We last encountered Robert Park in his childhood home of Redwing, North Dakota, where his father had a grocery business. How he got from there to excursioning around with Booker T. Washington, I don’t know. I do know that, at least according to my mother, they had been around the world twice. But who was paying for it, under whose auspices, was it a lecture tour, or if he just went from speaking engagement to speaking engagement, I don’t know. They must have had people who booked him. Booker T Washington was the star of the lecture tour whatever its characteristics were. Park was Booker T Washington’s secretary, yes. No, people didn’t think it was odd. [a black man with a white secretary in 1911] Booker T Washington was news, because he wasn’t only aspiring, but a black intellectual. They wrote a book [The Man Farthest Down] about the trip, yes. I don’t know much about the history, but I would guess that it was the abolitionist movement in its paler version. There was an uplift-blacks movement; it was some part of that. What you would really want to know was who was paying the bills and what the agenda was.
How did they get to know each other? It didn’t really require much, because my grandfather was infinitely curious. He was interested in everything. I remember going on a trip with him somewhere, and he took me to some little piney-woods church. He wanted to look at what was left of Black communities after the civil war had taken the plantation structure away. He was just interested in people who were stirring. Booker T Washington was sort of an exemplar of the “We’re Rising” Negro. It was the sort of thing that when you got Black Power they decided that was altogether too feeble, but he wasn’t.
My grandmother was along on this trip, too, I think, or at least on quite a bit of it. She wrote us the most marvelous letters; where they are now, I don’t know. They were letters from Johnny Doodlebug, who was a doodlebug who lived on the brim of her hat, and traveled along, so you got the travels as witnessed by Johnny doodlebug. I should think that my grandmother was also doing portraits at the same time. It was like Tepoztlán; what you would think was a serious piece of research turns out to have been a family picnic.
They were not professionals, they were not academics. Booker T Washington was involved in a black college [Tuskegee]; he was an educated black with aspirations; my grandfather loved people with aspirations. Was he taking it seriously? He probably was in a way; he thought of his fellow Negroes, as they were in those days, as aspiring, and he liked to speak up for their aspirations. More than that I don’t know.
They claimed that their guiding theme on this trip was to decide who was the man farthest down. So they looked at some people who were living in a cave, a not very nice cave, and various other situations of deprivation. They eventually decided that the man farthest down was somebody they met in London, and it wasn’t that his conditions of living were particularly onerous (actually they were better than those in these damned caves), but this guy had in his mind all the people on top and ahead of him; he had in his mind all the people who were better off than he was. That was the point of it. I think they were just traveling around having fun, but they were trying to dictate a central theme, and this was the theme. It was a theme that would encompass a lot of different settings and people.
I think they had a good time… that’s the main thing.
Lisa's Life 