president. The two men were in close agreement on many questions confronting blacks at that time. Kelly Miller, however, wrote Washington that in his opinion "the time has now arrived for colored men to be put in control of activities intimately connected with the racial life and uplift," and offered himself as a candidate. 24 Washington could hardly argue with Miller's general point, since he had been the president of his own all-black faculty for a quarter-century. In a "highly confidential" reply, "not to pass from your hands," Washington was favorable but tentative. Had the time really come for a black president? "Without committing myself on this point, I would say I believe it has, still I confess I am open to argument." If a black man was to be put in charge, Washington endorsed Miller as "the logical man." 25 Perhaps he had some second thoughts on learning that a committee of trustees had narrowed the list to two white men, for he wrote Miller, "I think it just as well that you do not let anyone know what my position is regarding the presidency as my support might hurt more than it would help in certain directions." 26 So another white clergyman became the president of Howard, and Washington let pass a chance to give history a nudge.

Another direction that Howard might have gone is indicated by a letter received from his friend and fellow-trustee Napier in 1915. Napier wrote that he had had an extended conversation with a professor at the University of Tennessee "about the line of Agricultural work we wish to get on foot at Howard University." He reported of the professor: "The first thing he asked me was why I did 'not go to Dr. Washington, the best posted man in the entire country on such matters, for advice and suggestions as to a method of procedure.' He insisted that you were the man to take the lead in the matter. I tried to explain to him how you felt and just what your position of modesty was when I heard from you. He regretted it; but promised to furnish me, within the next few days, some suggestions which may be of benefit to us." 27 This letter strongly suggests that Washington, while perhaps in favor of the introduction of agriculture in the Howard University curriculum, preferred that some other trustee take the lead, not out of modesty but with the certain knowledge that his own sponsorship of such a proposal would cause a storm of protest from the liberal-arts oriented faculty, students, and alumni. On the other hand,

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it is possible that Napier was in fact the only sponsor of the agricultural program and that what he thought was "modesty" was actually disapproval.

Washington was also a trustee of Fisk University for the six years from 1909 until his death. Here if anywhere was his opportunity to prove his benign attitude toward higher education and his ability to turn his administrative talent and fund-raising genius to the aid of a faltering institution. Washington seemed to genuinely like Fisk, where he had been for twenty years a frequent visitor and occasional commencement speaker. He had drawn on Fisk for many of Tuskegee's teachers. Margaret Washington had graduated from Fisk in 1889, and young Booker attended Fisk from 1907 until his graduation in 1913. In addition to these considerations, Washington was predisposed to favor Fisk because, though Du Bois had graduated there, Fisk as a whole took less part in the polarization of black social thought than other leading black universities such as Atlanta.

A crucial element in Washington's ever closer relations with Fisk University and particularly with its administrators was his effort, finally crowned with success, to persuade Andrew Carnegie to give to Fisk. At first Fisk asked for a music building, but Washington decided the time was not ripe for this particular request, for Carnegie had recently given to several other black schools at Washington's behest, and Washington had the impression, as he wrote President James G. Merrill, that "he [Carnegie] was feeling just a little that he ought to do a little more for the white people in the South before going further in the direction of helping colored institutions." 28 As many months passed without any action, Merrill wrote in exasperation: "Now of course if Mr. C. won't give any thing but a library 'beggars should not be choosers,' but if he could see the uniqueness of our case and give the music building ... it would be a very great mercy." 29 Washington explained that the crotchety old Scot would probably refuse to give a music building out of fear that if it became known that he had begun a new line of giving there would be an avalanche of letters asking for music buildings. At Washington's suggestion, therefore, the Fisk authorities asked for a library and planned to use the second floor for musical purposes. 30 Washington soon reported success, though Fisk would have to raise a nearly matching amount. "Mr. Carnegie will give the building," Washington wrote, "and one of the reasons, that made him especially pleased to do so is the fact that Mrs.

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Washington was educated there." 31 Washington sent copies of this letter confidentially to his lieutenants, saying, "you might show it to some of my . . . critics." 32 "The Morris, the Dubois and the Grimpke adherents will now have to take a new tackle," replied J. C. Napier, "for this one thing which you have done for Fisk University and the cause of higher education is more than they and their kind have done in all their lives." 33 Washington would find his critics, however, on other grounds than money or bricks and mortar.

President Merrill certainly valued Washington's friendly services, and almost immediately he invited the Tuskegean to speak at the Fisk commencement. When Washington pleaded a prior engagement, Merrill invited him to address the anniversary celebration the following winter. 34 When Washington learned, however, that without telling him Merrill had also invited Du Bois to speak, he withdrew from any such confrontation. As Scott explained to Merrill, "since the point of view of himself and Dr. Du Bois might differ, he does not think that it will be wise to have anything in the way of a seeming controversy." 35 Merrill reported soon afterward that Du Bois had also declined, and then Washington agreed to speak. 36

Carnegie had offered Fisk $20,000 if it would raise an equal amount, but after two years its earnest but tired old president still had not matched the sum. Washington proposed a plan: "Mr. Carnegie is very fond of Mrs. Washington, and I am quite sure if she were to make a personal appeal to him on the grounds that she is a Fisk graduate, to leave off the condition and to give you $25,000 straight for the erection of the library that he would accede to her request." 37 Margaret Washington presented to Carnegie the case for Fisk, and her husband followed it by explaining that, while Merrill was a poor fund raiser, he was an excellent educator and administrator, and that the Fisk faculty could be trusted to take good care of the library. 38 Carnegie yielded to the Washingtons' request and made his grant outright. His secretary could not resist pleading, however: "As it would not take many of these 'waivers' of endowment to embarrass us dreadfully please have the President keep the circumstances to himself." 39

Another development at Fisk accompanied Booker T. Washington's increasing presence there. Du Bois discovered to his alarm that in the 1906-7 Fisk catalog a new department of "Applied Science" was added, including courses in agriculture, animal husbandry, plant breeding, structural botany, and rural engineering, and in addition courses in

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mechanical arts and domestic science. Du Bois's address to the graduating class in 1908 was a jeremiad against this development and, according to his own account, brought about the hasty disappearance of the new department and the resignation three months later of President Merrill. 40 The history of Fisk by Joe M. Richardson (1980), however, tells a more complex story, that Fisk had accepted money for vocational instruction since 1884 but was careful not to let this work, mainly in the preparatory division, interfere with the commitment to liberal education. In 1905 it accepted $5000 from the Slater Fund for a department of applied sciences, but this applied to secondary and normal pupils only. 41 At any rate, there is no evidence that Washington had anything to do with these developments.

When President Merrill wrote to Washington of his intention to resign, and of his regret that he could not have any further part in the education of Washington's son, he said of his reason: "How I wish that I had been enough of a money getter to have felt justified in staying." 42 Merrill enlisted Washington in the search for a successor. The field soon narrowed to Washington's own candidate, George A. Gates, ex-president of Grinnell and, later, Pomona. Gates, however, gave no promise of improvement over Merrill, for he was said to have resigned at Pomona "because he could not raise the money for endowment." 43 Washington defended the choice, however, on the basis of his own favorable impressions of Gates's educational administration at Pomona. More important than fund raising, he wrote, was keeping Fisk up to its current academic standard. "If the college does good work the money will come in some way." 44

It is hard to believe that Washington wanted to see Fisk take a weak president, but he apparently believed that his own golden touch would help the school raise the funds it needed. He got Gates off to a brisk start by sending a check he had persuaded Jacob Schiff to give Fisk. 45 Soon invited to become a trustee, Washington accepted with alacrity. 46 At the first opportunity he visited the campus and gave Gates his own earthy view of the priorities in running an educational institution, three points that "dwell constantly in my mind." First was the condition of the boys' outhouse. "I am sure," he wrote Gates, "that no boy ever goes to the closet and comes away with any added respect for the University. I am also sure that no boy goes there unless he is absolutely forced to do so. When this is true, it does not add to the health of the students." Second, Washington noted that the basements were

184 Booker T. Washington

not clean and orderly. Third, arrangements should be made so that students could bathe, for at the current stage of civilization regular bathing was "no longer considered a luxury but a necessity, especially where large numbers of people congregate." 47 Washington also objected to the failure of Fisk students to rise to recite. 48 He thought that colleges taught too little English, and in the English courses neglected composition in favor of literature. Even where composition was taught, he thought, "too much stress is put upon the abstract, and too little upon the concrete." 49

Washington mentioned none of these private misgivings about the way higher education was conducted in his detailed and persuasive article praising Fisk, "A University Education for Negroes," which appeared in the New York magazine Independent in March 1910. The appearance of the article coincided with the formal inauguration of Gates as president. Washington spoke of the widespread black "love and even reverence for Fisk University." He remarked that during a recent tour of the campus he was surprised "that any institution, with so little means, could do so much work and such good work, and care for so large a body of students." He had nothing but praise for the dedicated faculty and earnest students, and pointedly deplored the fact that, while so much philanthropic wealth was going into white colleges, so little went to good black higher institutions such as Fisk. 50

Neither Washington's private letters nor his magazine article revealed much understanding of the nature of higher education, but he so clearly supported it that he was embarrassed that the editors of the Independent felt it necessary to preface his article with a note declaring "how mistaken is the idea that he is concerned only in the industrial training which will fit the race to support themselves in a humble station of life." To his friend Robert R. Moton, commandant of cadets at Hampton Institute, Washington grumbled privately: "This matter of defending and explaining these so-called higher institutions makes me tired. The sooner these institutions can learn that they are simply making a contribution to the general education of the people, the better it is going to be for all concerned." 51 Gates himself touched a sensitive spot in his inaugural address at Fisk when, perhaps too anxious to overcome criticism of his alliance with Washington, he invidiously compared Fisk and Tuskegee, saying that graduates of Tuske-gee needed four years of additional study to graduate from a higher institution such as Fisk. Washington protested that, like most people

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who had no knowledge of it, Gates undervalued industrial training. One might reply "that it would require at least two or three years for a graduate of Annapolis to complete the course at West Point" or for an M I T student to get through Harvard and vice versa. 52 Gates could only lamely reply that he was merely saying that Tuskegee and Hampton were secondary schools, whereas the general public believed they were "doing the same kind and grade of work that Fisk is doing and in addition to that carrying on the superb work in the industrial and manual education and training." He left the controversial passage out of the printed version of the address. 53

Despite these differences of outlook, perhaps inevitable, Washington worked as hard and effectively for the financial rescue of Fisk University as though it were part of his Tuskegee Machine. In October 1910 the Fisk board of trustees voted to undertake an ambitious campaign for $300,000. A committee consisting of Harvey L. Simmons, a New York trustee, and a Fisk teacher got nowhere until sometime in 1911, when Washington and Paul D. Cravath, New York corporation lawyer and son of Fisk ex-president E. M. Cravath, replaced the committee and took charge of the campaign. Washington and Cravath persuaded the General Education Board to grant $60,000 if Fisk raised the remaining $240,000 from others. By 1913 Washington and Cravath secured the matching amount, much of it from Washington's friends Julius Rosenwald, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan, as well as from the more traditional sources of support for the school. Fisk alumni pledged $45,000 of the total. 54

President Gates played so small a part in the fund raising that it must have seemed to outsiders that Booker T. Washington was in charge of Fisk. But Gates held the administrative reins firmly in hand and continued the liberal arts tradition at Fisk until a brain concussion suffered in a train wreck forced his sudden resignation in 1912. There was a two-year interregnum as two Afro-Americans, Dean Herbert H. Wright in 1912-13 and Dean Cornelius W. Morrow in 1913-14 administered the university while the trustees searched for another white president. Whereas at Howard, Booker T. Washington had at least considered a black president, as a Fisk trustee he unambiguously opposed such a move as untimely. The insistence of some blacks in and out of the university on a share of the governance of the institution was unfortunate, he wrote George E. Haynes, sociology professor and Urban League officer. "Now you and I both know," he went on, "that

