"Helping Others"

In Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, I read Chapter 4, "Helping Others."

In this chapter, Booker T. Washington extols the values of hard work and of self-reliance. And yet, although he indeed did work hard to help pay his way through school, he did receive help from other people. He admires the generosity of the Northerners who set up the school that he attended. His brother worked in the coal mines to support his family, including Booker. And Booker was not "every man for himself" in his mindset, for he felt a calling to help African-Americans to advance in life.

That was the gist of this chapter. It also talked about the death of Booker's mother, which was hard on Booker and the rest of the family. Booker hoped to make his mother comfortable in her later years, and for her to see her children educated. But this didn't happen, at least not in this life, for Booker looks back at this time as his years of struggle. In the four chapters that I have read so far, Booker contrasts where he is now with where he was then. Now, he can afford to buy his hats; as a child, he wore a hat that his mom made him. Now, he has passed a lot of tests; then, he had to clean a place in order to get admission to a school. Now, he speaks at a location as a guest to honor; years before, he slept outdoors near that very location. Now, he is a guest at a hotel many times; years before, he was a waiter at that hotel.

I'm not sure why Booker makes this point on a continual basis---if it's to encourage other African-Americans that they too can advance, or so he can count his blessings as he reflects on how far he has come. It's interesting how, as he looks back, he notices a higher level of satisfaction in his humbler days. He says that he's bought many hats, but he never valued those as much as the one his mom made him when he was a boy. He says that he's passed many tests, but he didn't have the sense of pride in his accomplishment as when he cleaned up a place and was admitted into a school on account of his doing a good job. A lot of this has to do with the fresh and exciting nature of initial accomplishment, which is why there are millionaires who frame the first dollar that they made.

There were other items of interest in this chapter. Booker bashes "professional labour agitators" at coal mines because strikes meant that there were times in which workers were not getting paid, and so their accounts were depleted. But Booker also notes that the workers went back to work after the strikes and received the same wages, so was his problem unions in general, or ineffective unions?

Booker also discusses the Ku Klux Klan, and he says that it is practically non-existent and forgotten in the South, except for a few areas. I think I did read that somewhere: that the Klan disappeared for a time, until it made its reappearance in the 1920's. But there may be more to the story.