g the impor-
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5. AFRICAN AMERICANS
Expectations, and role models, according to Booker T. Washington
It makes a great deal of difference in the life of a race, as it does in the life of an individual, whether the world expects much or little of that individual or that race. I suppose that all boys and girls bom in poverty have felt at some time in their lives that the weight of the world was against them. What the people in their communities did not expect them to do, it was hard for them to convince themselves that they could do.
After I got so that I could read a little, I used to take a great deal of satisfaction in the lives of men who had risen by their own
efforts from poverty to success. It is a great thing for a able to read books of that kind. It not only inspires him v to do something and make something of his life, but it te that success depends upon his ability to do something perform some kind of service that the world wants.
  The Intellectuals and the Bos speech deliverei
rance of industriousness and sobriety he sought to link a home-spun nationalism to a personal commitment to the ongoing improvement of the race.
If the legacy of slavery had its countless adverse consequences, then it was up to blacks to discover a positive legacy on which to capitalize and turn to their advantage. As a former slave, Washington was well acquainted with the humiliation of bondage, yet he had no patience with those who would replay the sins of the past. With all of its ambiguities, he still viewed America as a land of opportunity for blacks. He declared,  We should not permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.  Yes, it was possible for blacks themselves to retrieve from the years of degradation the means for economic and moral uplift, and to find, through their own effort,  compensations for the losses suffered. 
Washingtons rational, optimistic message was fully appreciated by a great many blacks of the time. In 1899, when William Pettiford became head of the black-owned Alabama Penny Loan & Savings in Birmingham, he was determined that the bank should be a tool of instruction for Birmingham s blacks. His goal was to educate ordinary people in the principles of saving and thrift, to impart the importance of sacrificing today to build for tomorrow.
After a successful advertising campaign to recruit new de-
positors, Pettiford discovered that about 90 percent of his new customers had never before held bank accounts. Regarding it his duty to encourage the wise use of money, he set about educating all who walked through his bank s doors in finance and investment, while providing loans and other services. Pettiford claimed that by encouraging blacks to save and make prudent investments,  it has been possible to stimulate a wholesome desire among our people to become property owners and substantial citizens. 
Penny Savings became well known for granting loans for home building and business development. The bank was praised also for the role it played in keeping the money of blacks  constantly in circulation in our immediate community.  Washington called the oo-eration of Penny Loan & Savings the best illustration of  how closely the moral and spiritual interests of our people are interwoven with their material and economical welfare.  He praised Pettiford because he was  far-seeing enough to attempt to develop this wealth that is latent in the Negro people. 
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Just as honorable were those blacks who used fi to combat racism. Washington celebrated Harlem realtt ton, who attained national attention when he and other bought two apartment buildings in order to prevent tl black tenants by bigoted white landlords. A newspaper Payton s actions as an  unexpected and novel metho race prejudice. 
Inur black characters ire often prosperous doctors, caterers, and modistes. Thore is a staidness, a steadiness about them, hot they are do Oreos. They are securely colored aod securely American.
Payton s sense of responsibility epitomized ington sought to teach. By acquiring wealth as Pa; blacks could slap bigotrv in the face, and be pre confidently into the future when legal restrictio lifted. Throughout the worst days of Jim Cr  BookerT. Washington never doubted that efforts 1 rights would eventually succeed. I le said, It is right that all privileges of law be ours, but it is vast tant that we be prepared for the exercise of these f is why he saw in a healthy business class the key t< held business men and women to a high standai lieved they had a unique responsibility to the rac<
30. Alternative Afrocentrisms
SS depended the building of a sound economic foundation ,on which everything else would rest.
To people like Washington, the businessman was the ulti-lte black role model.  It was evident,  he wrote  that the suc-ss of Negro businessmen was largely dependent upon, and juld tend to instill into the mass of the Negro people, habits of stem and fidelity in the small details of life, and that these bits would bring with them feelings of self-reliance and self-re-ect, which are the basis of all real progress, moral or material. 
In turning obstacles and difficulties to advantage, claimed 'ashington,  the Negro businessman has a peculiar opportunity r service, an opportunity that is offered to no other class among e members of the race.  He wanted all blacks to take pride in e race s business people. In referring to the perseverance rented by black entrepreneurs to overcome what often seemed like surmountable obstacles, he once reflected,  I was never more oud than I am today that I am a Negro. I am proud and grateful be identified with a race which has made such creditable ogress in the face of discouragement and difficulty. 
The business successes of blacks during the eighteenth and neteenth centuries were achieved before severe Jim Crow relictions went into effect in the South. But even after such biased ws were in place, great numbers of blacks continued to found mis, turning sections of some cities into what historian John Sibley utler describes as  entrepreneurial enclaves.  Serious damage was me to black economic development by laws that prevented the ipansion of their businesses beyond the limited borders of segre-ited black neighborhoods. But even greater damage was caused I the later arrival of a black leadership whose teachings were vastly fferent from those of people like Washington, Pettiford, and Pay-n. Suddenly blacks were guided to view their problems as beyond eir abilities to resolve: to look outward, especially to government, >r solutions; and to see themselves as objects of sympathy.
