Community and the Purpose of Education in Booker T. Washington and Malcolm X's Autobiographies

In their autobiographies, both Booker T. Washington and Malcolm X focus on their love of learning and books, their self-made education, and the endless amount of sacrifices and hard work they were willing to put in to get the knowledge they aspired to. Yet while this basic structure is the same, their stories begin to differ in how they wanted to use that education. While Booker T. Washington wanted education for the sake of knowledge itself, Malcolm X wanted it to inform his beliefs. While Booker T. Washington saw education as a way to earn the respect of others as individuals, Malcolm X saw it as something to unite his community. These ideas can be seen throughout both narratives, when talking about their own education, but also about those that inspired them to start educating themselves further, as seen in the following quotes:

“As soon as the coloured people found out that he could read, a newspaper was secured, and at the close of nearly every day’s work this young man would be surrounded by a group of men and women who were anxious to hear him read the news contained in the papers. How I used to envy this man! He seemed to me to be the one young man in all the world who ought to be satisfied with his attainments” (Washington 19-20).

In this quote, Washington describes a man who knew how to read and describes this as the ultimate goal. He doesn’t focus on the specific news and ideas the man can read, but focuses on the mere fact that he can read. Washington admires him for the power and autonomy he gets through knowing how to read. There is a tone of awe when he writes about how the man would be “surrounded” by people “anxious” to hear from him. His focus is on the respect that education brings, on the ideal of being looked up to by the people around you as the most educated person in the room.

Compare that with a quote from Malcom X’s autobiography:

“Mr. Muhammad sent me a typed reply. It had an all but electrical effect upon me to see the signature of the “Messenger of Allah.” After he welcomed me into the “true knowledge,” he gave me something to think about. The black prisoner, he said, symbolized white society’s crime of keeping black men oppressed and deprived and ignorant …” (X 1860).

The awe that Malcolm X expresses here is for almost the exact opposite reasons as Booker T. Washington’s awe for the man who could read. Almost immediately he makes the statement “he gave me something to think about.” This tells us two things. First, he is focusing on the beliefs Elijah Muhammad shared. It is the content of his letter that makes Muhammad impressive, the beliefs his knowledge has informed and not just the facts that he knows. Second, Elijah Muhammad didn’t just have his own beliefs, he shared them with Malcolm X, letting him think about them too. Malcolm X doesn’t feel inferior, he feels “welcomed”. Knowledge in this case is clearly about community. It’s about sharing what you have with the community to help everyone rise up and getting stronger from one another.

There is also an aspect of community in Washington’s quote. The man who could read is trying to help black people by bringing news to those in the community that couldn’t read. The people join together to listen to him and there is a unity in that. But there is also still a clear hierarchy. One man is reading and the others are listening. In Malcolm X’s quote, there is less of a clear hierarchy. Although Elijah Muhammad is the more educated, established person, he invites Malcolm X to think and reflect as well, rather than merely telling him what to think. 

These two attitudes inform Booker T. Washington’s and Malcolm X’s opinions respectively in their own quest for education. Washington wants to keep learning more and more by seizing every opportunity he can and moving up in the ranks of schools and learning opportunities. In contrast, Malcolm X wants to start applying his knowledge right away, focused on opportunities to use what he learned rather than finding any opportunity to keep learning.

This sentiment of Washington’s is represented when he first hears about Hampton Institute, the school he worked very hard to eventually attend. He writes:

“This was the first time that I had ever heard anything about any kind of school or college that was more pretentious than the little coloured school in our town… I resolved at once to go to that school” (Washington 29). 

He hears about another school and instantly is intrigued and determined to go learn more in a place that would have more opportunities than the smaller school he had previously had access to. He doesn’t need to know much about the school to know he wants to attend. He is open to and motivated to gain any kind of knowledge. The prestige and “pretentious”ness of the school drive him to attend even more. He sees this school as a way to gain a better education but also to move up in the ranks of society, the ultimate goal he sees.

In contrast, Malcolm X writes “I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol on its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America” (X 1868).

This seems like an almost direct response to Washington. Malcolm X didn’t want to get the kind of education Washington got. He didn’t care about status or seizing “the best” educational opportunities. Instead he knew what his cause was, and wanted to learn in order to help him with his cause. He read to gain knowledge about the history of the oppression of black people by white people. He read with the goal of his activism in mind, looking for information in books that he could apply to his life.

In these ways, Booker T. Washington and Malcolm X’s readers' autobiographies are different. Activism is a clear part of Malcolm X’s educational journey while it is much more subtle in Booker T. Washington’s. However, in the end, they do share a similar story in getting their own education and in the broadest purpose driving it.

