On this episode of Our American Stories, as the great-granddaughter of Booker T. Washington, the former slave-turned-famous educator, and founder of Tuskegee University, Sarah Washington O’Neal Rush has been influenced by her great-grandfather’s rise above slavery, his relentless stand on inner strength, and his principles on personal development. Here she is to tell her story (from her book Rising Up From the Ashes), and her great grandfather’s.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
As the great granddaughter of Booker T. Washington, the former
(00:30):
slave turned famous educator and founder of Tuskegee University, Sarah
Washington O'Neill rush has been influenced by her great grandfather's
rise above slavery, his relentless stand on inner strength, and
his principles on personal development. Here she is to tell
her story as well as her great grandfather's.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Let's take a listener.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
For as long as I can remember, I knew the
Booker T. Washington was my great grandfather. I didn't learn
about the significance of what it meant to be in
his bloodline until I was an adult, And as a
result of that, like so many of our children today,
I spent my childhood, my teenage years, and a lot
(01:19):
of my young adult years looking for myself in all
the wrong places. My mother, although she was the granddaughter
of Booker T. Washington, she was born and raised across
the street from Tuskegee. It was institute at the time.
Today it's Tuskegee University. But she rarely talked about it,
(01:39):
and she never knew her grandfather because she was born
four years after he died in nineteen fifteen. She was
born in nineteen nineteen. But I heard from others that
she and her parents and her three younger sisters were
all treated like royalty growing up there where it all happened.
(02:00):
My mother's father was Ernest Davidson Washington, and he was
the last born of Booker T. Washington's three children. I
actually learned more about what it was like growing up
in Tuskegee from hearing Lionel Richie speak about it on
an episode of Oprah Winfrey's Masterclass program several years ago.
(02:23):
He grew up right next door to my mom. My
mother grew up with his mother, and they lived right
across the street from the campus. And he said on
this episode living there was like being in a protective bubble,
raised by a community and surrounded by black professionals, away
from the discrimination and racism that he would later face
(02:46):
and discover outside of Tuskegee. I believe he said it
was in Montgomery, Alabama, when he started to travel with
the Commodores, but before that it was foreign to him.
So listening to him speaks so proudly about Tuskegee was
so moving. Today my mom is buried on the campus
(03:07):
of Tuskegee University along with Booker T. Washington and George
Washington Carver and other prominent African Americans, including her parents
and I believe two or maybe three previous Tuskegee University presidents.
Because she's passed away, I can only speculate about the
reason she didn't talk much about her lineage, and I
(03:31):
believe there were actually a combination of reasons that she
didn't talk about it. One was that she was overwhelmed
as a single parent. At times, my mom held down
two full time jobs just trying to make ends meet.
And another reason could have been that when I grew
(03:52):
up in the sixties in North Oakland, we were just
a stone literally a stone's throw away from where Hewing
knew and the Black Panther Party began, and at that time
there was little tolerance for the reconciliation stand that Booker T.
Washington took from the late eighteen hundreds until he died
(04:12):
in nineteen fifteen, he believed it was more important to
gain what we needed to get ahead in terms of
economics and industry. He determined the best way to do
that was to get along with white people rather than
to fight against them. He was led, always led by
his Christian values, and he talked about the Bible and
(04:34):
how he read it every single day, and how they
depended on that as slaves. That's where their hope and
their faith came from. And he said it up from
slavery his autobiography that he woke up every morning to
the fervent prayers of his mother on her knees, praying
for their freedom. And he said once he said, I
(04:56):
will never allow any man to drag me down so
low to make me hate him. That definitely comes from
the Christian values that he had in his heart. And
he also said, it's important and right that all privileges
of law be ours, but it is vastly more important
that we be prepared for the exercise of these rights
(05:17):
and privileges. In other words, what use was it to
have privileges if we weren't properly prepared on how to
use them. So because of this stance that Booker t
Washington took. He was often referred to as an uncle
Tom or a sellout, and I think that hurt my mother,
that was her grandfather. Unfortunately, at the time, those voices
(05:42):
overshadowed the voices of those who really knew all that
Washington accomplished for black Americans. And I could talk about
that for hours. Of the things that I've learned since
learning more about my great grandfather, and in a book
entitled Christian Business Legends, they cited by nineteen oh five,
(06:02):
Tuskegee turned out more self made millionaires than Harvard, Princeton
and Yale combined. And one final reason my mom may
have been quiet about her lineage was that my mom
was just very modest, like her grandfather. She just believed
that people pulled themselves up on their own hard work
(06:23):
and through their own merits. So she never dropped names,
she never boasted about anything. That was just her nature.
And now my father, on the other hand, and we
spent my brother and I, James, we spent every weekend
with my father. They were divorced since as young as
I can remember, about five years old, but we spent
(06:44):
He'd always lived nearby. We spent every weekend with him,
and he would, in a loud and proud voice, introduce
us to any and everybody as descendants of Booker T. Washington,
But he never saying why he was so excited.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
And you're listening to Sarah Washington O'Neill rush tell the
story of her great grandfather, but also of her own family.
I will never allow a man to drag me so
low that I hate him. When we come back, more
of the story of Birker T. Washington as told by
his great granddaughter. Here on Our American Stories. Liehbib here
(07:33):
the host of our American Stories. Every day on this show,
we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories
from our big cities and small towns. But we truly
can't do the show without you. Our stories are free
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com and click the donate button. Give a little, give
(07:55):
a lot. Go to Ouramericanstories dot com and give And
we continue with our American Stories in the story of
Sarah Washington O'Neill rush.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
And she's the great granddaughter of Booker T. Washington. Let's
pick up where she last left off.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
So whenever he introduced me and my brother, we would
just get embarrassed. And that was the only thing I
didn't adore about my father. Other than that, I just
really adored being with my father. My mom was the
one who made us do our homework, eat our vegetables,
but at my dad's house, it was just free gang.
We could do whatever we wanted to do. And I'll
(08:44):
talk a little bit about why that was in a second,
But when I was nine years old, I remember him
introducing us to an elderly stranger who just happened to
be passing by on the sidewalk, and in his usual
loud voice, he said, these are Booker T. Washington's great grandchildren.
