". . .we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation. . ."

Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday

January 18, 1998

Amos 5:21-24

 With your bulletins this morning we distributed a little flyer entitled "The Amistad Event." It describes that revolt among Africans on a Spanish slaver off the coast of Cuba on July 1, 1839. It is a critical event in American History, now told in an absorbing and haunting movie by Steven Spielberg entitled, "Amistad." The event is all about freedom. It is about Black liberation. The story is spell-binding, the movie stirring. I commend it to you.

There is a continuing story, however, the film only alludes to. This pamphlet closes with it. It is no less exciting, challenging and compelling. And the second story provides a context for focusing on two African-Americans and their decisive impact on our common history and the American story.  I refer to Booker T. Washington and William Edward Burghardt DuBois.

Why look at these two men this morning? Well, first of all because we celebrate the memory and continuing impact of a monumental African-American leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. on our nation's sense of self and identity; but secondly, because one of the results of the Amistad event lies in the founding by New England Congregationalists of the American Missionary Association. The Amistad Defense Committee, after defending the Amistad freedom fighters all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, reshaped and reformed itself and became, in 1846, one of the most creative, fierce and revolutionary of abolitionist societies. It sponsored significant mission outposts all over the world, but its most honored and continuing legacy lives in the schools it founded and supported in the South during the course of the Civil War, and in the universities it established in the decades following the war. Indeed, one of the founders of the Amistad Committee, its principle supporter and then founder of the American Missionary Association, learned his Christian ABCs and received his abolitionist convictions from the woman whose portrait hangs in the Guild Rooms on our fourth floor -- Abigail Waters.

She happened to be the great aunt of Lewis Tappan, who, according to his biographer, spent much of his early years in her home -- Lewis Tappan, the founder of Dunn and Bradstreet, whose character appears in the movie, and who, with his brother Arthur, along with Harriet Beecher Stowe among whites, became the leading lights of the pre-civil war abolition movements.

Now, the American Missionary Association founded liberal arts colleges dedicated to the higher education of Black freedmen and women: Berea College in Kentucky, Atlanta University in Georgia, Hampton University in Virginia, Dillard University in Louisiana, Fisk University in Tennessee, Talladega College in Alabama, and Tougalou in Mississippi. The stories told by New Englanders venturing into that hostile territory, the contempt, the threats, the pathetic conditions, the fury they faced from citizens forms a saga of heroism we hear all too little about. In his classic, almost mystical reflection entitled The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois, a graduate of Fisk in 1888, pays tribute to the enterprising and courageous men and women who founded and taught in those AMA colleges, and what they meant to him. Listen to him. (And remember this was written in 1903.)

This was the gift of New England to the freed Negro: no alms, but a friend; not cash, but character. It was not and is not money these seething millions want, but love and sympathy, the pulse of hearts beating with red blood; a gift which to-day only their own kindred and race can bring to the masses, but which once saintly souls brought to their favored children in the crusade of the sixties, that finest thing in American history, and one of the few things untainted by sordid greed and cheap vainglory. . . (In) educational power it was supreme for it was the contact of living souls.

The finest of things in American history: These New England Congregational founders -- women and men of those fledgling and now spirited universities in the post Civil War South. And two towering legacies of this New England foray into higher education -- a foray building on a tradition that founded Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth in the 17th and 18th century New England wilderness -- professing education as a key to extending one's full humanity -- two monumental AMA legacies come to us in Booker T. Washington, who graduated from Hampton Institute in 1875, and the aforementioned W.E.B. Dubois, from Fisk in 1888.

First, a word about Washington. He was born in 1856, in Franklin County, Virginia, his mother a slave, his father an unknown white man. He grew up in what is now Malden, West Virginia, near Charleston, packing salt, working in a coal mine, serving as house boy to the owner of the mine and in 1872, at the age of 16, trudging the 300 miles from Malden to Hampton, arriving there raggedy, shabby, and penniless. He worked as a janitor to pay his way through the Institute, graduated with honors in three years in 1875, majored in agricultural and academic subjects but found his main interest to be public speaking and debate. He returned to Malden to teach for six years, then, when the Alabama Legislature authorized a normal school at Tuskeegee to train Black teachers, the white Principal of Hampton recommended Washington and he arrived in Tuskeegee in 1881. He found no buildings, no money to construct any and $2000 for teachers' salaries alone. He acquired a shanty from a local church, recruited students, borrowed money from Hampton to purchase an abandoned farm as a site, built a kiln to manufacture bricks so students could build their own dorms and classrooms, sold bricks to outsiders to assemble some capital and in seven years built an institution owning 540 acres with an enrollment of over 400. By the time he died in 1915, Tuskeegee owned over 2000 acres, its endowment amounted to nearly 2 million dollars, the staff numbered 200 and 4,000 students enrolled in its regular, special and extension courses.

In Tuskeegee's remarkable success we can grasp the key to Booker T. Washington's philosophy and his program for what we might call the social, economic and political integration of men and women of color into the American mainstream. In a landmark address delivered at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition in September 1895, Washington articulated his approach to African-American progress and assimilation. He ignited a conflagration of controversy simmering to this day.

Before a vast audience of whites and blacks in the so-called "Negro Building" of the Exposition, Washington drew a vivid picture of a ship lost on a vast lake. Then he implored, "Cast down your buckets where you are. . . Cast down your buckets where you are," he admonished.