Washington s greatest fears came true. By the time of the legal ictories in the 1960s, the earlier spirit of enterprise had been de-eted, and a new civil rights vision redefined black missions and mis. The call to group solidarity now became a strategy primarily 1 coerce benefits from whites, or  the system.  Even self-help was defined as an initiative first requiring the input of whites.
The moral force of earlier leaders, who had galvanized tens t ousands of individuals to work toward economic indepen-^nce and self-reliance, ceased to carry influence. Booker T. Wash-Y ns ca^ for blacks to make themselves economically indispens-
3 e aded into a distant echo. Is it not time to listen once more?
^beth Wright is editor of Issues & Views, a quarterly publication on subjecting the black community (PO Box 467, New York, NY 10025),
jHssie Fauset
^Kauffinan
For never let the thought arise
at We are here on sufferance bare;
Outcasts, asylumed neath these skies, And aliens without part or share.
This land is ours by right of birth, This land is ours by right of toil; We helped to turn its virgin earth, Our sweat is in its fruitful soil.
 James Weldon Johnson from  Fifty Years 1863 1913"
The notion that African Americans are here on sufferance bare never once crossed the mind of Jessie Fauset, whose novels depicted a robust Negro middle class that was much more than George Babbitt in blackface.
Jessie Redmon Fauset was bom in 1882 to a father who was a respected A. M. E. minister in Camden, New Jersey. The Faucets were on the fringe of stylish Old Philadelphia society; they were frayed gentility, polite and mannerly if occasionally behind on the grocery bill. ( There is no pride so strong, so inflexible, so complacent as the pride of the colored  old Philadelphia ,  wrote Fauset in Comedy: American Style.)
Hers was a close and loving family; she was raised, she later recalled, in a  very conservative, not to say very religious, household,  and she grew up with a sense of the dignity of her race. Of course when the white world impinged young Jessie met the usual slights. At the Philadelphia High School for Girls  I happened to be the only colored girl in my classes ... and I ll never forget the agony I endured on entrance day when the white girls with whom I had played and studied through the graded schools refused to acknowledge my greeting. 
Upon graduation from Cornell, Jessie Fauset taught French for a dozen years at Washington, D.C. s storied Dunbar High ( The Greatest Negro High School in the World ), named after the turn-of-the-century black American poet best remembered for his exclamation,  I know why the caged bird sings! 
Fauset chose W. E. B. DuBois as her mentor. He, in turn, recognized his protege as a distaff member of the  talented tenth  whose efforts DuBois believed would uplift the race. We must, Jessie lectured the usually unlecturable DuBois,  teach our colored men and women race pride, tc//pride, self-sufficiency (the right kind) and the necessity of living our lives, as nearly as possible, absolutely, instead of comparing them always with white standards. 
Fauset wrote stories, reviews, and poetry for The Crisis, the NAACP flagship, before becoming full-time literary editor in October 1919- Though her own experiences of the richness of segregated black middle-class life kept her from swallowing whole the NAACPs integrationist panacea, she worked alongside the prickly DuBois for seven fruitful years. With sweetness and vigor she cultivated the flowering of Negro letters, for she shared in the delight expressed by her friend, the poet Countee Cullen:  Yet I do marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing! 
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5. AFRICAN AMERICANS
Jessie Fauset disdained literary politics and petty jealousies. As a wise older brother counsels in her first novel, There Is Con-fasion (1924),  Our battle is a hard one and for a long time it will seem to be a losing one, but it will never really be that as long as we keep the power of being happy...- Happiness, love, contentment in out midst, make it possible for us to face those foes without.  Happy Warriors, thats the ideal for us.
Fauset practiced what she preached. Her little kindnesses and generous praise encouraged the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. She was, arguably, the discoverer of Langston Hughes, who was forever grateful. ( I found Jessie Fauset charming a gracious, tanbrown lady, a little plump, with a fine smile and gentle eyes... From that moment on I was deceived in writers, because I thought they would all be good-looking and gracious like Miss Fauset. ) Even the rouge et noir bad boy Claude McKay said of Fauset:  All the radicals liked her, although in her social viewpoint she was away over on the other side of the fence. 
Few people, it seemed, wanted to hear about Jessie s side of the fence. There Is Confusion was rejected by one publisher because, she was told,  White readers just don t expect Negroes to be like this.  Her black characters are often prosperous doctors, caterers, and modistes: the sort who have, rather than are, domestic help. There is a staidness, a steadiness about them, but they are no Oreos. They are securely colored and securely American.
Her four novels frequently feature light-skinned Negroes who  pass  for white in