Booker T. Washington writes “The great and prevailing idea that seemed to take possession of every one was to prepare himself to lift up the people at his home” (Washington 42). This is similar to Malcolm X’s mission. They each feel a need for a different kind of education but both hope to use their education to do what they thought was best for black people.

Multivocality and Music in "Characteristics of Negro Expression" by Zora Neale Hurston and in the Harlem Renaissance

In this blog post, I will discuss some of the sections in Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression” and how they relate to the writing we have read from the Harlem Renaissance. In this essay, she lists and dissects a number of tropes uniquely depicted in African American art. Each section corresponds to one of these ideas. For the most part, I think that her analysis clearly matches what we have read, but there were some concepts that I didn’t think we saw as much, or we saw in a different way than what she described.

One idea that Hurston really focuses on and brings out through a variety of different sections in her essay, is the connection of black writing to black music and dance. She describes how the style of music and dance influenced the style of writing. One of her sections is entitled “Asymmetry” and highlights asymmetry we see in black art, for example in blues poems that repeat the same line but with a variation. When we see the line begin to repeat, we expect symmetry, but we don’t quite get it. This evokes the asymmetry we find in musical rhythms and helps make the poetry something that feels almost like it was meant to be sung or that falls into place with a rhythm that starts playing in our head when we read it. This rhythm propels us forward, keeping us engaged, which I think relates to black dancing and how it is “dynamic”, as Hurston discusses. Finally, when we see parts of lines repeat or asymmetry in the lengths of the lines, that also gives the poem a bit of a disjointed feeling, something Hurston discusses as “angularity”.

 Hurston sums a lot of these ideas together, when describing “the Jook” as a “pleasure house” a place of music and dancing (Hurston 9). She focuses on music and dancing as being emotional and focused on “feeling” rather than merely technical. As such, they align well with incorporation into literature, since the emotion leaves room for stories to be told. In Sterling Brown’s “Cabaret” and Langston Hughes’ “The Cat and the Saxophone”, we see not only the characteristics discussed earlier, but also poems that are actually set in Jooks with references to Jazz music or the Charleston step.

We can tell that a poem is set in a Jook, when we hear the sounds of a Jook in the lines of poetry. For example, in “The Cat and the Saxophone”, everyday conversation is juxtaposed with the voice of a singer in the background.  In other poems, we sometimes see musical instruments as well. This is one of the ways in which multivocality is depicted in these poems. Hurston discusses this additional voice of the instruments and how they are imitated by people in her section on imitation. She explains that in the past people have criticized black people for imitation, saying that using imitation makes black art unoriginal, and responds by saying “He does it as the mocking-bird does it, for the love of it, and not because he wishes to be like the one imitated.” (Hurston 8). As she indicated, the love for music that can be found through its depiction in poetry is one way black art is unique. However, multivocality is more broad than just this. In her own story “The Gilded Six Bits”, Hurston also depicts multivocality, switching between the thoughts of Missie May and Joe in order to show both their perspectives. This trope also continued after the Harlem Renaissance. For example, in Richard Wright’s “Down by the Riverside” we see the narration style shift between a 3rd person narrator and a 1st person account of Mann’s thoughts written in the vernacular. Here, rather than giving us the atmosphere of a jook as context for the plot of the poem, multivocality allows us to see multiple points of view simultaneously, helping us keep any one point of view in perspective of the broader circumstances. This form of multivocality involving different human perspectives isn’t really mentioned explicitly by Hurston in her essay.

However, I do see other passages in her essay that relate to this form of multivocality. One of these is drama. In her “drama” section, Hurston discusses the presence of drama in everyday life, and how the idea of every action in regular life being dramatic as though it were acted out, comes into play in black art. As she writes “Every phase of Negro life is highly dramatised. No matter how joyful or how sad the case there is sufficient poise for drama. Everything is acted out” (Hurston 1). I think multivocality relates to drama, because the structure of writing with multivocality is often reminiscent of a play. Just as in a play, we get to see different characters treated equally by the author and hear all their voices. For example, “The Gilded Six Bits” feels very dramatic to me, both in that sense and more broadly. I didn’t really think of it that way when I was reading it, but after reading Hurston’s essay, I saw how the “game” that Missie May and Joe play is very much acted out: the sort of thing you might see in a movie. However, it’s interesting that here, the characters are fully aware of the play they are putting on. I thought this idea was really interesting, and it made me further appreciate the relationship between Missie May and Joe.

