Ex-Slave Booker T. Washington and His Bridge Forward (Told By His Great-Granddaughter)

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To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the iHeart Radio 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 that 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 instituted the time today as 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 master class 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 protected building. It 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 proudly 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. And because she's passed away, I can only speculate about the reason she didn't talk and 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 60s in North Oakland, we were just a stone, literally a stone's throw away from where Huey Newton 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 as 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 we spent, my brother and I, James, we spent every weekend with my father. They were divorced since it's as young as I can remember about five years old, but we spent, 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 explained why he was so excited. And you're listening to Sarah Washington O'Neill rush tell the story of her great-grandfather, but also of her own family.

I will never allow a man to drag me so low that I hate him. When we come back, more of the story of Booker T. Washington is told by his great-granddaughter here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country.

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Let's pick up where she last left off. So whenever he introduced me and my brother, we would just get embarrassed. And that was the only thing I didn't adore about my father. Other than that, I just really adored being with my father. My mom was the one who made us do our homework, eat our vegetables, but at my dad's house, it was just free game.

We could do whatever we wanted to do. And I'll talk a little bit about why that was in a second. But when I was nine years old, I remember him introducing us to an elderly stranger who he just happened to be passing by on the sidewalk. And in his usual loud voice, he said, these are Booker T. Washington's great grandchildren. And while I cringed, the man looked down at me and he said in a really kind voice, he said, don't be embarrassed. It's an honor to know you and to know that his descendants still exist. But still, I didn't understand why.

So for a long time in my life, I would just write my family lineage off as just an accident of birth. I didn't know then, but I learned much later in my life that my dad was so loud and boisterous because on the weekends, he was usually intoxicated. As I reflect back on my childhood, my father only seemed happy when he was drinking. My father only seemed happy when he was drinking. And when he wasn't drinking, which was during the week because he had to go to work, he was usually distant or angry. And by the time I was 11, he decided to suddenly take off, leave town for a better life that didn't include me or my brother. And after that, not only did I rarely see or hear from him anymore, but I rarely heard about our relationship to Booker T. Washington. I believe my dad's problems started long before I was born.

In fact, I know they did. And it would probably was around the time he graduated from Texas Southern University Law School because he was never able to pass the state bar exam. My mother would often joke and say that he would never pass that bar because he could never pass a bar.

But he contended that it was the discrimination that he faced when he graduated in 1938. But as a little girl, none of that mattered to me. All I knew is that my father was gone. And unfortunately, the next time I would see him, I was an adult.

Meanwhile, in my teen years with my mother working two jobs and my father gone, I spent a lot of time unsupervised and again looking for myself in all the wrong places. And the year I turned 16, while my friends were planning sweet 16 parties, I was preparing for the birth of my son. Ironically, my birthday falls on February 16th.

My son was born on September 16th. And so while that number 16 should have represented life for me, it didn't. Instead, it represented huge amounts of shame, guilt, embarrassment. And that came from the harsh stares, the judgment and the criticism that came from friends, family, and even strangers who walked by and saw that I was much too young to be pushing a baby around in a stroller.

And so for a long time in my life, every time I heard the number 16, thoughts of guilt, shame and embarrassment will conjure up in my head. By the time I was 17, I was a single mom on welfare with a one year old child. I lived on my own raising him alone in a dangerous high crime drug infested housing project on 85th Avenue and way deep in East Oakland. And that was way on the other side of my high school.

I went to high school in North Oakland. But the one thing that I remember and the only thing I remember my parents ever agreeing about was the importance of education. So I would get up early every morning, I would get me and my son dressed, catch two buses to school, drop him off at daycare, which was across the street from the school, and I'd rush to class.

And against overwhelming odds, in a city that was deemed a dropout factory by a Harvard study, citing that 48% of the freshmen in the Oakland Public School District end up dropping out. But I'm proud to say I managed to graduate six months ahead of my class, having the grades and more than enough credits to do so. And while I still don't completely understand how I was able to accomplish all that without anyone encouraging me or urging me on, without any adult role model, positive role model around, I do know that I was determined to have a better life. And I now know that it probably didn't hurt that God placed me in a lineage where I had Booker T. Washington's blood running through my veins.

And for me, that gives life to Romans 828, that all things work together for good to those who love and love God and are called according to his purpose. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Booker T. Washington traveled nearly 500 miles, mostly by foot, to gain his formal education from Hampton, Hampton Institute, today Hampton University. And he was 16 when he went there, and he graduated three years later with honors. And just seven years earlier than that, he was a slave, and one of his slave duties was carrying the master's children's books as he walked behind them to school. And after he went inside, he would hang around on the outside of the schoolhouse to listen to what the teacher was teaching, but he'd run away before getting caught because at the time, a slave learning to read or write was a crime, and it was a crime that could be punished by death.

But he knew then what's still true today, that knowledge was power. And he said it felt like getting into a schoolhouse would be like arriving in paradise. So for me, although today the schools could use lots of improvement, I think the situation is a lot better now than it was when he was able to go to school.

And if he was able to use his education to build a school that still stands today and it produces graduates that come back into our communities as leaders for the next generation, I think that we can continue to make strides to make them better, but we can make more strides in our own lives as we push to make our schools better. For a long time in my life, I missed it. I was running on fumes.

I was just trying to survive. And it took nearly 20 years from the time that I graduated from high school to realize that there was more to this life. It happened when I went to the South for the first time in my life and I arrived on the campus of Tuskegee University. And that was the school that my grandfather opened on July 4th, 1881, 16 years after the end of slavery. And we went there for our very first Booker T. Washington family reunion. When we first stepped foot on campus, there were students, faculty, community leaders, reporters, there were writers and journalists, and they were all there to welcome us. Some were awestruck that we were still alive, like the older gentleman said, and I was awestruck that they cared so much. They were inspired simply by our presence and they asked us for autographs and interviews. They asked to take pictures with us. Some just wanted to rub shoulders and elbows and touch us.

And some just wanted a chance to talk and get to know us. My presence was important to them. And up to that point, I believe my life was pretty simple and ordinary or less than ordinary. And it wasn't, it was without much purpose because I grew up not knowing what all of these people who surrounded me knew about my great-grandfather and about my history. 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 16, like so many girls without fathers, she soon found herself a mother. It turns out Booker T. Washington, her great-great-grandfather,