As a child of the 1960s, my view of Booker T. Washington was shaped by the contemporary belief that while the famous founder of Tuskegee Institute was a civil-rights trailblazer in some respects, he was an Uncle Tom for having acquiesced in the rampant racial discrimination that was now being challenged by the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. But he did find an amazing number of things to make from peanuts.
That whites like myself — and some blacks, as well — confuse Booker T. Washington with George Washington Carver, the great botanist, is a symptom of how Washington’s star has gone into eclipse and has remained so, with annual time-outs for Black History Month. This makes the recently published Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington by Robert J. Norrell a welcome corrective for a true American hero whose legacy changing attitudes about civil rights have distorted.
Norrell, a University of Tennessee history professor, cuts right to the chase at the outset of this very fine book in noting that Washington detractors of the 1960s and since — including a goodly number of historians who accuse him of outright villainy because Dr. King’s embrace of protest would have been anathema to him — fall into the trap of applying contemporary expectations to a man who lived generations earlier.
Yet Washington also was vilified by some of his most prominent contemporary peers, notably W.E.B. DuBois, the leading voice for a bloc of northern blacks who believed Washington’s emphasis on self help and refusal to embrace more militant actions to be antithetical to their cause. DuBois was to supplant the soft-spoken educator as the leading black voice of the early 20th century.
Please click here to read the rest of this really long review at Kiko’s House, and here for an index to selected book reviews.