Washington, Booker T.

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Washington, Booker T. 1856–1915

Booker Taliafero Washington, a black educator, orator, and leader, was born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia, on April 5, 1856. His mother, Jane, was a cook, and his father was a white man who has remained unidentified. After emancipation in 1865, Booker, his mother, and his brother moved to Malden, West Virginia, where, with his stepfather, he worked in salt and coal mines and as a houseboy for the mine owners, General Lewis Ruffner and his wife Viola. In 1872, after acquiring a rudimentary education at public schools and from Mrs. Ruffner, Washington enrolled in the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, in Virginia.

Founded to educate former slaves, the school taught habits of rectitude, hard work, and service along with industrial and liberal arts. Washington flourished at what was essentially a high school, and after graduation he was invited to teach at his alma mater.

In 1881, Washington accepted a position as principal for a new state-funded school for blacks in Tuskegee, Alabama. Modeling the school after Hampton, Washington built Tuskegee into a showcase of industrial education and black self-help. Although the idea of industrial education was not original with Washington, he became its most ardent and noted black advocate. By century’s end, Tuskegee boasted an endowment of nearly two million dollars, more than one hundred buildings, a faculty of nearly two hundred black men and women, and an international student body.

In 1895, Washington was catapulted to national prominence when he delivered a five-minute speech at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition. His “Atlanta Compromise” speech summarized the program of education, self-help, and racial cooperation that he had pursued at Tuskegee. Whites concluded that Washington offered a palatable resolution of the nation’s “Negro problem,” namely black acquiescence to white supremacy in social, political, and economic matters. Washington himself believed that he was striking a bargain with whites, not surrendering to them. In return for white aid for greater educational and economic opportunity, he set aside black claims for civil and political equality in the South. Accommodating to, but not endorsing, racial segregation, Washington proposed, “In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

His widely published speech caught the attention of white philanthropists, who selected Washington to serve as the conduit through which charitable donations reached black institutions across the nation. His influence soon extended to national politics, and two U.S. presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, discussed race relations with him and solicited his advice regarding patronage appointments. Washington simultaneously extended his influence over black institutions by founding the National Negro Business League in 1900 to foster black entrepreneurship, by subsidizing newspapers and organizations, and by undermining groups that were hostile to him. By the turn of the century, no meeting or discussion on racial topics was complete without an appearance or a comment by Washington.

Washington’s rise to leadership was symptomatic of the deteriorating status of African Americans at the end of the nineteenth century. Increasingly denied meaningful political participation in the South, blacks had few mechanisms to select black leaders who could be assured of recognition

by whites. Whites, not blacks, effectively selected the leaders who spoke on behalf of blacks. In Washington’s case, connections, ambition, and circumstances, rather than a democratic process, anointed him a race leader. Yet his power remained tenuous because it derived from white patronage, which could never be taken for granted.

Constrained by the source of his power, Washington elected to use furtive means to challenge white supremacy. While voicing only tepid opposition to the disenfranchisement of southern blacks, he secretly funded legal challenges to constitutions in Louisiana and Alabama that restricted black voting. His private behavior, including a controversial meal with Theodore Roosevelt in the White House in 1901, also periodically breeched racial conventions, demonstrating that, despite his talk about the races being as distinct as fingers on a hand, he acceded to segregation only out of expediency.

Washington’s power over black institutions inevitably bred resentment among African Americans, however. As early as 1892, Washington alienated black clergy by suggesting that they were unfit to lead the black community, and his emphasis on industrial education irked black proponents of liberal arts education. In addition, his dismissal of electoral politics outraged black politicians who were struggling to retain their offices and influence in the face of disenfranchisement. In 1903, Washington’s perceived persecution of William Monroe Trotter, a black editor and civil rights activist in Boston, drew out other critics, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who fumed about his restrained denunciations of lynching; W. Calvin Chase, a Washington D.C. editor, who criticized Washington’s alleged “political dictatorship”; and W. E. B. Du Bois, who offered a comprehensive criticism of Tuskegee and its creator. A year later, Du Bois and other militants gathered at Niagara Falls, Canada, where they founded the so-called Niagara Movement. By 1909 they had forged a coalition of white racial liberals, reform-minded social workers, socialist radicals, and black militants into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Washington eyed the NAACP warily, and his relationship with the organization soon deteriorated into open and permanent competition. An even greater threat to Washington’s power was the election of Woodrow Wilson, a southern-born Democrat, who rapidly expanded the segregation of federal offices. No longer able to use his influence in the nation’s capitol to reward allies and punish critics, and no longer able to control the black press as he once had, Washington was dismayed in 1913 when the NAACP turned to the issue of black education and organized an association of black industrial and secondary schools.

In the final years of his life, despite his deteriorating health, Washington maintained a punishing regimen of speaking engagements, meetings, and fund-raising tours. He seemingly became impatient with the obstacles that impeded his program and became more outspoken in his condemnation of lynching, segregation, and disenfranchisement. By 1912, Washington’s increasingly strident denunciations of racial injustice surprised even his blacks critics. The optimism that had made his earlier pronouncements seem far too optimistic was replaced by a new urgency. Finally, on November 14, 1915, his body gave out and he died of “nervous exhaustion and arteriosclerosis.” Appropriately, he was buried in a cemetery on the grounds of Tuskegee, the institution and cause to which he had devoted his life.

Washington was married three times. He married his first wife, Fannie N. Smith, in 1882. They had one child, Portia M. Washington, before Fannie’s death in 1884. A year later, Washington married Olivia A. Davidson, a teacher at Tuskegee who subsequently served as assistant principal at Tuskegee. Before her death in 1889, she and Washington had two sons, Booker T. Washington Jr. and Ernest Davidson Washington. In 1893, Washington married Margaret James Murray. As Washington achieved international prominence, Murray likewise emerged as a leading figure in various women’s organizations. They had no children together. Murray died in 1925.