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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
In 1881, a 25-year-old former slave from Virginia used a $2,000 gift to open a one-room teacher-training school in one of the poorest rural counties in the southern state of Alabama. This man and his school, that began in a church basement, would become American legends.
The man was Booker T. Washington, who at the turn of the 20th Century succeeded another former slave, the fiery1 orator2 Frederick Douglass, as the recognized voice of black America. The school, which at first had no money for land or buildings, grew into the world-renowned3 Tuskegee Institute, a college for those whom no one else wanted to educate: African Americans in the backwoods of what was then the rigidly4 segregated5 South.
Proud history
Benjamin Payton is just the fifth president of what is now Tuskegee University. He says Washington was a great compromiser, which brought him scorn from confrontational6 black leaders but attracted moral and financial support from powerful whites.
"He did it at a time when racial conflict was at its height, when terrorism was at its height, when blacks were routinely taken as objects of play and murder," Payton says. "Washington took the position that no matter what other people think of you, the question is what you think of yourself and what you're going to do with the talents that have been embodied7 in you."
Tuskegee Institute President Booker T. Washington works at his desk in a photo taken around 1905.
In his most famous speech, at a cotton exposition in 1895 in Atlanta, Washington implored8 the agrarian9 South, which was beginning to industrialize, to put America's 4 million former slaves to work. "Let down your buckets where you are," he said. "You'll find fresh water...a major source of strength for the country."
Washington certainly put his Tuskegee students to work. They dug the clay, built the kilns10, fired the bricks, and themselves constructed campus buildings - including Washington's own stately home - that stand to this day.
And Washington hired away another onetime slave, a pioneer botanist11 and inventor working in the Midwest state of Iowa, who would join him in the pantheon of African-American giants. His name was George Washington Carver.
Peanut miracles
"When he first came into the South, he noticed how the farmers' crops were not producing a lot and that all the nutrients12 were sucked out of the soil," notes Shirley Baxter, a U.S. National Park Service ranger13 at the George Washington Carver National Historic site on the Tuskegee campus.
"He knew that if they planted legumes, if they rotated their crops, that that was really going to help them as a people. And when they started growing peanuts, they asked him 'What do we do with them?' And that's when he went into the lab."
George Washington Carver oversees14 the work of some of his botany students.
There, Carver performed miracles with the humble15 peanut in particular. He showed poor, black sharecroppers how to make a decent living turning peanuts into more than 300 products, including peanut butter, shampoo, wood stains and glue.
In the 1940s, black polio sufferers flocked to Tuskegee from across the South to get Carver's free, personal massages16 using peanut oil, which he and they believed was a miracle curative.
"Come to find out, it wasn't the peanut oil," Ranger Baxter reports. "It was the massages."
Carver, who had told Tuskegee's President Washington that he'd come for a couple of years in order to help fellow blacks, would stay at the institute for 47 years, right up to his death in 1943.
Carver, who became so immersed in his work that he routinely forgot to cash his modest paychecks, never married. "The reason, he always said, was that he would get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and go out on his daily hikes," Baxter says.
"And he would come back with mud on his shoes, and he said, 'No woman would ever put up with that.'...He was probably right."
Together, George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington taught not just Tuskegee students, but also poor Alabama farmers who had no time, money or education to go to college. The two men took their books and plants and test tubes out into the country in a farm wagon17, or what they called their "movable school."
Tuskegee airmen
Tuskegee Institute would one day gain international fame for a training program on the campus airfield18 during World War II in the 1940s. Its graduates - black fighter pilots and gunners - served with distinction, escorting U.S. bombers19 over Europe and Africa.
The Tuskegee airmen, black fighter pilots and gunners, served with distinction, escorting US bombers over Europe and Africa.
Carla Graves, a park guide at the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site in the hangar at the airfield where they trained, says the U.S. president's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, visited and met the head flight trainer, Charles "Chief" Anderson.
"Can Negroes really fly airplanes?" she asked Anderson.
"Certainly we can," he replied, and Mrs. Roosevelt shocked her security detail by accepting a ride with him in his biplane.
"Whatever she set out to do, she did it," Graves says."So she took that ride with Chief. And when they got back, she said, 'You can fly, all right.' So this provided a great boost to African Americans in aviation."
Of the 450 Tuskegee Airmen who fought abroad, 66 died in combat, and 33 crashed and were captured. Half a century later, in 2007, U.S. President George Bush presented survivors20 - and other Tuskegee Airmen posthumously21 - with a Congressional Gold Medal for their service.
