University of Virginia Library

I. The Story of the Negro

CHAPTER I
FIRST NOTIONS OF AFRICA

SOME years ago, in a book called "Up From
Slavery," I tried to tell the story of my own
life. While I was at work upon that book the
thought frequently occurred to me that nearly all
that I was writing about myself might just as well
have been written of hundreds of others, who began
their life, as I did mine, in slavery. The difficulties
I had experienced and the opportunities I had discovered,
all that I had learned, felt and done, others
likewise had experienced and others had done. In
short, it seemed to me, that what I had put into the
book," Up From Slavery," was, in a very definite way,
an epitome of the history of my race, at least in the
early stages of its awakening and in the evolution
through which it is now passing.

This thought suggested another, and I asked
myself why it would not be possible to sketch the
history of the Negro people in America in much the
same way that I had tried to write the story of my

own life, telling mostly the things that I knew of
my own personal knowledge or through my acquaintance
with persons and events, and adding to that
what I have been able to learn from tradition and from
books. In a certain way the second book, if I were
able to carry out my design, might be regarded as
the sequel of the first, telling the story of a struggle
through two and one-half centuries of slavery, and
during a period of something more than forty years
of freedom, which had elsewhere been condensed
into the limits of a single lifetime. This is, then, the
task which I have set myself in the pages which
follow.

There comes a time, I imagine, in the life of every
boy and every girl, no matter to what race they
belong, when they feel a desire to learn something
about their ancestors; to know where and how
they lived, what they suffered and what they achieved,
how they dressed, what religion they professed and
what position they occupied in the larger world about
them. The girl who grows up in the slums of a
large city, the Indian out in the wide prairie, the
"poor white" boy in the mountains of the Southern
states, and the ignorant Negro boy on a Southern
plantation, no matter how obscure their origin, each
will feel a special interest in the people whose fortunes
he or she has shared, and a special sympathy
with all that people have lived, and suffered and
achieved.

The desire to know something of the country
from which my race sprang and of the history of my
mother and her people came to me when I was still
a child. I can remember, as a slave, hearing snatches
of conversation from the people at the "Big House"
from which I learned that the great white race in
America had come from a distant country, from which
the white people and their forefathers had travelled
in ships across a great water, called the ocean. As
I grew older I used to hear them talk with pride about
the history of their people, of the discovery of
America, and of the struggles and heroism of the
early days when they, or their ancestors, were fighting
the Indians and settling up the country. All
this helped to increase, as time went on, my desire
to know what was back of me, where I came from,
and what, if anything, there was in the life of my
people in Africa and America to which I might point
with pride and think about with satisfaction.

My curiosity in regard to the origin and history
of the dark-skinned people to which I belong, led me
at first to listen and observe and then, later, as I got
some schooling and a wider knowledge of the world,
to inquire and read. What I learned in this way only
served, however, to increase my desire to go farther
and deeper into the life of my people, and to find out
for myself what they had been in Africa as well as in
America.

What I was first able to hear and to learn did not,

I confess, take me very far or give me very much
satisfaction. In the part of the country in which I
lived there were very few of my people who pretended
to know very much about Africa. I learned,
however, that my mother's people had come, like
the white people, from across the water, but from
a more distant and more mysterious land, where
people lived a different life from ours, had different
customs and spoke a different language from that
I had learned to speak. Of the long and terrible
journey by which my ancestors came from their
native home in Africa to take up their life again
beside the white man and Indian in the New World,
I used to hear many and sinister references, but not
until I was a man did I meet any one, among my
people who knew anything definite, either through
personal knowledge or through tradition, of the
country or the people from whom my people sprang.
To most of the slaves the "middle passage," as the
journey from the shore of Africa to the shore of
America was called, was merely a tradition of a
confused and bewildering experience, concerning
whose horrors they had never heard any definite
details. Nothing but the vaguest notions remained,
at the time I was a boy, even among the older people
in regard to the mother country of my race.

In slavery days the traditions of the people who
lived in the cabins centred almost entirely about
the lives and fortunes of the people who lived in the

"Big House." The favourite stories around the
cabin fireside related to what this or that one had
seen on some distant journey with "old master,"
or perhaps to the adventures they had when master
and they were boys together.

It has often occurred to me that people who talk
of removing the Negro from the Southern states and
colonising him in some distant part of the world do
not reflect how deeply he is rooted in the soil. In
most that the white man has done on this continent,
from the time Columbus landed at San Salvador
until Peary penetrated farthest North, the Negro
has been his constant companion and helper. Any
one who considers what the Negro has done, for
example, in the Southern states alone, in cutting
down the forests, clearing the land, tilling the soil
and building up the farms and the cities, will recognise
that, directly and indirectly, his labour has been
an enormous contribution to the civilisation of the
Western world. Any one, on the other hand, who
will listen to the songs that we sing, and the anecdotes
that are told by the Negro and concerning him; any
one who will read the literature and the history of
the Southern states, will see that the Negro has
contributed, not merely his labour, but something
also of his inner life and temperament to the
character and quality of the South.

