Chicago Symposium on Booker T. Washington

by Liberty and Power

The Heartland Institute will be co-sponsoring a symposium in Chicago on June 4-6 to mark the 150th anniversary of Booker T. Washington’s birth:

Leading scholars and leaders from business, politics, and civic organizations will come to Chicago to speak before audiences of hundreds of people. National media attention and publications will carry the message to millions of people.
This event has four purposes:
• To attract national, regional, and local media attention to the pro-education, pro-entrepreneurship, and pro-self-reliance messages of Booker T. Washington.
• To encourage and promote new research and public speaking on the importance of closing the black-white achievement gap in K-12 education, black entrepreneurship, and elevating the values of personal integrity and self-reliance while lowering the tendencies toward blaming and depending on others.
• To influence directly the lives of young people in high schools and colleges who may be inspired by Booker T. Washington’s example to finish their schooling, start their own businesses, and live rewarding and ethical lives.
• To lay the groundwork for an ongoing program that effectively promotes the achievement of these goals through media campaigns, educational outreach, events, and other means.

For more details, see here.

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David T. Beito - 4/11/2006

I meant to say that most blacks "didn't feel a need to pick sides."

Let me also note that while Washington had a strongly individualist side he was also a strong proponent of collective efforts, such as fraternal societies.

David T. Beito - 4/11/2006

Aster:

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

The trouble is that any hero we could chose has flaws. I share some of your concerns about Washington. He was something of dictator and could be very ruthless against opponents. I also wish that he had done more to emphasize the importance of rights in the here and now.

On the other hand,I would be even more leery of embracing DuBois. Whatever his faults, Washington was a builder who was responsible not only for Tuskegee but groups like the National Negro Business League. His behind-the-scenes efforts were probably more far-reaching than the above ground efforts of anyone else prior to the formation of the NAACP.

DuBois's accomplishments, by contrast, were much more limited and were often cancelled out by some unwise choices. He was a first-rate scholar and effective agitator through The Crisis but his subsequent career leaves something to be desired. While he did praise economic self-help (at least after 1910 or so) he accomplished little of substance in that realm.

During the 1930s, he abandoned his original position and adopted a quasi-Washingtonian view that blacks should abandon campaigns for integration and rights and instead launched a (largely ineffective) campaign to form a race-based "parallel economy."

During the 1940s and 1950s, tired of this approach, he increasingly drifted toward Stalinism in an age when Stalin's crimes were becoming obvious to everyone.

As to the original debate, I think it is a mistake to view this debate from perspective of either man. From what I can tell, most "rights-oriented" blacks in the early twentieth century felt a need to pick sides.

Madame C.J. Walker and Maggie Walker are very good examples of a pro-NAACP Washington admirerers though there were others such as the founder of North Carolina Mutual Life.

If I had to chose an icon from this period, it wouldn't be either Washington or DuBois. It would be the much ignored Moorfield Story, the first president of the NAACP. Story promoted a muscular combination of civil rights, self-help, and anti-imperialism. He was also a smart lawyer who won some key civil rights cases during the dark ages, such as Warley v. Buchanan.

Aster Francesca - 4/10/2006

David-

I'm aware of Washington's behind-the-scenes actions on behalf of Black human rights (from links in this forum, actually- my thanks). These were certainly admirable and honourable things, and I'm in no sense criticising Washington as an individual in this respect. What I *am* nervous about is the symbolism of libertarians adopting Washington as an icon of African-American/American history.

You mention DuBois, who of course was much on my mind while writing this (he's an author who has inspired me greatly). I would as such repeat his admonition to Washington: fighting for economic position *without* an equal and *equally strident* fight for civil and political rights is doomed. I'm not at all criticising Washington's practice of diplomacy as cunning as necessity in occupied territory. And I'm not saying Washington didn't fight for these rights behind the scenes, but that's a lot different from standing up and demanding them, and criticising the existing order in all its injustice. My worry is that to choose Washington as a symbol is precisely to say Blacks and other oppressed peoples should follow the rules and work under power.

To take Washington's stance today is to implicitly suggest that fighting for human rights isn't nearly as important today as trying to succeed under the existing system's rules. I don't think that works. I don't think that's liberal in spirit. But most immediately I don't think it's very *libertarian*.

I thought fighting for human rights was libertarianism's *job*. I also think fighting the rules of the existing corporate statist order is more recognisably libertarian than encouraging people to try to climb within it (which tends to also mean internalising its value and rules). Embracing Washington seems to say middle-class, Protestant work-ethic values are primary, while human rights are secondary. Forgive me, but how shall we then answer the charge of the left that libertarians are nothing but Republicans in sheep's clothing?