186 Booker T. Washington

this kind of agitation is most harmful and unwise. I am sure that the white people who during all these years have given of their money and of their time, and have suffered much in the way of ostracism, have done so for the sole purpose of helping. . . . The very worst thing that we could do is to indicate that we do not appreciate what has been done and is being done for us." Haynes agreed that the time was not ripe. 55

The trustees first offered the presidency to Thomas Jesse Jones, who turned it down, possibly because he sensed that his longtime connection with Hampton and industrial education would provoke controversy at Fisk. 56 The trustees next considered Fayette A. McKenzie, a Ph. D. from the University of Pennsylvania then teaching sociology at Ohio State University. He had taught in an Indian boarding school in Wyoming for several years and also had done research on Indians. McKenzie made the requisite pilgrimage to Tuskegee so that Washington might look him over. Washington was enthusiastically for McKenzie, and the doubters among the trustees came around to his support after Cravath threatened to resign unless they joined in the recommendation. 57

McKenzie turned out to be one of Washington's worst mistakes. He was a good fund raiser, but abetted by Isaac Fisher, a Tuskegee graduate and ex-employee, as editor of the Fisk University News, McKenzie gradually secured better relations with Nashville whites at the price of humiliation and alienation of the blacks. In 1925 a student revolt precipitated his resignation. 58

At the other end of the black educational ladder from the colleges were the wretchedly underfinanced black public schools, and Washington took a fostering interest in them, particularly the ones in the South. By 1912 he was urging Tuskegee's graduates not to found any more little industrial schools in imitation of Tuskegee, but instead to work at improving the public schools. 59 His chief agency in this work was the Southern Education Board, the executive body of the Conference for Education in the South, but also linked by interlocking directorate with the General Education Board and the Peabody and Slater Funds. The Southern Education Board, also known as the Ogden Movement, would appear to be the ideal instrument for the improvement of black as well as white education in the South, filled as it was with friends of Tuskegee and Hampton. Its stated purpose was to stimulate popular campaigns for better public schools for every child

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in the entire South. But Washington's relationship to the SEB proved one of the most frustrating of his life. He had close connection with the northern members of the board, including William H. Baldwin, Jr., chairman of the Tuskegee trustees; Robert C. Ogden, another Tuskegee trustee; George Foster Peabody, contributor to both Hampton and Tuskegee; Walter Hines Page, Washington's publisher and admirer; and Wallace Buttrick, executive secretary of the General Education Board. Hollis B. Frissell was also a member, as was Edgar Gardner Murphy, Washington's old ally in Montgomery, Alabama, and J. L. M. Curry of the Peabody and Slater Funds. Washington was himself a paid agent of the Southern Education Board, but his duties were never clearly defined and his appointment seemed almost a gesture of apology that he was not invited to be a member of the board.

The problem with the Southern Education Board was that its purpose was really the promotion of white public education. The southern white college presidents who formed the southern contingent of the board insisted on this. They also insisted that no black person, even Booker T. Washington, could meet with the board. It was the understanding of Charles W. Dabney, president of the University of Tennessee, that for the first two years at least "we would not emphasize the negro too much. In the excited state of public sentiment, this was considered wisest." 60 Another of the southern members, Edwin A. Alderman, president of Tulane and later of the University of Virginia, stated frankly in a national magazine article that in his view the education "of one untaught white man to the point that knowledge and not prejudice will guide his conduct ... is worth more to the black man himself than the education of ten Negroes." 61 Charles D. Mclver, president of the State Normal and Industrial College of North Carolina, was in some respects more democratic than his southern colleagues on the SEB, but he believed that disfi anchisement of southern blacks by educational qualifications had a salutary effect on black education. "The less the Negro has to do with politics the more cheerfully will his white neighbors help him to work out his educational and industrial salvation," Mclver wrote. 62 These men and Murphy, an anguished southern paternalist, prevented the northerners on the Southern Education Board from doing anything effective for black education on the ground that it would jeopardize the board's alliance with southern white moderates.

Throughout the thirteen-year duration of the Southern Education

188 Booker T. Washington

Board, Washington was kept on the sidelines. He could influence policy only indirectly through Baldwin, Frissell, and Ogden. Even before the board was formed, Washington urged Frissell in 1901 to "keep in close and constant touch, in order to guide matters wisely." 63 A few months later he warned Frissell that "you and others will have to watch carefully to see that nothing is done that would give the impression that Negro education is being shoved aside for white education, I mean that it is much easier to drift in the direction of least resistance. Of course Negro education means to those who are engaged in it a certain amount of trial, difficulty and ostracism that does not obtain in white education and for this reason the average man would yield to the temptation to go in the direction where there is least hardship to be endured. The recent outbreak in the South regarding my dining with the President convinces me more than ever of the importance of broad liberal education for all the people regardless of race." 64 Frissell reported to Washington a few days later on the organizational meeting of the Southern Education Board: "I spoke to Dr. Curry and Mr. Buttrick first about your appointment on the Committee. They both approve of it. I wanted to wait until to-night's meeting before formally having your name presented, in order to get enough atmosphere created so that a Southern representative will suggest your name, say Walter H. Page." Page had been born in the South, but he lived in New York. Apparently part of the atmosphere Frissell referred to was J. L. M. Curry's testimonial to Washington. He said: "In twenty years laboring and associating with him under all kinds of trials and conditions, I never heard him say or do an imprudent thing." 65 Baldwin also wanted to see Washington voted onto the Board, but neither he nor any of the other northern members could bring himself to chill the atmosphere by proposing his membership. 66 Frissell tried to reassure Washington by writing: "The fact that it is controlled by Mr. Ogden & Peabody will make it necessary for it to devote much thought to Negro as well as white education." 67 Ogden and Peabody footed the small expenses of the board, but on this crucial question of black representation it was clear from the beginning that the southerners were in control. Washington was appointed from the start as an agent of the SEB. Ogden wrote him: "I am not quite ready to express an opinion as to the precise form that this latter office may take." 68 It turned out to consist largely of touring the South urging

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blacks to improve their own schools and to conciliate their white neighbors.

Washington took the initiative in planning the SEB's Alabama public educational campaign in 1902. He arranged for the cooperation of the governor and the state superintendent. It was the white men, however, who took charge of the campaign, beginning with a mass meeting of whites in Montgomery. 69 This educational movement, a Tuskegee graduate pointed out, "means a very little to the Negro. The Negro teachers are very poorly paid now, because the persons in authority have a general understanding to cut their (Negro's) pay and augment the white teachers' salaries. If it is decided to help any rural schools, it must come thro' the medium of the Co. Supts, Trustees, etc., in just the ways they say. They say, educate the white boy first and then the Negro boy. This was the common consent among them." 70

Washington continued to search for a meaningful role in this educational movement that meant "a very little to the Negro." Under the sponsorship of President Alderman of Tulane, Washington went to New Orleans in the fall of 1902 to address an all-day meeting of the black teachers of Louisiana. He stressed the need for pressure on the white school officials to provide better salaries and longer terms and adequate schoolhouses for blacks. Many whites attended, either out of interest in the subject or to see Washington the celebrity. Alderman came as close on this occasion as he ever did to a public stand for equal opportunity, and he believed the meeting marked an epoch in the history of New Orleans. "There was a tremendous lot of nervousness about it," he confessed to Baldwin, "and a slip-shod sentence from either of us would have had power to raise a good deal of trouble, but I am glad to say that much good was done, and absolutely no criticism after the meeting. There was much doubt expressed by certain people as to the wisdom of my going into it, but I made up my mind that I had not worked eighteen years for nothing, and that if I could not afford to stand up for the education of all people, I may as well find it out." 71

Despite these brave words, Alderman remained one of the southern members of the SEB who would exclude Washington, its own agent, from its meetings in New York. All blacks were also excluded from the public platforms of the Conference for Education in the South in

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various southern cities. Ogden did make a feeble attempt to include Washington on the conference program in 1903, but he yielded to southern white protests out of fear that his shaky intersectional partnership would collapse. 72 Particularly irked that even the private northern meetings of the SEB excluded him, Washington wrote to Ogden in 1902 that his conscience would compel him to resign as an SEB agent unless his duties were defined and he was permitted to report personally to the board as the white agents were. "When this proposition was made and when I first began receiving it [his salary]," he wrote, "I was under the impression that I was to see the Southern members of the Board and that some kind of definite, systematic and organized plan was to be agreed upon by which I could work, but this has not been done. I cannot see that I am doing anything now for education in the South which I was not doing before I began receiving this money, and under these circumstances I cannot feel that it is right, I repeat, for me to continue receiving it." 73

It must have occurred to Washington that he was in effect being bribed to stand out of the way while the SEB did its work of promoting white public education. But his lifetime habits of interracial diplomacy gained the upper hand, and instead of sending the letter to Ogden he sent it to Baldwin to deliver to Ogden. Instead of delivering it, Baldwin merely talked with Ogden about the problem Washington presented, as he thought the letter as phrased "would seem like a criticism." 74 Washington realized that he would have to state his complaint more bluntly, and wrote Baldwin in 1903: "I have found it difficult to bring myself to the point where I could feel it proper to make a written report to a body which did not feel that it could afford to have me personally present at a meeting in order that I might make a report in the same way that the other officers made theirs. . . ." 75

Baldwin, though the chairman of the Tuskegee trustees, simply ignored Washington's complaint, for it challenged the intersectional compromise at the heart of the Southern Education Board. There was an undercurrent of disagreement between the northern and southern members of the SEB, but whenever disagreement reached the surface it was the northern members who yielded to the adamant southerners. Dabney wrote home to a Tennessee colleague after an SEB meeting, referring darkly to a "partisan feeling, at least a disposition to consider the negro's educational interests as separate from the whites," which "aroused intense anxiety in the Southern men." 76 The south-

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erners in the movement preferred to use the term "universal education," which in practice meant the universal education of white children in the South. On the very day that Washington protested his exclusion from board meetings, a North Carolina educational campaign agent wrote the director of that state's campaign that in an eastern North Carolina town he had visited "they are hot for the tax, if they can leave the negro out." He sounded the dominant note of the Ogden Movement. 77

Occasionally Baldwin, before his death in 1905, nudged his southern partners and timid Robert Ogden toward comparative racial liberalism, as when he persuaded Edgar Gardner Murphy and some other southerners to lunch with him and Carl Schurz in 1904 after the old Reconstruction warhorse had scathingly attacked southern racial injustices in a national magazine. Murphy, full of "sensitiveness and Southern blood," had to be talked into the luncheon, then told Schurz his article would make southern whites "hate the negroes." In reporting to Washington, Baldwin commented: "I wanted to say to him it ought to make the Alabama people hate themselves, but there is no use in stirring up bad blood." 78 But it was Ogden's movement, and he was overwhelmed by the gothic complexities of southern white supremacy and sectionalism. "The relation of the races has involved real complications quite aside from prevailing injustice," he wrote Baldwin. "We are doing great good but can destroy it in five minutes." 79 What they were actually doing was steadily widening the gap between the educational provisions and hence the life opportunities of the two races.

