I have been looking forward to writing about Booker T. Washington, who was born on April 5, 1856. But it seems especially timely to be writing about him today.
In some ways, Washington, who founded the Tuskegee Institute and was the dominant Black political leader in the late 1800s and early 1900s, has been on my radar since late April 2020, not long after I started this #stampoftheday project. One of those early posts featured Jane Addams, one of 35 Famous Americans portrayed on a series of stamps issued in 1940.
Those 35 people included 32 white men, 3 white women (Addams, Louisa May Alcott and Frances Willard), and Washington, who was the first Black person to appear on a US postage stamp (a milestone that required several years of lobbying). That 10-cent stamp, which is one two stamps that are today’s #stampoftheday was issued on April 7, 1940, turned out to be the most popular of the 35 Famous American stamps. (A 3-cent stamp, issued on April 5, 1956, in honor of the centennial of Washington’s birth, is the other #stampoftheday.)
To say Washington was a complicated figure would be an understatement. In 1881, at age 25, he was tapped to head the new Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (later Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, a secondary school located in the heart of Alabama’s “Black Belt.” He soon became the nation’s leading proponent of industrial education for blacks.
In 1895 he became famous because of a speech he to a mostly white crowd at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition. Washington started by discussing the need to give Blacks – especially in the South – a basic education, due process in law, and a chance to work – ideas that were not met with enthusiasm. But then he said that with such tools, Blacks did not need to interact with or be equal to whites. Rather, he said, holding up a hand, “we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
Those ideas catapulted him to national prominence. As historian Louis R. Harlan, author of two award-winning biographies on Washington’s life, wrote in 1971, the speech came at a time “when a tide of white aggression was engulfing the black communities and when white Americans were either joyfully or sadly proclaiming the final failure of the political approach of Reconstruction. Washington offered both races a negotiated peace.”
While Harlan noted “this peace was never actually consummated,” he added, “white Americans crowned Washington ‘king of a captive people.’ The price of his power, however, was acceptance of the overruling power of the whites. His public utterances were limited to what whites approved. He urged Negroes to have faith that their rewards would come through the white man’s Puritan ethic of work and striving, the conventional moral philosophy and economic thought of the day.”
However, Harlan noted while in public Washington came across as rather meek and apolitical, in private he was ruthless in trying to stymie his enemies, tactical in providing significant (but secret) support for many efforts to stymie the worst of Jim Crow laws, and systematic in building a wide network of supporters and allies.
“He drew less from the teachings of Jesus than from those of Machiavelli,” Harlan wrote, adding that Washington went about using “methods similar to those of urban political bosses” to build what “came to be called the Tuskegee Machine.” In fact, by “weaving many strands into an intricate web of influence and power, Washington became a minority-group boss whose power went beyond politics into almost every aspect of the life that black people were compelled to live in early twentieth-century America.” However by 1915, his influence was waning and Washington, who died that year, was beginning to admit that his accommodationist strategies had fallen short.
The news of the past week underscores that Washington’s choices and actions aren’t just the vestiges of history. Consider, for example, that more than 100 years after Washington concluded that there was little to be gained by directly confronting white political and policing power, black men testifying at the George Floyd trial are yet again describing what it means to know that a variety of forces are still arrayed against you. Or consider not only the debates over the blatant efforts in Georgia and elsewhere to restrict voting rights but also the ways that those debates are forcing both black political leaders and corporate leaders to decide whether, when, and how publicly to fight against those efforts.
By today’s standards, Washington’s response to such challenges was too accommodationist. But it’s too easy to dismiss him. As Harlan, a life-long civil rights activist noted in a 1984 New York Times interview given not long after his biography won the Pulitzer Prize, “the truth is, I began [the study of Washington] with the intention of treating [him] much more ironically than I did.”
Instead, as he wrote in early piece, Washington “illustrated the uneasiness of every head that wears a crown. He was sure that history would vindicate his actions when the whole tale was told. That verdict is uncertain, but there is no doubt that he was far more than a foot-dragging “Uncle Tom.” He was a man, with all that the name implies of strength and weakness. Some will see him sympathetically as a Brer Rabbit moving adroitly through the briar patch. Others will view him unfavorably as a classical deep-dyed villain. Whatever the judgment that black history pronounces on Booker T. Washington, it is clear that black history, if it is to be more than a procession of cardboard figures, must like other history have its shades of gray, its villains as well as heroes, its imperfect human characters as well as saints.”
That’s why I was looking forward to this stamp. I knew there was going to be an important lesson, I just didn’t know what it would be.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.