And while I cringed, the man looked down at me
(09:07):
and he said, in a really kind voice, he said,
don't be embarrassed. It's an honor to know you and
to know that his descendants still exist. But still I
didn't understand why, So for a long time in my
life I would just write my family lineage off as
just an accident of birth. I didn't know then, but
(09:28):
I learned much later in my life that my dad
was so loud and boisterous because on the weekends he
was usually intoxicated. As I reflect back on my childhood,
my father only seemed happy when he was drinking, and
when he wasn't drinking, which was during the week because
(09:48):
he had to go to work, he was usually distant
or angry. And by the time I was eleven, he
decided to suddenly take off leave town for life that
didn't include me or my brother. And after that, not
only did I rarely see or hear from him anymore,
(10:09):
but I rarely heard about our relationship. To Booker T. Washington,
I believe my dad's problems started long before I was born.
In fact, I know they did, and it probably was
around the time he graduated from Texas Southern University Law School.
Because he was never able to pass the state bar exam.
(10:31):
My mother would often joke and say that he would
never pass that bar because he could never pass a bar,
but he contended that it was the discrimination that he
faced when he graduated in nineteen thirty eight. But as
a little girl, none of that mattered to me. All
I knew is that my father was gone, and unfortunately,
(10:54):
the next time I would see him, I was an adult. Meanwhile,
In my teen years, my mother working two jobs and
my father gone, I spent a lot of time on
supervise and again looking for myself in all the wrong places.
And the year I turned sixteen, while my friends were
planning sweet sixteen parties, I was preparing for the birth
(11:17):
of my son. Ironically, my birthday falls on February sixteenth.
My sons was born on September sixteenth, and so while
that number sixteen should have represented life for me, it didn't. Instead,
it represented huge amounts of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and that
(11:38):
came from the harsh stairs, the judgment, and the criticism
that came from friends, family, and even strangers who walked
by and saw that I was much too young to
be pushing a baby around in a stroller. And so
for a long time in my life, every time I
heard the number sixteen, thoughts of guilt, chain and embarrassment
(12:01):
would conjure up in my head. By the time I
was seventeen, I was a single mom on welfare with
a one year old child. I lived on my own,
raising him alone in a dangerous, high crime, drug infested
housing project on eighty fifth Avenue and way Deep in
East Oakland. And that was way on the other side
(12:23):
of my high school. I went to high school in
North Oakland, But the one thing that I remember, and
the only thing I remember my parents ever agreeing about,
was the importance of education. So I would get up
early every morning, I would get me and my son dressed,
catch two buses to school, drop him off at daycare,
(12:43):
which was across the street from the school, and I'd
rush to class and against overwhelming odds in a city
that was deemed a dropout factory by a Harvard study
citing that forty eight percent of the freshman in the
Oakland Public School District end up dropping out, but I'm
(13:04):
proud to say I managed to graduate six months ahead
of my class, having the grades and more than enough
credits to do so. And while I still don't completely
understand how I was able to accomplish all that without
anyone encouraging me or urging me on, without any adult
role model positive role model around, I do know that
(13:29):
I was determined to have a better life, and I
now know that it probably didn't hurt that God placed
me in a lineage where I had Booker T. Washington's
blood running through my veins and for me that gives
life to Romans eight twenty eight, that all things work
together for good to those who love God and are
(13:51):
called according to His purpose. Unbeknownst to me at the time,
Booker T. Washington traveled nearly five hundred miles mostly by foot,
to gain his formal education from Hampton Hampton Institute today
Hampton University. And he was sixteen when he went there,
and he graduated three years later with honors, and just
(14:15):
seven years earlier than that, he was a slave, and
one of his slave duties was carrying the master's children's
books as he walked behind them to school, And after
he went inside, he would hang around on the outside
of the schoolhouse to listen to what the teacher was teaching.
But he'd run away before getting caught, because at the
time a slave learning to reader write was a crime,
(14:38):
and it was a crime that could be punished by death.
But he knew then what's still true today, that knowledge
was power. And he said it felt like getting into
a schoolhouse would be like arriving in paradise. So for me,
although today the schools could use lots of improvement, I
think the situation is a lot better now than it
(14:59):
was when he was able to go to school and
if he was able to use his education to build
a school that still stands today and it produces graduates
that come back into our communities as leaders for the
next generation. I think that we can continue to make
strides to make them better, but we can make more
(15:21):
strides in our own lives as we push to make
our schools better. For a long time in my life,
I missed it. I was running on fumes. I was
just trying to survive. And it took nearly twenty years
from the time that I graduated from high school to
realize that there was more to this life. It happened
(15:43):
when I went to the South for the first time
in my life and I arrived on the campus of
Tuskegee University, and that was the school that my grandfather
opened on July fourth, eighteen eighty one, sixteen years after
the end of slavery, and we went there for our
very first book or two Washington family reunion. When we
first stepped foot on campus, there were students, faculty, community leaders, reporters,
(16:09):
there were writers and journalists, and they were all there
to welcome us. Some were all struck that we were
still alive, and like the older gentleman said, and I
was all struck that they cared so much. They were
inspired simply by our presence, and they asked us for
autographs and interviews. They asked to take pictures with us.
(16:32):
Some just wanted to rub shoulders and elbows and touch us,
and some just wanted a chance to talk and get
to know us. My presence was important to them. And
up to that point, I believe my life was pretty
simple and ordinary, or less than ordinary. And it wasn't.
It was without much purpose because I grew up not
(16:54):
knowing with all what all of these people who surrounded
me knew about my great grandfather and about my history.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
And you're listening to Sarah Washington O'Neill rush tell the
story of her life, her father's life, and of course
her great grandfather.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Booker T.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Washington the book Rising Up from the Blood, a Legacy Reclaimed,
a bridge Forward, And what a story Sarah is telling
about her own father, most importantly, who had problems of
his own and abandoned his family, and at the age
of sixteen, like so many girls without fathers, she soon
found herself a mother. It turns out Booker T. Washington.
(17:34):
Her great granddad was sixteen when he traveled five hundred
miles to go to school, and that of course was
just years before he was a slave. When we come
back more of the remarkable story of Sarah Washington O'Neill
Rush and her great grandfather, Booker T. Washington, here on
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories
(18:11):
and the story of Booker T.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Washington, and equally important the story of his great.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Granddaughter, and that would be Sarah Washington O'Neil Rush. We
just heard how Sarah was reintroduced to her proud lineage
while visiting the university her great grandfather built with his
own hands, Tuskegee. The receptions he experienced, well, it was overwhelming.
Let's return to Sarah.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
So this experience brought back again. It brought back the
memories of walking on the sidewalk that day with my father,
when the elderly gentleman said, it's an honor to know you.
