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.

Want a hint about what the president will say tonight? Check out the guest list for the First Lady's box, which the White House just published. It's full of people who had trouble paying for their medical care--people who, though from different walks of life, all had to confront the same essential dilemmas. Whether or not Obama mentions them explicitly, it suggests the personal stakes Americans have in reform will be a major theme tonight--as it should be, but hasn't always in the last few months.

One other notable guest: Vietoria Kennedy, widow of Senator Ted.

Full list of guests follows: