Up From Slavery

Glossary

B

Brickmaking at Tuskegee: The school's first major manufacturing enterprise, begun to supply bricks for its own construction and for sale in the local market. Washington's crew failed at three successive kilns—the third collapsing in the night after a week of burning—before he pawned his own watch for fifteen dollars to fund a fourth, successful attempt, likening the ordeal to the Israelites "making bricks without straw." The industry went on to produce over a million bricks a year and built goodwill with local white customers who came to depend on Tuskegee-trained brickmasons.; Related: Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Industrial Education, Porter Hall and Alabama Hall

C

Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are: The central image of Washington's September 18, 1895 Atlanta address: a parable of a ship lost at sea that, each time it signals for water, is told to "cast down your bucket where you are," and draws up fresh water from the mouth of the Amazon. Washington used it as a figure for Black economic self-reliance, urging his own race to build livelihoods where they already stood—in Southern agriculture, mechanics, and domestic service—rather than looking abroad, and urging white Southerners to invest in the Black labor already "tilling your fields" rather than recruiting immigrant labor. The phrase became the address's most quoted line and the shorthand by which it is still remembered.; Related: The Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, The Atlanta Compromise, Industrial Education
Coeducation and Girls' Industrial Training at Tuskegee: From its first day in 1881, Tuskegee enrolled roughly equal numbers of men and women, and Washington and Olivia Davidson built out training in domestic and agricultural skills for young women alongside the men's trades—covering cooking, sewing, and, later, gardening, dairying, bee-culture, and poultry-raising. As the girls' boarding and industrial needs outgrew Porter Hall and Alabama Hall, two Boston donors funded a further building, given just before Washington's 1899 trip to Europe, dedicated to housing all of the school's industries for girls.; Related: Margaret James Murray Washington, Porter Hall and Alabama Hall, Industrial Education

E

Emancipation Day: The morning on the Franklin County plantation when a Union officer read the Emancipation Proclamation aloud to the assembled enslaved people, after weeks of rumor carried by the "grape-vine telegraph." Washington describes the initial "wild rejoicing" giving way within hours to a "feeling of deep gloom," as freedpeople confronted the sudden, unstructured reality of providing their own home, living, and children's education with no land, no money, and often nowhere to go—some older slaves drifted back to the "big house" that same day to ask their former owners what they should do next.; Related: The Condition of the Freedpeople, The Grape-Vine Telegraph, The Reconstruction Period

F

Fannie N. Smith Washington: Washington's first wife, a fellow Hampton graduate from Malden, West Virginia, whom he married in the summer of 1882 during Tuskegee's first year. She kept house for the school's small teaching staff and worked alongside Washington until her death in May 1884; their daughter, Portia, was born during the marriage.; Related: Olivia A. Davidson, Margaret James Murray Washington, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute

G

General J. F. B. Marshall: The treasurer of Hampton Institute who twice extended personal trust to Washington: first forgiving a sixteen-dollar board debt and readmitting him for a second year on his word alone, and later lending two hundred fifty dollars from his own funds—since he had no authority to lend Hampton's money—so Tuskegee could make the down payment on the abandoned plantation that became its permanent campus.; Related: Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Porter Hall and Alabama Hall
General Samuel Chapman Armstrong: Founder and principal of Hampton Institute, and the man Washington called "the noblest, rarest human being" he ever knew. Armstrong recommended Washington to lead the new school at Tuskegee in 1881, later toured the North with him to raise funds for Tuskegee's first building, and kept working for the cause of Black and poor white education even after a stroke left him largely paralyzed. Washington credited direct contact with Armstrong's character as more valuable than anything he learned from Hampton's textbooks.; Related: Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, The Plucky Class

H

Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute: The Virginia school founded by General Samuel Chapman Armstrong that trained Washington and shaped the educational model he later built at Tuskegee. Hampton paired academic study with manual labor and trade instruction, requiring poor students to work off part of their board, and Washington called it "the greatest place on earth" the moment he first heard two coal miners describe it. He later returned to Hampton as a teacher before being sent to found Tuskegee.; Related: General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Miss Mary F. Mackie and the Sweeping-Room Test
Harvard Honorary Degree: In 1896 Harvard University conferred an honorary Master of Arts on Washington at the invitation of President Charles W. Eliot—the first such degree a New England university had given a Black American. Washington describes the letter arriving as the greatest surprise of his life, and used his acceptance remarks at the alumni dinner to press the question of how "the strong, wealthy, and learned" could be brought into "helpful touch" with "the poorest, most ignorant, and humblest."; Related: Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, President McKinley's Visit to Tuskegee, Industrial Education

I

Industrial Education: The educational philosophy Washington built Tuskegee around: pairing academic instruction with training in a trade—farming, brickmasonry, carpentry, laundering—so that every graduate left able to earn a living and, in his words, to "dignify and glorify common labour." He drew the model from Hampton and set it against the Reconstruction-era emphasis on Greek, Latin, and political office, arguing that a people a few years removed from slavery needed to build an economic foundation of land, skill, and property first. He was careful to credit the plan to General Armstrong's work at Hampton rather than claim it as his own invention.; Related: Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, The Reconstruction Period, Brickmaking at Tuskegee