It was all beginning to make sense. And it was
at this reunion that I began to understand and my
interest in enthusiasm about my great grandfather was a nice
(19:01):
and it was there that I learned how important his
work was I was inspired by so much. And I
hear from people who learned that I'm the great granddaughter.
I hear from them about you know how they may
have thought one way about Booker T. Washington, and they
visited that campus, or they read up from slavery, and
their whole view change. And that was the experience that
(19:24):
I had from that trip. And what I was most
struck by, most fascinated by, were the original buildings that
some of them still stand today. And these buildings were
built by hand, brick by brick by Booker T. Washington
and his students African American ancestors, all former slaves, using
(19:46):
bricks that they made. And these bricks were of such
superior quality that people came from miles around to purchase them.
And there are buildings that are still standing in the
South today that are made from these very And he
put the money from the sell of these bricks back
into the school, giving his students lessons in business and finance, economics,
(20:09):
and industry. And that was his plan all along. And
there is a story of perseverance that can be found
in his autobiography up from Slavery, of his determination never
to give up and his quest for making these bricks,
because it got down to his last watch that he
had to pawn because he spent all the money and
(20:30):
the kiln wasn't working. But he while his students may
have been getting frustrated, he refused to give up. So
after I returned home from the reunion, I set out
to learn everything I could about my history and my
great grandfather. And that's when I read up from Slavery
for the first time, and I studied and I did research.
(20:51):
I read biographies about him, and I asked lots of questions.
I began looking at my family tree and I discovered
that I have fifteen cousins who are also the great
grandchildren of Booker T. Washington, and in that birth order,
I'm the last born. So I thought about it. I'm like,
(21:13):
that makes me the sixteenth of sixteen great grandchildren of
Booker T. Washington. And it hit me suddenly that that
number sixteen, which had always been a reminder of shame
and guilt and embarrassment, it began to take on a
whole new meeting. And I realized then that this was
(21:33):
no accident, because God doesn't make mistakes. Sixteen represents my birthday,
my son's birthday, the age of Washington when he traveled
to Hampton, the years that passed between the end of
slavery and the beginning of Tuskegee Institute, and it represents
my place in the birth order and the completion of
(21:55):
the fourth generation of Booker T. Washington. My whole life
has changed since that time in Tuskegee and making the
connection to my lineage. And that's why I do what
I do today in terms of being an inspirational speaker
and writer, because I believe these messages of resilience and
perseverance can go a long way and cultivating hope and
(22:19):
the strength necessary for us to pick up where our
ancestors left off. So, my great grandfather, Booker T. Washington,
he was a former slave turned famous educator and the
founder of Tuskegee University. And he was born into slavery.
The only parent or four parent that he knew was
(22:42):
his mother, Jane, and it was and that's the only
name that he knew her by, and he credits her
for his determination and his resilience. He didn't know any
because slaves were torn apart from their families. He didn't
know anybody else. He didn't know aunts or uncles or grandparents,
(23:03):
and so his mom, she was the cook on the plantation,
and she would sneak food for them, and they lived
in a one room cabin with a dirt floor. They
slept on the floor, and that's when he would wake
up to the fervent prayers of his mother every morning,
praying for their freedom. He suspects because he never knew
(23:27):
his father that he was a white man who lived
on a nearby plantation. He always vowed that because he
had no lineage hisself or he had no ancestors, that
he knew that he would leave a record for his
children and his grandchildren and great grandchildren that he hoped
would make them proud, which it absolutely worked for me
(23:51):
and for several of my family members. So when they
were fine, he was nine years old when freedom came
to them, immediately moved to West Virginia, where his stepfather was,
and he had to work in the salt furnaces and
the coal mines in order to help make ends meet
(24:12):
for the family. His mom knew his desire to go
to school, and so she bought him a dictionary that
helped him teach himself the ABC's, But he also got
a job during the day with Viola Rufner, and she
was the wife of a Quaker, and she was a
(24:35):
strict disciplinarian. So she was a white woman, and she
couldn't keep any of her staff who were also former
slaves because she was so strict. But Booker ge Washington,
he followed everything she asked to a tea and so
she was really impressed with him with his cleanliness. She
(24:55):
taught him cleanliness, how to clean a room, how to
clean up himself, how to look straight, how to sit
up straight, how to talk, how to speak, and she
was really impressed with his desire to follow these instructions,
and so she actually encouraged him to get his education
(25:17):
from Hampton Institute, which was one of the only schools
that was teaching former slaves. But she would also teach
him on her When he was done doing his work,
she would teach him how to read. And so when
he got to Hampton, he walked nearly the whole way
because he got kicked off at trains. He had to
(25:38):
sleep under sidewalks, and it was nearly five hundred miles
and when he got there, his entrance exam was to
clean a recital room so the teacher left while he
did that, and when she came back, she took her
handkerchief and she went over the room, the floors, the walls,
and she couldn't find a spell of dirt. And she
(26:01):
told him, you're accepted. And he credits by Alla Roughner
for teaching him how to clean a room in that way.
And I think the way Booker T. Washington looked at
things a little bit different, Like some people would hear
that and they would just be appalled, like how dare
she would? But his mindset was different, and so he
(26:23):
would look at more in a positive light, that it's
because of this that I'm here, and now I will
be able to do this, which he proved well that
he was able to take all of these things, adversity
and blessings and turn them over tenfold to his pupil.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
And you've been listening to Sarah Washington O'Neill rush tell
her story and also the story of her great grandfather
who she discovers after a family reunion trip to Tuskegee
and that one gentleman who said, it's an honor to
know you, and that lit a fire in Sarah to
(27:04):
learn more about her great grandfather and in the end herself.
When we come back more of the remarkable story of
Sarah Washington O'Neill Rush and her great grandfather Booker T.
Washington here on our American story, and we continue here
(27:38):
with our American stories and with Sarah Washington O'Neill Rush
telling the story of her own life, her family's life,
and the life of her great grandfather, Booker T.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Washington. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
So Booker T. Washington's philosophy was, there's a statue actually
on the front of the campus. It's a pretty famous statue.
It's called lifting the Veil of Ignorance, and he's lifting
the veil from a slave's eyes. And so many people
come from miles around, from all over the world, and
they take pictures in front of this statue lifting the veil.
