Booker T. Washington and The Great Responsibility of Being Free

Any time given to reading Booker Taliaferro Washington’s (1856-1915) autobiography Up From Slavery will be rewarded with necessary complications about what freedom meant at the time of the abolition of American slavery. Like most of the other people born or brought into the United States of America as capital, he was freed when the Union Army conquered the South and brought the Emancipation Proclamation with it. “Finally the war closed, and the day of freedom came,” wrote Washington. The day of freedom came to him in Virginia, where he'd spent his entire young life up to that point as another person's property. In this same state the author of the morally irrefutable American Declaration of Independence had lived and owned his own children as property too. (Prior to DNA sequencing, the main line of evidence for his fathering of Sally Hemmings’ children was that he allegedly promised Sally he would manumit their children when they reached adulthood. The rumor was confirmed by his keeping good on the promise, and that they were the only humans he ever set free from his enslavement.)

Emancipation was not equality and it was not the salvation it has often been portrayed as to the public. Emancipation opened a door that led to a world of problems people with dark skin had been forbidden to prepare for by design of America's Peculiar Institution. When a Union Army officer read the Emancipation Proclamation to Washington and the other slaves gathered around the plantation mansion, the reality of their sudden situation soon sunk in. Washington describes the reality as such:

“The wild rejoicing on the part of the emancipated coloured people lasted but for a brief period, for I noticed that by the time they returned to their cabins there was a change in their feelings. The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their children, seemed to take possession of them. It was very much like suddenly turning a youth of ten or twelve years out into the world to provide for himself. In a few hours the great questions with which the Anglo Saxon race had been grappling for centuries had been thrown upon these people to be solved. These were the questions of a home, a living, the rearing of children, education, citizenship, and the establishment and support of churches. Was it any wonder that within a few hours the wild rejoicing ceased and a feeling of deep gloom seemed to pervade the slave quarters? To some it seemed that, now that they were in actual possession of it, freedom was a more serious thing than they had expected to find it.”

Freedom is serious enough for landed and educated people to navigate. It was made intentionally more difficult for emancipated black Americans by denial of reparations and often successful efforts to keep rights and privileges only in the hands of white society. This denial reinforced itself by circular reasoning: A group is forcefully denied opportunity, unable to achieve similar prosperity as their oppressors as a result, and this lack of achievement is then declared to be the result of inherent deficiencies within that group and used as justification for further oppression.

For some elderly freed persons, freedom was beyond their ability to bear. On Washington's plantation, which he says was not nearly as violent as some others, this coupled with a sentimental attachment to their master’s family, who they raised for most of their lives. As a result, some decided to stay on working and living at the plantation after being freed. Most freed persons were too happy to leave, but those who stayed to live where they’d been held by force had their rationale. Decisions that seem otherwise astounding appear much more rational when the details of one’s circumstances and mental scope of future possibilities is better understood. When we put ourselves in the shoes of people from the past, our folly is that we put ourselves in their shoes with our own memories, knowledge and expectations.

Freedom is still a serious matter and always will be. Depending on your perspective, Homo sapiens was either gifted or burdened by its evolutionary history with the ability and the unshakable need to make moral judgments. The entire scope of human conflict has and will result from the question “what ought we to do?” This question is present in every choice made and underlies the problem of freedom. For example, how ought education be conducted and for how many years? How ought children to be raised and to be reprimanded for bad behavior? How ought criminals be weeded out, tried, and reformed or isolated from the public? Ought we to prioritize individuality or community? If anything, this simple realization stresses the importance for every individual to think critically, honestly, and above all, withhold opinions when they've no reason to have one.

Most of our pressing questions are sheltered under the umbrella inquiry that asks, how should I effect the experiences of the poeple and other feeling creatures around me? Samad Behrangi’s The Little Black Fish turns the question into an answer. In Hooshang Amuzegar’s translation, the Little Black Fish restores her confidence while traversing dangerous waters by assuring itself,

“I know that death can come at any moment. As long as I can stay alive I’ll do everything in my power to thwart it. Of course, once death is inevitable it becomes unimportant. What is important is the effect my life, or my death for that matter, will have on others…”

Behrangi offers a simple yet meaningful dictum. (It is meaningful because the Little black Fish's goals were good. This is obvious because after saying these words it soon dies while saving another fish from the belly of a heron.) Washington shares this belief, which evidently underlies his assertion “that those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.” He was neither first nor last to realize this though. It is notably a central tenet in The Book of Joy by the fourteenth Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. Happiness is not the same as temporary pleasure, it is more akin to the active pursuit of something you feel is meaningful.

Working to turn the human world into a more fair, safe and sustainable realm is both meaningful and laudable, but the conflict is in the details. What does a fair and free world look like? Who deserves the help of those who can provide it, and what does effective help look like? Offering bibles and prayers to people in need of clean food, water, and access to healthcare certainly isn't it. But we'll avoid getting caught in the weeds here. For the sake of argument, we'll assume that one's aims for a future that is more safe, fair, and free from unnecessary suffering applies to all people and even all feeling creatures. So if you believe this to be a good aim, then what?