Washington persistently argued for the presence of blacks in the southern educational conference programs. "The whole question is very difficult for me to understand," he wrote Baldwin. "For example, I have just received a most hearty and earnest invitation from a white Chautauqua in Louisiana inviting me to deliver an address there in August." 80 The more Washington privately complained, however, the more remote grew the southern contingent of the SEB. Their theme was that Washington, though seemingly popular among white southerners, was actually unpopular, and that the SEB could not defy public opinion. "Tuskegee and Mr. Washington were never so intensely unpopular," Murphy wrote Ogden in 1904. "Poor fellow! I am glad he does not see—and cannot see—the situation as it is. It is partly the unjust resentment at his success, partly the just resentment of the

192 Booker T. Washington

'showiness' of so large an institution, partly the effect of the national & state campaigns, partly the old old feud between black and white." 81 When Washington urged upon Murphy the need for southerners of both races to deal directly with each other, Murphy shied away. "The worst elements of both races cannot be expected to get together," he answered, "but it is especially saddening to me to find the increasing suspicion between those on both sides who ought to understand each other better. This is due in large degree to the instinctive feeling among the masses of our white population that there has been in your own leadership a distinct change of emphasis, if not of direction. I confess quite frankly that I think this feeling not wholly unreasonable." 82 Murphy warned Ogden with deep pessimism that southern demagogues lay in wait for a confrontation on race policy that "would 'drive to cover' men ... on whom we—and the negro— must depend for fairness and patriotism." 83

The Southern Education Board reached its crisis at its New York meeting in the summer of 1906, as the lowering clouds of impending race riot hung over Atlanta and as the racial imbalances created by its own educational campaigns were becoming more apparent. The very appetite for educational opportunity that the educational campaigns generated tempted whites all over the South to seize the school funds of the disfranchised blacks, to gerrymander school districts so as to exclude blacks from local tax benefits, and to develop an anti-black ideology to justify unequal treatment. Washington wrote urging the northern members to take "a strong stand in reference to Negro country schools." He charged that the southern members "do not put themselves on record in a straight and frank manner as much as they should," and that as a result the educational movement "means almost nothing as far as the Negro schools are concerned." In one Alabama county, for example, the black schools had been reduced from thirty to three; in many cases black teachers' pay was as little as $10 a month; and he had seen a contract between a black teacher and a white school official for a salary of $1.40 per month. 84

George Foster Peabody tried to force consideration of the state of black public education on the southern members, but they suggested delay until the South was calmer. Alderman said he had not felt comfortable about southern racial attitudes since Booker T. Washington's dinner at the White House five years earlier. "We should avoid anything like a crusade," Alderman spoke for the other southerners;

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"guard against going into it with heat"; avoid "touching a sore tooth." Peabody replied that it was "about time for a crusade of the right kind," but none of the others took up the theme, and the Southern Education Board continued to skirt the whole subject of black education. 85

Charles L. Coon, who had become superintendent of schools of Wilson, North Carolina, after several years as a Southern Education Board agent, undertook to disprove the frequent southern white claim that the whites were heavily burdened to pay for the black public schools. Coon demonstrated in the North Carolina state school report for 1905-6 by an array of statistics that, counting indirect taxes, more tax money was paid by blacks than the black schools expended. In 1909 he elaborated this argument with statistics from other southern states and presented his findings in an address at the Conference for Education in the South. The conference and the SEB continued to ignore the implications of Coon's study, but Washington immediately recognized its significance. He arranged for the Committee of Twelve to publish and disseminate it in pamphlet form. 86

Washington continued to press the case for the black public schools. In 1909 he sent the SEB members evidence that in Lowndes County, Alabama, $20 per capita went to white schoolchildren and 67^ per capita to black schoolchildren. 87 He pointed out that all nine of the Alabama teachers' institutes were for whites, and that Georgia had established an agricultural school in each congressional district for whites, but none for blacks. Nearly every southern state had appropriated legislative funds for building schoolhouses, but none of this money went for black schools. 88 Washington wrote to Peabody in exasperation that much of the advancement of white education "is being made at the expense of Negro education, that is, the money is actually being taken from the colored people and given to white schools." The southern whites who attended the Ogden conferences, he warned, "do not, I think, always state the truth." 89

Washington also tried to badger the General Education Board into doing something to correct the inequity of public high school provisions, for whites only. He wrote to its chief executive officer, Wallace Buttrick, in 1910: "I very much fear that if the General Education Board continues to employ people to encourage white high schools, and does nothing for Negro high schools, the southern white people will take it for granted that the Negro is to have few if any high schools.

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. . ." 90 Buttrick neatly sidestepped the suggestion by replying, "The professors of secondary education in the Southern States are not under our control or direction. All of our work is done through existing institutions." Though the GEB had provided the salaries of these professors, the fact that they promoted only white high schools in their states was to Buttrick simply a matter of policy of the state universities that employed them. 91

Just as it was becoming clear to Washington that the Southern Education Board and General Education Board were structurally incapable of helping the black public schools, he was fortunate enough to find more directly committed philanthropic agencies which he could more directly control in ameliorating the disadvantages of the black schools. It was not enough, and white public education steadily gained ground on the provision for black schools, but it was better than nothing at all.

The first of these new agencies for black public schools was the Anna T. Jeanes Foundation, generally known simply as the Jeanes Fund. Anna Jeanes was a wealthy Quaker woman in her eighties living in Philadelphia. When in 1905 Washington approached her for a contribution toward a new dining hall at Tuskegee, he had known her for a decade. She asked Washington the same question that she had recently posed to Hollis B. Frissell when he had called on her on a similar errand for Hampton. She asked: "Is not aid for 'Rural Schools' more desirable and important than the Tuskegee dining room, (to cost $54,000)? that might benefit the few while the influence of Rural Schools might benefit the many." 92 Taking a large view of his educational mission, Washington agreed with her: "I could use to the very greatest advantage $10,000 in the way that you suggest. There are few greater needs than that, especially if the money is used in a way to stimulate self-help, and that would be the manner in which I should like to use it." He thanked her for the opportunity to serve her purpose and said that he would find some others to help with the dining hall. 93

Washington apparently realized from the beginning that more than $10,000 was at stake, and at an early stage he and Frissell went into partnership and kept one another informed about negotiations with Miss Jeanes. Washington at first suggested that the money be made to do double duty, being lent at six per cent to black patrons building their own schoolhouses, and using the interest to pay part of the cost

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of schoolhouses. Miss Jeanes frowned on that suggestion. 94 A few weeks later, while Washington and Frissell were still considering various alternative uses for the money, Washington visited her again and she decided to enlarge the amount to $200,000, placing it for fiscal purposes under the General Education Board. 95 From the beginning, however, it was clearly understood that Washington and Frissell would make the policies and spend the money. 96 They began by giving matching grants for the building of black schoolhouses to communities in the immediate vicinity of their institutions.

Sensing her approaching death, Anna Jeanes in 1907 gave a million dollars to Washington, Frissell, and such other trustees as they would select, for an independent agency for black rural schools. In delicate negotiations concerning the terms of the gift, Washington and Frissell sought to satisfy Miss Jeanes's wishes but also tried to get the best terms for blacks and to disassociate themselves from the General Education Board, whom they did not inform until they had completed their negotiations with Miss Jeanes. 97 The two men then selected a board for the new fund modeled on the Tuskegee board of trustees. It included the most liberal white southerners available, Samuel C. Mitchell, president of the University of South Carolina; David C. Barrow, chancellor of the University of Georgia; and Belton Gilreath, a Birmingham coal operator and Tuskegee trustee. Among the northerners were Washington's collaborators in the Southern Education Board, Ogden, Page, and Peabody, along with Andrew Carnegie and William Howard Taft, then Secretary of War. The black members were all trusted lieutenants of the Tuskegee Machine: Robert R. Mo-ton of Hampton Institute, Robert L. Smith of Texas, J. C. Napier of Nashville, and A. M. E. Bishop Abraham Grant.

Anna Jeanes lived until November 1907, long enough to see her agency's work underway but not before it had chosen an executive officer. James Hardy Dillard, a classics professor and dean at Tulane who had been active in the Ogden Movement, at first refused the offer of appointment as general agent because he had only three more years of teaching before he could qualify for a Carnegie pension. This was a coveted award in that day when universities had no pension programs. But the Jeanes trustees persuaded the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to count Dillard's years with the Jeanes Fund toward his retirement, and he accepted. 98

The trustees of the Jeanes Fund debated the best use of its limited

196 Booker T. Washington

resources for the improvement of the black rural schools. Washington's first suggestion was that it be used "in changing and kneading public sentiment, so far as the white people are concerned, as to the question of Negro education in the public schools." Just as the Southern Education Board had stimulated interest in white schools, he reasoned, the Jeanes Fund could promote a concern for the development of black schools. "Of course, a man to do this work would have to be very discreet," Washington recognized. "It might not appear wise for him to be too bold in his utterances or in his activities." 99 Dillard, however, proposed a more direct program, one that could show tangible results in black schools rather than be dissipated in an uncertain white sentiment about black education. Beginning in 1908, he used the Jeanes Fund to employ the first supervising teacher. She was Virginia Randolph, an able and experienced black teacher in Henrico County, Virginia. She served, in effect, as a county superintendent for the black schools of her county, improving teaching methods, introducing simple forms of manual training that did not call for expensive apparatus, learning at first hand about conditions and problems in the scattered country schools, and guiding their development.

Randolph and Dillard developed a network of Jeanes supervising teachers, using Randolph as the model, first in other counties in Virginia and then in other southern states. In some counties the supervising teacher was on the faculty of some intermediate normal or industrial school such as Hampton and Tuskegee graduates had founded by the score; in other cases the Jeanes Fund agents simply searched out the best teacher in the county and set him or her to work visiting the other schools. Dillard took care "that nothing we might do should tend to lessen the responsibility of the regular school officials," and the Jeanes Fund never entered a county without authorization and assurances of good will. 100

As chairman of the Jeanes trustees, Washington insisted that the fund should not only stimulate the black teachers to self-help but somehow prod white school officials into more equitable provision for black schools from the public funds. He sent Dillard a copy of Coon's pamphlet on "Public Taxation and Negro Schools" to be given to the South Carolina state superintendent, John E. Swearingen. He wrote to Dillard: "Mr. Swearingen's attention might also be called to the fact that Negro education is not primarily for the benefit of the Negro, but is for the benefit of the South, in order that it may have the fullest

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development." When a black man was hanged for a crime, he noted, "one does not go around seeking to find how much of the expense of hanging was contributed by white people and how much by Negroes. Both races pay for the hanging in order that society may be protected, and both races pay for the education of all the people so that society may be protected." 101 Such negative arguments were the only ones that had any appeal in South Carolina, where the ratio of school expenditure for the white and black child was eleven to one. 102

By 1915 the Jeanes Fund, with help from the General Education Board, had placed black supervising teachers in 134 southern counties; in 110 of these counties part of the salary, from one-fourth to one-half, was paid by the county school board. 103 These achievements were statistically insignificant, as compared with the great and growing gap of educational opportunity between white and black. The typical black school was a black country church full of barefoot children of tenant farmers, children allowed to go to school for three or four months in the off-season, taught by a teacher barely more knowledgeable than the pupils. But at least it was a beginning.

Meanwhile the Rosenwald program to provide more adequate school buildings began to supplement the Jeanes Fund program to improve the quality of teaching for black schools. Rosenwald, the most imaginative of the American philanthropists of his time, began on a small scale in 1912, when he gave Booker T. Washington $25,000 to distribute to schools that were offshoots of Tuskegee, thus continuing programs along the same line funded earlier by Henry H. Rogers and Jacob H. Schiff. Washington next persuaded Rosenwald to allot $2100 of this money to the building of six model schoolhouses near Tuskegee Institute. 104 Rosenwald wanted these houses to be constructed "at the lowest possible cost without sacrificing quality. By this I do not mean a cheap building, of course, but a good building at a low price." Though his own firm offered prefabricated houses of a score of designs for sale by mail order, Rosenwald gave explicit instructions not to consider Sears, Roebuck in the purchasing "except as a factor toward reducing the cost." 105 In each construction contract the people of the community were to contribute as much in money, materials, or labor as they could.

