December 1 — The Real Thing
The man who has educated the negro, the man who has had in him really a touch of the divine, would never appeal to the Sentimentalist.
Booker Washington, very properly, of course, lives and lives well upon the results of his school. He has claimed from the rich, and justly has received, lavish aid for his enterprise. He dresses well, lives amply, travels in comfort, is entertained by Royalty and Chief Magistrates, and with his family, is put beyond even a chance of narrow means by his sympathizers’ lavishness. But who heeds the man who has really educated the negro? What crowned head or President entertains the small farmer in rough brogans and faded jeans, who sweats over his hoe in the cotton and tobacco fields, or in the steaming rice and sugar-cane swamps, and who has in forty years spent more than a hundred millions upon the education of the negro? This is the man, and the son of the man who turned heart-brokenly home on the begrudged horse to fields overgrown and laid waste—fields to which his conquerors, unlike the English, contributed no seeds or implements or stock—and from that land he has wrung by the hard labour of his hands that hundred millions which has been spent in educating his ex-slave.
He has lived hardly, in dingy, decaying houses, he has eaten of the coarsest, he has known no beauty or grace, and but scant comfort, he has been clothed in the plainest, he has politically known little but injury and contempt from the larger and wealthier half of his country, and worst of all he has seen his sons grow to manhood but partially and inadequately equipped with learning, because so large a portion of their birthright must be shared in the teaching of the negro in whose name he had been plundered and slaughtered.
The touching point of the story is that it has all been done without any consciousness of special merit. The duty was to be done, and was done without trumpets or drums. Such silent, patient, unreflecting, unadvertised goodness would, of course, never appeal to the Sentimentalist. If he could be brought to see it ’twould merely disturb his self-satisfaction.
It is only to the fantastic mind of a heretic that its meaning appeals, only the heart of a cynic is touched by the instinctive heroism of the white man of the South.