Booka T.

Booker T. Washington provides the answer of staying South to the debate we looked at in Douglass’s Life and Times. Booker T. agrees with Douglass that the newly freed blacks should stay in the South. He thinks that the black people should make it work with the South. Black people of the time wanted to look elsewhere to solve their problems, but Washington says, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” He stated that it was necessary that they stay in the South.
Booker T. Washington says, “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field, as in writing a poem.” (pg. 595) He says this because there is just as much dignity and virtue in staying and working fields in the South as there is in the North writing poems. At this time, the economy was driven by the labor in the South. If all the black people went to the North, then the economy would suffer.
He argued that the white needed to cast down their buckets too to give African Americans a chance. He said that blacks were 1/3 of the population and as a whole, Americans could not succeed with the African Americans because they are a huge chunk of it. Washington says that they are the people that have taken care of white people’s children, worked for them, and built the city that they live in, and they would all come together to make process. Even though whites and blacks don’t have to like each other, everyone has to come together. Both whites and blacks had to be willing to work.
Washington explained that by everyone going to the North is like saying that freedom doesn’t work in the South and that their rights don’t count just because the southern whites refuse to recognize them. This is why he says that this is an opportunity and that they should stay put and make it in the North.
He thinks this will work because he believes that helping others is what makes oneself most happy. He thinks that that is the most important thing, and he believes in cooperation, but this is not always how things work out.