Washington's report on the construction of these first Rosenwald schools was so satisfactory that Rosenwald decided to continue the experiment on the larger scale of a grant of $30,000. 106 It was Wash-

198 Booker T. Washington

ington's plan at first to build Rosenwald schools only in Macon County and a few surrounding ones until they were thoroughly supplied, and then to move on to other counties. He soon realized, however, that such a strategy would be unpopular in the depressed South, so he decided to open the program to a wide territory and build in counties where such schools were requested rather than in more apathetic ones. 107

Washington worked closely with the Jeanes Fund board of trustees and with Dillard, who became the agent of the Slater Fund as well as the Jeanes Fund, in carrying out the Rosenwald campaign. Though Rosenwald had insisted that his own company should not be given preference, Washington wrote to Rosenwald's secretary that "in connection with the building of schoolhouses we are using as far as we can Sears and Roebuck material; we not only show our appreciation to Mr. Rosenwald but save money at the same time." 108 He did not buy the Sears prefabricated buildings, however, because he found that local construction with the patrons donating their labor was far cheaper and also involved the parents in the education of their children. He had to be conscious of costs in another sense as well. "I think we will have to be very careful," he wrote the Alabama state rural school supervisor, "not to put so much money into a building that it will bring about a feeling of jealousy on the part of the white people who may have a schoolhouse that is much poorer." 109

A few months before his death in 1915, working through Tuske-gee's extension department and in harmony with a state rural school supervisor, Washington decided to extend the school-building program to five additional counties in Alabama that were "thoroughly ripe for such a movement." He wrote Rosenwald that by October 1, 1915, they could expect construction of a total of fifty school-houses. 110 Thus began the program basic to the quality of black education that was later conducted, after Washington's death, by the Rosenwald Foundation. "It is impossible for me to describe in words the good that this schoolhouse building is accomplishing," Washington wrote W. C. Graves, Rosenwald's secretary, "not only in providing people with comfortable school buildings, who never knew what a decent school building was before, but even in changing and revolutionizing public sentiment in the South, as far as Negro education is concerned." 111 To Rosenwald he wrote: "I often wish that you could have time to hear and see for yourself some of the little incidents that occur

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in connection with this work. I wish you could hear the expressions of approval that now come from white people—white people who a few years ago would not think of anything bearing upon Negro education. I wish you could hear the expressions of gratitude uttered over and over again by the most humble classes of colored people." 112

In his role as an educational statesman, Washington challenged the stereotype of mere accommodation and self-seeking. In a skillful and broad-gauged way he brought the money of the philanthropists into conjunction with the areas of need at every level of black education. He took care of the needs of his own institution first, of course, and did not scruple to play upon the foibles of the rich to gain his ends. But he also helped to channel philanthropy into a great number and variety of black higher educational institutions. As a dispenser of the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie and as a trustee of both Fisk University and Howard University, he showed himself to be a friend rather than an enemy of black higher education. There were limitations to his grasp of the concept of liberal education that limited his usefulness to it, but there was no such limitation on his work of rescue of the black public schools through the Jeanes Fund and the Rosenwald school-building program.

Washington h#d dreamed for decades, since the earliest days of Tuskegee, of an independent survey of the black private schools and colleges that competed for funds in the North. Such a study could separate the fraudulent claimants from the large majority of legitimate ones, and perhaps also establish some objective standards for the earnest but not equally efficient school enterprises for blacks. He saw a great opportunity in 1911 when Anson Phelps Stokes, treasurer of Yale University, wrote him of the founding of the Phelps-Stokes Foundation with a million dollars from the will of his aunt, Caroline Phelps Stokes, for many years a generous donor to Tuskegee. Stokes asked Washington, among others, to suggest a method for using $5000 to $10,000 "to the special advantage of negro education of the type that you are now doing at Tuskegee." 113 Washington replied that many of the denominational schools were trying to do the same kind of work as Tuskegee but failing because they did not know how. "If a person of tact and ability is selected," he suggested, "this individual could go to one of these schools and spend, say, a week or two showing them, in the first place, how to clean up the premises, what cleanliness and order mean, and above all, how to make out a course of

200 Booker T. Washington

study that would actually mean something to the people in the community where the school exists." 114 Such a program would in effect duplicate for the private and denominational schools what the Jeanes Fund teachers were doing for the public schools. The first thing to be done, however, should be "a pretty thorough study of the entire field with a view of selecting schools that are physically located in the right place, and secondly, those that have such backing as to insure them a reasonable future." But Washington warned that "to kill out a poor school" was the hardest task, saying: "The killing out of the poorer schools would have to be done very gradually and through a process of placing emphasis upon the efficient ones rather than any direct attempt to have the poorer ones disappear." 115

What Washington proposed was perhaps too ambitious for the initial project of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, and in 1911 and early 1912 he endorsed the Phelps-Stokes Fellowships, one each at first at the University of Virginia and the University of Georgia, granted to young white college students who would spend the year researching some aspects of the race problem. 116 These Phelps-Stokes fellowship papers later appeared in pamphlet form as part of a growing social-science literature on the race problem. Washington also persuaded the fund to contribute to the costs of the Tuskegee Negro Conference and his speaking tours of the various southern states. 117

Washington nevertheless continued to write and converse with Anson Phelps Stokes about his proposal of a survey of the roughly 600 black schools in the South classed as "above the ordinary public schools," that is, high schools, industrial schools, colleges, universities, and professional schools. "It would be a matter of the greatest help to have these schools thoroughly examined with a view of letting the public know just what they are doing," Washington insisted. "This has never been done. For example, there are many so-called industrial schools that have the reputation of giving industrial training, but in fact the work is a mere sham. There are not a few institutions with the name 'college' and 'university' that are in fact mere local schools pretending to do college work when in reality the majority of their students are in the primary or public school grades with no college work whatever being done." He suggested that the Fund employ someone with a salary and travel expenses, and strongly recommended his own ghostwriter Robert E. Park, who had degrees from

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Michigan, Harvard, and Heidelberg, and who had traveled widely in the South and knew conditions there among both whites and blacks. 118 The Phelps-Stokes Fund adopted Washington's suggestion, but rejected Park as the researcher, though Washington gave Park the credit for first suggesting the idea to him and called Park "by far the best qualified white man in any part of the country to have charge of this work." He conceded that the candidate put forward by Hampton Institute, Thomas Jesse Jones, was "a good man" but "a professional statistician," whereas Park "has the knack of meeting all classes of people in a way to get from them valuable information and at the same time not offend them." 119 The rejection of Park was probably fortunate for him, for he went on in 1913 to the University of Chicago to begin a distinguished career in sociology. Thomas Jesse Jones, a Welsh-born former teacher at Hampton, took this opportunity to move into a key position in the bureaucracy of educational philanthropy. His study of the black educational institutions, published by the U. S. Bureau of Education in 1916, was important not only for its information but because it gave the philanthropic foundations the initiative in reorganizing black higher and secondary education according to initiatives and standards of the foundations rather than of the black institutions affected. Jones moved on to Africa in the 1920s with a Phelps-Stokes survey that reached the sinister conclusion that industrial education was the type best suited to the distinctive racial nature of black Africans. 120 This was a position Washington never endorsed, and it was Park rather than Jones whom Washington proposed to the Phelps-Stokes Fund. Nevertheless, once Jones began his work, Washington loyally promoted it and worked to keep Oswald Garrison Vil-lard and his allied black militants from forming a counter-organization. 121 In the area of education, as in other aspects of black life, Washington left an ambiguous legacy, despite his earnest labors in behalf of every form of black education.

CHAPTER 9

Up from Serfdom

I are sho' ready to lef dese lowgrounds. I has hearn Booker T. has seen de ile mill, de big wheels an' all dat.*

WHATEVER else the Wizard of Tuskegee was in his many guises, he was always indelibly a southerner. He blended into his time and place like an old tree in a woodland landscape: of medium size and medium brown color, at home in a rumpled business suit, unex-citable, a master of understatement, modest but too dignified to be humble. In the many photographs taken of him at Tuskegee in company with northern dignitaries, the Yankees generally stood in stiff pose while he lolled relaxed with a thumb in each side pocket of his trousers. When he dressed up for public occasions it was as a prosperous peasant, wearing a brown derby instead of a top hat. The same rural southernness showed in his speech, never salty but always earthy and direct. He abhorred abstractions as he lived among people to whom mathematics was a foreign language and polysyllables a Yankee invention. He was southern also in his closeness to nature, the out-of-doors, in his pleasure in working with animals, in his fear and distrust of cities and city-dwellers, whether white or black.

Southernness came naturally to Washington, for he was born in the South, chose to remain there, achieved the zenith of his fame there

♦An old black woman, attending the dedication of the Mound Bayou Cotton Oil Mill, November 25, 1912.

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in his Atlanta Compromise address. And, when his time came, he chose to die there. It was a southern professor at a southern college, John Spencer Bassett of Trinity College, North Carolina, who called Washington "the greatest man, save Robert E. Lee, born in the South in a hundred years." 1 Bassett's southern neighbors made it so uncomfortable for him after that heresy that he left for the North, but Booker T. Washington stayed.

Washington knew the harsh injustices of southern society, but he was sentimentally fond of the southern physical environment. From the crowded cities and coal-burning trains of his northern speaking tours, he loved to retreat to the outdoor life of the south. He rode horseback all his life, hunted and fished when he could, and derived psychic healing from cultivating his own garden. "When I am at my home at Tuskegee," he once wrote, "I usually find a way by rising early in the morning, to spend at least half an hour in my garden, or with my fowls, pigs, or cows. As far as I can get the time, I like to find the new eggs each morning myself, and when at home am selfish enough to permit no one else to do this in my place." Other early risers found him in his overalls. "The pig, I think, is my favorite animal," he said, running through a list of the varieties he kept. "I do not know how this will strike the taste of my readers, but it is true . . . and it is a real pleasure to me to watch their development and increase from month to month." 2 Like the prosperous peasant the world over, Washington's garden was vegetables, not flowers. Compared to them, the food in the most expensive restaurants seemed tasteless. "One feels," he said, "when eating his own fresh vegetables, that he is getting near to the heart of nature; that is, not a secondhand, stale imitation of something, but the genuine thing." 3

Though he was well aware that many southern whites were proclaiming their region a "white man's country," he insisted repeatedly that he and the other blacks who were born there were loyal sons of the South and devoted to the region's best interests. He endorsed the New South doctrine of Henry Grady, who had said in the 1880s that, while northern capital investment would be welcomed as an aid to southern modernization, the southern people of both races should settle their racial differences among themselves. However Washington accommodated himself, and by implication his fellow-blacks, to the exclusion, segregation, and discrimination in the South, he insisted that it was merely the price of admission and that he was just as much

204 Booker T. Washington

a southerner, an insider, as the white man. He was an assimilationist above all else, and his quarrel with the blacks who left for the North or who talked of emigration was with their giving up the struggle in the land of their slave forefathers, with their self-alienation. He himself did all he could to wear the badge of the southerner, though it was not honored everywhere, and never said in the North anything about the South that he would not say at home. "I believe I have grown to the point," he said in 1898, "where I can love a white man as much as I can love a black man. I believe that I can sympathize with a Southern white man as much as I can sympathize with a Northern white man. To me 'a man is but a man for a' that and a' that.' " 4

Washington was more complex, however, than his public statements suggest. Where necessary he found secret means to fight directly against the meaner forms of southern white supremacy, and his ultimate goal was not a separate sphere for the black man but the opportunity and means to do all that the whites considered part of a full life. This was similar to the dreams of the European immigrants who poured into America by the millions during Washington's lifetime to begin the struggle upward into middle-class life, but with differences caused by Washington's being southern and black. Unlike the typical southerner of either race of his day, Washington was not ill-educated, poor, or provincial in his range of experience. He was a widely traveled man of the world, a man who hobnobbed with millionaires, with political leaders and heads of state, with the leading editors and authors who made opinion, and with those who ran the United States. And yet there clung to him the air and attitudes of a country bumpkin. He distrusted the immigrants who shared his dream of assimilation because of their foreignness and because they were labor competitors with blacks and lived in the cities he abhorred. He had the fear of strangers that coexisted with hospitality in all southerners.

