A Turn in the South (25 page)

“We were all aware of what the white attitude was, and we were unhappy about it. The most terrible thing was that you didn’t know
when it was ever going to end. But it wasn’t something we dwelled on at the Institute.”

And the elderly man who drove me round the campus, to show me the extent of it and to explain the stage-by-stage development of the place, and then drove me round the modest town, all black now—this man told me that in the old days a black man, even in a car, wouldn’t have been wise to hang around the Lake Tuskegee area.

Indignity outside; within the campus, the erect posture, the military correctness. Yet always—and how the irrationality would have twisted people!—it was necessary to make signals to the people outside that you were not getting above yourself.

Mrs. Guzman, who came to Tuskegee in 1923, and worked for many years on
The Negro Yearbook
, recalled that the old school chapel was also a little cultural center for the town, with movies, concerts, speakers. “The white people in the town came. They were given the best sets in our chapel, the front seats. A lot of the students and faculty resented it. But that was the custom. Whites sat in front, and Negroes behind them. When a younger president came in and stopped that, the white people stopped coming.”

But what would have looked like old-fashioned servility in the 1920s and 1930s would have been simple prudence in the days of Booker T. Washington. And perhaps some intuitive wisdom, some kind of peace offering to the people outside, who might so easily have crushed the black institute, lay at the back of Washington’s insistence that everyone should learn a trade. It encouraged a misunderstanding of the school outside (and perhaps that didn’t do any harm). Some people thought of Tuskegee only as an industrial, vocational institute. (Louis Harlan says that white people sometimes wrote to ask for trained servants; one man wrote in for “a full negro,” very black, to take to France. All these letters were acknowledged.)

There was a good deal more to it, of course. Ruskinian or Tolstoyan ideas about manual skills, anti-industrial crafts, the training of the hands, were very much in the air in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Ruskin was certainly at the back of Gandhi’s mind when, in South Africa in 1904, he established his Phoenix Farm (burned down by African rioters in 1986). And though the two men were so different—Washington the American with little time for Africans or Asiatics, Gandhi the spiritually adrift Hindu with little time for Africans—there
was a remarkable coincidence in their aim and method: the inculcation of self-respect in a subject people through the idea of work and service.

And, interestingly, a number of the old people I spoke to in Tuskegee seemed to have found some kind of beauty and content and human completeness in the trades they were taught. The old musician who had come to Tuskegee as a boy in 1913 learned shoemaking. (Tolstoy liked to do a little cobbling in his study sometimes.) The old man said, “I could sew on a pair of soles in twenty minutes by hand. A lot of people don’t know I know that trade. They know me only as a musician.” Mr. Louis Rabb—who did business administration at Tuskegee and then went on with Tuskegee grants to do personnel administration at Columbia and hospital administration at Northwestern, and afterwards had a long and distinguished career at Tuskegee—Mr. Rabb did tailoring for four years at the Tuskegee high school when he came there as a boy from Mississippi. His father chose that trade for him, and Mr. Rabb told me with a certain amount of quiet pride that he still sewed for himself.

But outside the Tuskegee oasis the world was grim. On one rack in the library were the Booker T. Washington file boxes. On another rack were sixty-three file boxes labeled
LYNCHING RECORDS
.

To take down the Washington files for part of 1903 was to feel even greater admiration for the man. So many letters from simple people—letters in pencil, some of them, letters on scraps of paper, letters shot through with need and hope—so well kept, so fresh, after more than eighty years. Every one had been read, acknowledged; and many of the carbon replies had the initials “BTW.” I noted a schoolteacher’s letter from the island of Jamaica, many pages long, in a neat schoolteacher’s hand (clearly a “fair copy”); another letter from a black woman on the island of Tobago. Perhaps these letters in the Tuskegee files were the only relics now of these people.

On narrow slips of pink paper there were initialed mauve carbon copies of Booker T. Washington’s famous little notes to Tuskegee staff, dictated to his secretary during his walks about the campus or after his horse rides around the campus. And there were the more political letters to people in Washington, dealing with issues hard for the uninformed to understand. There are so many aspects to a life; so much gets lost.

How had such method and punctiliousness come to a man who had
started so late and with so little? Perhaps one of his secrets was an absence of sentimentality. The letters from simple black people had moved me. Booker T. Washington might have been more hardheaded. He knew that people just freed from slavery hardly had an idea of education and often saw it as a means of avoiding physical work. He knew that many black people who could barely read had turned to preaching, for the easy life it offered. He had often ridiculed such people. In
Up from Slavery
he had had such a half-educated black say, “O Lawd, de cotton am so grassy, de work am so hard, and de sun am so hot dat I b’lieve dis darky am called to preach!” Extraordinary, this minstrel joke from the founder of Tuskegee. But the fact that he could make it, while never ceasing to fight for his cause, might have been part of his genius and toughness.

And there in the library was the reminder of the setting: the sixty-three boxes of lynching records. I dreaded to look at them. I thought they might have contained unofficial investigations or statements and would have been full of unbearable things. I was relieved, when I took down a box, to find that the records were mainly newspaper cuttings.

It was that kind of hostility that had given point to Tuskegee from its simplest beginnings. And as much as this hostility had frustrated some of the Institute’s imaginative plans—for agricultural extension work among black farmers, for instance—so it had stimulated the Institute’s growth, even after Booker T. Washington’s death. Segregation and hostility, defining black needs, had also helped to define the Institute’s goals, and given logic to the Institute’s growth.

When segregation went, there was nothing to pull against; the function of the Institute could no longer be what it had been. When black men could join the air force, there was no longer any need for them to learn to fly at Tuskegee. When black people could be admitted to the hospital at Montgomery, one of the best in the United States, there was no longer the same need for the hospital at Tuskegee.

