Character Building was published by Doubleday, Page & Company in 1902, the year after Up from Slavery. The book collects Washington’s Sunday evening talks to Tuskegee students — informal addresses delivered in the chapel on topics ranging from personal hygiene to racial solidarity to the proper way to write a letter. They are, in essence, sermons on the gospel of self-improvement, delivered by a man who believed that the habits of daily life — keeping one’s room clean, arriving on time, telling the truth about small things — were not trivial but foundational.
Washington’s moral philosophy is relentlessly practical. He does not quote scripture or invoke abstract principles; he tells anecdotes about students who succeeded because they were reliable and students who failed because they were not. The register is paternal — sometimes uncomfortably so — but the underlying argument is serious: in a society that judges Black people by their worst examples, every individual’s behavior is a political act, and the discipline to maintain high standards under hostile conditions is itself a form of resistance.
The book is easy to dismiss as Victorian moralizing, and much of it is. But it also contains Washington’s clearest statements about the relationship between personal conduct and collective progress, and his insistence that freedom without discipline is meaningless.
Collecting Character Building
First edition (Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, 1902): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, near fine: $100–$300
- Very good: $40–$120
- Good: $15–$40