Washington was a southerner also in his suspicion of the black intellectuals who dwelt in the northern cities or at the southern colleges he had never attended. He dismissed their arcane knowledge as too much from books and too little from life. "My experience," he wrote, "is that people who call themselves 'The Intellectuals' understand theories, but they do not understand things. I have long been convinced that, if these men could have gone into the South and taken up and become interested in some practical work which could have brought them in touch with people and things, the whole world would have

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looked very different to them. Bad as conditions might have seemed at first, when they saw that actual progress was being made, they would have taken a more hopeful view of the situation." But their environment had isolated them until all they could do was "insist on the application of the abstract principles of protest." At first, he said, the intellectuals protested against the South, which rarely heard them, then began to attack nearer home, until they "made me a frequent and favourite object of attack." 5

Washington was, however, a southerner with a difference. A lifetime of experience with white southerners gave him, and most other blacks in the region, an ability to see through the white stereotypes to the realities of southern society. When he himself employed the white stereotypes in his utterances, one assumes that he did so deliberately, to further a purpose of his own. Sometimes that purpose was his own influence and security, but it was more often an effort to buy social peace at the cost of concessions to the southern social order of segregation. In the Atlanta Compromise in 1895 and on other occasions he reassured whites that blacks would not demand an abstract "social equality," or intrude into private gatherings where they were not wanted. But he tried to distinguish between segregation and subordination, conceding separation for the present if blacks were to have "a man's chance in the commercial world" and equal educational opportunity. His approach was bound to fail, however, because it accepted the structural framework that stultified blacks' efforts at progress. The chief purpose of segregation was subordination. How could blacks make educational and economic progress without status as citizens and voters? How could blacks get their share of school funds without votes? How could black farmers struggle out of tenancy when whites refused to sell their land on the open market, banks refused to advance credit, and whitecap mobs—an informal, local Ku. Klux Klan—drove black merchants out of small southern towns? And yet Washington was not wholly wrong, for Reconstruction experience had shown in the preceding generation that the power to vote could not be sustained by an impoverished and uneducated people.

Washington sought to make of Tuskegee Institute a mighty engine of black self-help, not only through the formal educational program for the students enrolled there, but through its many and varied extension activities. The earliest of these was the Tuskegee Negro Conference, which he had founded in 1892. It consisted entirely of a

206 Booker T. Washington

gathering of as many black farmers as possible from the surrounding counties, as many as 2000, for a day of exhortation. The agricultural faculty also addressed the crowd, but the principal speaker and perennial president was Washington himself. In a typical address, delivered in 1904, Washington painstakingly told the sharecroppers and small owners how far short they were from "a great successful and progressive race." He offered an immediate remedy: "You could change all of that if you would take some of the money you spend in candy and help the school—that is build a schoolhouse for your children. I say candy, because one of the most disgusting sights to me is to see a man, a great big man going around the streets eating a red stick of candy on Saturdays." The money spent for that candy could buy seats for the schoolhouse, paint the building, extend the term, and pay the poll tax. "We disfranchise ourselves nine cases out of ten because we do not exercise enough forethought to pay our polltax. We should pay our polltax whether under the law we are allowed to vote or not. Every time you pay your polltax that much goes in the education of your children." 6

At the Negro Conferences, the poorer farmers heard from the more successful ones how they had managed to gain and hold their own land, build and furnish their houses, and educate their children. A second day was devoted to a Workers' Conference, when the country ministers and teachers addressed the social problems of rural black people. But one of the rules of these self-help conferences was accentuation of the positive. It was considered bad form to complain or protest, though occasionally a discouraging word would be heard, as when a farmer reported that the tax collector had said he was "not collecting poll taxes from colored people." The conference concluded that that was because the poll tax was "part of the qualification for voting," but it offered no remedy. 7 Occasionally a well-meaning white man would address the conference. Benjamin F. Riley of Birmingham said in 1910: "Those who are favorable to your race are the original slave owners and their descendants." The unfavorable ones were the "poor white trash." His remedy for the race's problems was "a mediator in the form of a Southern white man." 8 Washington used the conference as a forum to plead with the farmers to work hard, give up hurtful habits, avoid patent medicines, and acquire possessions. The twentieth annual Negro Conference in 1911 was much like the first,

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but there was one new element: "Prepare to meet the boll weevil by improving your methods of cotton raising." 9

A more direct service to the local farmers was the Jesup Wagon, a sort of agricultural school on wheels designed by Washington and George Washington Carver. The idea was probably Washington's, for Carver wrote him in 1904: "I think your idea of fitting up a wagon to serve as a traveling agricultural school is a most excellent one. Germany, Canada and other countries, I understand, do this with success." Carver then detailed the paraphernalia of such an undertaking. 10 Money for outfitting the wagon and the mule and harness came from Morris K. Jesup, a New York banker, Slater Fund trustee, and longtime contributor to Tuskegee. According to the early announcements, Carver was to take the wagon on the road, but the honor went to George R. Bridgeforth, Carver's bitter rival in the Tuskegee agriculture department. 11 Avoiding the idlers at the crossroads country stores, Bridgeforth took his wagon directly to the farmers at work in the fields, particularly the landowners on the Southern Improvement Company land near the campus. 12 The wagon's mobility made it convenient not only for demonstrating improved farm implements and methods but as a means of recruiting for Tuskegee's other extension services, the weekly farmers' institute, and the "short course" in agriculture open to non-students. For many years the Jesup Wagon served as Tuskegee's most visible sign in the nearby countryside. It was a sight that would make a man chopping cotton drop his hoe and approach for a closer look. This moving schoolhouse was twelve feet long and twelve feet high. The roof, according to Bridgeforth's description, "was covered with canvas and shaped like an electric car. The sides and ends were made of movable canvas, so that in case of rain they could be fastened down to protect the materials and apparatus which the school carried with it for the purpose of making its demonstrations." 13 Later, Washington persuaded Jesup to fund a similar wagon operating out of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and both received a grant from the Slater Fund for operating expenses. 14

Of more far-reaching importance in Tuskegee's extension program were the pamphlets that George Washington Carver produced as a result of his work at the agricultural experiment station at Tuskegee. One of his pamphlets, "How To Build Up Worn Out Soils," attracted the attention of Frederick T. Gates, who wrote to Washington in 1905:

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"I wish you would please send me half a dozen more copies of that rich work by your Mr. Carver." 15 A few weeks later Gates pursued the matter further, and the Tuskegee executive council minutes reported: "Mr. Gates, Mr. J. D. Rockefellow's confidential man wishes a report on agricultural conditions in the south, with an eye to carrying on work in reclaiming the soil at Mr. R.'s expense." 16 This was part of the genesis of the General Education Board's partnership with the U. S. Department of Agriculture in organizing what was then called the Cooperative Farm Demonstration Movement, later relinquished to the federal government as the county agent system. Dr. Seaman A. Knapp had begun a demonstration farm in Terrell, Texas, in 1903 for the Department of Agriculture to show local farmers that cotton could be raised despite the boll weevil by better methods of cultivation. Gates's investigation in 1905 was preparatory to the General Education Board's supplementing the federal effort by sponsoring demonstration farms in states where the boll weevil had not yet reached. About a month after Gates's expression of interest, Knapp asked Washington to recommend a Tuskegee graduate who "is well posted in agriculture, knows how to mix with men, is a good practical farmer, and can make a good talk on agriculture." Washington recommended three such men. 17 Negotiations took about a year to reach a signed agreement between the Agriculture Department and General Education Board to share Dr. Knapp's direction but to work in separate territories. Then Knapp paid Tuskegee a visit in 1906 and discussed with Carver and others his tentative plan for demonstration work using black agents for black farmers in Alabama. Knapp proposed that one black man be placed on the Farm Demonstration staff, and that in addition they would use Tuskegee's Jesup Wagon to reach each month about 150 demonstration farm plots. If Jesup would continue his aid, the Department of Agriculture would supplement the salary of the agent. Knapp thought Bridgeforth the best choice, for he had had experience with the Jesup Wagon. 18 In the agreement Washington ultimately signed with Knapp in the fall of 1906, however, Thomas M. Campbell became the demonstration agent, and the agreement was with the General Education Board rather than the Department of Agriculture. 19

Washington took an early opportunity in 1907 to try to persuade Knapp to expand his commitment to black demonstration agents elsewhere, at Mound Bayou and in Texas, but Knapp replied: "In fact,

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Mr. Washington, I am trying to manage this colored work in the Gulf States as an extention of the Tuskegee work. From my knowledge of conditions I think it will work better to keep it as an attachment and extension of your work than to consider it as something inaugurated by us. We can manage it just the same and I believe we shall run against fewer snags to handle it in this way." Knapp was seeking to compliment Washington and his school, but he also thus avoided giving black farmers an equal share in his agency's services. 20 There was apparently hostility among whites to any federal payment of black demonstration agents, and, in response to the power imbalance between the races, most of the benefits of the federal program went to white farmers through white agents. Thomas Campbell wrote in 1910 that "there are some sections in the South that Negro agents doing work under the auspices of the government would be subjected to bodily harm." 21 In 1911 Washington asked Knapp's son, who took over the demonstration program on his father's death, how many black agents there were. Bradford Knapp reported twenty-three: seven in Virginia, one in North Carolina, six in South Carolina, one in Georgia, five in Alabama, two in Mississippi, and one in Oklahoma. 22 Though these were outnumbered by the hundreds of white agents, thousands of white demonstration farms, and hundreds of thousands of white visitors to demonstration farms, it does indicate that blacks were not entirely left out. They simply received the separate and unequal treatment they experienced in education and other aspects of life. 23

In addition to Tuskegee Institute's formal extension work, Washington singled out occasional Macon County white plantation owners with many black tenants for individual arrangements for cooperation that combined agricultural improvement with public relations. He persuaded Morgan Russell in 1910, for example, to accept eight pounds of lime sent from the institute to be used in whitewashing the tenant houses on his plantation. A few weeks later he visited the Russell plantation and its black community, Fort Hull, and used it as an illustration that whites who treated their tenants well would suffer no "labor famine." He noted that the community had a good, painted schoolhouse, well taught and open for eight or nine months in the year. At the church building, also painted and attractive, was an exhibition of the vegetable crops grown by the tenants on their garden plots, and exhibits also of sewing, canning, and the school work of the

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children. "Right in the midst of it all," wrote Washington in the Washington Post, "was Mr. Morgan S. Russell himself with his son and clerks and helpers. He sat upon the platform, he spoke to the people, he welcomed our party, he was as proud in showing to our party the evidences of progress of the colored people in that community as any father could have been." 24 If this was paternalism, it was in Washington's view a benign variety that he hoped other whites would emulate. About the same time he sent the Tuskegee marching band out to play at a picnic that William Watson Thompson, brother of his Republican friend J. O. Thompson, gave to his tenants. Like Russell, Thompson encouraged his tenants to raise all of their vegetables and livestock, and told Washington he did all he could to help them get out of debt. Here also was a good schoolhouse and church, tenant houses of two or three rooms, and school in session seven to eight months. 25 Margaret Washington also continued the work she had begun in the 1890s through the Tuskegee Woman's Club of improving the conditions of black home life within a day's ride of the institute, supplying both the missionary spirit and the technical knowledge to promote what later came to be called home economics.