M

Malden, West Virginia: The Kanawha Valley mining town, five miles from Charleston, where Washington's family moved after emancipation to join his stepfather, who had found work at a salt furnace. Their cabin stood crowded among salt-workers' shanties with no sanitation. It was in Malden that Washington first learned to recognize a number from his stepfather's barrel markings, taught himself the alphabet from a borrowed Webster's speller, and chose the surname "Washington" for himself on his first day of school.; Related: The Salt Furnaces and Coal Mines, Mrs. Viola Ruffner, The Condition of the Freedpeople
Margaret James Murray Washington: A Mississippi native and Fisk University graduate who came to Tuskegee as a teacher and rose to Lady Principal before marrying Washington in 1893, becoming his third wife. Beyond her school duties she ran a mothers' meeting in the town of Tuskegee and a plantation outreach program eight miles away, led a campus women's club, and served as president of the Federation of Southern Coloured Women's Clubs.; Related: Olivia A. Davidson, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Coeducation and Girls' Industrial Training at Tuskegee
Miss Mary F. Mackie and the Sweeping-Room Test: The head teacher at Hampton who, doubtful about admitting the travel-worn, penniless Washington, tested him by ordering him to sweep and dust a recitation room. He swept it three times and dusted it four times; Mackie's inspection—running a handkerchief over the woodwork and finding no dirt—won him admission and a janitor's job that paid his board. Washington called it the best examination he ever passed, and Mackie remained one of his most helpful friends throughout his time at Hampton.; Related: Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Mrs. Viola Ruffner
Mrs. Viola Ruffner: The wife of General Lewis Ruffner, owner of the Malden salt-furnace and coal-mine, who hired the teenaged Washington as a household servant for five dollars a month. Known locally for driving off boy after boy with her strictness about cleanliness and order, she instead became one of his formative influences; he credited the habits of thoroughness she demanded—clean yards, mended fences, honest and exact work—as an education as valuable as anything he later received at Hampton.; Related: Malden, West Virginia, Miss Mary F. Mackie and the Sweeping-Room Test, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute

N

Night School at Tuskegee: Founded in 1884 for students too poor to afford even Tuskegee's modest day-school fees, it required ten hours of paid daytime labor plus two hours of evening study, with earnings held in trust to cover day-school board once a student advanced. Washington regarded it as the school's toughest test of character—"enough bottom to warrant being further educated"—and modeled it directly on the night-school program he had helped run at Hampton.; Related: The Plucky Class, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Industrial Education
Northern Philanthropists: The individual Northern donors Washington cultivated over decades of fundraising trips, including Collis P. Huntington, whose first two-dollar gift grew into a fifty-thousand-dollar endowment donation; Andrew Carnegie, who gave twenty thousand dollars for a library after ten years of courtship; Morris K. Jessup; and two anonymous New York women who funded three major buildings. Washington describes his method as patient, dignified fact-presentation rather than "begging," and credits small, recurring gifts from churches and Sunday schools alongside these large donors with sustaining Tuskegee's growth.; Related: The Slater Fund and the Peabody Fund, Porter Hall and Alabama Hall, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute

O

Olivia A. Davidson: A teacher from Ohio, trained at Hampton and the Massachusetts State Normal School at Framingham, who joined Tuskegee as co-teacher six weeks after it opened and became Washington's second wife in 1885. Davidson raised money for the school through festivals and door-to-door canvassing in the North, refused ever to conceal her racial identity for personal comfort, and Washington credited her with doing more than any other single person to lay Tuskegee's foundations before her death in 1889 from the strain of the work.; Related: Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Porter Hall and Alabama Hall, Fannie N. Smith Washington

P

Porter Hall and Alabama Hall: Tuskegee's first two major buildings, financed through small donations from Black and white residents of Tuskegee together with Northern gifts secured largely by Olivia Davidson. Porter Hall, named for New York donor A. H. Porter, housed the earliest boarding students in its attic; when the girls' housing and dining needs outgrew it, the school undertook the ten-thousand-dollar Alabama Hall, its basement dining room dug out partly by student labor.; Related: Olivia A. Davidson, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Northern Philanthropists
President McKinley's Visit to Tuskegee: On December 16, 1899, President William McKinley, his cabinet, and Alabama's state legislature visited Tuskegee, greeted by a student procession and floats contrasting old and new methods of farming, cooking, and housekeeping. Washington had spent over a year angling for the visit, believing a sitting president's willingness to travel out of his way to a Black institution would encourage the entire race; McKinley's address praised Washington's "genius and perseverance" in founding the school.; Related: Harvard Honorary Degree, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Northern Philanthropists

