Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 15, 1993 TAG: 9302160018
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: NF-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WENDI GIBSON RICHERT STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
VIRGINIA'S OTHER WASHINGTON
An ear of corn and a sweet potato, a white bonnet and a small flax shirt, a chestnut burr and a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation.Park Ranger Ajena Hakeem carried these items in her basket when she visited Body Camp Elementary School in Bedford County a few days ago. There, kindergartners and first-graders reached into the basket to share the strange objects with their classmates.
Hakeem works at the Booker T. Washington National Monument in Franklin County, which is run by the National Park Service. She spoke at Body Camp as part of the park's outreach programs for February - Black History Month.
While there, she told about the life of Booker T. Washington, a child born into slavery on a plantation in Franklin County, who grew up to become a leading black educator and respected spokesman for American blacks.
Washington was born in 1856 on the Burroughs Plantation, a tobacco farm in Franklin County that is now home to the Booker T. Washington National Monument.
As a grown-up, Washington remembered being a slave to the Burroughses when he was a child: "I was not large enough to be of much service. Still I was occupied most of the time in cleaning the yards, carrying water to the men in the fields or going to the mill," where he would take the corn the Burroughses grew to be ground.
Much of Washington's life is recounted in his autobiography "Up From Slavery." In it, we learn that his family lived in a small cabin that doubled as the kitchen where his mother, Sally, prepared meals for the Burroughs family.
Growing up, Washington had to wear wooden shoes and flax shirts that felt prickly when they were new. He likened them to chestnut burrs.
He also wrote that he and his family slept on rags on the floor instead of sleeping on beds, and roasted sweet potatoes that were stored in the root cellar under the floor of their cabin.
The fireplace in which his mom cooked kept the cabin toasty in the winter, but flooded the place with heat during the summer.
Like other slaves, Washington wasn't allowed to go to school. But he did walk with his master's daughter to a Franklin County schoolhouse, carrying her books. This trip to the classroom, open only to white students, caused him to write, "I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study would be about the same as getting into paradise."
When he was 9 years old, he got the chance. In 1865 a Union soldier arrived at the Burroughs Plantation and read the Emancipation Proclamation - a document by President Abraham Lincoln that freed the slaves. Once free to go, Washington and his family traveled to Malden, W.Va. There, Washington began working in the salt furnaces and learning on his own.
When he was 16, Washington traveled 400 miles by train, stagecoach and foot to Hampton Institute, a black secondary school in Eastern Virginia.
He paid for his tuition by working at the school, but the rewards were rich. Washington slept on a real bed at Hampton, ate on real tableclothes, bathed in a bathtub and brushed his teeth with a toothbrush, all for the first time.
After his graduation from Hampton Institute in 1875, Washington began the teaching career that would distinguish him as one of America's most remembered educators.
He moved back to West Virginia to teach, but four years later, Hampton asked him to return to teach there. He did for about two years, until he moved on to found Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, an Alabama school for blacks. There, he headed the trade and teaching school that grew from an abandoned church to a campus with 115 buildings. Some of of the buildings were built by Washington and his students.
Washington's life was spent educating blacks and fighting for their rights.
But some black leaders believed Washington was too soft on segregationists (people who thought blacks and whites should do things separately). It is true that Washington didn't like to speak out about black causes that weren't popular with Southern whites. He did, however, secretly finance lawsuits to advance black civil rights and oppose segregation.
The Booker T. Washington National Monument serves to remind us of Washington - a man who advised U.S. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. On a visit to the monument, you can tour the 207-acre site, where towering trees from Washington's boyhood on the plantation still grow. You'll view an award-winning slide show that details parts of Washington's life, too.
You'll see the reconstructed log cabin where Washington lived, with its fireplace and root cellar, the spot where his birth took place, a smokehouse, a blacksmith shed and an outhouse.
There is a reconstructed tobacco barn where workers on the plantation hung tobacco leaves six rafters high to cure before selling them to a tobacco factory.
Between Memorial Day in May and Labor Day in September, there are live demonstrations at the park, where people dress up in clothes like those worn in the 1800s, when Washington was growing up there. These people will show how plantation folks made soap, candles and baskets, and tended the gardens and livestock.
The park on Virginia 122 near Smith Mountain Lake is open year-round, except on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day, from 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. There is a $2 admission.