(28:20):
And what he did in lifting the veil of ignorance,
he did that by personal responsibility. Some of the philosophies
that Booker T. Washington stood for were character building, self reliance, excellence,
economics and wealth, Christianity, determination and education of the head
(28:40):
hand and the heart. And the head stood for book
smarts or academics. The hand was hard work, and the
heart was giving back and service to others. Some people
think that he just wanted blacks to continue to be slaves,
which so far from the truth. He wanted them to
(29:03):
take what they learned in slavery and he wanted them
to perfect it, which is an example of the bricks
and the buildings that still stand on the campus. So
personal responsibility kept moral character building. His students had to
every morning, they had to pray. They prayed morning, noon,
and night. He took that in. He took it from slavery.
(29:25):
He knew that that's what was going to work. It
taught them discipline. He was big on discipline. He when
he first got to Tuskegee, he traveled outside of the
area where the school was going to open, and he
went into the rural country districts because he wanted to
discover the life of the people and what their needs were.
(29:46):
And what he found it surprised even him. He found
people like five people living in one room shacks, and
he found children outside that were completely naked, and the
ones who had on clothing, some had only one piece,
and it was so filthy. He said, it didn't even
resemble cloth. And so he said He spent the night
(30:10):
with many of these families, and they always found room
for him, even though they didn't have room for themselves,
because they were anxious to get an education and improve
their lives. But one thing he saw was that they
would share one fork among them when they ate at
the table in the evening. There would be one fork
among maybe a family of five. But he saw an
(30:33):
expensive clock on a mantle, or he saw a piano
in someone's house, and he's like, how can they afford
these material items? And they can't even take care of themselves,
And so he knew that was something that he would
have to work on with them. And so when the
school was to open and when he accepted students and
students were accepted into the school, they felt like they
(30:56):
weren't going to have to do any more hard work,
that this was this was their ticket to freedom, to
real freedom. But he had different plans. And so when
he told them that they were gonna build their own
buildings and they were gonna grow their own food, and
they were gonna raise farm animals so that they would
have food and dairy, they protested loudly. But when he
(31:22):
picked up the first acts and he led the way
through the forest of trees. If you can imagine in
the South all the trees, and the he began to
cut down the trees, they willingly began to follow, quietly
and willingly began to follow. And many times when I
tell people that I are when people learned it I'm
(31:43):
the great granddaughter of Booker T. Washington, or especially i'm
speaking somewhere where there's a question answer period, I can
hear from their questions that they're confusing him with either
George Washington Carver, maybe even George Washington sometimes Web the Boys,
who was his greatest critic. And so I always realized
(32:05):
then that we need to learn our history. We need
to know our history. And I know for me that
learning about my history certainly changed my life. So while
my mother and her three sisters they didn't know Booker T.
Washington because he died four years before my mom, the
oldest was born, they did know George Washington Carver, who
(32:30):
was actually my aunt Edith's godfather. Booker T. Washington invited
him to be the head of the agricultural department, and
he said, I can't pay you much, but I can
give you room and board and all. George Washington. Carver
wanted to do was make a difference for his people.
(32:50):
He was also born as slave, and so many people
think that when I they found out I'm the great
granddaughter of Booker T. Washington, that it's George Washington Carver,
and they'll say, oh, he invented the peanut, and I
tell them, no, I think God invented the peanut. But
he found hundreds of uses for the peanut, and so
(33:11):
the things that he was able to do, the discoveries
he made through science. It was said that George Shinton
Carver could have been a multi millionaire or a millionaire
if he'd done something other than lead the agricultural department
at Tuskegee. But it was his choice to stay there,
(33:32):
and he stayed there until he is passing, and he
left every penny that he had, which I can't remember
how much it was, it was in the tens of thousands.
I believe he left all of that to Tuskegee. So
Booker T. Washington and w Eb de Boys. Something some
(33:54):
people don't know is that they were actually friends before
they publicly split. There was never really a debate, but
they publicly split because his most important project was getting
Tuskegee off the ground, and he made friends with white
people such as Andrew Carnegie, Teddy Roosevelt. He was the
(34:16):
first black invited to dine at the White House. There
was George Eastman of Eastman Kodak, Julius Rosenwald who was
the president of Sears Roebuck and Julius Rosenwald and Booker T.
Washington actually partnered and Julius Rosenwald funded the Rosenwald Schools
(34:38):
in the South. There were over five thousand schools that
were built for African Americans, and so Booker T. Washington
in order to get that those things done, he knew
he had to be respectful, and he had to look
the part and dress the part himself, and he had
to respect himself and carry himself in that manner in
(34:58):
order to get the tension that he needed for these schools.
He figured that all rights and privileges a law should
be ours, but it's more important that we'd be prepared.
He knew that in order to get prepared, that was
the first order of the day, and next, you know,
we would gain the respect of the people. The difference
(35:22):
between Booker T. Washington and WEV. De Boyce was that w. E. B. D.
Boyce was more for the talented tenth. I was at
a conference or I was speaking on a panel in Buffalo,
New York for the one hundredth anniversary of the Niagara Movement.
And the Niagara Movement was a precursor to the NAACP,
(35:43):
and it was started by Dubois and it was to
combat a lot of Booker T. Washington's ideas. And on
this panel there were professors and it was the first
time I was publicly speaking, and we were in Buffalo,
where du Bois started Niagara Movement, so people were on
his side and they would the moderator even sat in
(36:05):
on the panel, which was unheard of. I haven't seen
anything like it since. And they were all on the
side of the boys, and they wouldn't let me get
a word in edgewise. And one person who was actually
a well known he's a writer and a movie producer,
he said, I'm tired of this talk about Booker T. Washington.
All he wanted us to do is be slaves. And
(36:29):
so when I walked off the stage, there was a
man who the reporters were flocking around the night before
the reception, and he looked at me and he said,
those people are idiots. And then I later found out
that he was a famous poet, Ishmael Reid, and he
lived for a time in Buffalo, and he's a professor,
might be a professor of malitiss at UC Berkeley here
(36:52):
where I am. Yes, Booker T. Washington was more about
hard work. We can do this, we can clean up ourselves.
There is work that we need to do in order
to get where we need to go, to gain the
mutual respect and to get a hint.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to Sarah Washington O'Neill
rush her book Rising Up from the Blood, a Legacy Reclaimed,
a bridge forward.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
And what a story she told about Booker T. Washington.
