Booker T. Washington: Hero or Villain?

Washington at his desk, around 1900.

(Library of Congress)

The writer Elizabeth Gardner Hines’s first memory of hearing about Booker T. Washington is typical: “I can clearly remember another black student in high school or college making a joke about ‘blacks like Booker T. Washington,’” she recalls, “and how everyone laughed, as if we all understood what a terrible thing that was to be.” The author of the autobiography Up From Slavery and founder of the Tuskegee Institute was a celebrity in his day, who visited the Queen of England and supped with the President. So why, less than a century later, was he written off as a joke, or worse, a race traitor? Does he deserve the bad rap he gets today?

Hines and 19 other prominent African-Americans weigh in on those questions in Uncle Tom or New Negro: African Americans Reflect on Booker T. Washington and Up From Slavery 100 Years Later (Harlem Moon, $15.95), a new compilation of essays drawn from interviews conducted by the author Rebecca Carroll. Washington serves as a jumping-off point for a debate about issues of tribalism, permissible vs. impermissible blackness, what’s right and wrong about hip-hop culture, the gains and shortfalls of the civil rights movement, and modern black leadership.

“‘Enigmatic’” seems to be the interviewees’ favorite adjective for their subject. Washington, born in Virginia in 1856, was nine when the Emancipation Proclamation freed him. Starting with only a shanty in 1881, he built the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama from the ground up, developing an internationally acclaimed institution over the next decades. He ruffled feathers when he recommended that young blacks learn trades, while the NAACP founder W.E.B. Du Bois was championing broad-based liberal education. The duel between Du Bois and Washington, and indeed between many modern civil rights activists and Washington, emerges in Uncle Tom or New Negro as one of intellectuals vs. laborers, theory vs. practical ideas, political and social vs. economic gains, and North vs. South. Needless to say the book doesn’t actually solve any of these arguments, but it does offer interesting perspectives on Washington from many niches in the black community, from young and old, Northern and Southern, mayors and hip-hop politicos, journalists and CEOs, lawyers and activists.

Although most of the interviewees in Uncle Tom or New Negro believe Washington had the best interests of blacks at heart, they disagree about the morality of his methods. To build Tuskegee and keep it afloat, he relied on white benefactors, since no black Americans at the time had enough wealth to donate, and he had to play a game with those whites. He charmed huge sums from the Carnegies and Rockefellers, but many feel that to keep the money flowing he sold blacks short, by saying what whites wanted to hear.

Perhaps his single most reviled sentence comes from his speech to a mixed audience at the opening of the Cotton States and International Exhibition in Atlanta, in 1895: “We shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. 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.”

While that remark and others like it draw suitable outrage from many of the Uncle Tom or New Negro interviewees for endorsing segregation, the journalist Karen Hunter writes that such statements were a subtle psychological tactic, complimenting whites to soften them and then steal power. Others caution readers to take Washington’s words—as well as his belief that blacks should work within the existing society rather than alienating whites by agitating for change—in the context of his time and place. As the political analyst Earl Hutchinson points out, had Washington spoken avidly against segregation, Tuskegee would have lost its funding.

Nearly everyone agrees that Washington was looking for the best way to prepare blacks, who had just emerged from centuries of slavery with little or no formal education, to make their way in a horribly racist society. Northern intellectuals could perhaps afford to think about education and social change in the long term; impoverished Southern blacks needed to put food on the table right away. The author Debra Dickerson reminds us that Washington risked being lynched because of what activism he did show. Others, like the filmmaker Avon Kirkland, argue that regardless of the context Washington’s segregationism held blacks back and may continue to do so today.

The book’s consensus, if there is one, is to favor Washington’s economic policy, which encouraged self-sufficiency, and ignore the outdated accomodationist parts of his message. Washington sought economic equality for blacks first, expecting it to serve as a base for political and social equality. But as history has shown, true economic parity comes last if and when it comes. Whether because blacks have forgotten Washington’s teachings or because his tactics were ineffective or harmful, 40 years after the civil rights movement, black business ownership today is still nowhere near on a level with that of whites. Now may be the time to focus on the economic advancement Washington concentrated on 100 years ago. As Cora Daniels says in Uncle Tom or New Negro, if Washington were alive today “his approach would be much more on point; now is when we need black folks to care more about ownership of self and work, more so than of material excess.”

The interview-essays in Uncle Tom or New Negro come across as conversational and strikingly personal, illustrating how Washington has affected each writer’s life and career. The book serves as a testament not only to his enduring power but also to the life and vitality of history in the black community and in individuals’ lives. Some of the essays, of course, are more illuminating than others. A few seem tangential, efforts to dash off an answer to a questionnaire without doing any extra research. As a whole, though, the immediacy of the writing and experience in Uncle Tom or New Negro forms a stimulating contrast to the abstractions of more academic histories.

Perhaps the book’s most refreshing aspect is that not just one but two essayists reframe the Washington debate in the contemporary parlance of “playa hatin’”—jealous rage at success. “I think what you get with most of Washington’s contemporaries, Du Bois included, is what we now know as playa hatin.’ Those persons who looked at Washington in a negative light were just playa haters,” writes the philosophy scholar Bill Lawson. “But it’s important to remember that . . . the black masses understood his message and the value of his program. Consider that the statue of Washington in Tuskegee was built from funds raised by poor black people, which shows you that on the ground level there was all this love for Washington among the black masses.”

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.