Racial Politics of Booker T. Washington

Racial Politics of Booker T. Washington
Author: Donald Cunnigen
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2005-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0762310111

Scholars have sought to understand the mystique surrounding Booker T Washington. He is an enigma and continues to be lauded by those who offer him and his ideas as a model for Black Progress. This volume aims to provide the reader with a wide inter-disciplinary landscape with which to assess Washington.

Booker T. Washington and Black Progress

Booker T. Washington and Black Progress
Author: W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Publisher:
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780813028149

Inspired by the centenary of the publication of Washington's autobiography, Up From Slavery, this collection of essays reinterprets Washington's career and self-presentation. As the most visible and widely acclaimed black leader of his era, Washington played a pivotal role in advocating a strategy for the racial uplift of African Americans in an age of intensifying racism and discrimination. This collection insists that in order to understand the era of Jim Crow, we must come to terms with Washington and his autobiography. It uses Washington, his autobiography, and his program to consider the meanings of Up From Slavery, the plight of African Americans, and possible responses by blacks in the United States and elsewhere to the highest stage of white supremacy. Collectively and individually, these essays shed light on aspects of Washington and his life that have been poorly understood. Neither a critique nor an apologia, Booker T. Washington and Black Progress offers fresh perspectives by leading scholars on one of the most remarkable and influential figures in turn-of-the-century America, providing a new appreciation of both the man and his times.

Booker T. Washington Papers Volume 5

Booker T. Washington Papers Volume 5
Author: Booker T Washington
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 790
Release: 1977-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780252006272

This volume turns from emphasizing Washington's institution-building (Tuskegee Institute) to examine those writings which reveal more about the black leader's growing role as a national public figure. Volume 5 covers a period during which Washington's fortunes continued to rise even as those of the black masses, for whom he claimed to speak, declined. Though forced to adhere narrowly to the racial philosophy he had espoused in the Atlanta Compromise address of 1895, Washington nonetheless was able to involve himself covertly in matters of civil rights and politics. He used the National Negro Business League as a front for political activity. He successfully lobbied against disenfranchisement of black voters in Georgia during November, 1899. During these years Washington began behind-the-scenes civil rights activities that foreshadowed a much more elaborate ''secret life'' after the turn of the century. He worked with lawyers of the Afro-American Council to test in the courts the grandfather clause of the Louisiana constitution of 1898, raising money to pay the legal costs and swearing the other participants to secrecy. T. Thomas Fortune, the leading black journalist of the day, was Washington's close personal advisor as he sought to spread his sphere of influence from his southern base to northern cities. Also included are writings on the first convention of the National Negro Business League, Washington's address before the Southern Industrial Convention in Huntsville, Ala., and the full text of Washington's first book, The Future of the American Negro, published in December, 1899. A fascinating view of Booker T. Washington and the milieu in which he operated, Volume 5 provides further reason to call the project, as C. Vann Woodward has done, ''the single most important research enterprise now under way in the field of American black history.''''The Washington Papers continue to provide a rich load of material for social historians. Intelligently and imaginatively edited, they illuminate not only the life of Booker T. Washington but the several worlds in which he lived.''--Allan H. Spear, Journal of American History On the subject of Washington ''There is no better source to consult than Louis R. Harlan's biography and the first . . . volumes of the Washington papers.''--New York Review of Books ''A major enterprise in Black historiography.''--Times Literary Supplement

The Education of Booker T. Washington

The Education of Booker T. Washington
Author: Michael Rudolph West
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2006-01-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0231503822

Booker T. Washington has long held an ambiguous position in the pantheon of black leadership. Lauded by some in his own lifetime as a black George Washington, he was also derided by others as a Benedict Arnold. In The Education of Booker T. Washington, Michael West offers a major reinterpretation of one of the most complex and controversial figures in American history. West reveals the personal and political dimensions of Washington's journey "up from slavery." He explains why Washington's ideas resonated so strongly in the post-Reconstruction era and considers their often negative influence in the continuing struggle for equality in the United States. West's work also establishes a groundwork for understanding the ideological origins of the civil rights movement and discusses Washington's views on the fate of race and nation in light of those of Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., and others. West argues that Washington's analysis was seen as offering a "solution" to the problem of racial oppression in a nation professing its belief in democracy. That solution was the idea of "race relations." In practice, this theory buttressed segregation by supposing that African Americans could prosper within Jim Crow's walls and without the normal levers by which other Americans pursued their interests. Washington did not, West contends, imagine a way to perfect democracy and an end to the segregationist policies of southern states. Instead, he offered an ideology that would obscure the injustices of segregation and preserve some measure of racial peace. White Americans, by embracing Washington's views, could comfortably find a way out of the moral and political contradictions raised by the existence of segregation in a supposedly democratic society. This was (and is) Washington's legacy: a form of analysis, at once obvious and concealed, that continues to prohibit the realization of a truly democratic politics.

