Booker T. Washington: Making

“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

Booker T. Washington

Source: 1910s, My Larger Education, Being Chapters from My Experience (1911), Ch. V: The Intellectuals and the Boston Mob (pg. 118)

People , Business , Learning

“Character, not circumstances, makes the man.”

Booker T. Washington

"Democracy and Education" http://web.archive.org/20071031084046/www.historycooperative.org/btw/Vol.4/html/222.html, speech, Institute of Arts and Sciences, Brooklyn NY (30 September 1896)

“I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”

Booker T. Washington book Up from Slavery

Variant: I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
Source: 1900s, Up From Slavery (1901), Chapter XI: Making Their Beds Before They Could Lie On Them. This statement was quoted in Charm and Courtesy in Conversation (1904) by Frances Bennett Callaway, p. 153 as "I permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him." It has also often been paraphrased in various other ways: I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him. I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him. I let no man drag me down so low as to make me hate him.
Source: Up from Slavery

Soul , Hate

“Men may make laws to hinder and fetter the ballot, but men cannot make laws that will bind or retard the growth of manhood.”

Booker T. Washington

"The Problems of the Colored Race in the South," lecture, Hamilton Club, Chicago (10 December 1895) http://web.archive.org/20071031084051/www.historycooperative.org/btw/Vol.4/html/93.html
Context: Men may make laws to hinder and fetter the ballot, but men cannot make laws that will bind or retard the growth of manhood.
We went into slavery a piece of property; we came out American citizens. We went into slavery pagans; we came out Christians. We went into slavery without a language; we came out speaking the proud Anglo-Saxon tongue. We went into slavery with slave chains clanking about our wrists; we came out with the American ballot in our hands.
Progress, progress is the law of nature; under God it shall be our eternal guiding star.

Men , Law

“The longer I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for-and dying for, if need be-is the opportunity of making someone else more happy.”

Booker T. Washington

World , Happiness

“I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred. I learned that assistance given to the weak makes the one who gives it strong; and that oppression of the unfortunate makes one weak.”

Booker T. Washington book Up from Slavery

Source: 1900s, Up From Slavery (1901), Chapter XI: Making Their Beds Before They Could Lie On Them
Source: Up from Slavery

Love , Men , Strong

“After making careful inquiry I can not find a half a dozen cases of a man or woman who has completed a full course of education in any of our reputable institutions like Hampton, Tuskegee, Fiske, or Atlanta, who are imprisoned. The records of the South show that 90 percent of the colored people imprisoned are without knowledge of trades and 61 percent are illiterate. But it has been said that the negro proves economically valueless in proportion as he is educated. Let us see. All will agree that the negro in Virginia, for example, began life forty years ago in complete poverty, scarcely owning clothing or a day's food. The reports of the State auditor show the negro today owns at least one twenty-sixth of the real estate in that Commonwealth exclusive of his holdings in towns and cities, and that in the counties east of the Blue Ridge Mountains he owns one-sixteenth. In Middlesex County he owns one-sixth: in Hanover, one-fourth. In Georgia the official records show that, largely through the influence of educated men and women from Atlanta schools and others, the negroes added last year $1,526,000 to their taxable property, making the total amount upon which they pay taxes in that State alone $16,700,000. Few people realize under the most difficult and trying circumstances, during the last forty years, it has been the educated negro who counseled patience, self-control, and thus averted a war of races. Every negro going out of our institutions properly educated becomes a link in the chain that shall forever bind the two races together in all essentials of life.”

Booker T. Washington

Speech in New York (12 February 1904), as quoted in speech by Edward de Veaux Morrell in the House of Representatives https://cdn.loc.gov/service/rbc/lcrbmrp/t2609/t2609.pdf (4 April 1904)
1900s

Life , Women , Men , War