It is not told enough in our schools.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
And he wanted to do something simple with Tuskegee, and
that was create a great place for young African Americans,
young recently turned free people from slaves into independent and
self reliant people.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
And of course that story of Booker T.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Washington and du bois the boys trying to get to
the talented tenth populate the universities and change mindsets and
here is Booker T.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Washington and toiling in communities.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Trying to build up his own people to become independent
and free people.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
The story of Booker T.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
Washington, the story of his great granddaughter and his family,
and so much more. Hear on our American stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
As the great granddaughter of Booker T. Washington, the former
(00:30):
slave turned famous educator and founder of Tuskegee University, Sarah
Washington O'Neill rush has been influenced by her great grandfather's
rise above slavery, his relentless stand on inner strength, and
his principles on personal development. Here she is to tell
her story as well as her great grandfather's.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Let's take a listener.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
For as long as I can remember, I knew the
Booker T. Washington was my great grandfather. I didn't learn
about the significance of what it meant to be in
his bloodline until I was an adult, And as a
result of that, like so many of our children today,
I spent my childhood, my teenage years, and a lot
(01:19):
of my young adult years looking for myself in all
the wrong places. My mother, although she was the granddaughter
of Booker T. Washington, she was born and raised across
the street from Tuskegee. It was institute at the time.
Today it's Tuskegee University. But she rarely talked about it,
(01:39):
and she never knew her grandfather because she was born
four years after he died in nineteen fifteen. She was
born in nineteen nineteen. But I heard from others that
she and her parents and her three younger sisters were
all treated like royalty growing up there where it all happened.
(02:00):
My mother's father was Ernest Davidson Washington, and he was
the last born of Booker T. Washington's three children. I
actually learned more about what it was like growing up
in Tuskegee from hearing Lionel Richie speak about it on
an episode of Oprah Winfrey's Masterclass program several years ago.
(02:23):
He grew up right next door to my mom. My
mother grew up with his mother, and they lived right
across the street from the campus. And he said on
this episode living there was like being in a protective bubble,
raised by a community and surrounded by black professionals, away
from the discrimination and racism that he would later face
(02:46):
and discover outside of Tuskegee. I believe he said it
was in Montgomery, Alabama, when he started to travel with
the Commodores, but before that it was foreign to him.
So listening to him speaks so proudly about Tuskegee was
so moving. Today my mom is buried on the campus
(03:07):
of Tuskegee University along with Booker T. Washington and George
Washington Carver and other prominent African Americans, including her parents
and I believe two or maybe three previous Tuskegee University presidents.
Because she's passed away, I can only speculate about the
reason she didn't talk much about her lineage, and I
(03:31):
believe there were actually a combination of reasons that she
didn't talk about it. One was that she was overwhelmed
as a single parent. At times, my mom held down
two full time jobs just trying to make ends meet.
And another reason could have been that when I grew
(03:52):
up in the sixties in North Oakland, we were just
a stone literally a stone's throw away from where Hewing
knew and the Black Panther Party began, and at that time
there was little tolerance for the reconciliation stand that Booker T.
Washington took from the late eighteen hundreds until he died
(04:12):
in nineteen fifteen, he believed it was more important to
gain what we needed to get ahead in terms of
economics and industry. He determined the best way to do
that was to get along with white people rather than
to fight against them. He was led, always led by
his Christian values, and he talked about the Bible and
(04:34):
how he read it every single day, and how they
depended on that as slaves. That's where their hope and
their faith came from. And he said it up from
slavery his autobiography that he woke up every morning to
the fervent prayers of his mother on her knees, praying
for their freedom. And he said once he said, I
(04:56):
will never allow any man to drag me down so
low to make me hate him. That definitely comes from
the Christian values that he had in his heart. And
he also said, it's important and right that all privileges
of law be ours, but it is vastly more important
that we be prepared for the exercise of these rights
(05:17):
and privileges. In other words, what use was it to
have privileges if we weren't properly prepared on how to
use them. So because of this stance that Booker t
Washington took. He was often referred to as an uncle
Tom or a sellout, and I think that hurt my mother,
that was her grandfather. Unfortunately, at the time, those voices
(05:42):
overshadowed the voices of those who really knew all that
Washington accomplished for black Americans. And I could talk about
that for hours. Of the things that I've learned since
learning more about my great grandfather, and in a book
entitled Christian Business Legends, they cited by nineteen oh five,
(06:02):
Tuskegee turned out more self made millionaires than Harvard, Princeton
and Yale combined. And one final reason my mom may
have been quiet about her lineage was that my mom
was just very modest, like her grandfather. She just believed
that people pulled themselves up on their own hard work
(06:23):
and through their own merits. So she never dropped names,
she never boasted about anything. That was just her nature.
And now my father, on the other hand, and we
spent my brother and I, James, we spent every weekend
with my father. They were divorced since as young as
I can remember, about five years old, but we spent
(06:44):
He'd always lived nearby. We spent every weekend with him,
and he would, in a loud and proud voice, introduce
us to any and everybody as descendants of Booker T. Washington,
But he never saying why he was so excited.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
And you're listening to Sarah Washington O'Neill rush tell the
story of her great grandfather, but also of her own family.
I will never allow a man to drag me so
low that I hate him. When we come back, more
of the story of Birker T. Washington as told by
his great granddaughter. Here on Our American Stories. Liehbib here
(07:33):
the host of our American Stories. Every day on this show,
we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories
from our big cities and small towns. But we truly
can't do the show without you. Our stories are free
to listen to, but they're not free to make. If
you love what you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories dot
com and click the donate button. Give a little, give
(07:55):
a lot. Go to Ouramericanstories dot com and give And
we continue with our American Stories in the story of
Sarah Washington O'Neill rush.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
And she's the great granddaughter of Booker T. Washington. Let's
pick up where she last left off.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
So whenever he introduced me and my brother, we would
just get embarrassed. And that was the only thing I
didn't adore about my father. Other than that, I just
really adored being with my father. My mom was the
one who made us do our homework, eat our vegetables,
but at my dad's house, it was just free gang.
We could do whatever we wanted to do. And I'll
(08:44):
talk a little bit about why that was in a second,
But when I was nine years old, I remember him
introducing us to an elderly stranger who just happened to
be passing by on the sidewalk, and in his usual
loud voice, he said, these are Booker T. Washington's great grandchildren.
And while I cringed, the man looked down at me
(09:07):
and he said, in a really kind voice, he said,
don't be embarrassed. It's an honor to know you and
to know that his descendants still exist. But still I
didn't understand why, So for a long time in my
life I would just write my family lineage off as
just an accident of birth. I didn't know then, but
(09:28):
I learned much later in my life that my dad
was so loud and boisterous because on the weekends he
was usually intoxicated. As I reflect back on my childhood,
my father only seemed happy when he was drinking, and
when he wasn't drinking, which was during the week because
(09:48):
he had to go to work, he was usually distant
or angry. And by the time I was eleven, he
decided to suddenly take off leave town for life that
didn't include me or my brother. And after that, not
only did I rarely see or hear from him anymore,
(10:09):
but I rarely heard about our relationship. To Booker T. Washington,
I believe my dad's problems started long before I was born.
