| _I think you will make a mistake if you will let your mind dwell too much upon American prejudice, or any other racial prejudice. The thing is for one to get above such things. If one gets in the habit of continually thinking and talking about race prejudice, he soon gets gets to the point where he is fit for little that is worth doing. In the northern part of the United States, there are a number of colored people who make their lives miserable, because all their talk is about race prejudice_ Booker T. Washington in a letter to his daughter Portia then living and studying in Europe.(117) I am greatly impressed with this text, BOOKER T. WASINGTON, The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915. Professor Louis R. Harlan earned the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for History with this biography along with the Bancroft Prize and the Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association. The principle source is the Booker T Washington Papers in the Division of Manuscripts of the LIbrary of Congress, a rich, expanding collection of approximately a million letters, speeches, reports, newspaper clippings, and other documents. Professor Harlan is the editor of the published source that extends, currently, to 14 volumes. This material is available on-line in an Open-Book format at the site maintained by the University of Illinois Press (www.historycooperative.org/btw). This book begins in 1901, when Booker T. Washington at the age of forty-five was approaching the zenith of his fame and influence, and ends with his death in 1915. It is a biographical study in the sense that its focus is on the complex, enigmatic figure of Washington, the most powerful black minority-group boss of his time. It also recounts the inner life and struggles of the small black middle class in that generation once removed from slavery, as a coterie of college-bred black men and women challenged Washington's powerful coalition of northern, white philanthropists, southern white paternalists, black businessmen, and such members of the black professional class as he could attract to his side. Washington's wizardry - his skill of maneuver and ability to make the most of bad circumstances - was his strong point as a leader. His greatest failing was his inability to reverse the hard times for blacks during what whites called the Progressive Era. The same era which the historian Rayford Whittingham Logan (1897-1981) called the nadir of Afro-American history. As Washington's influence declined in his last years, W.E.B DuBois, a strong critic of Washington, and the founders at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sought relief through the court system. It was this legal strategy of the NAACP in the 20th Century that culminated in the successful Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and it is Washington's work-ethic, self-help, self-improvement and particularly, style of accomomdation that have been forgotten or discredited. This text helps us remember what Washington accomplished, however, more importantly, Professor Harlan's meticulous investigations reveal that the character of Washington is difficult to articulate succintly. Washington's correspondence with the large donors to Tuskegee does not reveal a conspiracy, either large or small, to prepare Tuskegee's students to become wage-workers in the corporate structure. The typical donor sent his check rather than his advice.,...Washington's efforts at Tuskegee Institute were to train students to become independent small businessmen, farmers, and teachers rather than wage-earners or servants of white employers. At the same time, it is clear that Washington flattered and cajoled the very rich and never challenged the appropriateness of their status at the peak of the American success pyramid. Tuskegee became a mecca for not only Africans but West Indians and Asians. As his writings were translated into many foreign languages, he became the most famous black man in the world, and his fame drew foreigners to him like a magnet. All manner of men, American missionaries, European colonialists, Afican nationalists, Buddhist reformers, and Japanese modernizers sought to enlist his aid. On the one hand were whites who sought to aid in introducing plantation agriculture into colonial areas. On the other hand Africans and Asians hoped to find in Tuskegee industrial education and Washington's philosophy of self-help a source of strength to resist the political and cultural impreialism of the Europeans. Washington sought to accomodate all of these contradictory propositions. While intrepid research has uncovered new material that lends fresh insight, rather than illuminating Washington for compassion to his motives, the added light only casts more shadows. Utterly at variance with the Sunday-school morality he publicly professed, there was also a more feral, more power-hungry Washington, inordinately involved in politics, and particularly the poitics of patronage. Few people, even those affected, such as W.E.B DuBois and Mary White Ovington, knew the extent to which Washington refused to meet our preconceived notions of how a great leader should behave. Inexplicable human fraility, aside, as a guide for the black community, Washington had a concrete program of industrial education and the promotion of small business as the avenue of black advancement "up from slavery" and into the middle class. This program may have been anachronistic preparation for the age of mass production, urbanization, and corporate gigantism then coming into being; but it had considerable social realism for a black population which was, until long after Washington's death, predominantly rural and southern. It gave purpose and dignity to black working-class lives of toil and struggle, and also was well attuned to the growth and changing character of black business in Washington's day. He championed the emerging black business class as the leaders of black communities, and they in turn, through the National Negro Business League, became the backbone of Washington's following. Washington's followers found hope in his message that fortified them in hopeless situations. During his time, he was exalted as a type of Moses who would lead his people to the promised land as welcome participants in the mainstream of society. For many in the US and around the world, his teachings were a type of deliverance from their oppressive circumstances. Moses had quite a few faults, as all deliverers do, and one of these faults prevented him from entering the promised land of Canaan. Even with all of his great abilities to accommodate the ruling class majority, his ability to conquer overwhelming obstacles, Booker T. Washington's inability to accomodate the strategies of the NAACP, who were themselves uncompromising, weakened his effectiveness. After reading this remarkable text, I see Booker T. Washington as a man with great accomplishments and failings perhaps as great. Even with his shortcomings, he was exceptional as he provided his followers hope and lifted their spirit. Professor Harlan has brought to life a man of enormous complexity, who will never be completely understood or known which makes Booker T. Washington much like the people of which I claim familiarity. PEACE |
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