Booker T. Washington Made School Janitors Cool Way Before Good Will Hunting
— Booker T. Washington
At 9-years-old, Booker T. Washington’s stepfather put him to work in the Malden, West Virginia salt mines, where brine was boiled down to make salt. Earlier that year, in the spring of 1865, his family had been freed from slavery with the arrival of Union troops at the end of the Civil War.
Shortly after settling in West Virginia, Booker’s mother got him a Webster’s spelling book, which he used to learn the alphabet. When a school opened in Malden, he would walk to the mines with his stepfather, watching kids his age walking to school. Booker would later say he, “Had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.”
He pled his case until his parents finally relented, making arrangements so that Booker could leave the mine at 9 a.m., go to school, and then return to work for few more hours after school was out. This meant waking up before dawn for work and missing the start of school, which started at 9 a.m. sharp. Booker hated showing up to school a half hour late every day, so he began pushing the work clock forward 30 minutes morning after morning, allowing him to leave work early and arrive at school right on time. Eventually, the boss found out and put the clock in a glass case, ending Booker’s gambit.
At 16, Booker was working in the local coal mine when he overheard two miners talking about a school for black students in Virginia. From that moment on, Booker’s every thought was consumed with finding a way to enroll at his new paradise, the Hampton Institute. When he had saved enough for the 500-mile trek, he set off for Hampton. He quickly learned he hadn’t saved nearly enough to make it, and after stops to work for train fare and sleeping on the sidewalk at night, Booker finally reached Hampton with 50 cents to his name.
The headteacher initially looked upon Booker with disdain — he didn’t look so hot after a stretch living on the street. After admitting other more put together students, she told Booker to grab a broom and sweep a nearby room. Booker was at the gates of paradise and he wasn’t about to blow it. He swept the floor three times and dusted the room four. Upon inspection, after being unable to find a smidgen of dirt, the head teacher admitted Booker to the Hampton Institute.
He’d pay for room and board by taking a job as a janitor at the school. His days would start with work at 4 a.m. and end late after night school classes. Three years later, Booker graduated with honors and returned to Malden to teach.
After a few years teaching in Malden, his alma mater would call for him. It seemed the Malden students Booker was sent to Hampton were so advanced and well-prepared they wanted him back to teach their students instead.
While Booker was teaching night school at Hampton, General Armstong, the school’s founder, received a message from Tuskegee, Alabama, asking if Armstrong knew any white candidates to run a new school for black students in Tuskegee. Armstrong replied, he couldn’t think of any white candidates, but he had a black one he could strongly recommend, Booker T. Washington.
What would soon become the Tuskegee Institute started with 30 students in a shanty room adjoining the Methodist church. The state had given Tuskegee a grant for $2,000, which could only be used for teacher salaries — there was no funding for a school building or supplies. When it rained, enterprising students would get up and open an umbrella so Booker could continue his lesson.
After setting a solid foundation for the school, Booker spent most of his time traveling the country to raise desperately needed funds. Bills would often come due and the school didn’t have a dime in its coffers. Booker felt intense pressure for the school to succeed. It would be one thing if a black school led by a white staff failed. If a black school led by black staff failed, the blame would be cast on an entire race.
So it was impossible to not be in a constant state of anxiety about the school’s finances. But as Booker traveled the country building a vast network of powerful allies, he found as long as he worked hard spreading gospel of Tuskegee, he could scrounge up enough money to pay of the school’s debts. He could worry all he wanted but it never did him any good — knocking on doors did.
In fact, there were two rules Booker learned from raising money:
1. Do your whole duty regarding making your work known to individuals and organizations.
2. Don’t worry about the results.
This meant traveling from Boston to Atlanta for the opportunity to speak for 5 minutes and immediately taking a train back to Boston for more speaking engagements.
It meant 10 years of hard work charming Andrew Carnegie before the school received a dime from him (Carnegie would donate $20,000 for a new library).
It meant walking miles to the country outside Stamford, Connecticut in the freezing cold to meet with a man Booker heard would have interest in his mission. The man didn’t donate, and just as soon as Booker felt like he had wasted hours of his time he reproached himself — he would have been more upset if he didn’t do his job chasing down every lead.
Two years later, Tuskegee received a check from the same man for $10,000, the biggest donation the school had yet received.
Booker learned not to worry from his countless conversations with some of the most successful people in America, noting they would “keep under the body,” never growing too excited, always remaining, “calm, self-possessed, patient, and polite.”
Twenty years after starting a school in a one-room shanty, Booker T. Washington became the first black man invited to the White House, where he dined with President Theodore Roosevelt.
He’d grown the school into the Tuskegee Institute, with twenty-three hundred acres of land, a $1 million endowment, and sixty-six buildings, all but four of them built by the students themselves.
Tuskegee had come a long way from when Booker first traveled through town to spread the word about the new school. On a day he’d never forget, he saw a boy sitting in a filthy one-room cabin in dirty clothes studying French grammar. On his tour, people would approach and brag to him about studying banking, yet few actually had bank accounts.
From his industrial inculcation at Hampton, Booker understood Tuskegee’s mission had to be about more than book learning. Instead, he taught a recently emancipated population how to care for themselves, the value of industry, and the beauty and dignity of labor rewarded.
Today many of us are as impractical as the people Booker saw on his tour of Tuskegee. We get sucked into the latest fads and trends. Should I learn to code? How do I become an influencer?
Or we hide in graduate school, indebting ourselves to credentials whose value are increasingly depreciating. Instead of diving deeper into our chosen profession or starting that secretly percolating project, we read profiles about the latest entrepreneur to make it or make snarky comments on social media about industries we barely understand.
It’s more likely big leaps we dream about are the stuff of simple tasks, in taking care of our bodies, improving our homes, and focusing on the opportunities right in front of us. When you break it down, Booker T. Washington’s mission was dead simple, but not easy — he had to raise money for a school. But that required getting over the shame of asking for help, literally begging haughty rich people for money. By focusing on the things that don’t scale — going door to door and talking about his vision for Tuskegee, he transformed a one-man fundraising operation into the Tuskegee Machine, a nationwide political network consisting of the growing black middle class, white philanthropists, and the Republican party.
Recommended Reading:
Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
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