Many of these schemes of rural self-improvement came to a focus during the Woodrow Wilson administration. Congress in 1914 passed the Smith-Lever Act, providing federal funds to the states for agricultural extension services through county agents. In the Congressional debate over distribution of the funds some advocated the allocation of a definite proportion of the funds in each state to black agents for black farmers, but one of the sponsors of the measure, Senator Hoke Smith of Georgia, stated that no graduate of Tuskegee Institute had ever been sufficiently trained to be a scientific farmer. This silenced objection in the all-white Senate, and the bill left allocation of the funds to the states. Washington knew that, in most if not all southern states, this would mean the same sort of racial discrimination that blacks had suffered in the public school allocations, land grant colleges, and experiment stations. He began, therefore, an energetic campaign to try, at least in Alabama, for an equitable distribution.

Washington appealed to Governor Emmet O'Neal in the summer of 1914 to designate Tuskegee Institute as recipient of the Smith-Lever funds for blacks, on the ground that it had the requisite exper-

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tise because of its twenty years of agricultural extension work. 26 The Governor sent to Tuskegee a blue-ribbon commission of white men to investigate the school's suitability. The chairman was Reuben F. Kolb, an old agrarian reformer who had been for many years the commissioner of agriculture. The committee recommended that thirty per cent of the Smith-Lever money be allocated to blacks, to be divided equally for programs at Tuskegee Institute and the Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes, at Normal, in the northern part of the state. 27

Thirty per cent was fair in that it represented the black proportion of the state's population, and Washington appealed to the Governor to carry out the committee's recommendation. "I am anxious to have it demonstrated to the world," he wrote, "that the distribution of such a sum of money is left to our Southern white people and that they will do justice to the Negro without such appropriations having to be restricted at the original source by Congress or any other organization out of the state." 28 One may assume that Washington was appealing to state pride rather than expressing his true feelings, for he sent to Governor O'Neal statistical evidence of discrimination against blacks in the other agricultural funds. 29

Washington finally had to settle for a compromise. The state assigned the entire administration of the fund to the white agricultural college at Auburn, but the officials at Auburn agreed with the two black schools to furnish about thirty per cent of the amount to them for black agricultural agents. 30 "The people at Auburn seem deeply interested and want to do the fair and just thing," Washington wrote a white friend in Washington, "in fact at present they are rather priding themselves on the fact that they are going to do more than any Southern state south of Virginia." 31 Washington feared, however, that in most of the South and in the future most of the money would ultimately go to white agents for the aid of white farmers. A lifetime of experience with "separate but equal" as an avowed policy had bred a distrust even in such an eternal optimist as he was. His hope was that David F. Houston the Secretary of Agriculture, who had once been a member of the Southern Education Board, would exercise "a veto power on the use of the fund," or at least a suggestion that white agricultural colleges give blacks their fair share of agricultural agents. "Without any some such suggestion," he wrote privately in December 1914, "I fear that little or nothing will be done." He thought once or

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twice of approaching President Wilson on the subject, but apparently put the thought aside. 32

School extension work was another service that Tuskegee Institute sought to render to the surrounding community. Its effectiveness is even harder to judge than agricultural extension. From the beginning Tuskegee Institute extended its educational program beyond the bounds of the campus, through the teachers' institutes, the Workers Conference during the second day of the Negro Conference, and tours by faculty members to the schools of Macon and surrounding counties. 33 Margaret Washington began what she called a plantation school in 1898 at the Russell Plantation, about eight miles from the institute, adapting some of the methods of the settlement houses of northern cities to the rural conditions of the Black Belt. Tuskegee's school extension program began in an abandoned one-room cabin, when Annie Davis moved in and set up a school based on what she had learned at Tuskegee. At first the effort was subsidized by money from Tuskegee, but eventually it was, at least in part, supported by the patrons, with the state contributing $15 a month for the teacher's salary. The Russell Plantation settlement became "an oasis of thrift and comfort" in a region of "thriftless fields and unwholesome little cabins." 34

In the fall of 1905 Clinton J. Calloway took charge of all Tuskegee school extension work. He and an assistant undertook to persuade the Macon County farmers to raise money for lengthening the school term and building schoolhouses. In 1906 he founded a monthly magazine, The Messenger, published at Tuskegee Institute, to combine exhortation for school improvement, thrift, and temperance with information on improved farming methods. 35 Washington kept a close eye on the magazine, writing Calloway: "In the Messenger keep constantly before the people the advantages of buying homes in Macon county and settling there. Hold out the advantages of the school, cheap land, good race relations, etc. Emphasize constantly before the teachers the importance of teaching agriculture and other industries in the public schools." 36 When the philanthropic agencies and federal government began to turn their attention to similar concerns in the first decade of the twentieth century, they found Washington and his school already at work. Washington supplemented the efforts of the extension agents by his own speaking tours through Macon, Wilcox, and other nearby counties. When in 1913 Joseph L. Sibley became state supervisor of rural schools under subsidy by the General Education Board for his

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salary, he soon realized the enormity of his task and relied heavily on Washington's advice and Tuskegee's experience. Naturally, he made Macon County one of the three he selected for an intensive study of rural school conditions and needs. 37

Another constructive effort Washington made to change the dismal cycle of black farm tenancy was a series of schemes for black farmers to buy farms and houses at low interest. The earliest such effort at Tuskegee Institute was the Dizer Fund, established about 1892 by a small grant from Silas C. Dizer of Boston, which provided $1500 as a revolving loan fund to black tenant farmers to buy or build a farm or a "model Christian home" among the surrounding tenant shacks. 38 Later other amounts for a similar purpose came from Ellen Collins, John E. Milholland, and W. Bourke Cockran. Hard times among the borrowers soon dissipated these funds through failure to repay. A more ambitious and businesslike plan along the same lines was actually started at Hampton and then extended to Tuskegee. This was the Southern Improvement Company, founded and directed by the white treasurer of Hampton Institute, Alexander Purves, who was also Robert C. Ogden's son-in-law. The chief financial backers were Og-den, W. H. Baldwin, Jr., and other supporters of the two industrial schools. The Southern Improvement Company bought 4000 acres adjoining the Tuskegee Institute farm and sold small plots of it on long-term credit to black farmers. One strength of this plan was that it was sufficiently capitalized to provide a house on each plot of forty to eighty acres of farm land. Though the company lost momentum after the death of Purves in 1904, it was on the whole a success. 39

Borrowing on the experience of the Southern Improvement Company, Washington established Baldwin Farms in 1914 as a memorial to his most helpful trustee, William H. Baldwin, Jr., who had died in 1905. Tuskegee trustees and friends were the financial backers. The plan permitted Tuskegee graduates in agriculture who had no land of their own, who would otherwise have to work for someone else, to purchase forty acres and a $300 house planned in such a way that rooms could be added as the family grew. A sawmill and a railroad spur line offered Baldwin Farms a chance to survive economically. The Tuskegee Farm and Improvement Company, which held the land, also mortgaged crops and equipment at eight per cent, whereas mortgage on the land was at six per cent. In the tradition of the Southern Improvement Company, the company was on a business rather than

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a charitable basis, and Washington thought that "the idea of getting the experiment located far enough from the school so that the graduates will not depend upon Tuskegee too much is very good." 40 As Washington explained to a local newspaper, he believed this method of helping the graduates "would inspire enthusiastic work, since the result of their struggles and sacrifice is a home and a farm paid for and clear of debt." 41

Washington urged the superintendent of Baldwin Farms, himself a Tuskegee graduate, to stress five practical rules of conduct: to pay as much as possible on the debt; to use rainy days to improve the interiors of the houses; because of the nature of the soil, to keep it stirred all the time so as to conserve moisture; to can and preserve everything possible; and to raise as many pigs and fowls as possible. He sent copies of the rules to every colonist. 42 A month later, however, just before reaching Baldwin Farms on the train with a group of teachers coming to the summer session, a Tuskegee faculty member proudly invited the group to note the contrast between the farms on either side of the railroad, and to his shock, discovered the conditions were the same. "I must confess," he wrote Clinton Calloway, "that I have never been more embarrassed by the poor crops, weeds, and grass along the colony." He did not get the impression that the colonists had yet caught the spirit of freedom, "and it seems that they are getting the spirit of looking for a hand-out from somebody rather than dig it out of the ground." 43 Miracles did not occur overnight, even with a "wizard" about.

The most ambitious black land-purchase scheme of the era was that on Hilton Head in the South Carolina sea islands, a joint effort of Washington and W. T. B. Williams of Hampton Institute. Because of his distance from the site and his busy schedule, however, Washington depended on Williams for detailed supervision of the enterprise. The largest of the sea islands, Hilton Head was some ten miles south of Beaufort at its north shore and twenty miles from Savannah on the south. The shipping magnate William P. Clyde owned about half the island, four white men owned between them another fourth, and about 1000 black inhabitants owned the final fourth. Clyde used his 10,000 acre tract as a hunting preserve. Sometime after Washington had secured a small contribution from him for Tuskegee in 1904, perhaps because of something Washington said to him or simply because he was getting too old to enjoy hunting, Clyde asked Washington for

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suggestions about a settlement on his tract. As Washington explained to a Tuskegee worker, Clyde was "thinking of trying to make an ideal settlement, as an illustration of what Tuskegee graduates can teach the people to accomplish. He is thinking of financing the scheme, in case we care to undertake it." 44

Once a producer of high-grade sea island cotton, Hilton Head had lost its entrepreneurs after the Civil War, and life went on at a lower level and a slower pace induced by poverty, the subtropical climate, and widespread malaria. The plan worked out by Washington and Williams, and approved by Clyde and his son William P. Clyde, Jr., was to divide the Clyde tract into one-horse farms of about thirty acres each. They would build on each tract a frame house of two or more rooms, with a shingled roof, provide an outhouse and d well, and sell each farm at $520, to be paid over a seven to ten year period. 45 Clyde agreed to commit 1000 acres to the experiment, reserving the rest until the plan had been tested. Stephen T. Powell, a Tuskegee graduate with some practical farming experience, became the superintendent of the colony. He could rely for advice on another Tuskegee graduate nearby, Joseph S. Shanklin, principal of the Port Royal Agricultural School in Beaufort, or on Williams, a black Harvard graduate on the Hampton staff, who soon became a traveling agent of the General Education Board. As a last resort he could ask Washington's advice, but it was many years after the colony began in 1906 before Washington found time to visit. He could only urge from a distance that Powell "stick to that work until you make it a great success." He urged upon Powell the use of whitewash and paint, improvement of the school, and production of some long-staple cotton for sale. 46

When the colony was two years old, Washington sent J. R. E. Lee, head of the academic department at Tuskegee, to assist and advise Powell for two or three days. "I am very anxious that the industrial, moral and religious condition of the people be improved as fast as possible," Washington instructed Lee. "For example, I want them to begin the whitewashing of their houses and fences, planting better crops and making better farms. They are a very primitive, backward people and cannot take ideas on very fast." 47 Lee reported at length on his visit. He found Powell setting a good example of farming methods on his plot, and that some neighbors who had cultivated exclusively with hoes were going to use plows after seeing him do so. Powell had whitewashed his school and all the houses of those who

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had taken up land in his colony. Lee recommended more industrial instruction in the school that Powell and a Hampton graduate were conducting. He also suggested that another school be built five or six miles away, to be taught by a Tuskegee graduate. Lee believed the islanders needed an example in the use and preparation of food and in house furnishings. "The people need to know how to live," he wrote. 48

Washington reached Hilton Head for his first visit to the colony in the summer of 1908. He found the land better than he had expected, but the people were poorer and more primitive. "We shall have to, in my opinion, greatly interject a little new blood into the island," he wrote Clyde. "The people are about as run down as the animals, but there is a foundation for a good work here." 49 During the following year, some of the islanders were replaced as colonists by Tuskegee students, and the Tuskegeans added another two-teacher school. 50 Clyde and his son, in addition to furnishing the land, had been from the beginning of the colony contributing $500 a year to the salaries of four teachers not on the state payroll, as well as a small sum for a conference modeled on the Tuskegee Negro Conference, designed to encourage the islanders "to adopt the improved methods of living and farming that it is the purpose of the colony scheme to teach them." 51 To infuse that "new blood," Washington placed a letter in the Tuskegee Student apprising Tuskegeans of this excellent opportunity to put Tuskegee principles to work, "to either buy or rent land and settle down as successful farmers on Hilton Head." He was eager "that a first-class, up-to-date Tuskegee colony be located there." 52