In fact, I know they did, and it probably was
around the time he graduated from Texas Southern University Law School.
Because he was never able to pass the state bar exam.
(10:31):
My mother would often joke and say that he would
never pass that bar because he could never pass a bar,
but he contended that it was the discrimination that he
faced when he graduated in nineteen thirty eight. But as
a little girl, none of that mattered to me. All
I knew is that my father was gone, and unfortunately,
(10:54):
the next time I would see him, I was an adult. Meanwhile,
In my teen years, my mother working two jobs and
my father gone, I spent a lot of time on
supervise and again looking for myself in all the wrong places.
And the year I turned sixteen, while my friends were
planning sweet sixteen parties, I was preparing for the birth
(11:17):
of my son. Ironically, my birthday falls on February sixteenth.
My sons was born on September sixteenth, and so while
that number sixteen should have represented life for me, it didn't. Instead,
it represented huge amounts of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and that
(11:38):
came from the harsh stairs, the judgment, and the criticism
that came from friends, family, and even strangers who walked
by and saw that I was much too young to
be pushing a baby around in a stroller. And so
for a long time in my life, every time I
heard the number sixteen, thoughts of guilt, chain and embarrassment
(12:01):
would conjure up in my head. By the time I
was seventeen, I was a single mom on welfare with
a one year old child. I lived on my own,
raising him alone in a dangerous, high crime, drug infested
housing project on eighty fifth Avenue and way Deep in
East Oakland. And that was way on the other side
(12:23):
of my high school. I went to high school in
North Oakland, But the one thing that I remember, and
the only thing I remember my parents ever agreeing about,
was the importance of education. So I would get up
early every morning, I would get me and my son dressed,
catch two buses to school, drop him off at daycare,
(12:43):
which was across the street from the school, and I'd
rush to class and against overwhelming odds in a city
that was deemed a dropout factory by a Harvard study
citing that forty eight percent of the freshman in the
Oakland Public School District end up dropping out, but I'm
(13:04):
proud to say I managed to graduate six months ahead
of my class, having the grades and more than enough
credits to do so. And while I still don't completely
understand how I was able to accomplish all that without
anyone encouraging me or urging me on, without any adult
role model positive role model around, I do know that
(13:29):
I was determined to have a better life, and I
now know that it probably didn't hurt that God placed
me in a lineage where I had Booker T. Washington's
blood running through my veins and for me that gives
life to Romans eight twenty eight, that all things work
together for good to those who love God and are
(13:51):
called according to His purpose. Unbeknownst to me at the time,
Booker T. Washington traveled nearly five hundred miles mostly by foot,
to gain his formal education from Hampton Hampton Institute today
Hampton University. And he was sixteen when he went there,
and he graduated three years later with honors, and just
(14:15):
seven years earlier than that, he was a slave, and
one of his slave duties was carrying the master's children's
books as he walked behind them to school, And after
he went inside, he would hang around on the outside
of the schoolhouse to listen to what the teacher was teaching.
But he'd run away before getting caught, because at the
time a slave learning to reader write was a crime,
(14:38):
and it was a crime that could be punished by death.
But he knew then what's still true today, that knowledge
was power. And he said it felt like getting into
a schoolhouse would be like arriving in paradise. So for me,
although today the schools could use lots of improvement, I
think the situation is a lot better now than it
(14:59):
was when he was able to go to school and
if he was able to use his education to build
a school that still stands today and it produces graduates
that come back into our communities as leaders for the
next generation. I think that we can continue to make
strides to make them better, but we can make more
(15:21):
strides in our own lives as we push to make
our schools better. For a long time in my life,
I missed it. I was running on fumes. I was
just trying to survive. And it took nearly twenty years
from the time that I graduated from high school to
realize that there was more to this life. It happened
(15:43):
when I went to the South for the first time
in my life and I arrived on the campus of
Tuskegee University, and that was the school that my grandfather
opened on July fourth, eighteen eighty one, sixteen years after
the end of slavery, and we went there for our
very first book or two Washington family reunion. When we
first stepped foot on campus, there were students, faculty, community leaders, reporters,
(16:09):
there were writers and journalists, and they were all there
to welcome us. Some were all struck that we were
still alive, and like the older gentleman said, and I
was all struck that they cared so much. They were
inspired simply by our presence, and they asked us for
autographs and interviews. They asked to take pictures with us.
(16:32):
Some just wanted to rub shoulders and elbows and touch us,
and some just wanted a chance to talk and get
to know us. My presence was important to them. And
up to that point, I believe my life was pretty
simple and ordinary, or less than ordinary. And it wasn't.
It was without much purpose because I grew up not
(16:54):
knowing with all what all of these people who surrounded
me knew about my great grandfather and about my history.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
And you're listening to Sarah Washington O'Neill rush tell the
story of her life, her father's life, and of course
her great grandfather.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Booker T.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Washington the book Rising Up from the Blood, a Legacy Reclaimed,
a bridge Forward, And what a story Sarah is telling
about her own father, most importantly, who had problems of
his own and abandoned his family, and at the age
of sixteen, like so many girls without fathers, she soon
found herself a mother. It turns out Booker T. Washington.
(17:34):
Her great granddad was sixteen when he traveled five hundred
miles to go to school, and that of course was
just years before he was a slave. When we come
back more of the remarkable story of Sarah Washington O'Neill
Rush and her great grandfather, Booker T. Washington, here on
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories
(18:11):
and the story of Booker T.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Washington, and equally important the story of his great.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Granddaughter, and that would be Sarah Washington O'Neil Rush. We
just heard how Sarah was reintroduced to her proud lineage
while visiting the university her great grandfather built with his
own hands, Tuskegee. The receptions he experienced, well, it was overwhelming.
Let's return to Sarah.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
So this experience brought back again. It brought back the
memories of walking on the sidewalk that day with my father,
when the elderly gentleman said, it's an honor to know you.
It was all beginning to make sense. And it was
at this reunion that I began to understand and my
interest in enthusiasm about my great grandfather was a nice
(19:01):
and it was there that I learned how important his
work was I was inspired by so much. And I
hear from people who learned that I'm the great granddaughter.
