My Larger Education: Being Chapters from My Experience 1911]. IT
HAS been my fortune to be associated all my life with a problem a
hard, perplexing, but important problem. There was a time when I
looked upon this fact as a great misfortune. It seemed to me a
great hardship that I was born poor, and it seemed an even greater
hardship that I should have been born a Negro. I did not like to
admit, even to myself, that I felt this way about the matter,
because it seemed to me an indication of weakness and cowardice for
any man to complain about the condition he was born to. Later I
came to the conclusion that it was not only weak and cowardly, but
that it was a mistake to think of the matter in the way in which I
had done. I came to see that, along with his disadvantages, the
Negro in America had some advantages, and I made up my mind that
opportunities that had been denied him from without could be more
than made up by greater concentration and power within. Perhaps I
can illustrate what I mean by a fact I learned while I was in
school. I recall my teacher's explaining to the class one day how
it was that steam or any other form of energy, if allowed to escape
and dissipate itself, loses its value as a motive power. Energy
must be confined; steam must be locked in a boiler in order to
generate power. The same thing seems to have been true in the case
of the Negro. Where the Negro has met with discriminations and with
difficulties because of his race, he has invariably tended to get
up more steam. When this steam has been rightly directed and
controlled, it has become a great force in the upbuilding of the
race. If, on the contrary, it merely spent itself in fruitless
agitation and hot air, no good has come of it. Paradoxical as it
may seem, the difficulties that the Negro has met since
emancipation have, in my opinion, not always, but on the whole,
helped him more than they have hindered him. BOOKER T WASHINGTON
1911].
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