Booker T. Washington Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The most powerful African American leader of his time, Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) preached and practiced a gospel of economic self-uplift. In an era when southern states were disenfranchising blacks and rolling back the civil rights they had won during Reconstruction, he encouraged African Americans to suspend the quest for social and political equality and focus instead on economic development.

Born into slavery in Franklin County, Virginia, in 1856, Washington worked in the salt furnaces and coal mines of West Virginia after Emancipation (1863). After hearing of the recently established Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute for black freedmen, he journeyed five hundred miles to enroll. Graduating in 1875, Washington so impressed Hampton’s faculty that, in 1881, the school’s principal recommended him to Alabama authorities to head the newly established Negro Normal School in Tuskegee. Washington held his first classes there in a dilapidated shanty, but over the course of two decades he gradually built the Negro Normal School into the Tuskegee Institute, a world-famous institution of African American higher learning that, by 1900, boasted sixty-six buildings, eighty-six faculty members, and a half-million-dollar endowment.

Tuskegee became a platform for Washington to advocate industrial education as the most promising avenue of African American self-uplift. Rather than pursue a classical curriculum, students at Tuskegee mastered basic subjects and developed the virtues of thrift, self-discipline, and industry through vocational study. Washington promoted the Tuskegee model on speaking tours throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, but it was his 1895 Atlanta Exposition Address that catapulted him to national prominence. In that address, he called on the South to increase educational and economic opportunities for African Americans with the understanding that blacks would henceforward refrain from seeking social equality and challenging white political supremacy. “It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top,” Washington said, “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” (Washington 2003, 143). Applauding his proposed “compromise,” white society recognized Washington thereafter as the leading spokesman for his race.

Washington published his autobiography, Up from Slavery, in 1901, cementing his reputation as an African American exemplar of America’s rags-to-riches possibilities. Philanthropists showered Tuskegee and allied institutions with large donations, and presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft solicited Washington’s advice on race relations. Many of Washington’s African American contemporaries, however, lamented his acquiescence to social inequality and second-class citizenship. Some regarded him as a self-interested political boss who used his widespread power and influence to enhance his own position and stifle dissent. The disclosure of Washington’s personal papers since his death, however, has allowed scholars to arrive at a more nuanced view of Washington—as a trickster figure who ingeniously navigated the landscape of racial segregation in the United States to maximize African American opportunity. The discovery that Washington secretly financed legal challenges to early-twentieth-century efforts to strip black citizens in Louisiana and Alabama of the vote attests to the fact that Washington was more sympathetic to the African American quest for political equality than his public statements suggested. Behind the mask of accommodation lurked a politically subversive spirit. Washington died of nervous exhaustion and arteriosclerosis in 1915.

Bibliography:

Harlan, Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Booker T. Washington in Perspective: Essays of Louis R. Harlan. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006.
Meier, August. Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963.
Norrell, Robert J. Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Washington, Booker T. 1901. Up from Slavery. Edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.
West, Michael Rudolph. The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

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