With one exception, the Tuskegeans who took up the challenge prospered in their first years on the island, but W. T. B. Williams reported a serious social problem: "The islanders, it seems, will not help the men of the colony." The one Tuskegean who failed did so because he could not get help in harvesting his crop. "His cotton was late in maturing. It was just ready for gathering about the first of December when according to custom all the horses, cows and hogs on the island are turned out to go where they will. Stanfield's crop of cotton was actually eaten up by the stock before he could get it in without assistance." 53 Washington and Clyde had hoped that, in addition to revival of sea-island cotton production, winter truck farming for the eastern cities could be developed. This was impossible as long as the hogs ran loose. They also talked of the construction of a cotton

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gin for the island, but Clyde hesitated to invest more in an enterprise with already so many other problems. He decided to put the whole colony on one more year of trial, with the threat of abandonment if it did not begin to surmount its problems. 54

Powell took every precaution to avoid reporting one of his biggest problems until disclosure was unavoidable. This was the "general dishonesty" of the colonists. "It seems impossible to get in a full set of tenants who will not fall into the hands of the islanders," he wrote Washington; "and when ever they do that means a loss to us. And it seems that every body is in favor of the man who steals. I have found that even the people who are suppose[d] to administer the law have received cotton which was thrown over in their yard by night. That is the system of delivering it. Just throw it over in the yards and who ever calls for pay for the right number of sacks will get the money." Powell began to question whether it was worth while to remain to bring order and modernity out of this traditional disorderliness. 55 Washington also privately concluded that "the work there has not panned out as we hoped it would. This is no fault of Powell's, however." 56 Even the weather conspired against the self-help Utopia by a drought, and Clyde decided to discontinue his outlays. "Please notify all of the teachers," Washington wrote Powell, that Clyde would no longer pay their salaries. 57 Washington brought Powell to Tuskegee for discussion of a plan for gradually closing down the Hilton Head colony. "Please be careful to see that all property is carefully locked until after formally turned over," he wired Powell. "See nothing is lost. Let men understand what they can depend on." 58 Washington suggested that it would please Clyde if, in dismantling the schools, the school furniture be given to the islanders. 59 By April the colony was no more. Washington wrote the younger Clyde, "we have done the best we could under the circumstances I think," and Clyde must have agreed, for that year he made a $1000 contribution to Tuskegee. 60

For a few individuals, those charged with the work-ethic and the desire for self-determination, the land purchase schemes succeeded. As group enterprises, however, they failed. The whole system of racial subordination and labor exploitation on which the cotton growing economy rested went counter to such efforts. White supremacy in political control reinforced the whites as landlords, the whites as bankers, the whites as merchants, and relegated the blacks to tenancy, share-cropping, the crop lien, and, sinking deeper into subservience, to the

218 Booker T. Washington

forced labor of debt peonage and convict lease. As the dream of the self-sufficient peasant, of "Uncle Tom in his own cabin," faded, Booker T. Washington dreamed another dream, the all-black town, where not only would the black farmers own their land, but the merchant, the banker, and the mayor would be black.

Washington put great faith in the self-segregated economy and polity of the all-black town, seeing it as a positive sign of black enterprise rather than as a negative result of white exclusion. Indeed, he probably thought of Tuskegee Institute, with its all-black faculty and student body, and the surrounding families of Greenwood Village as an example of the all-black town. What he said of Boley, Oklahoma, in a magazine article captures his attitude toward all such communities. "Boley," he wrote, "like the other negro towns that have sprung up in other parts of the country, represents a dawning race consciousness, a wholesome desire to do something to make the race respected; something which shall demonstrate the right of the negro, not merely as an individual, but as a race, to have a worthy and permanent place in the civilization that the American people are creating. In short, Boley is another chapter in the long struggle of the negro for moral, industrial, and political freedom." 61

Washington took a fostering interest in Boley and in Allensworth, California, and Wilberforce, Ohio, but it was Mound Bayou, Mississippi, that captured his heart. He was devoted to this small town in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta that seemed to embody the values, methods of self-help, and priorities of his own social philosophy. If any all-black town in the middle of a white-dominated America could satisfy all the needs of its citizens, it would be Mound Bayou. Yet a thoughtful historian, August Meier, has concluded that the Mound Bayou attempt at a segregated economy was a failure, even with strategic help in its critical moments from northern philanthropy. Self-help and racial solidarity in the substandard status that blacks held in America were no basis on which a viable economy or a genuinely independent community could develop. The white supremacy atmosphere of the surrounding region choked the life out of the isolated and struggling town. 62

Mound Bayou demands a close look as a test of the viability of Washington's priority of the economic over the political approach. Isaiah Montgomery, the founder, went into partnership with a railroad company to clear the underdeveloped area where the town was

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located in 1887. Three years later, as the only black delegate to the state constitutional convention, he supported the constitution that disfranchised the state's blacks. His whole faith was in economic progress. As he wrote in 1901, "a colored man may successfully conduct almost any kind of business in an average town; he must, however, have tact, grit, and sufficient backing to hold on till his business is well understood; experience proves that he can secure fair patronage from the public generally." 63

By the early twentieth century, Montgomery was relegated to the role of patriarch of the town, and Charles Banks, a native of nearby Clarksdale, became its leading businessman. In 1904 he moved his mercantile business to Mound Bayou and founded the Bank of Mound Bayou, becoming its cashier. 64 Tuskegee took an active interest in the bank, Scott investing in its stock and becoming a director. 65 Washington arranged for Mound Bayou to receive a Carnegie library and a General Education Board farm demonstration agent, 66 and Banks in turn became an officer in Washington's National Negro Business League, a Republican politico in partnership with Edgar S. Wilson, and sponsor of Washington's speaking tour through Mississippi in 1908.

Banks and his bank saved the town from financial crisis when the railroad company that had originally sponsored Mound Bayou changed hands and the new owners threatened wholesale foreclosure of mortgages it held against most of the farmers in the community. Banks and his associates persuaded the railroad to renew the loans, and at six instead of eight percent, and founded the Mound Bayou Loan and Investment Company to gradually take over the mortgages. 67

Recognizing the need for a broader economic base in the town, Banks in 1907 began to raise money for a cottonseed oil mill. He asked Washington to find a northern capitalist willing to cooperate with the bank in advancing money to local farmers and establishing the oil mill. 68 Banks was a mixture of romantic black nationalism and the business ethic, and he vacillated between pleading for a white angel and building a model town "owned and controlled by Negroes." 69 He tried to persuade Emmett Scott to ask Andrew Carnegie for the money to buy out the railroad and other white owners and sell the land around Mound Bayou in forty-acre plots. "You have an idea what it would mean for us to ultimately control this corner of the county as we now control Mound Bayou," Banks wrote. "Talk this over with

220 Booker T. Washington

the Dr. and let us know what can be done." 70 Washington himself was somewhat captured by the mystique of black territorial expansion, and wrote a white friend about the Yazoo Delta: "There, if anywhere, I believe, the black man is going to finally get on his feet, or finally perish." 71

Banks grew ever more solicitous of Washington's help in securing outside white capital for the oil mill. He and his black associates had by 1910 practically completed the buildings without borrowing from outside, but they needed machinery and working capital. If he could market ten or fifteen thousand dollars of oil mill stock, he wrote Washington, with someone who "really wanted to help us, but wanted to do so on a business basis, some one who was in easy circumstances, and could afford to wait three or four years, with the interest paid annually, I should be glad to be put in touch with them as I want to operate this fall." 72 His original deadline for opening had been two years earlier, and it would be two years later before the machinery actually turned.

Meanwhile Banks used the bank and the mill to promote race pride. The Mississippi State Business League met in Mound Bayou, and according to Banks's report "race consciousness, race confidence struck a new note many keys higher in the scale" as the assembled black business leadership of the state walked about their city and for the first time in their lives "felt that they were welcome, truly welcome to the city they had entered." They walked in the shadow of their oil mill "now nearing completion by all Negro capital." "They lodged and feasted in Negro homes . . . bought what dry goods they needed from Negro merchants; rode in Negro carriages, ate in Negro hotels, drank their soda water from the bottles of a Negro bottling firm; bought their tickets from a Negro ticket agent; cashed their checks at a Negro bank, and went and came in perfect security under the rule of a Negro Mayor and a Negro Marshal." 73

Such was the dream but only part of the reality of Mound Bayou under the leadership of Charles Banks. It is unclear how much the black businessmen of Mississippi invested in the oil mill, but it was clearly not enough to turn the wheels of the enterprise. Banks continued to hope that Carnegie would be the angel of the all-black town, but Robert E. Park the sociologist, at this time Washington's ghostwriter and adviser, was skeptical of Banks's grasp of reality. "The real trouble," he wrote Emmett Scott, "is that Banks hasn't got a definite

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scheme to pursue to philanthropic people and he hasn't any one with sense enough and persistence enough to take it up and hammer it into the heads of the Northern people." 74 Besides, Banks had failed to carry out his part of contractual obligations in his earlier dealings with philanthropists. As Scott himself reminded Banks, Washington had persuaded Andrew Carnegie to donate a library to Mound Bayou on condition that the city council provide $400 a year for books and upkeep, but reportedly there were no books in the library and "it is not at all being used for that purpose, and instead is the headquarters of the Masonic Beneficent Association." If Carnegie should learn how his library grant had been abused, the canny Scot would resent it and take no further interest in the town. 75

Banks nevertheless somehow reached Andrew Carnegie, who asked him to arrange for letters of recommendation from those who knew about the Mound Bayou enterprises at first hand. Banks asked Washington to write, but the Tuskegean preferred to wait, and told Banks: "If Mr. Carnegie desires my personal opinion on the project he undoubtedly will write me, and I shall then be very glad to write him at such length as may seem wise." 76 Nothing was forthcoming from Carnegie, perhaps because he heard of the neglectful treatment of his library. In 1912, however, Julius Rosenwald began to take an active interest in Mound Bayou and its symbolic importance as an all-black enterprise. This was undoubtedly through Washington's suggestion, and the first Rosenwald "investment" in the town was a Rosenwald school. 77

Of all the philanthropists of his time, Rosenwald was the most accessible to black people and the most easily touched in heart and pocketbook by blacks who undertook to match his generosity with their own self-help. Isaiah Montgomery, who happened to meet him in New York where he had gone to a memorial service for a friend who had died on the Titanic, secured from Rosenwald an offer to buy some of the cottonseed oil mill bonds and also to supply funds to the Bank of Mound Bayou to take mortgages on surrounding agricultural lands and thus "supplant all of the foreign loans existing there now." 78 A month later Banks made this informal agreement somewhat more definite by a meeting with Rosenwald to persuade him not to make his loans contingent on funds from other sources. 79 Still in general terms, and in consultation with Washington, Rosenwald indicated that he might lend the Bank of Mound Bayou as much as $250,000 for buy-

222 Booker T. Washington

ing up local mortgages held by whites, draining swamp land, and financing agricultural improvements. 80

With the prospect before him of Rosenwald's backing, Banks decided to formally open the oil mill in 1912 with a community ceremony with Washington as the principal speaker. Banks informed Washington that opening the mill did not mean operating it, but he did not disclose how far the mill actually was from readiness to operate. 81 Standing on a platform of cotton bales, with the mill building looming behind him, Washington addressed a crowd of 15,000, an enormous one for a small town that was not even a county seat. The Wizard of Tuskegee saluted black enterprise without frightening the whites into opposition:

At this late date, it requires no argument to demonstrate the fact that white people and black people in this state are here to remain for all time and in my opinion side by side, and the building up of an enterprise of this kind in the commonwealth of Mississippi does not mean that it is anything that will threaten or jeopardize the white man's civilization or power, but it means that which will enhance the white man's prosperity and civilization, for if one race goes down the other in the same degree goes down. If one race goes up, the other in the same degree goes up.

