What he meant to say

Around 1910, a man who had recently become a grandfather learned that his grandchild was seriously ill and had to go to the hospital. His daughter, the child’s mother, was beside herself with worry, maybe close to a nervous breakdown.

Although he was very busy, with a crammed schedule, the grandfather cancelled all his events for two weeks to spend time with the worried family, who lived in the Washington D.C. area. He helped with the medical expenses, and he arranged for the hospital’s chief surgeon to oversee the child’s case.

What was this grandpa so busy with, anyway? He was Booker T. Washington, president of Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), famous educator, writer, activist, and speaker. He was in high demand across the country, consulted by people like Theodore Roosevelt (26^th U.S. president), Tuskegee University (economist and editor of The New York Age), and Julius Rosenwald (president of Sears, Roebuck).

With Rosenwald, for example, Washington was helping build 5,000 schools in the southeast US for black kids. That involved finding local leaders, seeking matching funds, and guiding communities in building the schools – a tremendous amount of work. The Rosenwald school program was enormously successful and influential. But it sure took time.

So it’s good to know that Washington could also be there for his family. (It looks to us as if the child was Sidney Pittman, Jr., and that he survived the medical crisis.)

One day he took his daughter, Portia Pittman (a pianist) to visit the Washington Monument. We suppose he was trying to take both their minds off worrying about the hospitalized boy. On the way out, Washington signed the guest book.

The guard on duty grabbed the book away and “used a racial epithet to say that the invitation to sign the book did not extend to blacks.” That’s how it’s described in You Need a Schoolhouse by Stephanie Deutsch. Louis Harlan’s The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 confirms what you might suspect, that the guard used the n-word.

Then the guard glanced at the book and read the signature. Gasp! Booker T. Washington! He apologized. Washington either “said nothing” and “just walked away” (Deutsch) or “accepted with an indifferent shrug” (Harlan).

The story seems to have been found in Portia Pittman’s letters, which we can’t access right now, because covid.

We don’t have the wording of the guard’s apology. It may have been something like, “Sorry, I didn’t realize who you were.” Which leaves the implication that other black people were still considered so awful they can’t sign the book. (Other black people including Portia Pittman, standing right there.)

That’s not an apology anyone should accept.

In the unlikely case that the guard’s apology included the statement that he’d had a change of heart, and a promise that in future he would not stop people from signing the book because of their race, that would have been different.

Washington was not a man who favored bitterness. He once wrote to Portia, studying piano in Germany, not to “dwell too much upon American prejudice, or any other racial prejudice. The thing is for one to get above such things. If one gets into the habit of continually thinking and talking about race prejudice, he soon gets to the point where he is fit for little that is worth doing.”

If Washington shrugged indifferently, we doubt that constituted acceptance. Maybe it conveyed, “I hear you” and “Whatever.”