Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was a black American leader, teacher, speaker and writer. He founded the Tuskegee Institute in 1881, which was his life’s work. He became the most famous and powerful black man in the country. He spoke on race relations and had the ear of President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1901 Roosevelt invited him to dinner at the White House, the first black American so invited. He wrote about his life in “Up From Slavery” (1901).
Washington did not openly push for equal rights, like the right to vote, he did not push for an end to Jim Crow. He said blacks must first pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Education, hard work, saving money and patience were the way. Rocking the boat will help no one. White people both North and South agreed!
But W.E.B. Du Bois did not agree. He and others founded the NAACP to fight for equal rights by challenging racism through the courts. In time it led to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the huge growth of black middle-class that followed.
Washington, in his defence, wanted to help people in the here and now. The best way he could do that was to start a school – Tuskegee – that would produce black teachers, tradesmen and farmers. He also raised millions for black education – for Tuskegee, Fisk, Howard and Hampton. None of this would have been possible if he openly opposed white power.
Washington, as it turns out, was for equal rights too – in private. We know that because he secretly gave money to help fight for them in court. From his private letters we know he was putting on something of a front for whites.
Washington started life as, yes, a house Negro. His mother, like him, was a slave in Virginia. She was a cook. He helped her out, learning the ways of white people. His father was some unknown white man.
The summer he was nine the slaves were freed. Soon after his family moved to West Virginia where his stepfather found work in the salt furnaces and coal mines.
More than anything he wanted to learn to read. His mother could not read but bought him spelling books. Although he worked full-time he still got as much education as he could – even if it was just two hours at night
At 16 he left home to go to Virginia to become a schoolteacher. He went to Hampton, which was founded after Emancipation to produce black schoolteachers.
At 19 Washington came back home to teach, but soon was asked back to Hampton to teach there. They loved him. The state of Alabama wanted a school just like Hampton and so at age 25 Hampton sent him to Alabama to start it. The state did not give him much money, but slowly he made it into one of the best black schools in the land – Tuskegee.
See also:
- W.E.B. Du Bois
- Jim Crow
- the black middle-class in America
- house Negro
- The feelings of white people
- The race industry argument – quoting Rush Limbaugh and Booker T. Washington about how some black people just love to complain
- white father, black mother
Thanks! I didn’t know that Booker T Washington was helping The Cause in private! Smart move. Get em from the front and the back! Strategic.
Where are today’s Booker T Washingtons?
A very informative post. Booker T. Washington’s contribution to education is worthy of emulation.
it sounded like he and the web had some good ideas, its just they needed to both meet half way.
its important to fight for civil rights, but its important that the race tries to lift itself up on its own as much possible and become powerful so this way it doesn’t have to depend on the majority race.
in fact as good as the movement was in the 60s, i think that is what went wrong. when MLK was assassinated it was as if many people didn’t know what to do after that, and then you had the 70s and that didn’t help with the underground/gangs and all. i think this is why people like jackson and sharpton have alot of power in the black community and are major jokes to white people.
i personally don’t like those sharpton and jackson because they aren’t helping the cause, i do think they do the civil rights thing for the attention, not to mention, they have been used to much that its hard to make the whites listen when they appear because like i said before, they think they are jokes.
but anyways, Booker did have a good point, the black race should try to uplift itself, in the same way the Jewish people did, the Asians did, and the Native Americans did.
I mean we may have the worse American history, but we should overcome it to have a more positive ending to the story.
I do not remember as a child in the fifties, the view that the average Black person viewed such a controversy between Washington and DuBois. They were both celebrated.
I think the controversy is now being exploited for the expansion of some people political agenda. Wrongly so, because this is the 21th century and I don’t think many Back people have any sense of the ancestors now. Many have no idea how it was to live under Jim Crow. It is almost as if we have some Disenyized or Williamsburg’s vision of the past.
In the fifties most Blacks understood how we survived and how many compromises one had to make.
this is great, i always admired dubois and booker t washington. If I ever have a son I would like to name him Booker for a middle name atleast, preserve our history. I remember my granny telling me how when she went to the store she couldn’t try on the clothes because they thought she would dirty it up cuz she was black and stories of my aunt having to sit up in the way back of the movie theatre with no air conditioning and it would get so hot people would be pouring sweat in the summer. Man…
I think a Booker T. Washington strategy is needed now by many disadvantaged groups. Accumulation of human capital is a necessary condition for true equality.
DuBois and Washington were both correct, just as King and Malcolm were both correct, just as Truth and Brown were both correct. This has never been a one-strategy battle.
Take King and Malcom, who I grew up listening to. King had the ideal strategy for the South. He knew the enemy, he knew the terrain, he knew the strengths and weaknesses of both the foe and his own people. King’s strategy was for a people who had already achieved or proven beyond reasonable doubt they could achieve sociological parity with whites.
Growing up in the south, it never occurred to me that I, as a black child, could not become a doctor or lawyer or teacher or businessman…because I was surrounded by doctors, lawyers, teachers, and businessmen who looked just like me. Certainly I could go to college–so many people around me who looked like me had gone to college. That wasn’t even a question–it was normalcy. What blacks in the south had accomplished was very similar to what Jews and Chinese were able to accomplish.
There wasn’t anything whites were doing or could do in the south that black people were not doing–except where a white man stood bodily to block them. There was a King in the south mostly because there had been a B. T. Washington in the South.
That was not the situation in the north. Much more clever forms of racism made it less clear that black people could ever achieve their parity. It was, in fact, much more effective than racism in the south. The murder of Malcom–who knew northern racism and the strategy to over come it– timed at it was, might have been a greater tragedy than the murder of King.