Louis R. Harlan (1983). Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915. New York: Oxford University.
Time has not dealt kindly with Booker T. Washington. At the beginning of this century he was perhaps the most famous black man in the world. Certainly he was by far the most influential in American public life. In 1901 he was the first African-American to be invited to dinner at the White House, by Theodore Roosevelt--an act that provoked intense controversy at the time (pp. 3-4). Today, little more is remembered of him than his name, and a hazy association with the Tuskegee Institute. That there was once a "Tuskegee Machine" with nationwide influence in the Republican Party has been quite forgotten.
The decline of Booker T. Washington's public reputation is largely due to the evolution of racial politics and consciousness in his own time and subsequently. Even in his heyday, Washington's gradualism and accommodationism was controversial among black leaders. The future of the civil rights movement lay with more militant figures like W.E.B. DuBois, who firmly rejected Washington's conservative political positions and his assumptions about the future course of African-American development. To subsequent generations, Booker T. Washington appears to have been at best irrelevent, at worst a detrement to the cause of equality. His name carries a whiff of Uncle Tomism.
Yet in some respects, Washington's emphasis on self-help, on "industrial education and the promotion of small business as the avenue of black advancement" (p. ix) is almost post-modern. Inculcating habits of responsibility, he chided his audiences that
You could change all that if you would take some of the money you spend in candy and help the school--that is
build a schoolhouse for your children. I say candy,
because one of the most disgusting sights to me is to
see a man, a great big man going around the streets
e...