I hear from them about you know how they may
have thought one way about Booker T. Washington, and they
visited that campus, or they read up from slavery, and
their whole view change. And that was the experience that
(19:24):
I had from that trip. And what I was most
struck by, most fascinated by, were the original buildings that
some of them still stand today. And these buildings were
built by hand, brick by brick by Booker T. Washington
and his students African American ancestors, all former slaves, using
(19:46):
bricks that they made. And these bricks were of such
superior quality that people came from miles around to purchase them.
And there are buildings that are still standing in the
South today that are made from these very And he
put the money from the sell of these bricks back
into the school, giving his students lessons in business and finance, economics,
(20:09):
and industry. And that was his plan all along. And
there is a story of perseverance that can be found
in his autobiography up from Slavery, of his determination never
to give up and his quest for making these bricks,
because it got down to his last watch that he
had to pawn because he spent all the money and
(20:30):
the kiln wasn't working. But he while his students may
have been getting frustrated, he refused to give up. So
after I returned home from the reunion, I set out
to learn everything I could about my history and my
great grandfather. And that's when I read up from Slavery
for the first time, and I studied and I did research.
(20:51):
I read biographies about him, and I asked lots of questions.
I began looking at my family tree and I discovered
that I have fifteen cousins who are also the great
grandchildren of Booker T. Washington, and in that birth order,
I'm the last born. So I thought about it. I'm like,
(21:13):
that makes me the sixteenth of sixteen great grandchildren of
Booker T. Washington. And it hit me suddenly that that
number sixteen, which had always been a reminder of shame
and guilt and embarrassment, it began to take on a
whole new meeting. And I realized then that this was
(21:33):
no accident, because God doesn't make mistakes. Sixteen represents my birthday,
my son's birthday, the age of Washington when he traveled
to Hampton, the years that passed between the end of
slavery and the beginning of Tuskegee Institute, and it represents
my place in the birth order and the completion of
(21:55):
the fourth generation of Booker T. Washington. My whole life
has changed since that time in Tuskegee and making the
connection to my lineage. And that's why I do what
I do today in terms of being an inspirational speaker
and writer, because I believe these messages of resilience and
perseverance can go a long way and cultivating hope and
(22:19):
the strength necessary for us to pick up where our
ancestors left off. So, my great grandfather, Booker T. Washington,
he was a former slave turned famous educator and the
founder of Tuskegee University. And he was born into slavery.
The only parent or four parent that he knew was
(22:42):
his mother, Jane, and it was and that's the only
name that he knew her by, and he credits her
for his determination and his resilience. He didn't know any
because slaves were torn apart from their families. He didn't
know anybody else. He didn't know aunts or uncles or grandparents,
(23:03):
and so his mom, she was the cook on the plantation,
and she would sneak food for them, and they lived
in a one room cabin with a dirt floor. They
slept on the floor, and that's when he would wake
up to the fervent prayers of his mother every morning,
praying for their freedom. He suspects because he never knew
(23:27):
his father that he was a white man who lived
on a nearby plantation. He always vowed that because he
had no lineage hisself or he had no ancestors, that
he knew that he would leave a record for his
children and his grandchildren and great grandchildren that he hoped
would make them proud, which it absolutely worked for me
(23:51):
and for several of my family members. So when they
were fine, he was nine years old when freedom came
to them, immediately moved to West Virginia, where his stepfather was,
and he had to work in the salt furnaces and
the coal mines in order to help make ends meet
(24:12):
for the family. His mom knew his desire to go
to school, and so she bought him a dictionary that
helped him teach himself the ABC's, But he also got
a job during the day with Viola Rufner, and she
was the wife of a Quaker, and she was a
(24:35):
strict disciplinarian. So she was a white woman, and she
couldn't keep any of her staff who were also former
slaves because she was so strict. But Booker ge Washington,
he followed everything she asked to a tea and so
she was really impressed with him with his cleanliness. She
(24:55):
taught him cleanliness, how to clean a room, how to
clean up himself, how to look straight, how to sit
up straight, how to talk, how to speak, and she
was really impressed with his desire to follow these instructions,
and so she actually encouraged him to get his education
(25:17):
from Hampton Institute, which was one of the only schools
that was teaching former slaves. But she would also teach
him on her When he was done doing his work,
she would teach him how to read. And so when
he got to Hampton, he walked nearly the whole way
because he got kicked off at trains. He had to
(25:38):
sleep under sidewalks, and it was nearly five hundred miles
and when he got there, his entrance exam was to
clean a recital room so the teacher left while he
did that, and when she came back, she took her
handkerchief and she went over the room, the floors, the walls,
and she couldn't find a spell of dirt. And she
(26:01):
told him, you're accepted. And he credits by Alla Roughner
for teaching him how to clean a room in that way.
And I think the way Booker T. Washington looked at
things a little bit different, Like some people would hear
that and they would just be appalled, like how dare
she would? But his mindset was different, and so he
(26:23):
would look at more in a positive light, that it's
because of this that I'm here, and now I will
be able to do this, which he proved well that
he was able to take all of these things, adversity
and blessings and turn them over tenfold to his pupil.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
And you've been listening to Sarah Washington O'Neill rush tell
her story and also the story of her great grandfather
who she discovers after a family reunion trip to Tuskegee
and that one gentleman who said, it's an honor to
know you, and that lit a fire in Sarah to
(27:04):
learn more about her great grandfather and in the end herself.
When we come back more of the remarkable story of
Sarah Washington O'Neill Rush and her great grandfather Booker T.
Washington here on our American story, and we continue here
(27:38):
with our American stories and with Sarah Washington O'Neill Rush
telling the story of her own life, her family's life,
and the life of her great grandfather, Booker T.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Washington. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
So Booker T. Washington's philosophy was, there's a statue actually
on the front of the campus. It's a pretty famous statue.
It's called lifting the Veil of Ignorance, and he's lifting
the veil from a slave's eyes. And so many people
come from miles around, from all over the world, and
they take pictures in front of this statue lifting the veil.
(28:20):
And what he did in lifting the veil of ignorance,
he did that by personal responsibility. Some of the philosophies
that Booker T. Washington stood for were character building, self reliance, excellence,
economics and wealth, Christianity, determination and education of the head
(28:40):
hand and the heart. And the head stood for book
smarts or academics. The hand was hard work, and the
heart was giving back and service to others. Some people
think that he just wanted blacks to continue to be slaves,
which so far from the truth. He wanted them to
(29:03):
take what they learned in slavery and he wanted them
to perfect it, which is an example of the bricks
and the buildings that still stand on the campus. So
personal responsibility kept moral character building. His students had to
every morning, they had to pray. They prayed morning, noon,
and night. He took that in. He took it from slavery.