He was proud that it was in the South that such a monument of black enterprise rose, and promised blacks that it would mean both black capital gains and black employment. 82

A tremendous yell went up when Washington pulled the cord that stretched through the trees for 200 yards and sounded the factory whistle and set the wheels in motion for a few rounds inside the Mound Bayou Cotton Oil Mill. A white reporter for a Memphis newspaper thought an old black woman in the crowd epitomized the meaning of the ceremony and recorded her words: "Well, Lord, here I is. I are sho' ready to lef' dese lowgrounds. I has hearn Booker T. . . .1 has seen de ile mill, de big wheels an' all dat. But what was ain't now, fer us cullud folks is gwine ter see de cotton after it's done picked in de fiel' and 'fo' we buys it back 'cross de counter." 83

The opening really proved, however, that Banks's supreme talent was that of the promoter. He claimed, for example, both publicly and to Julius Rosenwald, that the oil mill represented an investment of $100,000 entirely by black people, principally through fraternal orders in the state. But the $100,000 figure was actually the capital stock

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of the company, not all of which had been sold. At a meeting with Banks that Washington staged at Tuskegee, in February 1913, Rosen-wald agreed to buy $25,000 of an issue of six per cent bonds if Banks could sell another $15,000 of them. Rosenwald bought the bonds on Banks's representation that the plant cost about $100,000 and had no other indebtedness, and he secured a first mortgage on the plant as security for his loan. 84

Banks put Montgomery to work trying to sell the remainder of the oil mill stock, while he himself tried to market the $15,000 in bonds to match the $25,000 Rosenwald was buying. This effort led both black men into quagmires. It turned out in 1915 that an agent o f the oil mill company had sold stock under false pretenses and pocketed the money. 85 Meanwhile with Washington's help Banks tried to market the bonds among oil mill machinery companies. 86 Meeting with no success, he finally sold the bonds to B. B. Harvey, a Memphis white man with a cottonseed oil mill of his own. Harvey secured a lease on the Mound Bayou mill and became in fact its manager, but Banks obscured that fact from both Washington and Rosenwald. He sent Washington the news: "MOUND BAYOU OIL MILL BEGAN MANUFACTURING TODAY." 87 A visitor from Tuskegee saw "the big oil mill, standing there with its shadow outlined against the stars" and dreamed dreams of the expanding spirit of black enterprise: "the lone puffing of an engine, the opening and shutting of a boiler door . . . the glare of red fire in the distance." 88 That was the poetry, but the prose of the oil mill was that it became Harvey's enterprise, and this unscrupulous white man milked it into disaster.

Particularly after the depression of 1914 brought about the bankruptcy of his Memphis mill, Harvey used Rosenwald's money for operating purposes but refused to submit a financial statement, and forced Banks and Montgomery at first to pay the interest, taxes, and insurance required by their agreement with Rosenwald, and finally when the mill suspended operation in January 1915 its attorney revealed to Rosenwald the true state of affairs. 89 Rosenwald apparently never reaped the six percent return on his quasi-philanthropic loan. In the fall of 1915 Banks sent to Tuskegee a somewhat farfetched explanation of the failure to operate the mill. He said he was baffling the efforts of "designing White men including our late lessee, Harvey, to confiscate the plant. . . . We have taken possession and rather than let Harvey operate to our financial detriment as well as wear and tear

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to the plant, we have refused to let it run this Season, and are aiming to fortify ourselves for the coming Season when we will have a plant owned by Negroes, operated by them in its entirety." 90 This was black enterprise in reverse gear.

Washington also persuaded Rosenwald to become financially interested in the Bank of Mound Bayou. He first asked Frank J. Parsons, vice president of the United States Mortgage and Trust Company, in 1913 to consider investing in the bank. Parsons agreed to discuss the matter with Charles Banks, but he concluded that the bank's affairs had "gotten to the point where it was rather a matter for philanthropic interest than a strictly commercial proposition." Any investor, he thought, would be wise to insist on putting "an experienced and competent party in charge of the mill and bank operations until they were on a firmer footing." 91 Even before the outbreak of World War I brought depression, the Bank of Mound Bayou was in trouble in early 1913 because of overextension of credit to neighboring black farmers, and Banks's trip to New York at that time was unsuccessful. 92 He managed to borrow $5000 in May 1913 and another $10,000 in April 1914. 93 By June 1914, however, he was pleading to Tuskegee for rescue, and Washington met him in Chicago to visit Rosenwald, who agreed to lend the bank $5000. 94 Despite this, the state bank examiners closed it in August 1914.

As soon as the white-owned banks in the surrounding towns learned that they were free of the Mound Bayou competition and low interest rates, they raised their own interest rates, insisted that cotton be brought to their towns for sale and ginning, and even dictated to landowners how much they should charge for rent. The people of Mound Bayou felt the full severity of the white retribution against their effort to run their own affairs. "These conditions set our people to thinking and resulted in a few get together meetings recently," Isaiah Montgomery reported to Washington; "as a result we shall have cash capital for a $10,000 Bank safely subscribed within the near future, Mr. Banks as usual takes a large share." 95 The crisis brought at least a temporary end to the rivalry that had developed between Montgomery and the more aggressive and younger Banks, and Washington found "comfort and happiness" in that news. He wrote to the grizzled founder of Mound Bayou: "I am so glad that the people of Mound Bayou are realizing the importance of getting together and working together. Outside of Tuskegee, I think I can safely say that there is

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no community in the world that I am so deeply interested in as I am in Mound Bayou." Above all else, he hoped harmony would lead to a reorganized bank. 96

Mound Bayou needed all the unity it could muster for the further storms ahead. The state bank examiners sought to indict Banks and other officers of the failed bank, but the grand jury decided that since the bank's accounts were in good order and no shortage or irregularities were evident, the officers had committed no criminal act, and so turned down the examiners' recommendation of indictment. Banks wrote to Washington that the examiners' complaint that the bank's securities were worthless was based on the fact that they were in a black settlement. Whites would not buy the securities as long as the blacks of Mound Bayou insisted on controlling their own institutions, and the blacks lacked the money to take over the securities. 97

As in the case of many another small-town bank, the Bank of Mound Bayou died, its threnody was sung, and out of its ashes phoenix-like a new bank appeared, the Mound Bayou State Bank, organized in the spring of 1915 to be opened in June. The state authorities delayed the granting of its charter, however, and Banks complained to Tus-kegee: "Besides their carrying out a policy to eliminate Negro banks wherever possible it is an effort to handicap me." Banks sought a national charter, and also withdrew as an officer of the new state bank. Then the state authorities relented and allowed the bank to open in October 1915. Though not an officer, Banks furnished according to his account $11,000 of the $12,000 the state required. 98 Since Rosen-wald was soon to visit Tuskegee, Banks asked Scott, if he got a chance, "in that characteristic tactful way of yours [to] tell him how well we have worked out of our difficulties here, in the face of all kinds of opposition and discouragement." 99

Mound Bayou was the vessel of many of Washington's hopes for a successful and expanding empire of black enterprise, racial solidarity, and self-determination. Yet it was the opposition and discouragement that was most striking. There was a gap between the rhetoric of black capitalism and the reality of exploitation by grasping white capitalists and rescue by more benign ones, a gap between the ideology of black solidarity and independence and the practice of shoddy compromises and petty quarrels. Nevertheless, Mound Bayou was a temporary refuge for enterprising blacks elsewhere in the state who were being literally run out of town.

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Whitecapping flourished in Mississippi all through the early twentieth century. The very blacks whose respectability and usefulness to the community Washington had promised would lead to their acceptance and the restoration of their rights were driven out of towns where their prosperity excited the envy of whites. A sort of informal Ku Klux Klan of hooded men enforced the rule that no black person be accorded human dignity in that neighborhood.

Isaiah Montgomery in 1904 gave Booker T. Washington a detailed description of the impact of the whitecaps on black business in West Point, Mississippi. "Thomas Harvey runs a neat little Grocery, he kept a Buggy and frequently rode to his place of business, he was warned to sell his Buggy and walk. Mr. Chandler keeps a Grocery, he was ordered to leave, but was finally allowed to remain on good behavior. Mr. Meacham ran a business and had a Pool Table in connection therewith, he was ordered to don overalls for manual labor." A hack-man was ordered to sell one of his two hacks. A black printer named Buchanan owned a piano and allowed his daughter, who was his cashier and bookkeeper, to ride a buggy to and from work, until "a mass meeting of whites decided that the mode of living practiced by the Buchanan family had a bad effect on the cooks and washerwomen, who aspired to do likewise, and became less disposed to work for the whites." A mob forced Buchanan's wife and children to flee during his absence from town, and refused to let him return even to collect his belongings. 100 The economic means and hard work that Washington's social philosophy proposed for blacks in the face of the political, social, and economic problems they faced as a minority group were clearly not a remedy that the blacks could in all circumstances employ.

Could technological change cut the Gordian knot of black subordination? Washington pinned his main hope for black progress on the work-ethic and its inculcation through industrial education, but he gave his provisional blessing at least to the mechanical cotton-picker that seemed in his day most likely to succeed. Theodore H. Price in 1911 claimed to have invented a cotton-picker that would be commercially successful, organized a company, and asked Washington for an endorsement. The machine already had the enthusiastic recommendation of Walter Hines Page, Charles W. Dabney, Robert C. Ogden, and other advocates of a modernized South, but Price frankly wrote Washington that he wanted to use Washington's name because others "have thought that possibly the effect of the Machine upon the finan-

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cial condition of the negro would be injurious." 101 Washington, after some hesitation, spoke at a Boston meeting in favor of the machine. There is no record of Washington's words, but he later remarked to Price: "It will be a happy moment for our country when the colored people and the white people in the South can get nearer together and let the world see that in actual daily relations there is little friction between them. I am sure that the launching of this cotton picking machine will go far in this direction, and whenever I can serve in the slightest manner I hope you will not fail to command me." 102 The Price machine failed commercially, however, and Washington turned a deaf ear four years later to the promoter of a rival machine, the Kotton King. 103

The southern cotton mills offered another limited avenue of black advancement, if only the total exclusion of blacks that had been their hallmark since their burgeoning in the 1880s could be broken. The wages among the "lintheads" in the mills were among the lowest in the United States, and use of child labor was rampant, but Washington explored every possible crack in the "door of opportunity." Though a low-wage industry, cotton manufacturing was the South's leading industry, and Washington's effort to get black-owned and black-operated mills was part of his quiet campaign against labor segregation and exclusion. He encouraged every black entrepreneur who wanted to start a cotton mill and every white millowner willing to take the risks involved in hiring black workers in defiance of the unwritten law.

One possible way of promoting black entry into cotton mills would have been to train Tuskegee students for such jobs, but the pay was so low, the requisite skill so low, and the prospect of employment so poor that Washington saw no point in doing this. For a brief time in 1900 the Tuskegee trustees seriously investigated the possibility of setting up a cotton mill as one of the campus trade buildings. 104 Several philanthropically inclined whites, notably Henry C. Davis of Philadelphia, Elkan Naumburg of New York, Richard P. Hallowell of Boston, and B. Frank Mebane of Spray, North Carolina, considered establishing cotton mills with black labor, but nothing developed from any of their plans. A Charleston cotton mill used black labor for a short while in the 1890s. In general, however, poor whites had a labor monopoly, for whatever that was worth.