How Ex-Slave Booker T. Washington Empowered Emancipated Slaves (Told By His Great-Granddaughter)

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. As the great-granddaughter of Booker T. Washington, the former slave turned famous educator and founder of Tuskegee University, Sarah Washington O’Neill Rush has been influenced by her great-grandfather’s rise above slavery, his relentless stand on inner strength, and his principles on personal development. Here she is to tell her story as well as her great-grandfather’s.

Let’s take a listen.

For as long as I can remember, I knew Booker T. Washington was my great-grandfather. I didn’t learn about the significance of what it meant to be in his bloodline until I was an adult. And as a result of that, like so many of our children today, I spent my childhood, my teenage years, and a lot of my young adult years looking for myself in all the wrong places. My mother, although she was the granddaughter of Booker T. Washington, she was born and raised across the street from Tuskegee. It was an institute at the time, today’s Tuskegee University. But she rarely talked about it, and she never knew her grandfather because she was born four years after he died in 1915. She was born in 1919. But I heard from others that she and her parents and her three younger sisters were all treated like royalty growing up there, where it all happened. My mother’s father was Ernest Davidson Washington, and he was the last-born of Booker T. Washington’s three children.

I actually learned more about what it was like growing up in Tuskegee from hearing Lionel Richie speak about it on an episode of Oprah Winfrey’s Masterclass program several years ago. He grew up right next door to my mom; my mother grew up with his mother, and they lived right across the street from the campus, and he said on this episode, “Living there was like being in a protective bubble, raised by a community and surrounded by Black professionals, away from the discrimination and racism that he would later face and discover outside of Tuskegee.” I believe he said it was in Montgomery, Alabama, when he started to travel with the Commodores, but before that, it was foreign to him.

So listening to him speak so, so probably about Tuskegee was so moving.

Today, my mom is buried on the campus of Tuskegee University, along with Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver and other prominent African Americans, including her parents and I believe two or maybe three previous Tuskegee University presidents. Because she’s passed away, I can only speculate about the reason she didn’t talk much about her lineage, and I believe there were actually a combination of reasons that she didn’t talk about it. One was that she was overwhelmed as a single parent. At times, my mom held down two full-time jobs just trying to make ends meet. And another reason could have been that when I grew up in the sixties in North Oakland, we were just a stone, literally a stone’s throw away from where Hewing and the Black Panther Party began, and at that time, there was little tolerance for the reconciliation stand that Booker T. Washington took from the late 1800s until he died in 1915. He believed it was more important to gain what we needed to get ahead in terms of economics and industry. He determined the best way to do that was to get along with white people rather than to fight against them. He was led, always led by his Christian values, and he talked about the Bible and how he read it every single day, and how they depended on that as slaves. That’s where their hope and their faith came from. And he said in ‘Up from Slavery,’ his autobiography, that he woke up every morning to the fervent prayers of his mother on her knees, praying for their freedom. And he said once, he said, “I will never allow any man to drag me down so low to make me hate him.” That definitely comes from the Christian values that he had in his heart. And he also said, “It’s important and right that all privileges of law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these rights and privileges.” In other words, what use was it to have privileges if we weren’t properly prepared on how to use them? So because of this stance that Booker T. Washington took, he was often referred to as an Uncle Tom or a sellout, and I think that hurt my mother; that was her grandfather. Unfortunately, at the time, those voices overshadowed the voices of those who really knew all that Washington accomplished for Black Americans. And I could talk about that for hours. Of the things that I’ve learned since learning more about my great-grandfather, and in a book entitled ‘Christian Business Legends,’ they cited, by 1905, Tuskegee turned out more self-made millionaires than Harvard, Princeton, and Yale combined. And one final reason my mom may have been quiet about her lineage was that my mom was just very modest, like her grandfather. She just believed that people pulled themselves up on their own hard work and through their own merits. So she never dropped names; she never boasted about anything. That was just her nature.

And now my father, on the other hand—and my brother James and I, we spent every weekend with my father. They were divorced since as young as I can remember, about five years old, but he’d always lived nearby. We spent every weekend with him, and he would, in a loud and proud voice, introduce us to any and everybody as descendants of Booker T. Washington, but he never said why he was so excited.

And you’re listening to Sarah Washington O’Neill Rush tell the story of her life, her father’s life, and of course, her great-grandfather Booker T. Washington. The book ‘Rising Up from the Blood, a Legacy Reclaimed, a Bridge Forward.’ And what a story Sarah is telling about her own father, most importantly, who had problems of his own and abandoned his family, and at the age of sixteen, like so many girls without fathers, she soon found herself a mother. It turns out Booker T. Washington, her great-granddad, was sixteen when he traveled five hundred miles to go to school, and that, of course, was just years before he was a slave. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of Sarah Washington O’Neill Rush and her great-grandfather, Booker T. Washington, here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Booker T. Washington, and equally important, the story of his great-granddaughter, and that would be Sarah Washington O’Neill Rush. We just heard how Sarah was reintroduced to her proud lineage while visiting the university her great-grandfather built with his own hands, Tuskegee. The reception she experienced, well, it was overwhelming. Let’s return to Sarah.

So this experience brought back again. It brought back the memories of walking on the sidewalk that day with my father, when the elderly gentleman said, “It’s an honor to know you.” It was all beginning to make sense. And it was at this reunion that I began to understand, and my interest and enthusiasm about my great-grandfather was reignited. And it was there that I learned how important his work was. I was inspired by so much. And I hear from people who learned that I’m the great-granddaughter. I hear from them about, you know, how they may have thought one way about Booker T. Washington, and they visited that campus, or they read ‘Up from Slavery,’ and their whole view changed. And that was the experience that I had from that trip. And what I was most struck by, most fascinated by, were the original buildings that some of them still stand today. And these buildings were built by hand, brick by brick, by Booker T. Washington and his students—African American ancestors, all former slaves—using bricks that they made. And these bricks were of such superior quality that people came from miles around to purchase them. And there are buildings that are still standing in the South today that are made from these very bricks. And he put the money from the sale of these bricks back into the school, giving his students lessons in business and finance, economics, and industry. And that was his plan all along. And there is a story of perseverance that