Booker T. Washington was born in slavery, in Virginia,
on April 5, 1856. In his autobiography, entitled Up From Slavery,
published in 1901, Washington says that his father was an unknown white
man. Recall that Frederick Douglas had said the same thing (his master
was thought to have been his father). Booker T. Washington was raised by
his stepfather. Washington graduated from Hampton Institute in 1875. From
there he went on to Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama, as teacher and principal.
In 1895, Booker T. Washington delivered a speech at the Cotton States Exposition
in Atlanta. Sometimes it is just called the Atlanta Exposition. There,
he said, "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate
as the five fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual
progress." This speech catapulted Washington to national prominence
and acclaim. The white South adored Booker T. Washington, who seemed to
be saying that Jim Crow segregation was okay with black people. Washington's
position was conservative. He saw no need for social equality between blacks
and whites.
THE TUSKEGEE IDEA
Washington was the principal (David Levering Lewis, Du Bois, Vol. I, p. 221) of Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama. It was a school for industrial or vocational education for Negroes. Washington felt that a liberal arts, college education, was senseless for black people. Black people did not need to learn Greek or Latin, or literature or foreign language. Black people did not need a college education. There were no jobs for college-educated Negroes. Instead, Washington realized that 3/4ths of African American people in the South were sharecroppers, trapped in debt and poverty in the agricultural sector. Washington wanted to free black people from the dead-end, and the shackles of sharecropping.He wanted blacks to become self-sufficient yeomen farmers, to become landowners like the white man. He wanted black people to learn to work with hands, as skilled craftsmen and artisans, as tanners, coopers, masons, bricklayers, carpenters. He wanted them to have a skill and a trade so that they could work FOR THEMSELVES. Washington's school was supported by white philanthropy. The Rockefellers and the Peabody's gave him money, and supported industrial, and mechanical and agricultural education for Negroes as the ONLY kind of education suitable for the inferior Negro people. Ultra white supremacists opposed any education for Negroes at all. Moderate white supremacists agreed with Washington, and felt that industrial education for Negroes was okay because it was the kind of education that "would best fit the black man to serve the white man." Washington, however, was playing with the devil.
ACCOMMODATION; TEMPORARILY DEFER CIVIL RIGHTS
Further, Washington said that civil rights agitation was foolishness, and it would just get black people killed in the South. Remember that the 1890s was the peak of lynching, with 250 blacks being lynched in 1892. Washington felt that if black people had jobs and careers, and proved their economic value to the community, they could earn the respect of the good white people--the paternalists. Washington felt that for the time-being, African Americans should temporarily relinquish their civil rights and political rights and social rights until they had achieved economic independence. Washington felt that a poor, indebted sharecropper didn't need a vote so much as he needed land of his own so that he could become a farmer, a landowner, and escape sharecropping. His first need was economic, not political. To this end, in 1900, he established the National Negro Business League. Washington's first priority was economic development, whether through land ownership or a skilled trade or entrepreneurship. Washington was the leading voice on behalf of black entrepreneurship, or black owned businesses. Washington felt that, for the time being, African Americans should acquiesce to or not object to segregation. This conservative position is called accommodation, or accommodationism. It says that we should accommodate to or adjust to or submit to civil and political and social second class citizenship, for the time-being, until we have been able to achieve economic power and self-sufficiency. Washington felt that in life, and in reality, you have to crawl before you can walk.
Privately, (speaking to AAs) Washington said that later, AFTER black people had gained economic independence and power as landowners and tradesmen and merchants, THEN they could reclaim their civil and political and social rights from a position of economic strength-- rather than fight an unequal battle for them from a position of weakness. Publicly, he did not say this to whites. Washington wanted to postpone the issue. He wanted a delay. He said, in essence, if we fight now, in 1895, we are doomed. They are too strong and we are too weak and we are certain to lose. You don't fight when you know you will lose. Washington's position was one of desperation, maybe even defeatism. To some black people, however, this position was cowardice, and opportunism (fight when it is convenient).
TWO SELVES: PUBLIC VERSUS PRIVATE
In public, for the ears of the white man, Washington counseled patience and accommodation to the status quo and to Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement. He refrained from condemning lynching. In private, he provided funds to other African Americans to bring lawsuits challenging segregation and disenfranchisement. Washington was playing a double game.
BUT THE TRAINING IS FOR JOBS THAT ARE OBSOLETE
Part of the difficulty, however, was that the economy was already moving from handicraft production to mechanization and automation and the assembly line. Why train a man to stitch shoes by hand when there are machines that can do it cheaply? Why train people to be trained tailors when there are sewing machines? The jobs that Washington was training people for were jobs that were being rendered obsolete by the industrial revolution anyway.He wanted economic independence and self-determination for black people. Economically, he wanted the right thing. But the price that he asked black people to pay in order to attain this economic independence was too high. Washington was 50-100 years too late. Nevertheless, Booker T. Washington was the white power structure's favorite Negro until he died in 1915. And from the death of Frederick Douglas in 1895 until 1915 Washington was the most famous African American in the U.S. Nevertheless, Washington is generally regarded as a "sell-out" and an "Uncle Tom." He was the "white man's Nigger."
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’S "formula" can be summarized as follows:
EDUCATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMIC
AGENDA AGENDA AGENDA
Industrial education accommodation
black capitalism
As an alternative
to
(black owned
To sharecropping
segregation
businesses,
(temporarily)
entrepreneurs,
land ownership)
Basically, as the South began to industrialize and diversify into mining, lumber, steel production and textiles, it relied upon investment capital from the North. The "New South" was supposed to be industrial (instead of the plantation). The New South industrialists and their Northern capitalist partners desired a cheap, docile, subservient labor force. Many whites in the South entered into a corrupt bargain. Employers would enforce segregation and exclude blacks, or relegate them to only the lowest and most menial jobs. Employers would pay whites more than blacks. In return, whites must renounce unions and demands for higher wages. Basically poor blacks and poor whites were fighting for the crumbs and scraps at the bottom of the barrel.
Booker T. Washington "succeeded" in attracting Northern white money for black education by saying what he knew his white patrons and sponsors wanted to hear. William Baldwin, former vice president of the Southern Railroad Company, and president of the Long Island Railroad, was Boston-bred and Harvard-educated. He was a trustee and benefactor of Tuskegee.
George Peabody Foster gave $2.5 million to Southern education between 1867 and 1914.
Robert C. Ogden, the director of Wanamaker’s, was a trustee of Tuskegee.
John Rockefeller, Jr. gave $1 million to the General Education Board (GEB) in 1902. By 1930, the GEB had given $176 million for white colleges in the South and $21 million for the historically black colleges. In 1903 Andrew Carnegie gave Booker T. Washinton bonds from U.S. Steel, valued at $600,000. Tuskegee soon accrued the largest endowment of any black college (in that time period). BT Washington was the channel through which white money flowed to black higher education.**