Overall, I thought Hurston’s characterization of black art fits well with what we read from the Harlem Renaissance, although it also made me reflect and see the black writing we read in a new light. One trope that she mentioned that I didn’t see as much in our class readings was the idea of “folklore” and “culture heroes” (figures like the devil, Rockefeller, and “Jack, the greatest culture hero of the South”) (Hurston 5). I’d be curious to read texts that depict these more, and learn more about how they are written about.

Questioning reconstruction through the stories of Mr. Ryder and Liza Jane

     

Charles Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” tells a story about two characters, 25 years after the end of slavery, and through the differences between them, questions the success of reconstruction. It shows a disparity between what people said about the goals of the movement and what it was actually able to accomplish, emphasizing how difficult it is to “recover” from something like slavery.

Right from the first page, it describes the “Blue Veins” with an ironic tone. I view the Blue Veins as a metaphor for reconstruction. They are trying to help black people rise socially and improve their status, and in this way they are trying to “redress the inequalities of slavery”. As Chesnutt writes “Its [the Blue Veins] purpose was to establish and maintain correct social standards among a people whose social condition presented almost unlimited for improvement” (Chesnutt 1). Right from the start, Chesnutt depicts the near impossibility of the mission that reconstruction sets out to do. It also questions the focus of the organization. “Social standards” is in many ways, a superficial term. It is not something that is necessary to survive, and is something that is associated with wealthy, privileged people that do not have to focus on more basic needs. When we first hear the phrase, “social standards” seems to be something that would help people establish order in their day to day lives, but this description calls out the fact that in reality it is about focusing on something that detracts attention from the real issues that black people are facing.

After giving us an overview of the Blue Veins, the story shows us the people that its approach left behind. We are introduced to Liza Jane, someone that didn’t fit the limited sector of black people that the Blue Veins tried to help, those who could essentially pass for white. As the story says “she looked like a bit of the old plantation life, summoned up from the past by the wave of a magician’s wand…” (Chesnutt 10). She is someone who wasn’t able to move forward after slavery ended the way Mr. Ryder was and is therefore someone Mr. Ryder doesn’t encounter in his day to day life. The reference to a “magician’s wand” indicates that Mr. Ryder doesn’t fully recognize the existence of people like her. He would rather imagine her as someone who has magically been brought to his world, than acknowledge that her and the issues she’s facing are still real, even in his time. For 25 years, she has been stuck trying to pick up the pieces she needed to get to a place where she could start building up, by looking for the family she’d been separated from. Her story emphasizes that the effects of slavery weren’t something that could just be changed overnight by emancipation. Just getting to a stable situation where she could settle down with her family was something that was still impossible for Liza Jane after 25 years of freedom. Yet her situation was invisible to the government and to people like Mr. Ryder that might have been able to use their social status to help her.

But, it’s not just Liza Jane who’s still struggling to build a regular life after slavery. At the end of the story, learning that Liza Jane was Mr. Ryder’s wife forces us to call into question the impression we had of Mr. Ryder. His wealth and high social status might make us think that he has “moved on from slavery” but though he seems to have made a new identity for himself, it comes crashing down in some ways when Liza Jane comes back. His new identity was all on the outside, but inside he hasn’t resolved the regret of leaving Liza Jane and the knowledge of  what he was missing and what he lost because of slavery. The Blue Veins allowed him to hide the trauma, but it doesn’t help him actually address the issues and struggles he has to deal with because of slavery.

Liza Jane and Mr. Ryder are two people that started out in the same place and position when they were slaves, but ended up in very different places 25 years later. At first, it seems clear that Mr. Ryder’s position is better off as he is wealthier and has higher social status, but after thinking about it, it’s not clear to me that he’s happier. I can’t help wondering what Mr. Ryder would have been like if he had followed a path more similar to Liza Jane’s. Would he have been able to reunite with her sooner? Would they have had a happier life together? Looking at the text, I think Mr. Ryder wonders the same thing. Although Mr. Ryder seems to be the kind of person who would look down on someone with lower social status, Mr. Ryder shows respect to Liza Jane from the moment she walks into his office. He is intrigued by her and the strong impression she makes on him, seeing her as magical. When he finally acknowledges her as his wife at the party, he describes her saying “such devotion and confidence are rare even among women” (Chesnutt 20). With this line, he praises the character traits that kept her from assimilating with white people.

Overall, “The Wife of His Youth” shows reconstruction as too focused on trying to make black people like white people, leaving the reader with a lot of questions. Were the actual steps taken as noble as the goals?