T

The Atlanta Compromise: The name history attached to the bargain implicit in Washington's Atlanta address, in which he told his audience that "in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress," and that "the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly." In the address and in his own account of it, Washington frames the position as urging economic opportunity and gradual, merit-based advancement over immediate political and social agitation. He reports that the speech drew swift acclaim from figures like President Grover Cleveland and the Atlanta press, while some Black newspapers and readers, on rereading it in cold print, felt he had conceded too much.; Related: Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are, The Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, The Reconstruction Period
The Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition: The 1895 Atlanta fair at which Washington delivered the address that made him nationally known. He had first drawn organizers' notice with a brief address to a Congressional committee lobbying for federal Exposition funding, after which directors decided to erect a Negro Building—designed and built entirely by Black mechanics—and, in an unprecedented step, invited a Black speaker to appear on the opening-day program alongside Southern and Northern white dignitaries.; Related: Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are, The Atlanta Compromise, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute
The Black Belt: A term Washington explains as originally describing the dark, rich soil of a swath of the Deep South where enslaved labor had been concentrated because that soil was most profitable to plant; after the war the term shifted to a political meaning, denoting counties where Black residents outnumbered white residents, sometimes by six to one. Tuskegee, in Macon County, Alabama, sat at the center of this Black Belt.; Related: Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, The Reconstruction Period, The Condition of the Freedpeople
The Condition of the Freedpeople: Washington's description of what emancipation actually delivered: freedom with nothing to fall back on, no money, no property, and for most no education, thrown all at once into questions of home, livelihood, child-rearing, citizenship, and church that "the Anglo-Saxon race had been grappling with... for centuries." He compares the shift to abruptly turning a ten- or twelve-year-old out into the world to fend for himself, and singles out the aged, who had "no strength with which to earn a living in a strange place," as facing the hardest reckoning.; Related: Emancipation Day, The Reconstruction Period, Industrial Education
The Grape-Vine Telegraph: The informal network by which enslaved people on isolated plantations kept precisely informed about the Civil War's progress despite having no access to newspapers, usually via the messenger sent to fetch the plantation's mail, who would linger to overhear white patrons' conversation at the post office and relay it back to the slave quarters. Washington notes that slaves on his plantation often learned the outcome of major battles before the white family in the "big house" did.; Related: Emancipation Day, The Condition of the Freedpeople, Malden, West Virginia
The Ku Klux Klan: Armed white bands that Washington describes as successors to slavery-era "patrollers," organized to crush Black political participation through night-riding violence, burning schoolhouses and churches and killing "not a few coloured people." Washington witnessed an open battle between Klan members and Black residents in Malden during his youth, in which his former employer's husband, General Lewis Ruffner, was badly wounded defending the Black community—an episode he calls "the darkest part of the Reconstruction days."; Related: The Reconstruction Period, Malden, West Virginia, Mrs. Viola Ruffner
The Plucky Class: The nickname Washington gave to Hampton's night-school students when he ran the program under General Armstrong's direction—young men and women who worked ten hours a day, in the sawmill or laundry, in exchange for two hours of evening instruction. Graduates received a printed certificate of "good and regular standing," and the program became the direct model for the night school Washington later founded at Tuskegee.; Related: Night School at Tuskegee, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong
The Reconstruction Period: Washington's retrospective account of 1867 to 1878, which he characterizes as dominated by two mistaken priorities among newly freed Black Southerners: a "craze for Greek and Latin learning" disconnected from practical use, and a hunger for political office pursued before any economic foundation existed. He describes ill-prepared Black legislators and ministers, a troubling dependence on the federal government, and argues that the era's political gains were "artificial and forced" because they outran land ownership, trade skill, and savings.; Related: The Condition of the Freedpeople, Industrial Education, The Ku Klux Klan
The Salt Furnaces and Coal Mines: The industries that structured daily life in Malden and put young Washington to work as early as four o'clock in the morning, first packing salt barrels and later hauling coal a mile underground in total darkness. The mine work was dangerous—premature powder explosions and falling slate were constant risks—and Washington later wrote that boys who began their working lives there often lost any ambition beyond staying miners. It was in the mine that he overheard two miners discussing Hampton Institute.; Related: Malden, West Virginia, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, The Condition of the Freedpeople
The Slater Fund and the Peabody Fund: Two philanthropic funds for Black education that became steady annual sources of Tuskegee income beginning in the school's third year—the Slater Fund's initial thousand-dollar grant eventually rising to eleven thousand dollars a year, the Peabody Fund's five hundred dollars to fifteen hundred. Washington credits the funds' general agent, J. L. M. Curry, an ex-Confederate soldier turned advocate for Black education, and Slater Fund treasurer Morris K. Jessup with helping establish industrial education's national reputation.; Related: Northern Philanthropists, Industrial Education, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute
Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute: Founded by Washington in 1881 in Tuskegee, Alabama, after General Armstrong recommended him for the post; the state appropriation covered only instructors' salaries, so Washington began with no land, buildings, or equipment. Students built the school's own facilities as a matter of principle, learning trades while constructing dormitories, classrooms, and workshops. By the time Washington wrote his account it had grown from thirty students and one teacher to over a thousand students on twenty-three hundred acres.; Related: Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Industrial Education, Brickmaking at Tuskegee