Booker T. Washington, first Principal and founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, which has since become Tuskegee University, a Historically Black University in Alabama, has a bad rap. Despite his significant achievements, and his vital role in the promotion of mass education for African-Americans after the end of Reconstruction, many, including some of his contemporaries, like W.E.B. DuBois and William Monroe Trotter, accused him of being too much of an accommodationist- giving racist whites what they wanted, so he could hold his own power niche as the “Wizard of Tuskegee,” a nickname given to him at the time.
Photo Courtesy of Tuskegee University
Many have pointed out the differences in background between Washington and the two before-named critics, including that those two men were born in the North, and were younger than Washington, so this post will not litigate this dispute on those grounds. Instead, this post will focus on a salient reality of Washington’s works, particularly as it pertains to the 1880s and 1890s, and the likely influences. Washington helped create the first Black Lives Matter movement, albeit in a form that is very foreign to Americans today. This was in part because Washington’s world was very foreign to Americans today, even, and perhaps especially, those who are less informed on American history.
In consideration of this premise, it is apparent that we should examine Washington’s life. Booker T. Washington was not his original name. The T stands for Taliaferro, which was his original surname, and he only added Washington in his adulthood. This addition underscores the ways with which Washington hoped to identify with American nationhood and origins, and choosing the name of the “Father of his country,” and large scale slave owner, underscores a willingness to identify with those who had sinned against African-Americans.
Much of Washington’s biography is known, because he told his own story in his autobiography Up From Slavery. He is from southern Virginia, was born into slavery in 1856, and lived in West Virginia after the war ended, before walking to Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute to get an education.
When considering Washington’s later career and philosophy, it makes sense to revisit his childhood. After all, we are formed in childhood, and he, himself, spoke often of his childhood mentor, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the founder of Hampton University, as it is known today. However, in revisiting this childhood, it is worth discussing the events that he did not discuss, but of which he surely would have been aware, as an aspiring educator and student. It is these omissions which suggest a rationale and a purpose for his career.
Washington (then still Taliaferro), would have become fully and officially free at the age of 10 years old with the passage of the 13th Amendment. However, 1866 was a notable year for several events, which presaged the troubles ahead for freed people.
When the Civil War ended, the newly freed people took to the roads. African-Americans had never been free to travel before (even those who were free- since they risked kidnapping into enslavement, like Solomon Northrup), since the slave patrols and pass system made travel impossible for African-Americans. The few times enslaved people might move about the country was when their “masters” moved them.. Or sold them away from their families. The reality of the destruction of the Black family by slavery is well-documented, and under-appreciated. After the war, thousands took to the roads not only because they could, but because they were seeking to reunite with lost family, to rebuild what slavery had stolen from them.
Many African-Americans were subject to random violence and abuse, and so they came together in larger towns and cities under the protection of Union troops, including many African-American troops, since some 180,000 Black men had fought to save the nation, and themselves, and their families, from the sin of slavery. This meant there were large makeshift villages, shanties often, by major cities like Memphis, Washington, New Orleans, etc. These makeshift settlements would often form the basis of longstanding Black neighborhoods over time, but in 1866, these settlements were quite unwelcome, at least unwelcome to the white inhabitants of the cities.
Equally unwelcome to the defeated traitors was the presence of troops, especially Black troops in blue uniforms. This tinderbox led to two racial massacres in 1866, in which white mobs, including white police, sheriff’s deputies, and firefighters murdered African-American freed people and soldiers, and burned down their homes and businesses. The first occurred in Memphis, targeting Black settlements and mustered out Black veterans, the second (with sinister political implications) occurred in New Orleans, targeting Black veterans and white Republican allies of freed people, who were attempting to rewrite the Louisiana Constitution to extend civil and voting rights to African-Americans.
By the time of the New Orleans massacre, the role of violence had gone from angry spasm of defeated white supremacist rage to strategic tool to recreate a lost social order. The defeated traitors, with the acquiescence of white supremacist president, Andrew Johnson, realized that they could violently defeat attempts by “radicals” to create a new social order based on racial equality, and all they had to do was outlast Northern concern for racial equality. By 1867, when Washington was 11 years old, their violence strategy seemed to have backfired. Radical Republicans, committed to aggressive advocacy of racial equality had won control of Congress and were overriding Johnson’s vetoes in an attempt to create a more just society. The 1868 election of American war hero, Ulysses S. Grant, just seemed to confirm the defeat of this strategy. Grant took aggressive action against the numerous white supremacist groups operating in the defeated South, like the Ku Klux Klan, White Liners, White League, Knights of the White Camelia, etc. (Most of these organizations have been forgotten, because only the KKK got hero treatment in a movie: “The Birth of a Nation.”)
However, violence persisted, and when Republicans in the Grant administration got involved in a series of scandals, their hold on government became tenuous. This tenuous hold on power encouraged Grant to pull back from enforcement of equal protection under the law in the South, and Southern white supremacists noticed.