And I am, to say the least, not comfortable with a libertarianism which downplays the radical concept of individual rights for the moderate practise of strive-and-succeed within the values of the existing order (which, as Kevin Carson has shown us, is far from libertarian even in principle). Where does that leave libertarians, including minorities, who demand their individual rights *against* middle-class morality?

David T. Beito - 4/10/2006

First of all, your first statement is not quite right. Washington was extremely active behind the scenes fighting Jim Crow and disfranchisement. He was in regular communication with attorneys he funded to, for example, overturn the disfranchisement provisions of the Alabama 1901 Constitution. Interestingly, many of these letters are written in code but they are kept on file in his papers at Tuskegee University. In pursuing this strategy, he anticipated the later efforts of the NAACP legal fund under Thurgood Marshall. He believed in fighting precisely the two front war you recommend.

Interestingly, Washington was despised by the notorious white racist, Thomas Dixon, who warned in a fascinating article for the Saturday Evening Post, that whites should not trust him because he was teaching blacks to be "masters of men" not serve the white man.

It is true that Washington deemphasized the stress on voting and rights and Jim Crow in the short term arguing that if blacks built a solid economic foundation they would be in a better position to promote civil rights.

In some respects, he was prophetic. The black professional middle, professional, and business classes (created through Washingtonian hard work, thrift, and business ownership) provided the essential leaders of the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s. The Washingtonian black millionaire A.G. Gaston of Birmingham, for example, bailed King out of jail during the Birmingham protests and gave over his hotel to be a meeting center for the SCLC.

Could Washington have been more assertive in defending rights in public? Perhaps. Please note, however, that, unlike DuBois, he was trying to build a school in the heart of Jim Crow.

Again, I do not think that there was a necessary conflict between the Washington/DuBois strategy and most black leaders during the early twentieth century did not see one. The main difference between the two was one of emphasis. To this, of course, you can add the fact that they hated each other on personal level.

Aster Francesca - 4/9/2006

Booker T. Washington famously argued that Afro-Ameericans should focus on economic self-promotion at the *expense* of the pursuit of civic and political rights? Wouldn't a more libertarian message be to promote economic individualism *and* to forthrightly demand political justice? In a society where we have huge minority prison populations worked as slave labour, where police brutality against minorites is rampant, and where welfare state systems function as a form of serfdom, I would hope libertarianism *could* be such a voice of aggressive justice.

It's not a requirement of individualism to put all the burden of social or political injustice on the individual- the reason socio-political injustice is *bad* is precisely because it destroys our opportunity to make our own lives (even Ayn Rand was emphatic that the creators eventually *will* give up under the weight of enough collectivism, of which racism is a particularly vicious kind). There's nothing anti-individualistic about calling out social and political structures which tear down human flourishing before it happens. There's nothing collectivist about demanding antistatist or astatist social change in *order* that people can realise their dreams.

Certainly, it's admirable to overcome persecution and bigotry as an individual, by being twice as good or fighting twice as hard as anyone else. But by *definition* few people can manage that- if you fight poverty, exclusion, or just society not caring long enough you *will* start taking hits, and with enough hits most people *will* go under, unless you're tough as nails. And I think it does horrible things to the human spirit to become tough as nails.

I think an empowering message that deals with actual social reality has to empower the individual to *fight* oppression, not just fight *through* it. 'Bootstraps' messages often function to advance an agile, culturally adapatable, and unusually driven segment of a disadvantaged population to dodge the oppression and suceed on the dominant society's terms. This masks the situation for a majority left behind while simultaneously giving complacent (or worse) conservatives an excuse to declare the problem over with.

And shouldn't any form of liberalism- including libertarianism- stress not only individualism but also strident antiracism and cosmopolitanism? Another part of Washington's message was not to challenge segregation. Given the degree of de facto segregation and subliminal hostility that still exists in American society, is this really the message libertarians want to be associated with?

I don't actually disagree with any of the purposes of the Heartland Institute's symposium (tho' I'd want watch *very* closely what might sneak in under the rug of 'ethical lives'). I myself believe *very* strongly in knowing your own strength and making your own way, no matter what they throw at you- because that is the only way you keep your freedom. But I do think, in the context of current American society and political debate, that there is something dangerously one sided about preaching the self-help message without a word acknowleging the existence of racism or any real, hurtful, social injustice. It plays into the hands of conservatives who like to blame the victim. And it plays into the hands of welfare statists who have a vested interest in equating free-marketeering with social complacency.