Until freedom came the life of the Negro was so
intimately interwoven 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 I 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 I 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 to have any such feelings in
regard to the persons whom I had seen wearing
ornaments in their ears. In spite of all this, I still
held fast to the notion that a race which could
produce as good and gentle and loving a woman as

my mother must have some good in it that the
geographers had failed to discover.

It is hard for one who is a member of another race
and who has not had a like experience to appreciate
the impression that has often been made upon me,
and upon other members of my race as they have
listened, as inexperienced boys and girls, to public
speeches in which the whole Negro race was
denounced in a reckless and wholesale manner, or
as they have read newspapers and books in which
the Negro race has been described as the lowest and
most hopeless of God's creation. Sometimes, when
I was a young man, I was driven almost to despair by
the hard and bitter, and frequently, as it seemed to
me, unjust statements about my race. It was
difficult for me to reconcile the ruthless denunciations
which men, with whom I was acquainted, would
make in their public speeches, with the uniform
courtesy and kindness which they had shown to me
and others of my race in all their private relations.
Even now it is difficult for me to understand why so
many Southern white men will allow themselves, for
the purpose of enforcing an argument or in the heat
of a political discussion, to go so far in the denunciation
of the Negro as to do injustice to their own better
natures and to their actual feelings toward coloured
people whom they meet, perhaps, in business, or
toward the servants employed in their own household,
the woman who cooks their food, looks after

their house and cares for their children. I mention
these facts because they serve to illustrate the singular
relations of interdependence and opposition in
which the white and black people of the South stand
to each other to-day, all of which has had and is having
a very definite influence upon the development of
my people in the South.

The hard and discouraging statements which I
was compelled to hear in regard to my race when I
was a boy, had, at different times, two very different
effects upon me. At first they sometimes made me
feel as if I wanted to go away to some distant part of
the earth and bury myself where I might be a stranger
to all my people, or at least where the thing that we
call race prejudice did not exist in the way it does in
the Southern states. Sometimes I thought of doing
something desperate which would compel the world,
in some way or other, to recognise what seemed to
me the wrongs of my race. But afterward, and on
second thought, the effect was to drive me closer to
my own people, to make me sympathise with them
more intimately and more deeply, to feel toward
them as I did toward my own dear mother who had
brought me into the world when she and they were
slaves.

In the end there grew up within me, as a result of
both these feelings, a determination to spend my life
in helping and strengthening the people of my race,
in order to prove to the world that whatever had

been its feelings for them in the past it should learn
to respect them in the future, both for what they were
and what they should be able to do. I made up my
mind, also, that in the end the world must come to
respect the Negro for just those virtues for which
some people say he is despised, namely because of
his patience, his kindliness, and his lack of resentment
toward those who do him wrong and injustice.

The feelings that divided my mind and confused
my purposes when I was a young man, have also
divided the members of my race. The continual
adverse criticism has led some of us to disavow our
racial identity, to seek rest and try our successes as
members of another race than that to which we were
born It has led others of us to seek to get away
as far as possible from association with our own race,
and to keep as far away from Africa, from its
history and from its traditions as it was possible
for us to do.

My attention was first called to this disposition of
members of certain section of my race to get away
from themselves, so to speak; to be ashamed, in other
words, of their history and traditions, when I found
them bashful or lukewarm in regard to singing the
old songs which are the peculiar and unique product
of Negro life and civilisation in this country. I have
heard musical critics, whose judgment the world
respects, say that the old plantation hymns and songs
were among the most original contributions that

America has made, not only to music but to any one
of the so-called fine arts, and this not merely for their
intrinsic charm and beauty but for their qualities,
which make it possible for the trained musician to
develop out of them more elaborate and refined
musical forms, such as have been given to them
recently by the Negro composer, Coleridge-Taylor.
For myself, though it has been my privilege to hear
some of the best music both in Europe and America,
I would rather hear the jubilee or plantation songs
of my race than the finest chorus from the works of
Handel or any other of the great composers that I
have heard. Besides, this music is the form in which
the sorrows and aspirations of the Negro people, all
that they suffered, loved, and hoped for, in short their
whole spiritual life, found its first adequate and satisfying
expression. For that reason, if for no other,
it should be preserved.

