Who was Booker T. Washington?

 

Booker T. Washington was born a slave. He then rose to become one of the most influential African-American intellectuals of the late 19th century. In 1881, he formed the Tuskegee Institute, a black school in Alabama hoping to train teachers. Washington was also behind the formation of the National Negro Business League 20 years later. He also served as an adviser to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

Although Washington mixed with other black leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and drew ire for his seeming acceptance of segregation, he is recognized for his educational advancements and attempts to promote economic self-reliance among. 

African Americans. 

Washington was educated at Hampton Institute, one of the earliest freedmen’s schools devoted to industrial education; Hampton was the model upon which he based his institute in Tuskegee. Growing up during Reconstruction and imbued with moral as opposed to intellectual training, he came to believe that postwar social uplift had begun at the wrong end: the acquisition of political and civil rights rather than economic self-determination. Washington’s philosophy and the “Tuskegee machine” won him widespread support among northern white philanthropists as well as acclaim among blacks.

In his Atlanta Compromise address, delivered at the Cotton States Exposition in 1895, he struck the keynotes ofracial accommodationism: “Cast down your buckets where you are,” Washington urged blacks. “In all things that are purely social,” he announced to attentive whites, “we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” His thoroughly bourgeois, antilabor, antidemocratic appeal stood for years as an endorsement of segregation. He sustained his power as an educational statesman by some ruthless and duplicitous methods. Rival black newspapers, educators, and thinkers were frequently intimidated by his brand of boss politics. Black newspaper editors and aspiring young intellectuals risked ostracism and unemployment if they embraced political activism rather than Washington’s accommodationist social policy. Such disputes surfaced especially in the famous debate between Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois over the aims of “industrial” as opposed to “classical” education among blacks.