He was born in Virginia in 1856 to a black slave mother and a white master father, but bootstrapped his way out of servitude to economic independence, with hardly a boot or a strap. He held his first jobs in West Virginia salt furnaces and coal mines, but eventually matriculated through Hampton Institute in Virginia and Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C. (now Hampton University and Virginia Union University in Richmond, Va.), despite an evolving conviction that the greatest avenue for the advancement of the black masses was through technical training. As the first principal of Tuskegee Institute—a position he held from the age of 25—he guided the locally oriented teacher-training center into a bona fide regional institution of higher learning, overcoming hostile neighbors in the foothills of an ex-Confederate bastion and erecting a sprawling, well-endowed incubator of black educators, farmers, and professionals. He was an influential consultant to U.S. presidents but found popularity among black audiences of humble standing as well. He died at age 59 in 1915, a man of considerable means, universally recognized as the leader of black America. Today, the institute he built in the Black Belt of Alabama is rated as one of the South’s best universities.
He was Booker Taliaferro Washington, a now-controversial figure whose life has been chronicled and interpreted and dissected and fought over in hundreds of books, many of them comparing and contrasting him with other black leaders and finding him wanting. In Up From History—the title alludes to Washington’s 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery—University of Tennessee historian Robert J. Norrell sets out to accomplish nothing short of “reinstat[ing] this extraordinary historical figure in the pantheon of black leaders, illuminating not only his mission and achievement but also, poignantly, the man himself.” Norrell’s greatest contribution is his frank but fair critique of how scholars, commentators, and activists have characterized and evaluated Washington’s legacy.
How does Norrell do it? By masterfully framing Washington as a complicated and crafty man operating within tight constraints at a turning point backward in American history. During Washington’s adolescence, slavery was ending and the country was being reassembled. During his early adulthood, Reconstruction in his native South was providing stunning socio-political mobility for blacks. During his mid-twenties, hundreds of schools were being opened for blacks across the South. During his midlife, white good will was giving way to the imposition of Jim Crow segregation across much of the country.
Through all of this upheaval, Washington believed that education was the pivotal force by which black citizens would rise within the social and economic structure of their country, regardless of the white majority’s vacillation. In his quest to lift his race, “education” included learning oriented to useful and marketable ends, such as training in agricultural techniques to produce profitable enterprises in the rural areas to which many of his students, including mothers and fathers, would be returning. Focused on a gradual accumulation of property, income, wealth, and then power, blacks would demonstrate their commitment to American ideals of hard work and loyal citizenship, eventually showing skeptical whites (who far outnumbered the blacks and ran virtually everything, including all but a few of the other black colleges) that black folk, too, were entitled to equal protection under the law.
Acting upon this vision and having accepted leadership at Tuskegee, Washington rose into a nationally prominent role as black spokesman and race leader. His non-confrontational approach was sharply criticized by some blacks, most notably W. E. B. Du Bois. That New Englander, the first black Harvard PhD, scornfully labeled Washington “the Great Accommodator”; the more Washington achieved success in building relationships with major philanthropists, the harsher Du Bois’ criticism became. On the other hand, champions of Washington’s approach included Sears, Roebuck & Company’s Julius Rosenwald and the Rockefeller family, who contributed millions of dollars for education at Hampton and Tuskegee while also supporting legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement.
Re-examining Washington’s life and legacy, Norrell is careful in presenting the viewpoints of Washington’s contemporaneous critics and those who have appeared over the years since he died, nearly a century ago. In the final chapter of Up From History, Norrell sketches an instructive intellectual history of commentary about Washington, from A to Z. “The first assessments of his life by black scholars in the 1920s,” Norrell writes, “affirmed that popularity … among the masses of southern Blacks that Washington had gained through direct contact with them.” He singles out noted black sociologist Charles S. Johnson’s 1928 defense of Washington’s way as “the most sophisticated defense of Washington’s career” for its perceptiveness in concluding that Washington saw that white fears were a threat constantly on the verge of explosion and had to be abated or at least controlled if blacks were to make progress. Unfortunately, Norrell observes, Johnson’s assessment “hardly registered, in part because the Great Depression, signaling as it apparently did the demise of capitalism, led scholars to question Washington’s acceptance of capitalism, his emphasis on black agriculture, and his skepticism about unions.”
