|
MESSAGE TO HARVARD: WE ARE COMING - B.T.
WASHINGTON 1896
Harvard University Address
It follows the full text transcript of
Booker T. Washington's Harvard University
Address, delivered at Boston, Massachusetts — June 24, 1896.
 |
Mr. President and Gentlemen: |
It would in some
measure relieve my embarrassment if I could,
even in a slight degree, feel myself worthy of
the great honor which you do me today.
Why you have
called me from the Black Belt of the South, from
among my humble people, to share in the honors
of this occasion, is not for me to explain; and
yet it may not be inappropriate for me to
suggest that it seems to me that one of the most
vital questions that touch our American life, is
how to bring the strong, wealthy and learned
into helpful touch with the poorest, most
ignorant, and humble and at the same time, make
the one appreciate the vitalizing, strengthening
influence of the other.
How shall we make
the mansions on yon Beacon street feel and see
the need of the spirits in the lowliest cabin in
Alabama cotton fields or Louisiana sugar
bottoms? This problem Harvard University is
solving, not by bringing itself down, but by
bringing the masses up.
If through me, an humble representative, seven
millions of my people in the South might be
permitted to send a message to Harvard — Harvard
that offered up on death's altar, young Shaw,
and Russell, and Lowell and scores of others,
that we might have a free and united country,
that message would be,
Tell them that
the sacrifice was not in vain. Tell them
that by the way of the shop, the field, the
skilled hand, habits of thrift and economy,
by way of industrial school and college, we
are coming.
We are
crawling up, working up, yea, bursting up.
Often through oppression, unjust
discrimination and prejudice, but through
them all we are coming up, and with proper
habits, intelligence and property, there is
no power on earth that can permanently stay
our progress."
If my life in the
past has meant anything in the lifting up of my
people and the bringing about of better
relations between your race and mine. I assure
you from this day it will mean doubly more. In
the economy of God there is but one standard by
which an individual can succeed
— there is but one
for a race. This country demands that every race
measure itself by the American standard. By it a
race must rise or fall, succeed or fail, and in
the last analysis mere sentiment counts for
little.
During the next
half century and more, my race must continue
passing through the severe American crucible. We
are to be tested in our patience, our
forbearance, our perseverance, our power to
endure wrong, to withstand temptations, to
economize, to acquire and use skill; our ability
to compete, to succeed in commerce, to disregard
the superficial for the real, the appearance for
the substance, to be great and yet small,
learned and yet simple, high and yet the servant
of all. This, this is the passport to all that
is best in the life of our republic, and the
Negro must possess it, or be debarred.
While we are thus being tested, I beg of you to
remember that wherever our life touches yours,
we help or hinder. Wherever your life touches
ours, you make us stronger or weaker. No member
of your race in any part of our country can harm
the meanest member of mine, without the proudest
and bluest blood in Massachusetts being
degraded. When Mississippi commits crime, New
England commits crime, and in so much, lowers
the standard of your civilization. There is no
escape — man drags man down, or man lifts man up.
In working out our destiny, while the main
burden and center of activity must be with us,
we shall need, in a large measure in the years
that are to come, as we have in the past, the
help, the encouragement, the guidance that the
strong can give the weak. Thus helped, we of
both races in the South, soon shall throw off
the shackles of racial and sectional prejudice
and rise, as Harvard University has risen and as
we all should rise, above the clouds of
ignorance, narrowness and selfishness, into that
atmosphere, that pure sunshine, where it will be
our highest ambition to serve MAN, our brother,
regardless of race or previous condition.
More History
|
