Booker T. Washington biographer explains his fresh approach
[Robert J. Norrell is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee and author of Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Harvard University Press, 2009).]
Any scholar taking on a well-studied topic approaches the existing literature with some trepidation. But anxiety turns into fear when you become convinced that the main line of interpretation is seriously in error — as I discovered while writing a revisionist biography of Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute and the recognized leader of American black people from 1895 until his death in 1915.
He has been viewed as an accommodationist to segregation, an African-America leader who traded black equality and voting rights for his own influence among white bigots. Washington rose to national fame with a speech at the Cotton States Exposition, in Atlanta, in which he told Southerners, black and white, that "in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." Most black people and many influential white people looked to him from then on as the leader of his race. But from the 1960s onward, his reputation suffered: As one historian put it, "the tar brush of Uncle Tomism has stuck."
In my view, leading American historians have committed the anachronistic fallacy of removing Washington from the context of his life. They have done so out of protest against racial injustice — an understandable motive, but one that casts the Tuskegeean as a foil to African-American protest leaders of the 1960s.
While I was conducting research on the civil-rights movement in the South, and on Tuskegee in particular, I developed an intense desire to set the record straight. I was astonished at the disparagement from Louis R. Harlan, whose celebrated two-volume biography (1972 and 1983) suggested that "Washington 'jumped Jim Crow' with the skill of long practice, but he seemed to lose sight of the original purposes of his dance."
The mainstream view of Washington originated largely with W.E.B. Du Bois, the Tuskegeean's longstanding rival for black leadership. Du Bois survived Washington by nearly a half-century and shaped the memory of his avowed enemy. In 1903, in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois condemned Washington for serving Northern industrialists who wanted a big supply of cheap, docile black labor and for excusing discrimination in the South by blaming the black man for his own poverty. Du Bois insisted that Washington's emphasis on material advancement over political involvement, and on industrial schooling over purely academic education, gave black consent to segregation and discrimination. By contrast, Du Bois advocated classical education for black people and a strong, public condemnation of the many forms of white oppression. He became the paradigm of black virtue.
What I found was something different: Washington did protest discrimination by railroads and labor unions. In response to the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which upheld segregation in accommodations, especially railroads, Washington wrote that the U.S. Supreme Court might just as well have "put all yellow people in one car and all white people, whose skin is sun burnt, in another car ... [or] all men with bald heads must ride in one car and all with red hair still in another." He publicly commanded Southern black people to push local school boards for public financial support for black schools: "This kind of appeal should be repeated again and again until we do receive our just share." He also spoke out repeatedly against lynching, unfair voting qualifications, and segregated-housing legislation....
Read entire article at Robert J. Norrell in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Any scholar taking on a well-studied topic approaches the existing literature with some trepidation. But anxiety turns into fear when you become convinced that the main line of interpretation is seriously in error — as I discovered while writing a revisionist biography of Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute and the recognized leader of American black people from 1895 until his death in 1915.
He has been viewed as an accommodationist to segregation, an African-America leader who traded black equality and voting rights for his own influence among white bigots. Washington rose to national fame with a speech at the Cotton States Exposition, in Atlanta, in which he told Southerners, black and white, that "in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." Most black people and many influential white people looked to him from then on as the leader of his race. But from the 1960s onward, his reputation suffered: As one historian put it, "the tar brush of Uncle Tomism has stuck."
In my view, leading American historians have committed the anachronistic fallacy of removing Washington from the context of his life. They have done so out of protest against racial injustice — an understandable motive, but one that casts the Tuskegeean as a foil to African-American protest leaders of the 1960s.
While I was conducting research on the civil-rights movement in the South, and on Tuskegee in particular, I developed an intense desire to set the record straight. I was astonished at the disparagement from Louis R. Harlan, whose celebrated two-volume biography (1972 and 1983) suggested that "Washington 'jumped Jim Crow' with the skill of long practice, but he seemed to lose sight of the original purposes of his dance."
The mainstream view of Washington originated largely with W.E.B. Du Bois, the Tuskegeean's longstanding rival for black leadership. Du Bois survived Washington by nearly a half-century and shaped the memory of his avowed enemy. In 1903, in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois condemned Washington for serving Northern industrialists who wanted a big supply of cheap, docile black labor and for excusing discrimination in the South by blaming the black man for his own poverty. Du Bois insisted that Washington's emphasis on material advancement over political involvement, and on industrial schooling over purely academic education, gave black consent to segregation and discrimination. By contrast, Du Bois advocated classical education for black people and a strong, public condemnation of the many forms of white oppression. He became the paradigm of black virtue.
What I found was something different: Washington did protest discrimination by railroads and labor unions. In response to the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which upheld segregation in accommodations, especially railroads, Washington wrote that the U.S. Supreme Court might just as well have "put all yellow people in one car and all white people, whose skin is sun burnt, in another car ... [or] all men with bald heads must ride in one car and all with red hair still in another." He publicly commanded Southern black people to push local school boards for public financial support for black schools: "This kind of appeal should be repeated again and again until we do receive our just share." He also spoke out repeatedly against lynching, unfair voting qualifications, and segregated-housing legislation....