Mainers packed Booker T. Washington speech

“Booker T. Washington will speak on the work of the Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama, and its results, in the chapel at Hancock Point, at 2:30 o’clock, Wednesday, Aug. 17. All are invited.”

In this short item buried on Page 8 in 1904, the Ellsworth correspondent for the Bangor Daily News announced the coming to Maine of the nation’s most influential African-American, a former slave who had advised the president of the United States on “the Negro Question” and founded one of the most innovative institutions of higher education.

Notice of Washington’s presence in Maine crescendoed, however, and by the time he spoke in Bangor in late November, exactly a century ago tonight, half a page would be devoted to his impressive oratory skills and his wit and wisdom.

Washington’s connection among the wealthy summer community at Hancock Point was Nathalie Lord, one of his most influential teachers at Hampton Institute in Virginia. The Kennebunkport native had taught him public speaking, his great talent, gaining her mention in his famous autobiography, “Up From Slavery.” He took care of her boat and rowed her about to make money to help pay for his schooling.

Washington was one of the highlights that summer at the exclusive Colony where “the tide of life flows merrily on for young and old. Coaching, tennis, golf and boating fill the day program, while dinners, cards, seashore parties and dancing wile away the evening hours.”

This festive mood described in a dispatch from Hancock Point published the morning of Washington’s address hardly fit the tone of his troubling theme – “the Negro Problem.” But Washington was adept at talking to white audiences. He had spoken at Hancock Point at least once before. The fiery discourse of the modern civil rights movement was yet to come. Washington sensed intuitively how far the nation was ready to go at that moment, and he preferred convincing white people with reason and humor than with vitriol.

The next day, the newspaper correspondent picked from Washington’s words four sentences as being the most significant of his talk: “Within a few months it has been asserted that no matter how much training … the negro may receive – no matter how much skill of hand may be imparted to him – after all the weak point is in his moral condition; and some have gone so far as to say that the more education the negro receives the more immoral he grows. Now what are the facts? My friends, I measure my words when I say that you cannot find today in a single jail or penitentiary a person who holds a diploma from Hampton or Tuskegee institutions. That does not show that education increases crime much among colored people.”

At the end of the address $260 in donations were collected toward his cause.

This was only the beginning of a speaking tour in Bar Harbor, Seal Harbor and Northeast Harbor, where other liberal and wealthy donors would attend. “Parties” had also been arranged in Bangor, Ellsworth, Sullivan, Hancock and

Lamoine.

Race relations at the time were crude and brutal. Front page stories from other parts of the nation about lynchings, riots and other forms of violent confrontations involving the races were common.

Blacks were known for their skill as boxers, but white boxers wouldn’t fight them.

Shortly before Washington arrived in Bangor in November, “Big Jim” Jeffries, a white pugilist, made his views clear: “The story that I have agreed to fight Jack Johnson is not true. I will never fight a negro.”

And talk about racial stereotyping. The newspaper reported that on his way to Bangor, in Worcester, Mass., Washington had gotten off the train and been mistaken for black boxer Jack Blackburn by the man who was managing Blackburn’s fight that night.

Of course, there was plenty of racism in Maine. To its credit, the NEWS weighed in with strong editorials opposing lynchings and the literacy requirements that kept blacks from voting in the South. Part of the paper’s goal, of course, was to crack the Democratic voting block that controlled the South back then.

Washington’s appearance in the Queen City on Nov. 29 received extensive and respectful coverage. “A lecture of far more than usual interest will be that of Booker T. Washington in City Hall [located then at Hammond and Columbia streets], Tuesday night, on the negro question and work of the industrial institutes in the south for the education of the negro race. Mr. Washington is an educator of much prominence and because of his ability, depth of character and the amount of good he has done for his people during his life he is unquestionably the most prominent and highly respected representative of his race in the United States today,” said the lead on a newspaper advance.

Washington was a guest of the Rev. John S. Penman of the Central Congregational Church. Free tickets had been distributed by area churches. The general public could find seating in the last few minutes before the talk was scheduled to start if the seats were not filled.

Despite freezing streets and drizzling rain the auditorium was packed to overflowing, and “hundreds of others had to be turned away at the door.” The next day Washington visited the University of Maine where he received a “regal welcome” from the students before giving a brief talk at the end of chapel.

By 1904, Washington was already under attack from

W.E.B. Dubois and other more radical members of his race for his emphasis on vocational education at Tuskegee and his willingness to compromise civil rights in exchange for economic gain. Part of his Bangor speech was devoted to defending his philosophy of manual education that some saw as a way to hold back black men and women.

“I believe that one of the most important factors in our entire system of education is the teaching of our pupils the intelligent, dignified, I almost say Christianizing power of the labor of the hand. [Applause],” the paper reported. “It was not easy to make them [Tuskegee students] understand the dignity of hand labor – to force upon them the great truth that the labor of the hand is in many ways as important as the labor of the head.”

About 60 years later, a new generation of civil rights leaders had taken to the streets. The land was afire with protest and demonstrations. Martin Luther King even came to Brunswick and spoke in the big white Congregational church at the top of the hill next to the Bowdoin College campus. I stepped inside briefly to listen to his speech, and there was standing room only.

The ideas of Booker T. Washington and his generation sounded quaint by then. But the success of King and the other firebrands was conducted on the shoulders of Washington and the other people of his generation including the students he trained at Tuskegee Institute.

Wayne E. Reilly has edited two books of Civil War era diaries and letters including “The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War.”

He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.