Let’s Help Lift Each Other Up
(A review of Up from Slavery, by Booker T. Washington)
By Theresa Camoriano
I just finished reading Up From Slavery, the autobiography of Booker T. Washington, which you can read on-line here. (I downloaded it onto my Kindle from Amazon at no charge.) What an inspiring story! I can’t believe I never read it before, or that it was not required reading when I studied American history in school.
Booker T. Washington was born a slave on a plantation in Virginia shortly before the Civil War, and he tells about his life as a slave, what happened after emancipation, how he struggled to get an education, and how he founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He said he held no grudge or ill will toward the slave owners, and he thought the institution of slavery had been harmful to the owners as well as to the slaves.
He worked all his life to try to help lift himself and other people up, so they could be more successful and productive, and he believed that blacks and whites would get along better to the extent that they were able to benefit each other more. He had an attitude of abundance, believing that helping other people become their best, to develop and use their talents to the greatest extent possible, was good for everyone. And he was right.
We need to promote that attitude of abundance again. We need to get rid of the attitude of scarcity, in which people believe there is only a fixed amount of wealth, and that one person can succeed only at the expense of someone else. That attitude is very destructive, promotes division, strife, and poverty, and simply is not an accurate view of the world. When a person is free and uses his freedom to become more productive and useful to others, he benefits not only himself but others around him as well.
Unfortunately, our current administration has adopted the attitude of scarcity, promoting class envy, hatred of the “rich”, and “spreading the wealth around”. That attitude results in destructive policies that are very harmful to the economy, and, of course, to real people. At the moment, it is causing real pain in the black community, where unemployment is very high, and roughly half of black youth are unemployed.
The only way for us to get out of our current mess is to promote liberty and the empowerment of every person, promote respect for every person and his property, and try to help every person lift himself up and make the most of his situation. Instead of telling people they are victims, or adopting a victim mentality, or telling people they are helpless and need to rely on handouts from the government, which is a path toward self-pity, misery and failure, we should be telling the story of Booker T. Washington. His life story and his attitude would be an inspiration to many people. His message is exactly what we need to hear today.
Reading Booker T. Washington’s inspiring book, adopting his attitude of abundance, and sharing both his book and his winning attitude with others would be a very positive step you could take that would benefit you and the community around you. Please take that step.
“You can’t help someone get up a hill
without getting closer to the top yourself.” – Norman Schwarzkopf
Theresa Camoriano is a patent attorney in Louisville KY.
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