FREE ESSAY ON BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
Booker Taliaferro Washington was the foremost black educator of the later 19th and early
20th centuries. He also had a major influence on the southern race relations and was the
dominant figure in black public affairs from 1895 until his death in 1915. Born a slave
on a small farm in the Virginia back country, he moved with his family after emancipation
to work in the salt furnaces and coal mines of West Virginia. After a secondary education
at Hampton Institute, he taught an upgraded school and experimented briefly with the
study of law and the ministry, but a teaching position at Hampton decided his future
career. In 1881 he founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial on the Hampton model in the
Black Belt of Alabama.
Though Washington offered little that was innovative in industrial education, which both
northern philanthropic foundations and southern leaders were already promoting, he became
its chief black exemplar and spokesman. In his advocacy of Tuskegee Institute and its
educational method, Washington revealed the political proficiency and accommodational
philosophy that were to characterize his career in the wider arena of race leadership. He
convinced southern white employers and governors that Tuskegee offered an education that
would keep blacks down on the farm and in the trades. To prospective northern donors and
particularly the new self- made millionaires such as Rockefeller and Carnegie he promised
the instillment of the Protestant work ethic. To blacks living within the limited
distances of the post- Reconstruction South, Washington held out industrial education as
the means of escape form the web of sharecropping and debt and the achievement of
attainable, self-employment, landownership, and small businesses. Washington acquired
local white approval and secured a small state accumulation, but it was northern
donations that made Tuskegee Institute by, 1900, the best-supported black educational
institution in the country. 
The Atlanta Compromise Address, delivered before the Cotton States Exposition in 1895,
enlarged Washington's influence into the arena of race relations and black leadership.
Washington offered black consent in disfranchisement and social segregation if whites
would encourage black progress in economic and educational opportunity. Hailed as a sage
by whites of both sections, Washington further consolidated his influence by his widely
read autobiography Up From Slavery (1901), the founding of the National Negro Business
League in 1900, his celebrated dinner at the White House in 1901, and control of
patronage politics as chief black advisor to Presidents Theodor Roosevelt and William
Howard Taft.
Washington kept his white following by conservative policies and moderate remarks, but he
faced growing black and white liberal opposition in the Niagra Movement (1905-9) and the
NAACP (1909-), groups demanding civil rights and encouraging protest in response to white
aggressions such as lynching, disfranchisement, and segregation laws. Washington
successfully repelled these critics, often by underhanded means. At the same time,
however, he tried to translate his own personal success into black advancement through
secret sponsorship of civil rights suits, serving on the boards of Fisk and Howard,
universities, and directing philanthropic aid to these and other black colleges. His
speaking tours and private persuasion tried to equalize public educational opportunities
and to reduce racial violence. These efforts were generally unsuccessful, and the year of
Washington's death marked the beginning of the Great Migration from the rural South to
the urban North. Washington's racial philosophy, pragmatically adjusted to the limiting
conditions of his own era, but did not survive the change. Booker T. Washington was a man
the greatly influenced that American society.