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Booker T. Washington
A Lesson in Character building In Coloring Book Format
By Robin Washington Banks
Trafford Publishing
Copyright © 2012 Robin Banks
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4669-2247-1
Chapter One
Booker, The Boy Character Traits
Respect for the Creator
To be one with God is to be like God. Our real religious striving should be to become one with God, sharing with Him in our poor humble way His qualities and attributes.
Cheerfulness
Go out and be a centre, a lift giving power as it were, to a whole community, when an opportunity comes, when you may give life where there is no life, hope where there is no hope, power where there is no power. Begin in a humble simple way, and work to build up institutions that will put people on their feet. It is that kind of life that tells.
Compassion
Get hold of the spirit of helping somebody else, seek every opportunity to make somebody happier and more comfortable.
Cooperation
A race, like an individual lifts itself up by lifting others up.
Kindness
It requires little wisdom or statesmanship to repress, to crush out, to retard the hopes and aspirations of a people, but, the highest and most profound statesmanship is shown in guiding and stimulating a people so that every fiber in body, mind and soul shall be made to contribute in the hiqhest degree to the usefulness of the state.
Booker, The Student
Character Traits
Cleanliness
The child who goes to school in a room that is clean and attractive will not long be contented to live in a home that is dirty and disorderly.
Courage
It often requires more courage to suffer in silence than to rebel, more courage not to strike back than to retaliate, more courage to be silent than to speak
Loyalty
Cast down your buckets among these people who have, without strikes, and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forest, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South.
Scholarship
Happily the world has at last reached the point where it no longer feels that in order for a person to be a great scholar, he has got to read a number of books, that he has got to master a certain number of foreign languages, but the world has come to the conclusion that the person who has learned to use his mind whether it has come about through the use of a tool or through the use of any other implement-that the person who has mastered something, who understands what he is doing, who is master of himself in the classroom, out in the world, master of himself everywhere, that person is a scholar.
Booker, The Builder
Character Traits
Creativity
A race like an individual is not measured by its ability to condemn, but to create.
Diligence
The only way we can make ourselves useful to humanity and serviceable to God is: 1) by resolving to do something; 2) to do that something, stick to it, improve it, make a specialty of it and in that way we shall make ourselves useful and reliable.
Generosity
The only thing worth living for is the lifting up of our fellow men.
Patience
We are to be tested in our patience, in our forbearance in our power to endure wrong, to withstand temptation, to economize to acquire and use skill in our ability to succeed in commerce, to disregard the superficial for the real, the appearance for the substance. To be great and yet the servant of all
Tolerance
We should not let our grievances overshadow our opportunities.
Success
There are a few things that we must recognize in the beginning if we are to succeed and if we do not recognize that we must have certain qualities and elements in us, we cannot succeed. We cannot succeed unless we recognize that we must have a certain amount of groundwork and foundation or we shall find all our efforts largely in vain.
Booker, The Educator
Character Traits
Citizenship
Every person who has grown to any degree of usefulness, every person who has grown to distinction, almost without exception has been a person who has risen by overcoming obstacles, by removing difficulties, by resolving that when he met discouragement he would not give up.
Fairness
In all things purely social we can be as separate as the fingers yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.
Honesty
Have you grown to the point where you can unflinchingly stand up for the right for that which is honorable, honest, truthful, whether it makes you popular or unpopular? Have you grown to the point where absolutely and unreservedly you make truth and honor your standard of thinking and speaking? If you have reached this point in your moral development, you have reached the highest point for which you have come here {Tuskegee}.
Patriotism
The greatness of a nation in the future will be measured not by the vessels that it floats, but by the number of schools and churches and useful industries that it keeps in existence. It will be measured not by the number of men killed, but by the number of men saved and lifted up.
Education
The highest education is that which fits an individual to live successfully in the community where his life is thrown. The object of all education, no matter by what name it is called, should be to fit the individual to articulate what he has learned in the school room into the active everyday life of the community in which he lives.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Booker T. Washington by Robin Washington Banks Copyright © 2012 by Robin Banks. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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