Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington

After reading this short excerpt by Booker T. Washington I was able to learn a lot about why he believes African Americans should stay in the south and not go up to the north where everyone was wanting to go. In this excerpt Book T. Washington gives many different reasons and the first reasons is because of the huge amount of people all going there at once. All the African Americans wanted to go up to the north because they felt like they could find much better jobs than they could find in the south. This caused a huge influx of people in the north and all that would o is make a lot of the “good” jobs that the African Americans wanted would soon be taken anyway. Booker T. Washington likes to talk about how in the south there are many of the same opportunities that there are in the north. Just moving to the north wouldn’t solve anything for them because everything they need is in the south. He also likes to talks about how African Americans believe that working in the fields is in a bad thing. He talks about how using your brain isn’t the best thing for everyone and that working in the fields isn’t a bad thing at all. Working in an office works for Booker T. Washington, but he says that it isn’t for everyone. One last example tat he uses to say why African Americans shouldn’t move to the north is because he says that it shows they feel the north is better than the south when in reality they are mostly the same and that working in the fields is not the only thing you can do in the south. These are some of the reasons why Booker T. Washington believes that moving to the north from the south is not the best idea.