The town—where once black students had worn their Tuskegee uniform as a kind of protection—was now safe: when black people had won the vote, the white people of Tuskegee had moved away. So there had been a kind of victory here. But the town that had been taken over was small and poor, black-poor, with nothing of the life and money of the white university town of Auburn, just twenty miles away. And
Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, which could be said to have contributed to that local victory, was in decay.

The swiftly changing impressions I had had at the moment of arrival—the grandeur, the rhetoric, the decay—had endured and been amplified. President Reagan had visited the university not long before to inaugurate a new $18-million building for aerospace science and health education, named after General Daniel James, the first black four-star air-force general, who had graduated from Tuskegee in 1950. The campus roads of the presidential route had been asphalted for the occasion. But the roads elsewhere were not so good, and the broken glass globes of electric standards in other parts of the campus had remained broken. And no one I spoke to (though I spoke to no official) could assure me that the university could afford a faculty to match the splendor of its aerospace building.

Decay was melancholy enough to me, a visitor, a man passing through. It wasn’t a subject I felt I could raise with older people who had given their lives to Tuskegee, who had received so much in return, and to whom the Booker T. Washington spirit of service and self-help had mattered so much. And the subject didn’t come up. Were there tennis courts? Yes, there were: just at the back of the library. But grass was growing through the asphalt surfacing of two (or three) of the courts. A kind of silence was imposed on the visitor, as in a private house; certain things were not to be seen.

The subject of decay came up more easily in places where people felt more secure—in the veterinary department, for instance, which was said to be among the best in the country, and behaved as though it was. A department like that, successfully lobbying for federal funds (it had recently been granted 36 million for a new project), could survive on the basis of its own excellence. But for other departments it was not so easy. Now that good black students and faculty were in demand by universities all over the country, Tuskegee no longer had a special claim on government or foundation funds. The millionaire philanthropists of the North whom Booker T. Washington had charmed no longer existed; that way of doing things was over.

But there were people who thought that Tuskegee still had its special cause to serve. Black students didn’t score as well as others in the standardized university-entry tests. Tuskegee had always been ready to take in such students, and its record showed that it could train such
people for the world of work. One retired official said, “Tuskegee will take a student as it finds him academically and socially, and through individualized attention and concern will bring that student in four to five years to his full realization.”

There was another, and perhaps more important reason why some people thought Tuskegee was still needed. Tuskegee was still in effect a black university, and it could provide a “black experience,” which, with desegregation, more and more black people appeared to feel they needed.

In Florida Mr. Crockett, the Parole Board commissioner, had told me how he had felt he had to take his son out of a too-white setting; he had sent the boy first to a black high school and then to Tuskegee. And I heard now, from a pretty woman of twenty-three who came from a distant state where there were few black people, and who would have made her way in any university, why she had come to Tuskegee.

“The schools I went to in the other place were all-white. They don’t concentrate on your being a black person. They give you some of your history, but not a lot. In the other place you try to push, thinking, ‘If I can be like them I’d be all right.’ You lose yourself a little bit. You’re not really sure who you are.”

“What was your very first impression when you came here?”

“My very first? ‘Go back home.’ After coming from a nice city, metropolitan, nice facilities, stores, shopping malls. After that, here, seeing little dirt roads—they’re not
dirt
roads, but some places they don’t have sidewalks. At home I was used to being able to go downtown a lot, used to going places. Here there was no bus service. When I got here I realized, ‘There is nothing to do. Oh my God, I’m trapped here and there’s nothing to do. And it’s hot and humid.’ I think people here are real
country
. They’re closed. They’re friendly, but they have their little country ways.”

And the accommodation wasn’t all that it could have been. “Some of the places are dangerous. There are things to be fixed, doors to be fixed. There are light switches upside down. I notice these things, being from where I come, a pretty place, where they do things prettily, nicely.”

But clearly there was a reason why she had stayed on. “It was
my
idea to come here. My mother didn’t want me to leave home. I wanted to be in an all-black town, to be not in a minority but a majority. And that is one thing I do like about being here. Sometimes in the other
place you go into a place and you’re the only black person there. But here, when you go into a business, the owner or the manager will be black, the workers will be black, and it helps you to feel you can progress after your goals and accomplish them.

“Here you are in competition with your own kind. And they can be hard on you, because they’re trying and you’re also trying. At home I used to be a C-D student. Here I’m an A-B student. I get encouraged seeing other people doing things. And here that happened. I’m ready to leave now. I would probably like to go to another black college, maybe in Atlanta. But it doesn’t have to be black any longer. Tuskegee has served a purpose.”

It was a version—a century on—of the Booker T. Washington idea. For this young woman (and there were others like her) the Tuskegee idea still held. Yet she said she had known almost nothing about Booker T. Washington before coming to Tuskegee. She had known only that he was a black man who had done something famous long ago. A month after she came she read
Up from Slavery
. “The teachers here encourage you to find out about the school, and you appreciate it.”

Tuskegee was still a going concern. It had a devoted community; and it still had heart. Its financial predicament was the predicament of black schools generally; and it was better off than some. Its physical condition was very far from that of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where in parts the campus looked ruined. There was a melancholy bronze statue there too, at Fisk, meant to set the seal on glory, but now seeming to watch over the ruins. The statue was of W. E. B. Du Bois, the rival and critic of Washington.

Du Bois thought that Tuskegee’s emphasis on vocational training was wrong; and that Washington’s apparent acquiescence in segregation and black disenfranchisement could only lead to further humiliation. Was there an alternative, though? And mightn’t it be said that Booker T. Washington’s great achievement, his great service to black people at that time, was simply being very famous and admired? One can read books and documents, but it isn’t easy imaginatively to reenter that bitter time, and to have a sense of the weight for black people of day-to-day life.