Cast them down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. . . Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life. . .

and here he takes a massive negative shot at what we might call cultivating the mind-nurturing and soul-nourishing gifts of higher education and the life of the mind:

. . .we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental geegaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper until it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.  It is at the bottom of life we must begin and not at the top.

In that Atlanta address Washington begged the white South to halt immigration, as he said, to cast its buckets down among those who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, built your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth. . .

He assured his listeners, in a chilling assertion,

that in all things purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, -- in all things we can be as separate as fingers -- yet as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

And as for the politics of social change, and the right to vote, he asserted,

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than artificial forcing. . . It is important and right that all the privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house. . .

In short Booker T. Washington believed the road to success for a poverty-stricken, disenfranchised, Jim Crow segregated Black race perceived by whites as inferior and valued for more than 200 years on this continent as no more than cattle or oxen -- that their future lay in learning a trade, harvesting a crop, pursuing self help, plunging into hard work, becoming thrift conscious and thriving on good character. All of this promising eventually -- eventually -- he believed, men and women deserving respect from the larger white society, eventually men and women perceived asdeserving achievers; finally, men and women, pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, eventually -- eventually -- deserving recipients of political and human rights, eventually a people who might earn human dignity.

The mood of this address and its approach to citizenship, self respect, human dignity and the American dream for all citizens gained wide acceptance. In the white community, both South and North, it triggered tremendous enthusiasm. Booker T. Washington became, until his death in 1915, the most powerful African-American in the United States, swaying elections, dining with presidents, channeling money to his favorite causes, claiming authority on race relations, hob-nobbing in the salons of Rockefellers, Carnegies and Harrimans. The world called him the "Wizard of Tuskeegee." He stood at the core of a socio-cultural political empire that became known as the "Tuskeegee Machine." (And how I remember my dad, as graceful and wonderful man as I have ever known, born in 1903, coming of age during Washington's zenith years, speaking of him with almost reverential awe.)

In any case, Booker T. Washington's approach to African progress ignited, as we said a moment ago, a firestorm of resistance and bitter antagonism. His speech became known in some quarters as "The great Atlanta Compromise." And one man spent much of his life and intellectual force combating it. William Edward Burghardt DuBois. DuBois was a Massachusetts man, born in Great Barrington in 1868. Educated there, he went on to Fisk University in Nashville, graduating in 1888, proceeding to Harvard for a year, to the University of Berlin for two years, returning and receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895.

An intellectual, an activist, a poet, a professor, one of America's first and foremost sociologists whose study of Philadelphia Black poor is still used, whose Ph.D. thesis on the slave trade became the first volume in an early Harvard Historical Series, a man who turned his so-called Niagara Movement into the NAACP, -- DuBois founded that organization -- whose news articles, editorial commentary, magazine reflections, public addresses,  political causes, personal passion and public life became a single focused, scholarly, polemical, tireless crusade for immediate recognition of universal human dignity and equal civil rights. And in this crusade he took on Booker T. Washington point by point.

DuBois saw Washington's work as a "complete surrender" to an ironclad and unjust status quo. He understood white enthusiasm for Washington's program as a sign of white relief to Washington's cultural and political accommodation -- no political action, no economic sanctions, no rhetorical agitation -- the whites essentially responding, "You want to solve your problem by lifting it to your own shoulders. If that's all you and your race ask, take it."

DuBois is relentless. He attacks Washington for giving up three things. As he writes: "political power; insistence on civil rights and higher education for Negro youth." The results? Catastrophic. DuBois sees the suicidal consequences of Washington's scheme surfacing immediately. He describes them as: "(1)The disenfranchisement of the Negro. (2.)The legal creation of distinct civil inferiority for the Negro. (3.)The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions of higher training of the Negro." His indignation boils over.

(We) do not expect that the free right to vote [this is 1903] -- (we) do not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated will come in a moment; (we) do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet; but (we) are absolutely sure that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.

DuBois calls for outright resistance to Washington's strategy. He claims the burden of human rights belongs to the whole nation, North and South, and believes the industrial revolution and commercial interests with their unrelenting pursuit of profit anesthetizes the conscience of both the North and South, asking finally, "If worse comes to worst, can the moral fibre of this country survive the slow throttling and murder of nine millions of men?"

He closes a bitter condemnation of Washington, giving Washington, in the first place, credit where credit is due, yet concluding,

But, so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South; [so far as he] does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds -- so far as he, the South or the Nation, does this -- we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them. By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords the men, clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Father would fain forget: "we hold these truth to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

How those words echo and come alive generation after generation. And as we close this morning, we are reminded by headline and statistic, by personal story and chance encounter, by a continuing public struggle over the place of Blacks, Latinos and Asians in our universities, and graduate schools of law, medicine and education and just this week again in the sacred precincts of Wall Street, all amid a continuing Presidential dialogue -- we are reminded that as W.E.B. DuBois wrote so long ago, ". . .the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." And to us who are white-folk, he speaks still. "Your country?" he asks.

How came it yours? Before the pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song -- soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centered for thrice a hundred years; out of the nation's heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of Right. Nor has the gift of Spirit been merely passive. Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation, -- we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy and Truth lest the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer and warning have been given to this nation in Blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America without her Negro people?

God forbid!