Books with title My Larger Education: Being Chapters from My Experience

The primary voice of the African American community from 1890 to 1915, and the author of Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington was an educator and orator as well as a founder of the Alabama school that developed into Tuskegee University. Washington proposed that most African Americans would benefit from a practical trade rather than a liberal arts education — a position opposed by other black leaders, including W. E. B. Dubois, and the source of a debate that lingers to this day. In this autobiographical work, Washington discusses how he arrived at his views on race relations, focusing on the importance of cooperation and teamwork and describing the experiences that led to the founding of Tuskegee. My Larger Education is essential reading for anyone wishing to learn more about Washington and his ideas as well as those seeking insights into the challenges faced by African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century.

The primary voice of the African American community from 1890 to 1915, and the author of Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington was an educator and orator as well as a founder of the Alabama school that developed into Tuskegee University. Washington proposed that most African Americans would benefit from a practical trade rather than a liberal arts education—a position opposed by other black leaders, including W. E. B. Dubois, and the source of a debate that lingers to this day. In this autobiographical work, Washington discusses how he arrived at his views on race relations, focusing on the importance of cooperation and teamwork and describing the experiences that led to the founding of Tuskegee. My Larger Education is essential reading for anyone wishing to learn more about Washington and his ideas as well as those seeking insights into the challenges faced by African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century.

IT HAS been my fortune to be associated all my life with a problem -- a hard, perplexing, but important problem. There was a time when I looked upon this fact as a great misfortune. It seemed to me a great hardship that I was born poor, and it seemed an even greater hardship that I should have been born a Negro. I did not like to admit, even to myself, that I felt this way about the matter, because it seemed to me an indication of weakness and cowardice for any man to complain about the condition he was born to. Later I came to the conclusion that it was not only weak and cowardly, but that it was a mistake to think of the matter in the way in which I had done. I came to see that, along with his disadvantages, the Negro in America had some advantages, and I made up my mind that opportunities that had been denied him from without could be more than made up by greater concentration and power within. Perhaps I can illustrate what I mean by a fact I learned while I was in school. I recall my teacher's explaining to the class one day how it was that steam or any other form of energy, if allowed to escape and dissipate itself, loses its value as a power. Energy must be confined; steam must be locked in a boiler in order to generate power. The same thing seems to have been true in the case of the Negro. Where the Negro has met with discriminations and with difficulties because of his race, he has invariably tended to get up more steam. When this steam has been rightly directed and controlled, it has become a great force in the upbuilding of the race. If, on the contrary, it merely spent itself in fruitless agitation and hot air, no good has come of it. Paradoxical as it may seem, the difficulties that the Negro has met since emancipation have, in my opinion, not always, but on the whole, helped him more than they have hindered him. For example, I think the progress which the Negro has made within less than half a century in the matter of learning to read and write the English language has been due in large part to the fact that, in slavery, this knowledge was forbidden him. My experience and observation have taught me that people who try to withhold the best things in civilization from any group of people, or race of people, not infrequently aid that people to the very things that they are trying to withhold from them. I am sure that, in my own case, I should never have made the efforts that I did make in my early boyhood to get an education and still later to develop the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama if I had not been conscious of the fact that there were a large number of people in the world who did not believe that the Negro boy could learn or that members of the Negro race could build up and conduct a large institution of learning.

My Larger Education: Being Chapters from My Experience [1911]. IT HAS been my fortune to be associated all my life with a problem a hard, perplexing, but important problem. There was a time when I looked upon this fact as a great misfortune. It seemed to me a great hardship that I was born poor, and it seemed an even greater hardship that I should have been born a Negro. I did not like to admit, even to myself, that I felt this way about the matter, because it seemed to me an indication of weakness and cowardice for any man to complain about the condition he was born to. Later I came to the conclusion that it was not only weak and cowardly, but that it was a mistake to think of the matter in the way in which I had done. I came to see that, along with his disadvantages, the Negro in America had some advantages, and I made up my mind that opportunities that had been denied him from without could be more than made up by greater concentration and power within. Perhaps I can illustrate what I mean by a fact I learned while I was in school. I recall my teacher's explaining to the class one day how it was that steam or any other form of energy, if allowed to escape and dissipate itself, loses its value as a motive power. Energy must be confined; steam must be locked in a boiler in order to generate power. The same thing seems to have been true in the case of the Negro. Where the Negro has met with discriminations and with difficulties because of his race, he has invariably tended to get up more steam. When this steam has been rightly directed and controlled, it has become a great force in the upbuilding of the race. If, on the contrary, it merely spent itself in fruitless agitation and hot air, no good has come of it. Paradoxical as it may seem, the difficulties that the Negro has met since emancipation have, in my opinion, not always, but on the whole, helped him more than they have hindered him. BOOKER T WASHINGTON [1911].

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IT HAS been my fortune to be associated all my life with a problem a hard, perplexing, but important problem. There was a time when I looked upon this fact as a great misfortune. It seemed to me a great hardship that I was born poor, and it seemed an even greater hardship that I should have been born a Negro. I did not like to admit, even to myself, that I felt this way about the matter, because it seemed to me an indication of weakness and cowardice for any man to complain about the condition he was born to. Later I came to the conclusion that it was not only weak and cowardly, but that it was a mistake to think of the matter in the way in which I had done. I came to see that, along with his disadvantages, the Negro in America had some advantages, and I made up my mind that opportunities that had been denied him from without could be more than made up by greater concentration and power within. Perhaps I can illustrate what I mean by a fact I learned while I was in school. I recall my teacher's explaining to the class one day how it was that steam or any other form of energy, if allowed to escape and dissipate itself, loses its value as a motive power. Energy must be confined; steam must be locked in a boiler in order to generate power. The same thing seems to have been true in the case of the Negro. Where the Negro has met with discriminations and with difficulties because of his race, he has invariably tended to get up more steam. When this steam has been rightly directed and controlled, it has become a great force in the upbuilding of the race. If, on the contrary, it merely spent itself in fruitless agitation and hot air, no good has come of it. Paradoxical as it may seem, the difficulties that the Negro has met since emancipation have, in my opinion, not always, but on the whole, helped him more than they have hindered him. For example, I think the progress

The leading African American leader in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was Booker T. Washington. His conciliatory stance toward the white majority, preference for working behind the scenes rather than public protest to remedy discrimination, and emphasis on education in the practical trades for the black masses as opposed to a liberal arts education, all won favor with prominent white politicians and businessmen. Among many black intellectuals, however, Washington was a controversial figure. They criticized his lack of public emphasis on civil rights and felt that his leadership style almost guaranteed a bleak future of segregation and second-class status for blacks.In this book, a sequel to his famous autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), he lays out his philosophy of hard work and cooperative attitudes in persuasive and reasonable terms. He describes the men and experiences that had a lasting influence on his thinking and the impressive achievements of his Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama.He also respectfully disagrees with his critics among black intellectuals. Chief among these was W. E. B. Du Bois, who criticized Washington's slow, patient methods and passive stance in the teeth of so much injustice. Indeed, reading Washington's account, one would never know that in the 1890s lynching reached an all-time high, that blacks were effectively disenfranchised in their own communities, and that the grip of poverty among African Americans was virtually ensured by the white power structure.However controversial his career, My Larger Education is still worth reading as an important document in African American history, and Washington's emphasis on economic empowerment for blacks is a continuing theme to this day.