Booker T Washington (April 15, 1856 – November 14, 1915) was a leader of the African-American community in the United States in the early 20th century. After his death, his style of publicly accepting segregation, working with rich and powerful whites, and avoiding public protests came under attack by militant blacks.
Washington was born into slavery to a white father and a black slave mother on a rural farm in southwestern Franklin County, Virginia; the slaves were freed in 1865. He attended Hampton University and Wayland Seminary. In 1881, he became the first head of the new normal school (teacher's college), which became Tuskegee University in Alabama.
Washington was the dominant figure in the African-American community from 1890 to 1915, especially after he achieved prominence for his Atlanta Compromise of 1895. White leaders in politics and philanthropy recognized him as the spokesperson for African-American citizens.
Representing the last generation of black leaders born into slavery, he was credible when speaking publicly and seeking educational improvements for those freedmen who had remained in the New South in an uneasy second-class relationship with whites under the "Jim Crow" system of segregated schools and jobs.
He built his leadership of the African-American community nationwide through a network of core supporters, including black educators, ministers, editors, and businessmen. He gained access to top national leaders in politics, philanthropy, and education and was awarded honorary degrees.
Critics called his network of supporters the "Tuskegee Machine."
Late in his career, Dr. Washington was criticized by the leaders of the NAACP (formed in 1909), especially by W.E.B. DuBois, who demanded a stronger, more public line on civil rights protests. After being labeled "The Great Accommodator" by DuBois, Dr. Washington replied that confrontation would lead to disaster for the outnumbered blacks and that cooperation with supportive whites was the only way to overcome pervasive racism in the long run.
Although he did some aggressive civil rights work secretively, such as funding court cases, he seemed to truly believe in skillful accommodation to many of the social realities of the age of segregation. While apparently resolved to many undesirable social conditions in the short term, he also clearly had his eyes on a better future for blacks.
Through his own personal experience, Dr. Washington knew that a good education is a major and powerful tool for individuals to collectively accomplish a better future.
Washington's philosophy and tireless work on education issues helped him enlist both the moral and substantial financial support of many philanthropists. He became friends with millionaires such as Andrew Carnegie, Henry H. Rogers Sears, Roebuck, and Company President Julius Rosenwald.
They funded his causes, especially in education. To upgrade the schools open to blacks, Washington solicited millions of dollars, often using matching funds that stimulated local contributions. Washington's system established and operated over 5,000 schools and supporting resources throughout the South. This work was a major part of his legacy and was continued (and expanded through the Rosenwald Fund and others) for many years after Washington's death in 1915.
Booker T. Washington was the central figure in improving the overall friendship and working relationship between the races in the United States and heading off the "herrenvolk" racism of lower-class whites expressed through lynching and led by Ben Tillman.
His powerful autobiography, Up From Slavery (1901), was widely read among blacks and sympathetic whites. It told the story of his own emancipation, education, and successful career to inspire southern blacks who had been denied opportunity for education and self-improvement.
He carried the same theme forward in The Story of the Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery (1909). Washington, in contrast to the civil rights activists like DuBois and the NAACP, deemphasized politics in favor of the importance of cultivating middle-class habits of skill, industry, thrift, and character so that blacks, having prepared themselves educationally and culturally for the responsibility, would be accepted by liberal whites as meriting civil rights.
Early Years, Emancipation, and Education
Booker T. Washington was born a slave on April 5, 1856, on the Burroughs farm in the community of Hale's Ford, Virginia. His mother, Jane, was a black slave who worked as a cook, and his father was a white man who owned a nearby farm. Under the laws of the time, his mother's status also made young Booker a slave. The "T" in his name stood for Taliaferro, his owner's name. He recalled Emancipation after the Civil War in early 1865:
As the great day drew nearer, there was more singing in the slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring, and lasted later into the night. Most of the verses of the plantation songs had some reference to freedom... Some man who seemed to be a stranger (a United States officer, I presume) made a little speech and then read a rather long paper, the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. After the reading, we were told that we were all free and could go when and where we pleased. My mom, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying but fearing that she would never live to see.
In the summer of 1865, at the age of nine, Booker and his brother John and his sister, Amanda, moved to Kanawha County, West Virginia, with their mother to join his stepfather, whose last name was Washington. When he could, young Booker attended school and learned to read and write.
Leaving home at sixteen, Booker T. Washington enrolled at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia. Tuition was low, and school jobs were available, so Washington paid his own way.
The normal school (teachers college) at Hampton was founded for the purpose of training black teachers and had been largely funded by church groups. From 1878 to 1879, he attended Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C., and returned to teach at Hampton.