Norrell then turns to influential arguments against Washington’s legacy. Here the historian serves up an all-out indictment of Du Bois’ most influential critique of Washington, which first appeared in Du Bois’s 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk and was recycled and amplified in his 1940 memoir Dusk of Dawn. Norrell summarily accuses Du Bois of having “focused selectively on the ideological differences between himself and Washington,” of having asserted that “the Tuskegee public-relations efforts were aimed only at advancing Booker’s power and defeating his critics,” of having “claimed that Washington had excused the South’s discrimination,” and of having “remained angry about him” twenty-five years after Washington’s death. Of these slights, Norrell remarks, “Few men in an open society get to set the terms for the historical memory of their avowed enemy, but W. E. B. Du Bois was one who did.”
To be sure, in Washington’s famous 1895 Atlanta Exposition Speech given at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta (and known today as the infamous Atlanta Compromise address), he celebrated the industrial education oriented toward the jobs then available to the majority of blacks, in contradistinction to Du Bois’ desire for blacks to have access to the same liberal arts education that most whites enjoyed. Du Bois and like-minded activists envisioned that an élite cadre whom Du Bois had dubbed the Talented Tenth would advance to lead the race to a wider variety of occupations. Declared Washington to the whites in the middle of his 1895 address: “As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. 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 passage, music to the ears of many whites and blacks of the period, subsequently has been regarded widely as mere shucking and jiving accommodationism. Yet, as Norrell implies, readers must be careful not to fall into the trap of the anachronistic fallacy; by 1895, it was clear that Reconstruction was over, with black political power and economic mobility being withheld to a degree not experienced since the days of slavery into which Washington had been born. Washington’s white father had not freed him or his mother; they were read their rights by a soldier who articulated the Emancipation Proclamation to his mother and siblings on the plantation, according to his recollections in Up From Slavery. Facing an increasingly powerful and ubiquitous Ku Klux Klan alongside diminished black political clout at the turn of the century, Washington understood that the blacks would have to go along to get along. As they did, however, he continued to build Tuskegee while secretly funding legal challenges to Jim Crow segregation and other direct confrontations of racial injustice.
Like all of the so-called race men of his time, Washington was willing to work with the whites to achieve his objectives, even when those objectives were distinct from those of the whites. Tuskegee Institute had been founded, after all, as a result of the collaboration of Lewis Adams, a former slave who had achieved prominence in Tuskegee, with George W. Campbell, a local white banker and former slaveholder who assisted in brokering a deal with white state Senate candidate W. F. Foster. A school for blacks would be built with the state Senator’s backing in exchange for the newly freed blacks’ votes for him in the upcoming election. This kind of interracial cooperation was not uncommon across the South, even decades after Reconstruction was dismantled. In the 1920s, the blacks of Louisville, Kentucky, were decisive in defeating a bond issue for the all-white University of Louisville and conditioned their support in the subsequent re-balloting upon the agreement by local officials to fund and open the Louisville Municipal College for Negroes. The blacks did their part the next time around, the whites’ bond issue passed—and the blacks’ college was opened, succeeded, and eventually merged into the University of Louisville following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in the 1950s.
Norrell devotes ample attention to showing the extent to which Washington was vindicated in life and in death, dutifully informing readers that the post-World War II era evidenced how blacks’ demonstration of hard work, skill, thrift, integrity, and loyalty to their country actually led to tangible benefits, including the lifting of segregation in the armed services by President Harry Truman. In this connection, Norrell also adduces as evidence some pivotal political maneuvering in Macon County, Alabama, during the 1950s, by which blacks organized politically to reclaim power taken away by whites, a move made possible by the economic independence they enjoyed as a result of having implemented Washington’s economic program calling for self-reliance in their own lives.
Almost comically, though, Norrell at times appears guilty of a variant of the anachronistic mistake of which he accuses certain contemporary critics of Washington. Discounting 1920s-era opinions dissenting from Washington’s, for example, Norrell judges Du Bois’ developing opposition to Washington as overbroad and unfair, ignoring that during the first half of the 1900s the white power structure dominating the critical institutions essential to black advancement tended to view black leadership as a zero-sum game and thus would freeze out initiatives of productive, progressive, and strategic leaders such as Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson in favor of the whites’ favored partner, Washington. No wonder Du Bois openly and bitterly complained that Washington’s virtual monopoly of the public discourse as the leading black voice in the country resulted in undermined support for the classically oriented Atlanta University among the big philanthropies. Understanding the uncompromising Harvard PhD in the context of his experiences during his times might have led Norrell to a less strident dismissal of Du Bois’ opposition to Washington.
Such minor shortcomings do not diminish the great contribution Norrell has made through Up From History. He freshly portrays a powerful symbol of the last generation of black leaders born into slavery as a transformative proponent of education for freedmen in the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow South—a man justifying his standing among a nationwide network of core supporters from many different kinds of communities.
Amos N. Jones practices law in Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
