Does African-American History need a new Booker T. Washington?

If you have any interest in African American history, the history of American race relations, or the civil rights movement, I recommend that you read Robert J. Norrell's"Reshaping the Image of Booker T. Washington," CHE, 27 February.* It is an apologia for his new biography, Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington, which seeks to frame the story of BTW's leadership in positive terms. In doing so, Norrell must necessarily challenge the image of Washington that we've received from W. E. B. Du Bois, C. Vann Woodward, and Louis R. Harlan. And, in doing so, he can't resist the temptation to depict the Wizard of Tuskegee as the early twentieth century's Barack Obama.

As I've said earlier, count me among the skeptics. Norrell will certainly find sympathetic readers among conservative and libertarian historians, but they didn't need Norrell to tell them that in Washington there was much to admire. More critical to the reception of his book, I suspect, are the historians of"the long civil rights movement," Jacquelyn Hall, Thomas Sugrue, Glenda Gilmore, Mary Dudziak, and many more. Will they embrace a revised and positive portrait of BTW as a major chapter in the long struggle? Despite the timeliness of his book, Norrell doesn't appear on their April conference program. Maybe BTW as Barack Obama just didn't have the right ring to the program's organizers.

But, then, I've my own reservations about"the long civil rights movement" frufraw anyway. At its baldest, tlcrm claims that the movement didn't spring virgin from the minds of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks in 1955. Well, of course. No well-informed historian ever claimed that it did and self-evident truths hardly make cutting-edge historiography. The struggle had a history extending back into the early twentieth century and a national and international scope well beyond the South. Some of us, including Du Bois, Woodward, Harlan, John Hope Franklin, August Meier, and others, wrote about the long civil rights struggle before tlcrm sprang virgin from the minds of younger historians. A major part of the problem is that no one – including the lcrm historians -- has done a history of the organization central to the struggle, the NAACP. And an important question in the larger and longer history is the place of Booker T. Washington in it. Robert Norrell has forcefully raised it.
*Thanks to David Glenn at the Chronicle for the link that is free to non-subscribers for the next five days.