(29:25):
He knew that that's what was going to work. It
taught them discipline. He was big on discipline. He when
he first got to Tuskegee, he traveled outside of the
area where the school was going to open, and he
went into the rural country districts because he wanted to
discover the life of the people and what their needs were.
(29:46):
And what he found it surprised even him. He found
people like five people living in one room shacks, and
he found children outside that were completely naked, and the
ones who had on clothing, some had only one piece,
and it was so filthy. He said, it didn't even
resemble cloth. And so he said He spent the night
(30:10):
with many of these families, and they always found room
for him, even though they didn't have room for themselves,
because they were anxious to get an education and improve
their lives. But one thing he saw was that they
would share one fork among them when they ate at
the table in the evening. There would be one fork
among maybe a family of five. But he saw an
(30:33):
expensive clock on a mantle, or he saw a piano
in someone's house, and he's like, how can they afford
these material items? And they can't even take care of themselves,
And so he knew that was something that he would
have to work on with them. And so when the
school was to open and when he accepted students and
students were accepted into the school, they felt like they
(30:56):
weren't going to have to do any more hard work,
that this was this was their ticket to freedom, to
real freedom. But he had different plans. And so when
he told them that they were gonna build their own
buildings and they were gonna grow their own food, and
they were gonna raise farm animals so that they would
have food and dairy, they protested loudly. But when he
(31:22):
picked up the first acts and he led the way
through the forest of trees. If you can imagine in
the South all the trees, and the he began to
cut down the trees, they willingly began to follow, quietly
and willingly began to follow. And many times when I
tell people that I are when people learned it I'm
(31:43):
the great granddaughter of Booker T. Washington, or especially i'm
speaking somewhere where there's a question answer period, I can
hear from their questions that they're confusing him with either
George Washington Carver, maybe even George Washington sometimes Web the Boys,
who was his greatest critic. And so I always realized
(32:05):
then that we need to learn our history. We need
to know our history. And I know for me that
learning about my history certainly changed my life. So while
my mother and her three sisters they didn't know Booker T.
Washington because he died four years before my mom, the
oldest was born, they did know George Washington Carver, who
(32:30):
was actually my aunt Edith's godfather. Booker T. Washington invited
him to be the head of the agricultural department, and
he said, I can't pay you much, but I can
give you room and board and all. George Washington. Carver
wanted to do was make a difference for his people.
(32:50):
He was also born as slave, and so many people
think that when I they found out I'm the great
granddaughter of Booker T. Washington, that it's George Washington Carver,
and they'll say, oh, he invented the peanut, and I
tell them, no, I think God invented the peanut. But
he found hundreds of uses for the peanut, and so
(33:11):
the things that he was able to do, the discoveries
he made through science. It was said that George Shinton
Carver could have been a multi millionaire or a millionaire
if he'd done something other than lead the agricultural department
at Tuskegee. But it was his choice to stay there,
(33:32):
and he stayed there until he is passing, and he
left every penny that he had, which I can't remember
how much it was, it was in the tens of thousands.
I believe he left all of that to Tuskegee. So
Booker T. Washington and w Eb de Boys. Something some
(33:54):
people don't know is that they were actually friends before
they publicly split. There was never really a debate, but
they publicly split because his most important project was getting
Tuskegee off the ground, and he made friends with white
people such as Andrew Carnegie, Teddy Roosevelt. He was the
(34:16):
first black invited to dine at the White House. There
was George Eastman of Eastman Kodak, Julius Rosenwald who was
the president of Sears Roebuck and Julius Rosenwald and Booker T.
Washington actually partnered and Julius Rosenwald funded the Rosenwald Schools
(34:38):
in the South. There were over five thousand schools that
were built for African Americans, and so Booker T. Washington
in order to get that those things done, he knew
he had to be respectful, and he had to look
the part and dress the part himself, and he had
to respect himself and carry himself in that manner in
(34:58):
order to get the tension that he needed for these schools.
He figured that all rights and privileges a law should
be ours, but it's more important that we'd be prepared.
He knew that in order to get prepared, that was
the first order of the day, and next, you know,
we would gain the respect of the people. The difference
(35:22):
between Booker T. Washington and WEV. De Boyce was that w. E. B. D.
Boyce was more for the talented tenth. I was at
a conference or I was speaking on a panel in Buffalo,
New York for the one hundredth anniversary of the Niagara Movement.
And the Niagara Movement was a precursor to the NAACP,
(35:43):
and it was started by Dubois and it was to
combat a lot of Booker T. Washington's ideas. And on
this panel there were professors and it was the first
time I was publicly speaking, and we were in Buffalo,
where du Bois started Niagara Movement, so people were on
his side and they would the moderator even sat in
(36:05):
on the panel, which was unheard of. I haven't seen
anything like it since. And they were all on the
side of the boys, and they wouldn't let me get
a word in edgewise. And one person who was actually
a well known he's a writer and a movie producer,
he said, I'm tired of this talk about Booker T. Washington.
All he wanted us to do is be slaves. And
(36:29):
so when I walked off the stage, there was a
man who the reporters were flocking around the night before
the reception, and he looked at me and he said,
those people are idiots. And then I later found out
that he was a famous poet, Ishmael Reid, and he
lived for a time in Buffalo, and he's a professor,
might be a professor of malitiss at UC Berkeley here
(36:52):
where I am. Yes, Booker T. Washington was more about
hard work. We can do this, we can clean up ourselves.
There is work that we need to do in order
to get where we need to go, to gain the
mutual respect and to get a hint.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to Sarah Washington O'Neill
rush her book Rising Up from the Blood, a Legacy Reclaimed,
a bridge forward.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
And what a story she told about Booker T. Washington.
It is not told enough in our schools.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
And he wanted to do something simple with Tuskegee, and
that was create a great place for young African Americans,
young recently turned free people from slaves into independent and
self reliant people.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
And of course that story of Booker T.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Washington and du bois the boys trying to get to
the talented tenth populate the universities and change mindsets and
here is Booker T.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Washington and toiling in communities.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Trying to build up his own people to become independent
and free people.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
The story of Booker T.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
Washington, the story of his great granddaughter and his family,
and so much more. Hear on our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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