Grant managed to win re-election, but throughout the South racial violence and intimidation aimed at suppressing the Black vote (an old Southern tradition), had consequences. In Colfax, Louisiana, Black citizenry organized to defend the courthouse against a takeover from the white supremacist “White League.” After being assured safe passage in exchange for surrender, the Black citizens surrendered and exited the courthouse, where they were promptly massacred by the White Leaguers. Washington was 17 at the time, and a student at Hampton. This event made national headlines, and reluctance of authorities to prosecute the killers, and even more reluctance by juries to convict was readily apparent, realities which likely would not have been lost on Washington. The Federal government, however, prosecuted three men as ringleaders under President Grant’s Enforcement Acts, and obtained convictions. It was an early example of the newly formed Department of Justice stepping in to protect citizens from abuse at the hands of State officials and white supremacists. It would not be enough, and it would not last.
The three convictions prosecutors obtained were eventually overturned by the Supreme Court in the 1875 Cruikshank case. Washington was 19 years old at the time, and graduated from Hampton that year, ready to begin his career as an educator.
He spent the next few years as a teacher in West Virginia, as white supremacist violence, Republican corruption, and an alliance between the Democratic party and the defeated traitors crippled the Reconstruction. Historians tend to date the end of Reconstruction at 1877, when incoming president, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, pulled Federal troops out of the Southern states, but Black voter participation and political activity managed to persist for years afterwards, though in increasingly more dangerous circumstances, and also in greatly diminished circumstances.
As a school teacher in West Virginia, Washington had a front row seat to a short-lived multiracial coalition in Virginia, the “Readjuster Movement” under reformed traitor William Mahone. The old planter elites, so-called “Bourbon Democrats,” defeated this multiracial alliance in 1882, installing an elitist government of old Virginia aristocrats that ruled Virginia for decades afterwards, including delivering one of their own, Woodrow Wilson, into the White House in 1912. It was during these heady "Readjuster" days in the neighboring state of Virginia (home to his alma mater), that his old mentor, Armstrong, recommended him to take up a new position in Alabama, as the head of a new Normal school (school for training teachers) in the town of Tuskegee, Alabama. Funding for this school, the result of white attempts to court the remaining Black voters, was to be built into the subsequent budget, after the elections. In other words, just as multiracial coalitions took control of Virginia, white politicians still needed to court Black voters in places like Alabama, years after the Federal troops had left.
Washington arrived in Tuskegee, and found that the promised appropriation had been allocated for salaries only, and there was no actual building for his school, only a few rundown cottages and barns. Washington, and his first class of students were on their own. Washington was undaunted. His students built a brick kiln and began making their own bricks, from which they fashioned the first formal buildings of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. These bricks were of such quality, Washington later commented, that local whites from the town of Tuskegee began coming by to purchase them, and Tuskegee soon had a funding stream to compensate for the full appropriation that the Alabama legislature failed to deliver.
It is clear that these events impacted Washington, since he relates them several times, including in his essay ‘The Educational Outlook in the South,” and his autobiography.
However, there is clearly more at work than the pride of building one's own school. Washington came of age as Black voter participation was being violently suppressed (especially in the few places where multiracial coalitions were flexing their power), and the Federal government was turning its back on Black civil and human rights. As a child, he would have learned of the racial massacres in Memphis, New Orleans, and elsewhere. While studying at Hampton, he surely witnessed the Colfax killers escape justice because of the Supreme Court, and saw how this emboldened violent agitators against Black voting rights, especially in areas where African-American voters were a numerical minority, or where Black voters had managed to leverage their voting power to obtain favorable policies or power.
During Tuskegee Institute’s third year in existence, Justice Joseph Bradley delivered the opinion of the Supreme Court, that African-Americans have to accept that they could not be a “special project” of the government. This ruling overturned the several Civil Rights Acts, which the Grant Administration had passed in the waning days of Radical Republican control of Congress, and effectively put African-Americans outside of the protection of the Federal government. In other words, just as Washington was beginning to build his school at Tuskegee, the Federal government was in complete retreat from protecting African-American civil rights, and the last civil rights advocating president (for many years), James Garfield, had died at the hands of his unclean doctor after an assassination attempt, robbing African-Americans of an advocate at the pinnacle of American government.
Couple this governmental retreat from protecting the rights of African-Americans with the widespread violence against African-Americans that Washington had witnessed since childhood, and it is apparent that African-Americans were in an increasingly precarious situation. The value of Black life was in decline in the South, and Washington took it upon himself to protect Black life by promoting its value, increasing its value, in fact, through education. He was quite candid that any Black advancement required the support and acquiescence of the very people who were attacking, killing, and segregating African-Americans.
As he put it in “The Educational Outlook in the South”, “Any movement for the elevation of the Southern Negro, in order to be successful, must have to a certain extent the cooperation of the Southern whites. They control government and own the property [emphasis mine]- whatever benefits the black man benefits the white man.”
As he put it, “Brains, property and character for the Negro will settle the question of civil rights.”
