Booker T. Washington

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

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being written into law, and blacks being systematically disenfranchized in Southern states. There was active pressure within the Republican Party to invoke the enforcement clause of the 14th Amendment, and reduce Southern congressional representation in proportion to the number of disenfranchised blacks, and a plank to this effect was written into the 1904 Republican platform. Washington opposed this plank, writing to Roosevelt that "as a matter of righting wrongs in the South, you of course know that I have never felt that reduction of representation was a remedy" (pp. 26-27). Roosevelt, in his reply, noted that the plank referred to action by Congress, not the President, and he simply ignored it. In the course of Theodore Roosevelt's first term, Washington had had considerable success in patronage politics, successfully persuading the president to resist the domination of Southern Republican politics by "lily white" factions, and securing some appointive federal positions in Southern states for his own black supporters. During this period, Washington's alliance with Roosevelt reinforced his own standing in the African-American community, since Roosevelt and the Republicans were seen as champions of civil rights. In R

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