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Booker T. Washington MJ Wade -
Summary • Booker T. Washington was a great black educator, who rose up out of slavery and illiteracy to become as such. When slavery was abolished, he enrolled in a school for freed blacks. He later opened a Black school in Alabama, and told the people he educated and their peers not to expect racial equality immediately, and to take part in the reconstruction. He was often referred to as “The Wizard of Tuskegee” because of his highly developed political skills.
Early Years • Booker T. Washington was born in 1856 in Franklin County, Virginia, on a plantation owned by James Burroughs. He was the son of an unknown white man, and a slave cook named Jane. • They lived in a one-room log cabin on this plantation, and according to his mother, the father played no part in his life whatsoever; he remains unnamed. • After the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Booker and his mother walked 500 miles to find work in the salt mines in Malden, West Virginia.
Goals/Methods • Booker wanted to confront racism indirectly; meaning, he didn’t want to fight the white people who were racist, but to let them be racist, until it settled down, and take action when violence wouldn’t be an option. He educated his peers and even children in these ways, so as to spawn a generation that could resolve problems without resorting to violence. • This was met with criticism by the NAACP, and by W. E. Dubois, another civil rights activist. Dubois had said that he advocated activism to confront civil rights, as letting the white people be racist would never solve anything, and would drag on for as long as it could.
Reception • Washington was perceived as a supporter for the education for the free black man during the times of the post-reconstruction, Jim Crowe-era. He represented the last generation of black leaders who were born into slavery. • Due to his well-used political skills, he was often asked for advice by former U.S. Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. • Critics often referred to him as the “Wizard of Tuskegee” because of his highly developed political skills.
Legacy • He was held in high regard by business-oriented conservatives, and because of his creation of a nation-wide machine based on the black middle-class, white philanthropy, and his support of the Republican Party. • Booker T. Washington had many things to teach people of his era, however, we can still look at his methods today and realize that by ways of perseverance rather than violence, good things may come. If people in our time would do that, there would be a fair bit of worries and anxieties removed from the people, and their leaders.
Citations • . (Sadlier, Rosemary. "Chapter 4/Unit 3." Black History: Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Toronto, ON: Emond Montgomery Pub., 2009. N. pag. Print.) • (Harlan, Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915. Vol. 2. New York: Oxford UP, 1983. Print.) • (Woodward, Comer Vann., and Wendell Holmes. Stephenson. Origins of the New South: 1877-1913. [Baton Rouge, La.]: Louisiana State Univ. [u.a., 1967. Print.)
