Booker T. Washington's "Up From Slavery" p.665

Booker had a very different way of seeing the world then any other I have heard of from his time. When others resented the white people for their sins against the slaves, he recognized the troubles that slavery had caused the white people. He states that "not one, so far as I know, ever mastered a single trade or special line of productive industry." He actually feels that the very fact that his race had been forced to perform manual labor in the service of the white people had given them an advantage.

Despite the advantage that he felt his people had in that they were skilled laborers and craftsmen, the author coveted the whites ability to read and write. "I determined, when quite a small child, that, if I accomplished nothing else in life, I would in some way get enough education to enable me to read common books and newspapers." This today is something that we all take for granted in that we are all expected to be able to do such things long before adulthood. In the time shortly after slavery such an achievement must have seemed to be nearly unattainable for the author to say that he has no greater goal.

Unfortunately as we progress through the Text for this course I am finding more and more that it is just a tease of many works rather than a complete set. "Up from Slavery" skips several chapters and drops the reader of this book right into the Address at the Atlanta Exposition. This was truly an inspired speech. I hesitate to break it down and analyze it because it was so well written to begin with. I enjoyed his call to his race to "Cast down" their buckets. This was a message to establish themselves and to root themselves in the culture which they were already a part of. It was also a call to the white people in the South to fill the buckets of the former slaves with fresh water when their buckets were cast down. It seems as if the author believed that there was a mutual respect between the people of the South of both races. He believed that the white people had grown to love the Black due to the mutual dependence on each other and that they needed to continue to depend on each other and work together in their new capacity as free people of two separate races.