Sincere belief in the righteousness of one's goal isn't always sufficient to pursue it. Trouble comes  during moments when tempting incentives are aligned against your pursuance of that goal. Overcoming these incentives requires that you understand when and how they act upon you, which is nearly impossible if you do not first understand yourself. 

You are very difficult to understand of course. If you are like most others you are adept at excusing yourself for, if not outright ignoring, your sins and shortcomings. The philosopher Martin Buber expressed this well through a religious parable about when God called upon Adam in the Garden of Eden. In The Way of Man According To The Teaching of Hasidism he writes,

“Adam hides himself to avoid rendering accounts, to escape responsibility for his way of living. Every man hides for this purpose, for every man is Adam and finds himself in Adam’s situation. To escape responsibility for his life, he turns existence into a series of hideouts.”

Self-reflection takes courage because we are often afraid of what we might discover. Of course, in order to improve, you have to learn how you became who you are from who you used to be. That is, why do we hold our beliefs about the way the world works, and how do we make decisions?

Our actions in the world are not truly free. We are born with genetic codes, parents, siblings, local communities, nationalities, and all other constructions of influences which we did not choose, and which are themselves the product of historical processes. (Not to mention natural circumstances, down to the laws of physics by which we must abide and did not create.) Peering into your past is to look back at history, and then beyond our personal past into the history that created the particular circumstances that shaped our life's experiences. This is what John Tosh emphasized when he wrote in The Pursuit of History that “[t]o be free is not to enjoy total freedom of action – that is a Utopian dream – but to know how far one’s action and thought are conditioned by the heritage of the past.” 

The heritage of the past made the freedom of emancipation incomplete, and therefore not freedom at all. This is best summarized in the ironic falsehood that the Army officer told Washington and the crowd on the day of their emancipation. “After the reading,” Washington wrote, “we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased.” Washington discovered this was untrue while making his way to the Hampton Institute, a boarding school for blacks in Virginia. He was the only black person on board a stage coach that was travelling over the cold mountains of Virginia. At night it stopped at a small hotel, where the passengers all were given room and supper while he was told the inn would not take a black lodger. Nor would they sell him food. He had an experience that black Americans the country over have still today. “It was my first experience,” he wrote, “in finding out what the colour of my skin meant.” Left outside to suffer sickness or death, Washington walked and walked and walked to keep warm during the night until the party left again in the morning.

The most generalized history of what followed the civil war is well known to even an occasional spectator of American history. Jim Crow soon legalized the violent separation of blacks and whites, homeowner covenants and red-lining stopped blacks from free relocation and encouraged the process of urban ghettoization, and lynchings were committed without a hint of justice. The list is long, and it adds more emphasis to two salient points. The first is that emancipation did not mean freedom. The second is that the responsibility of freedom was hard to bear precisely because it was not complete and because the conditions of bondage were designed to deny black people all of the opportunities, education, and generational wisdom accumulated through decades of freedom which white society had at its disposal. 

How then have African Americans gone about claiming and obtaining the full measure of their freedom while also endeavoring like everybody else to bear its accompanying responsibility? How has the larger society in which they are a part of helped or hindered their efforts and aims, and how has this varied by location and time? Frequently the non-black general public have vague, uncomplicated, and as a result, often false ideas about how these should be answered. The answers are by necessity complicated, given to general trends with exceptions that sometimes prove insightful. and other times are solely curiosities.

Emphasizing black America's past and present oppression does not ignore the progress made toward racial equality. The emphasis is necessary for identifying the origins of the historical processes, and the processes themselves, which have resulted in the settings of black experiences today. The progress so far achieved cannot be appreciated without a more complete comprehension of where we've progressed from, and no amount of progress will be sufficient to ignore the problems that still exist. Everybody understands this when it applies to issues that affect them personally, but wish to ignore it when they might be implicated in the problem. 

The temptation to reduce black Americans to the role of perpetual victim may follow continuous descriptions of their suffering, but this reduction denies both black agency and therefore history. This is especially prominent among those inoculated against a particularly insidious strain of the avian flu- who are resistant to the virulent desire to ostrich one's own head deep in the sand.  The remedy they administer to the flu-infected is an emphasis on oppression so singular that it morphs from one vital factor of African American history into the only shape that history could ever take. One of the effects of this is that the only household names of influential black Americans are not the inventors, engineers, politicians, etc., but Civil Rights leaders or victims of racist violence. Having recognized this, we have a responsibility to educate ourselves, to be critical of the thought processes and available or cherry picked information beneath our beliefs, and actively pursue the most complete truth whenever it is clear we do not possess it.

A person can be said to be growing up as they obtain a sense of duty and begin taking responsibility for themselves. This is serious business. People live and die for their ideas of how that responsibility ought to be taken up. Wars are waged, people enslaved, and sometimes truly good ideas do prevail. Other times, bad ideas triumph enough to remind us that the universe cares not for justice, and that if there is to be any of it at all, it begins and ends with us. In other words, how we bear the responsibility of being free.