The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.1, page 402, Extracts from “The Story of the Negro,” 1909, U. of Illinois Press

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BOOKER T. WAS HINGTON Autobiographical Writings woven with that of the white man that it is almost true to say that he had no separate history. To the slave on the plantation the ''Big House,'' where the master lived, was the centre of the only world he knew. It was after freedom came that the masses of the Negro people began to think of themselves as having a past or a future in any way separate and distinct from the white race. There were always some among them, like Frederick Douglass, who were different in this respect from the masses. They became the fugitive slaves. After I began to go to school I had my first opportunity to learn from books something further and more definite about my race in Africa. I cannot say that I received very much encouragement or inspiration from what ~ learned in this way while I was in school. The books I read told me of a people who roamed naked through the forest like wild beasts, of a people without houses or laws, without chastity or morality, with no family life and fixed habits of industry. It seems to me now, as ~ recall my first definite impressions of my race in Africa, that the books I read when I was a boy always put the pictures of Africa and African life in an unnecessarily cruel contrast with the pictures of the civilised and highly cultured Europeans and Americans. One picture I recall vividly was in the first geography I studied. It was the picture of George Washington placed side by side with a naked African, having a ring in his nose and a dagger in his hand. Here, as elsewhere, in order to put the lofty position to which the white race has attained in sharper contrast with the lowly condition of a more primitive people, the best among the white people was contrasted with the worst among the black. Naturally all this made a deep and painful impression upon me. At this time I had the feeling, which most of us are likely to have when we are young and inexperienced, that there must be something wrong with any person who was in any way, whether in dress or manners, markedly different from the persons and things to which I was accustomed. It seemed to me at that time a mark of degradation that people should go about with almost no clothes upon their backs. It did not occur to me that, possibly, the difference in the customs of wearing clothes in Africa and in America, and the difference in the feeling that people in Europe and in Africa have about clothes, was largely a matter of climate. It seemed to me that a human creature who would willingly go about with a ring in his nose must be a very fierce and terrible sort of human animal, but it never occurred to me 4O~