What I have said here of my own feelings in regard
to my race is representative of the feelings of thousands
of others of the black people of this country.
Adverse criticism has driven them to think deeper
than they otherwise would about the problems which
confront them as a race, to cling closer than they
otherwise would have done to their own people, to
value more highly than they once did, the songs
and the records of their past life in slavery. The
effect has been to give them, in short, that sort of
race pride and race consciousness which, it seems

to me, they need to bring out and develop the best
that is in them.

So it was that, thinking and studying about the
origin and the destiny of my people, and of all of the
forces that were working for and against them in my
own country and elsewhere, the desire to know more
about the history of my own people steadily increased
and I tried, as well as I was able, to understand the
Negro thoroughly, intimately, in those qualities
in which, as a race, he is weak, as well as in those
qualities in which he is strong.

This habit of observation and study of my own
race, in the way I have described, led me to inquire
into the personal histories of the men and women of
my own race whom I have met in all parts of the
United States. I sought to make myself acquainted
with their difficulties and their successes, to understand
their feelings and their habits of thought, to
discover the inner drift and deeper currents of their
lives; for any one who knows to any extent the
character of the Negro people, knows that they have,
just as other people, an outside and inside, and
one cannot always tell what is going on deep down
in their hearts merely from looking in their faces.
Sometimes the Negro laughs when he is angry and
cries when he is happy. Very often, has it seemed
to me, the Negro himself does not know or fully
understand what is going on in the depth of his own
mind and heart.

Perhaps it will not be out of place for me to say
here, at the beginning of this book, that the more
I have studied the masses of the race to which I
belong, the more I have learned not only to sympathise
but to respect them. I am proud and happy
to be identified with their struggle for a higher and
better life.

Now and then I have read or heard it said that, in
consequence of the inconveniences, the hardships
and the injustices that members of my race frequently
suffer, because of the colour of their skins, there was
something exceptional and tragic about the situation
of the Negro in America, "the tragedy of colour,"
as one writer has called it. No doubt there is much
that is exceptional in the situation of the Negro, not
only in America, but in Africa. No one is more
willing than I to admit this to be true. But hardships
and even injustice, when they concern the
relations of people who are divided by creed, by
class, or by race, are not exceptional. On the
contrary, they are common, and every race that has
struggled up from a lower to a higher civilisation has
had to face these things. They have been part of its
education. Neither is there, as far as my experience
goes, anything peculiarly tragic connected with the
life of the Negro, except in the situation of those
members of my race who, for one reason or another,
have yielded to the temptation to make a secret of
their lowly birth and appear before the world as

something other than they are. Every coloured
man knows, or has heard, of such cases, and in the
whole history of the Negro race there are few sadder
stories than some of these lives. I should say it was
only when an individual suffers from his own folly,
rather than the mistakes of others, that he is likely
to become the hero of a tragedy. This is just as true
of a race. The Negro race has suffered much
because of conditions for which others were responsible.
As a rule Negroes have had very little chance
thus far, to make mistakes of their own. We have
not been free long enough. While the world hears
a great deal about "the tragedy of colour" and
other phrases of the so-called Negro problem, I have
observed that the world hears little, and knows,
perhaps, less about the Negro himself. This is true
of white people but it is also true of coloured people.

Some time ago, I had the privilege of meeting at
Cambridge, Mass., a group of about twenty-five
young coloured men who were studying at Harvard
University. I found that most of these young men
had a high standing in the University, were respected
by their professors and, upon inquiring in regard to
the subjects of their studies, I learned that several of
them had taken extended courses in history. They
seemed to know in detail, the story of Greek and
Roman and English civilisations, and prided themselves
upon their knowledge of the languages and
history of the French and German peoples. They

knew a great deal about the local history of New
England and were perfectly familiar with the story
of Plymouth Rock and the settlement of Jamestown,
and of all that concerned the white man's civilisation
both in America and out of America. But I found
that through their entire course of training, neither
in the public schools, nor in the fitting schools, nor
in Harvard, had any of them had an opportunity
to study the history of their own race. In regard to
the people with which they themselves were most
closely identified, they were more ignorant than they
were in regard to the history of the Germans, the
French, or the English. It occurred to me that this
should not be so. The Negro boy and girl should
have an opportunity to learn something in school
about his own race. The Negro boy should study
Negro history just as the Japanese boy studies Japanese
history and the German boy studies German
history.

Let me add that my knowledge of the Negro has
led me to believe that there is much in the story
of his struggle, if one were able to tell it as it deserves
to be told, that it is likely to be both instructive and
helpful, not merely to the black man but also to the
white man with whom he is now almost everywhere,
in Africa as well as America, so closely associated.
In the last analysis I suppose this is the best excuse
I can give for undertaking to tell "The Story of
the Negro."