Tuskegee Airmen William Campbell and Thurston Gaines are pictured in Italy in 1945.
By that time, Tuskegee University had burst beyond its historic role as a rural school for teachers, veterinarians, agronomists22, and business executives. Within its sprawling23 campus today, one finds the nation's only aerospace-science program at a historically black college, as well as a renowned center for bioethics in research and health.
The latter was established following the discovery of a 40-year-long experiment by the U.S. Public Health Service in which 399 mostly illiterate24 black men in the county that includes Tuskegee were deliberately25 infected with the venereal disease syphilis.
Modern times
University president Payton says the shock that many people display when they come to the modern Tuskegee campus amuses him.
"I'm not sure what they expected to find," he says. "Chicken coops and pigpens tended by folk with baggy26 trousers and suspenders?
This statue, titled, “Lifting the Veil,” is a centerpiece of the Tuskegee campus. It depicts27 Booker T. Washington lifting the veil of ignorance from a former slave.
"Clearly they do not come here with the expectation that they will find programs reaching 50 or more sciences and the liberal arts and engineering, biomedicine, veterinary medicine, nursing - the cutting-edge disciplines that relate to research on human beings and the new challenges those very successes present."
Asked to assess the state of black America as he prepares to retire after 29 years on the job, Payton says he rejoices that ever-increasing numbers of African Americans go to, and thrive in, college. But he says this achievement is more than offset28 by a high-school drop-out rate among African Americans of more than 50 percent.
"We need to produce young men and women who care about themselves - the kind of persons who have some sense of what it means to be an individual with dignity, who respect others, who know that just as you want to be respected, we treat other people as we want to be treated," Payton says. "We made so much progress through the advancement29 of science and technology. But ethically30 and morally, we are in a bad way."
Outside Payton's window stands a statue of his famous predecessor31, Booker T. Washington, pulling a shroud32 from the face of a former slave kneeling next to him. "He lifted the veil of ignorance from his people," an inscription33 reads, "and pointed34 the way to progress through education and industry."
收听单词发音 |
1
fiery
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| adj.燃烧着的，火红的；暴躁的；激烈的 | |
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orator
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| n.演说者，演讲者，雄辩家 | |
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renowned
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| adj.著名的，有名望的，声誉鹊起的 | |
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rigidly
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| adv.刻板地，僵化地 | |
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segregated
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| 分开的； 被隔离的 | |
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confrontational
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| adj.挑衅的；对抗的 | |
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embodied
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| v.表现( embody的过去式和过去分词 )；象征；包括；包含 | |
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implored
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| 恳求或乞求（某人）( implore的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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agrarian
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| adj.土地的，农村的，农业的 | |
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kilns
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| n.窑( kiln的名词复数 )；烧窑工人 | |
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botanist
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| n.植物学家 | |
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nutrients
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| n.（食品或化学品）营养物，营养品( nutrient的名词复数 ) | |
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ranger
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| n.国家公园管理员，护林员；骑兵巡逻队员 | |
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oversees
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| v.监督，监视( oversee的第三人称单数 ) | |
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humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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massages
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| 按摩，推拿( massage的名词复数 ) | |
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wagon
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| n.四轮马车，手推车，面包车；无盖运货列车 | |
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airfield
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| n.飞机场 | |
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bombers
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| n.轰炸机( bomber的名词复数 )；投弹手；安非他明胶囊；大麻叶香烟 | |
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survivors
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| 幸存者，残存者，生还者( survivor的名词复数 ) | |
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posthumously
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| adv.于死后，于身后；于著作者死后出版地 | |
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agronomists
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| n.农（艺）学家( agronomist的名词复数 ) | |
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sprawling
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| adj.蔓生的，不规则地伸展的v.伸开四肢坐[躺]( sprawl的现在分词 )；蔓延；杂乱无序地拓展；四肢伸展坐着（或躺着） | |
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illiterate
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| adj.文盲的；无知的；n.文盲 | |
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deliberately
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| adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地 | |
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baggy
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| adj.膨胀如袋的，宽松下垂的 | |
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depicts
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| 描绘，描画( depict的第三人称单数 )； 描述 | |
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offset
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| n.分支，补偿；v.抵消，补偿 | |
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advancement
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| n.前进，促进，提升 | |
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ethically
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| adv.在伦理上，道德上 | |
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predecessor
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| n.前辈，前任 | |
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shroud
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| n.裹尸布，寿衣；罩，幕；vt.覆盖，隐藏 | |
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inscription
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| n.（尤指石块上的）刻印文字，铭文，碑文 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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