GREGORY CLAEYS WASHINGTON, BOOKER T. (1856–1915)

GREGORY CLAEYS WASHINGTON, BOOKER T. (1856–1915)

Booker T.Washington came to be the foremost political leader of the African American people in the late nineteenth century. He followed in the footsteps of such major figures as Henry Highland Garnet (1815–82) and Frederick Douglass (1818–95), former slaves who rose to prominence in the abolitionist movement prior to the Civil War (1861–5). Douglass dominated the political scene during Reconstruction (1865–77), agitating for civil rights for freed blacks and supporting suffrage for all US women (which occurred with the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1920; see FEMINISM AND THE FEMALE FRANCHISE MOVEMENT). Washington’s political platform differed from Douglass’s, which emerged from his abolitionism and called for immediate assimilation of African Americans into all walks of life. Washington conceded at points to racism and segregationism, the legal division of races; later Washington’s popularity with whites would grow and black resistance to his accommodation of segregationism would increase.

Washington was born in the last decade of US slavery on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia, where his mother, Jane, was the cook. He detailed his slave experiences, with the help of a ghost writer, in his autobiography, Up from Slavery, published in serial form in the popular magazine, Outlook, during 1900–1, subsequently publishing it later that year as a complete text. Following the conventions of the popular slave narrative, widely published in ante bellum USA in support of abolitionism, he begins his narrative with the traditional ‘I was born’, noting the location of his birth and revealing his uncertainty of the date of his birth and his parentage, though he alluded to the plantation rumours that named a prominent, local white man. He vividly described his years under slavery, detailing the meanness of the system of slavery and the want of

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adequate food, housing and clothing. Despite this revelation of oppression, Washington chose to characterize slavery as a ‘school’ for blacks, not to justify slavery, but to clarify to racist whites that slavery left a people prepared for freedom instead of the nation of potential loafers and criminals white southerners feared. Up from Slavery was designed as an argument for the political, social and economic future course of policy treating freed African Americans using Washington’s individual life as an example.

The most important theme in Washington’s narrative was the want of a formal education for himself and for other blacks. Longing to attend school even as a very young boy, Washington attended a school for blacks after his stepfather moved the family to Malden, West Virginia, following Emancipation. With his stepfather and brother, Washington worked in the salt mines, but was fortunate enough to attend a night school. In the fall of 1872, he left Malden to travel nearly 500 miles to attend the Hampton Institute, in Hampton, Virginia, the school for African Americans and Native Americans founded by General Samuel C.Armstrong (1839–93), a white philanthropist dedicated to the education of people of colour. Washington uses this lengthy portion of his narrative to appeal to potential white patrons in securing additional funding for Negro education.

Washington paid his way through college working full time as a janitor, graduating with honours in 1875, serving as faculty for the next five years. In 1881, the Alabama legislature granted Washington funding to begin his own school for African American technical education. On 4 July 1881, the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute opened its doors. The deep success of the Tuskegee Institute added to Washington’s power and renown, and added strength to his argument that to succeed, freed Blacks required technical skills rather than lofty education.

His rise as a national black leader is marked by a speech given at the Cotton States and International Exposition, which opened on 18 September 1895 in Atlanta, Georgia, seven months after the death of Douglass. This was a crucial political period: the death of Douglass; the failure of Reconstruction; ‘Jim Crow’ legislation legalized by Supreme Court cases such as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that established the notion of ‘separate but equal’ as the defining national philosophy of racial and social interactions and restriction; and a marked rise in the lynching of black men all foretold of a white backlash to any gains made by African Americans following the end of the Civil War. Washington’s ‘Atlanta Exposition Speech’ is indicative of his conciliatory approach to southern racist ideology and northern economic interests while simultaneously promoting education and economic uplift for nearly 70 million African Americans. The phrase most closely associated with Washington’s accommodationist ideology, which critics at the time and for the next 100 years would use to pinpoint his potential betrayal of his people, emerged from this oration. Washington clarified to his white audience that blacks were willing to accept 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.’ This speech was reproduced nationally and praised from then-president Grover Cleveland as well as the white sponsors of the Exposition and white philanthropists eager to finance Negro education.

Referred to as both the ‘sage of Tuskegee’ and as the ‘Wizard of the Tuskegee Machine’, Washington spent the next 20 years of his life working to achieve a balance between conflicting forces and discrepant ideas about the future of the race he purportedly led. In order to gain sufficient financial backing, Washington continued to promote the idea of individual uplift and self-help that he had come to use effectively at

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Tuskegee. Over time, more African Americans came to criticize his approach. Although initially W.E.B.DU BOIS (1868–1963) sent a letter of praise following the Atlanta Exposition and supported Washington’s leadership, the two came to vie publicly and privately for political power and the unofficial position of leader of the black race, particularly over the key issue of segregation versus integration of the races. Ultimately, Washington came to recognize and support Du Bois’s efforts at advocating integrationism.