Soon, Hampton officials recommended him to become the first principal of a similar school being founded in Alabama.
Tuskegee Institute
The black organizers of a new all-black state normal school in Tuskegee, Alabama, found the energetic and visionary leader they sought in 25-year-old Booker T. Washington, who bore the strong recommendation of Hampton president Samuel C. Armstrong. Washington thus became the first principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, with a $2,000 annual appropriation from the state legislature.
The new school opened on July 4, 1881, initially using space rented from a local church. The next year, Washington purchased a former plantation, which became the permanent site of the campus. The school later grew to become the present-day Tuskegee University.
Tuskegee provided an academic education and instruction for teachers but included skills such as carpentry and masonry that the graduates could teach in all-black schools in Alabama. The institute illustrates Washington's aspirations for his race. His theory was that by providing these skills, African Americans would play their part in society, and this would lead to acceptance by white Americans.
He believed that African Americans would eventually gain full civil rights by showing themselves to be responsible, reliable American citizens.
He was head of the school until his death in 1915. By then, Tuskegee's endowment had grown to over $1.5 million, compared to the initial $2,000 annual appropriation.
Family Life
Washington was married three times. In his autobiography Up From Slavery, he gave all three of his wives enormous credit for their work at Tuskegee and was emphatic that he would not have been successful without them.
Fannie N. Smith was from Malden, West Virginia, the same Kanawha River Valley town located eight miles upriver from Charleston where Washington had lived from age nine to sixteen (and maintained ties throughout his later life). Washington and Smith were married in the summer of 1882. They had one child, Portia M. Washington. Fannie died in May 1884.
Washington next Wed Olivia A. Davidson in 1885. Davidson was born in the black community in Ohio, spent time teaching in Mississippi and Tennessee, and received her education at Hampton Institute and the Massachusetts State Normal School at Framingham. Washington met Davidson at Tuskegee, where she had come to teach.
She later became the assistant principal there. They had two sons, Booker T. Washington Jr., and Ernest Davidson Washington, before she died in 1889.
Washington's third marriage took place in 1893 to Margaret James Murray. She was from Mississippi and was a graduate of Fisk University. They had no children together. Murray outlived Washington and died in 1925.
Atlanta Compromise and Benefactors
Booker T. Washington's 1895 Atlanta Compromise address, given at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, was widely welcomed in the African-American community and among liberal whites North and South. He was supported by W.E.B. DuBois at the time, but several years later, the two had a falling out. Washington valued the "industrial" education oriented toward actual jobs available to the majority of African Americans at the time, and DuBois demanded a "classical" (liberal arts) education among an elite he called "The Talented Tenth."
Both sides sought to define the best means to improve the conditions of the post-Civil War African-American community. While not publicly attacking Jim Crow laws, Washington privately contributed funds for legal challenges against legal segregation and disfranchisement, such as his secret support in the case of Giles v. Harris, which went before the United States Supreme Court in 1903.
Booker T. Washington aggressively fought off competition, such as the Niagara Movement, formed in 1905 and practically defunct by 1909. In 1909, Du Bois and other blacks from the Niagara movement joined with a group of white liberals in the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which proved a more formidable opponent of Washington since it built a national network of local chapters.
Blacks were solidly Republican, but after 1890, many lost the vote in the deep South (but continued to vote in border and northern states). Washington emerged as their spokesman and was routinely consulted by Republican national about the appointment of African Americans to political positions throughout the nation. He worked and socialized with many white politicians and notables.
He argued that the surest way for blacks eventually to gain equal rights was to demonstrate patience, industry, thrift, and usefulness and said that these were the keys to improved conditions for African Americans in the United States and that they could not expect too much, having only just been granted emancipation.
Booker T. Washington was associated with the richest and most powerful businessmen and politicians of the era. He was seen as a spokesperson for African Americans and became a conduit for funding educational programs. His contacts included such diverse and well-known men of the Gilded Age as Andrew Carnegie, President William Howard Taft, Henry Huttleston Rogers, and Julius Rosenwald, to whom he made the need for better educational facilities well-known.
As a result, countless small schools were established through his efforts, in programs that continued many years after his death.
Death
Booker T. Washington remained as the principal of Tuskegee Institute until his death on November 14, 1915.
The cause of his death was unclear, but was clear that he had worked himself to exhaustion and had aged rapidly. He collapsed in New York City and was brought home until his death.
His ideals would be picked up by men such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackie Robinson.
He still remains one of the most effective men to work for the rights of his fellow African Americans.