Near the end of Up from Slavery, Washington receives a letter from Harvard University requesting his presence at that year’s commencement so that the school can grant him an honorary degree. Washington’s reflections on this moment capture the situational irony of a formerly enslaved Black man like himself (who has faced hardship after hardship) receiving a degree from Harvard:
As I sat upon my veranda, with this letter in my hand, tears came into my eyes. My whole former life—my life as a slave on the plantation, my work in the coal-mine, the times when I was without food and clothing, when I made my bed under a sidewalk, my struggles for an education, the trying days I had had at Tuskegee, days when I did not know where to turn for a dollar to continue the work there, the ostracism and sometimes oppression of my race,—all this passed before me and nearly overcame me. I had never sought or cared for what the world calls fame.
In this passage, Washington names all of the factors that could have kept him from getting to this moment: being a former slave, experiencing temporary homelessness, having little access to education, struggling to get the Tuskegee Institute off the ground, facing financial instability, and generally dealing with on-going racial oppression in the United States.
Not only is it ironic that he was able to achieve Harvard-level success despite all that, but—as he notes in the short final sentence—he never even wanted such success. He was not striving for the type of fame that would lead him to receive honorary degrees. He was simply working hard to benefit other Black Americans. Implied in this entire passage is that hard work alone guarantees success, one of the key tenets of his philosophy of racial uplift.