“Harmony will come in proportion as the black man gets something that the white man wants, whether it be of brains or of material.”
“Coming to the bread-and-meat side of the question, the white man needs the Negro, and the Negro needs the white man.”
“The two races must be brought to have faith in each other.”
In these excerpts, we see a man trying to highlight the inter-dependency of white people and African-Americans, and the need to breach the gap created by slavery and white supremacy. Washington seems to have believed that the peaceful way forward was one that would not antagonize white people, since they were prone to white supremacist violence, and suffered no consequences from government for those acts of violence and murder. By establishing Tuskegee as a school where he would teach “the dignity of labor”, he could begin to create circumstances by which African-Americans could own property and become indispensable economic contributors to the “New South.” In doing this, Washington seems to have hoped for that “conversion experience” that old time Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison had sought.
He finishes his essay with this passage:
"Poverty and ignorance have affected the black man just as they affect the white man. They have made him untruthful, intemperate, selfish, caused him to steal, to be cheated, and made the outcast of society, and he has aspired to positions which he was not mentally and morally capable of filling. But the day is breaking, and education will bring the complete light. The scales of prejudice are beginning to drop from the eyes of the dominant class South, and their clearer and more intelligent vision they are beginning to see and recognize the mighty truth that wealth, happiness, and permanent prosperity will only come in proportion as the hand, head and heart of both races are educated and Christianized."
Washington seems to define the problem as one of education, not just for African-Americans, but for the mass of Southern whites, who had similarly been denied educational opportunities in the Aristocratic Southern Slaveocracy. He understood that without government support, he would need alternatives, and so began his career currying favor with upper class whites, that “dominant class” to which he referred. It was after all, that same “dominant class” that had coined the term “white trash” to define the mass of poor Southern whites, and which had insured that public institutions that might support those poor whites (as well, and especially enslaved and later freed African-Americans) did not develop at all.
Washington was celebrated around the North, and men like Carnegie and Rockefeller opened their wallets to help fund Tuskegee, and Washington’s other educational endeavors. Tuskegee-trained teachers began to spread throughout the South, teaching in the nascent segregated public school system. His stature was so high, even among some Southern whites, that he received an invitation to speak at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895. His address there, celebrated among many African-Americans, because of the respect with which he was greeted by some elite white people, was the one at which he declared that white and Black can “be as separate as the fingers, yet one hand for mutual progress” taken as an acceptance of racial segregation, in exchange for economic development.
Washington’s acceptance of segregation was controversial, though, perhaps was a consequence of man who saw the figurative “writing on the wall,” since the Supreme Court was at that moment deliberating the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, which legalized “separate but equal” as the law of the land. After all, Washington had steered some of his money to the Plessy effort, which means he knew the progress of the case, and, likely, the rumblings that came from court.
“Jim Crow” laws were already shaping up in most of the deep South, and disenfranchisement of African-Americans was proceeding, regardless of what Washington said. He was not blind to the problems African-Americans faced in the South, as he explained in a letter to reformed racist, George Washington Cable, “The colored people are tired [of] working hard all year and getting nothing for it. It is simply impossible under the present mortgage system for them to get ahead- they can not pay 25 & 30 per cent interest on the dollar.” (from Herbert Aptheker’s A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United State. Volume 2)
He also seems to have believed firmly (perhaps naively) that, “No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long, in any degree, ostracized,” as he stated in Atlanta.
However, Washington’s attempts to validate Black life in the minds of Southerners, to end the ostracism, were not successful. The 1890s began the “Nadir” in race relations, as racial violence and lynchings exploded across the South, with racial violence becoming a normal fact of life in Southern society. In this environment African-Americans had already been retreating into Black worlds, away from the violence of white people, and in these Black worlds, educated African-Americans were creating and building new institutions to sustain Black life and nurture Black excellence, regardless of whether Black lives mattered to government or the rest of Southern society.
Washington’s attempts to placate and ingratiate himself with wealthy and powerful white people might have rubbed many the wrong way, like the two named at the beginning of this article, but his attempts to make Black Lives Matter to society, helped create an institutional framework of education, economic development, and community control, which would help sustain African-Americans through the long period of Jim Crow segregation. By the time of the 1950s era Civil Rights movement, Black institutions and organizations were self-sustaining, and the movement was able to fund itself through the contributions of African-Americans, who had managed to build some wealth against the stacked odds. Washington seems to have misunderstood the depth of white racism, and the powerful political use to which Southern elites (like the aforementioned “Bourbon Democrats”) could put that racism, to hold power and wealth in their society. He might also have misunderstood the vulnerability that results from lacking political power (after all Tuskegee only received its seed funding because Black Alabamans could vote). Despite these misunderstandings, or perhaps because of a hard-nosed acceptance of an awful situation, his contributions to building institutions that would propel a movement indicate that his work really was the first Black Lives Matter movement, and today’s movement must draw strength from this first one, while also drawing heart from the fact that the challenges today are far less (although still deadly serious!) than what Washington faced in his day.
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