The Race Man

Up from History:
The Life of Booker T. Washington

By Robert J. Norrell

(Harvard University Press, 508 pp., $35)

I.

Once the most famous and influential African American in the United States (and probably the world), Booker T. Washington has earned at best mixed reviews in the decades since his death in 1915. Black intellectuals and political activists, from W. E. B. Du Bois to the present day, have generally seen Washington as a conservative racial accommodationist, yielding to the repressive power of Jim Crow and urging American blacks to abandon their political struggles for equality and instead to set their sights on a future of manual labor and petty property ownership.

Nothing brought Washington more notoriety than the speech that he delivered in 1895 at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta when, before a racially mixed audience, he appeared to acquiesce to the imperatives of legal segregation ("in all things purely social we can be as separate as the fingers") while encouraging African Americans to "cast down your buckets" in the Jim Crow South. Although he is still read in college (and some high school) classes, usually against Du Bois, and remains in the pantheon of black historical figures, Washington is widely ridiculed and derided in black communities for his seemingly shameless pursuit of white favor. For many, he is the classic "Uncle Tom." Even his most distinguished biographer, Louis R. Harlan, could not do much better than find at Washington's core a drive for personal power and a penchant for political manipulation. And now that we are in the Age of Obama, when a man of African descent who set his sights on higher education and threw himself into grassroots politics--in short, who did many of the things that Washing-
ton advised against--has been elected president of the United States, do we really need to reacquaint ourselves with the likes of Booker T. Washington? Do his life and views any longer have meaning for us? Do we need another biography?

Robert J. Norrell clearly thinks we do. The author of several histories of race and the American South, including a fine study of the civil rights movement in Tuskegee, Alabama, where Washington flourished, Norrell believes that both the professional and popular wisdoms on Washington are seriously mistaken. In his view, they overestimate the efficacy of protest as a vehicle for change and they underestimate the challenges that Washington faced. Americans, Norrell writes, have lost touch not only with the idea of educational, moral, and economic development as a means for integrating disadvantaged groups in the modern world, but also with the memory of how fiercely Southern whites contested the developmental projects that Washington devised. In Booker T. Washington, Norrell sees a sophisticated mind, a complex approach to social problems, and admirable goals for the people he sought to lead, all in a world that set profound limits on what he could expect to achieve. Rather than take the potentially suicidal path of resistance or simply concede the fight, Washington offered hope and optimism, together with an effort to rise above history itself. But who, we might ask, benefitted from his offer, and how?

Booker T. Washington lived an extraordinary life, as he was among the first to recognize. Indeed, much of what we know about his early years comes to us by way of two autobiographies that he published just after the turn of the twentieth century, The Story of My Life and Work, and the far better-known Up from Slavery. Both celebrated Washington's rise to the leadership of his race and provided powerful lessons as to how the perilous world of the late nineteenth century might be successfully navigated. Although Norrell does not uncover anything really new in the details, it is hard not to marvel at the ascent.

Washington's origins were as humble as any American origins could be. He was born a slave in 1856 on a small plantation in western Virginia. His father was a white man whose identity (he claimed) was never revealed to him, and his mother, Jane, was a slave who struggled mightily to protect and nurture her three children, and to instill the values of hard work and thrift. "If I have done anything in life worth attention," Washington subsequently reflected, "I feel sure that I inherited the disposition from my mother." Very young when the Civil War erupted, Washington later remembered how the slaves learned of the unfolding political events and how his mother prayed fervently "that Lincoln and his armies might be successful and that one day she and her children might be free."

By 1865, those prayers were answered, and Jane quickly gathered up the children and headed to the industrial village of Malden, West Virginia, two hundred
miles away, where her husband, Wash Ferguson, had found a job in the local saltworks. Although Booker (he had no surname at this point) initially went to work with Ferguson at the saltworks and then, for a time, in nearby coal mines (family economies were the basis of survival for most laboring people in the United States), his great desire was for an education. Stepfather Ferguson saw no purpose in the idea and was especially mindful of the lost income. But Jane helped her son gain the rudiments of literacy and then persuaded her husband to allow Booker to go to school if he would do an early shift at the saltworks. Enrolling in school set him on a better path and, not incidentally, required that he have a surname: he chose "Washington," which Norrell suggests associated him forever with the American nation and its founder, but was also the first name of his stepfather. He later added Taliaferro as a middle name, which his mother had apparently given him shortly after his birth.