Atlanta Compromise

Atlanta Compromise
Author: Booker T. Washington
Publisher: CreateSpace
Total Pages: 24
Release: 2014-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781497492707

The Atlanta Compromise was an address by African-American leader Booker T. Washington on September 18, 1895. Given to a predominantly White audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, the speech has been recognized as one of the most important and influential speeches in American history. The compromise was announced at the Atlanta Exposition Speech. The primary architect of the compromise, on behalf of the African-Americans, was Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute. Supporters of Washington and the Atlanta compromise were termed the "Tuskegee Machine." The agreement was never written down. Essential elements of the agreement were that blacks would not ask for the right to vote, they would not retaliate against racist behavior, they would tolerate segregation and discrimination, that they would receive free basic education, education would be limited to vocational or industrial training (for instance as teachers or nurses), liberal arts education would be prohibited (for instance, college education in the classics, humanities, art, or literature). After the turn of the 20th century, other black leaders, most notably W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter - (a group Du Bois would call The Talented Tenth), took issue with the compromise, instead believing that African-Americans should engage in a struggle for civil rights. W. E. B. Du Bois coined the term "Atlanta Compromise" to denote the agreement. The term "accommodationism" is also used to denote the essence of the Atlanta compromise. After Washington's death in 1915, supporters of the Atlanta compromise gradually shifted their support to civil rights activism, until the modern Civil rights movement commenced in the 1950s. Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 - November 14, 1915) was an African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community. Washington was of the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants, who were newly oppressed by disfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1895 his Atlanta compromise called for avoiding confrontation over segregation and instead putting more reliance on long-term educational and economic advancement in the black community.

Schooling Jim Crow

Schooling Jim Crow
Author: Jay Winston Driskell
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2014-12-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813936152

In 1919 the NAACP organized a voting bloc powerful enough to compel the city of Atlanta to budget $1.5 million for the construction of schools for black students. This victory would have been remarkable in any era, but in the context of the Jim Crow South it was revolutionary. Schooling Jim Crow tells the story of this little-known campaign, which happened less than thirteen years after the Atlanta race riot of 1906 and just weeks before a wave of anti-black violence swept the nation in the summer after the end of World War I. Despite the constant threat of violence, Atlanta’s black voters were able to force the city to build five black grammar schools and Booker T. Washington High School, the city’s first publicly funded black high school. Schooling Jim Crow reveals how they did it and why it matters. In this pathbreaking book, Jay Driskell explores the changes in black political consciousness that made the NAACP’s grassroots campaign possible at a time when most black southerners could not vote, let alone demand schools. He reveals how black Atlantans transformed a reactionary politics of respectability into a militant force for change. Contributing to this militancy were understandings of class and gender transformed by decades of racially segregated urban development, the 1906 Atlanta race riot, Georgia’s disfranchisement campaign of 1908, and the upheavals of World War I. On this cultural foundation, black Atlantans built a new urban black politics that would become the model for the NAACP’s political strategy well into the twentieth century.

Up from History

Up from History
Author: Robert Jefferson Norrell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 523
Release: 2011-04-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0674060377

Since the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., has personified black leadership with his use of direct action protests against white authority. A century ago, in the era of Jim Crow, Booker T. Washington pursued a different strategy to lift his people. In this compelling biography, Norrell reveals how conditions in the segregated South led Washington to call for a less contentious path to freedom and equality. He urged black people to acquire economic independence and to develop the moral character that would ultimately gain them full citizenship. Although widely accepted as the most realistic way to integrate blacks into American life during his time, WashingtonÕs strategy has been disparaged since the 1960s. The first full-length biography of Booker T. in a generation, Up from History recreates the broad contexts in which Washington worked: He struggled against white bigots who hated his economic ambitions for blacks, African-American intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois who resented his huge influence, and such inconstant allies as Theodore Roosevelt. Norrell details the positive power of WashingtonÕs vision, one that invoked hope and optimism to overcome past exploitation and present discrimination. Indeed, his ideas have since inspired peoples across the Third World that there are many ways to struggle for equality and justice. Up from History reinstates this extraordinary historical figure to the pantheon of black leaders, illuminating not only his mission and achievement but also, poignantly, the man himself.

Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington
Author: Raymond W. Smock
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2009-06-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1615780076

From the time of his famous Atlanta address in 1895 until his death in 1915, Booker T. Washington was the preeminent African-American educator and race leader. But to historians and biographers of the last hundred years, Washington has often been described as an enigma, a man who rose to prominence because he offered a compromise with the white South: he was willing to trade civil rights for economic and educational advancement. Thus one historian called Washington's time the "nadir of Negro life in America." Raymond W. Smock's interpretive biography explores Washington's rise from slavery to a position of power and influence that no black leader had ever before achieved in American history. He took his own personal quest for freedom and acceptance within a harsh, racist climate and turned it into a strategy that he believed would work for millions. Was he, as later critics would charge, an Uncle Tom and a lackey of powerful white politicians and industrialists? Sifting the evidence, Mr. Smock sees Washington as a field general in a war of racial survival, his compromise a practical attempt to solve an immense problem. He lived and worked in the midst of an undeclared race war, and his plan was to find a way to survive and to flourish despite the odds against him.

Tuskegee & Its People

Tuskegee & Its People
Author: Booker T. Washington
Publisher:
Total Pages: 608
Release: 1905
Genre: African American universities and colleges
ISBN: