Booker T. Washington and the True Source of Dignity

(Lifting the Veil of Ignorance, monument to Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee University. Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)

Tuskegee, Alabama

The contemporary language of racial justice tends to focus on external threats to human dignity rather than on what individuals and groups do for themselves to maintain or rebuild a sense of self worth against the odds. The two narratives are not mutually exclusive, of course. But nor are they of equal power. While some forms of justice can be achieved by confronting those who’ve trampled on your rights, individual dignity and self worth can never be granted by a third party. They can only be developed internally, usually through a combination of strong will and hard work.

Yet because of the emphasis on the wound over the healing, minority progress is too often discussed exclusively in terms of the need for recognition from white society or redress from the government. Particularly since the 1960s, minority protest has eclipsed capacity building in the eyes of the intellectual elite. That’s likely because “the experience of rights-assertion,” as critical race theorist Patricia Williams has written, can give individuals the feeling “of empowerment of an internal and very personal sort,” tantamount even to the “process of finding the self.”

While not insignificant, validation only goes far. And it still places the power to validate in the hands of a third party. At the very least, it requires a straw man against whom to define oneself.

Sometimes, the exclusive focus on protest and validation evades the question of rights or even and formulating solutions to any given problem. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, for instance, activists focused on mounting a racial validation campaign rather than directly addressing specific ways to curb police abuse. Almost 3 years later, it’s unclear what that campaign achieved substantively.

It is this narrow focus on protest–whether for rights or validation–that has led to the sidelining of one of the great men of American history, Booker T. Washington.

Washington, who was born into slavery in 1856, founded a teachers college in Tuskegee, Alabama, on July 4, 1881, under a charter granted by the state’s legislature. What started as the Tuskegee Institute grew to become Tuskegee University. The initial emphasis of the institute was to provide students with both academic and vocational training. Its first students built the school’s buildings, grew its food, and generally provided for most of the student body’s necessities. Implicit in these duties was Washington’s belief in the necessity of focusing on the moral, economic and educational development of African Americans. The larger goal was to have Tuskegee-trained teachers take this ethos of self-reliance communities across the South.

Given this extraordinary achievement– a 25-year-old, late-19th century black man building a school of higher learning even during the worst years of racial terror–one would think Washington would be a well revered figure in U.S. history.

Instead, over the course of more than a century, Washington has become a controversial figure, sometimes viciously characterized as the embodiment of “Uncle Tomism,” i.e., being subservient to whites. What earned him that derogatory epithet? He chose the path of self-improvement over protest.

In order to build the Tuskegee Institute, Washington had to appeal to sympathetic whites who had money and power. He found allies –and donors– in men such as Andrew Carnegie and J. Pierpont Morgan, and was consulted by several U.S. presidents. (In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington to dinner at the White House.)

Given his familiarity with this milieu, it isn’t surprising that Washington was fluent in the language of the marketplace rather than that of morality or justice. Nor is it shocking that Washington thought that integrating blacks into America’s growing industrial economy was the path to betterment—and better treatment—for African Americans.

In his infamous 1895 speech at an economic expo of Southern states held in Atlanta, Georgia, Washington clearly laid out his philosophy to his audience of white businessmen. He emphasized the importance of hard work and steady economic advancement for African Americans. He argued that rather than flee the South or put their hope in politics, blacks should “cast down their buckets” and find work in “agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions.” “The wisest among my race,” he insisted, “understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.” Emphasizing the need for African Americans to contribute to the regional economy, he said that, “[n]o race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges.”

At the same time, however, he asked whites to also “cast down their buckets” with black workers rather than hire immigrants, not as an act of charity but as one that furthered their own self-interest. As African Americans made up one third of the region’s population, he argued, “no enterprise seeking the material, civil or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success.” Conversely, if they did not choose blacks to help themselves, it would be to everyone’s detriment. “We shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South,” he warned, “or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.” Washington believed that only through economic achievement, which required cooperating with those who had the power to hire, could blacks ever achieve political and social equality.

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At first, Washington’s speech was enthusiastically received by both whites and blacks. It was only as the violence and indignities of the Jim Crow era multiplied did he begin to receive criticism from a small cadre of Northern black intellectuals. In the decade after the speech, which his critics dubbed the “Atlanta Compromise,” most southern states disenfranchised black voters and formally established segregation. White racial violence was epidemic. It was then that his critics began to see Washington’s conciliatory Southern strategy as nothing less than cowardice. “Among his black critics,” writes historian Robert J. Norrell, “each denial of a constitutional right, every indignity against a black railroad patron, and every lynching became a mark against Washington’s leadership.”

It wasn’t until the mid-20th century, when activists began to demand more revolutionary change, that Washington would fully become a convenient antihero who symbolized the failed strategies of gradualism and accommodationism. 

But I see no reason why an undoubtedly great man has to symbolize all things to all people. Minority advancement requires more than one strategy, and the ideology of hard work and protest are not mutually exclusive.

It’s entirely understandable why 1960s militants saw rights as being more important than interracial cooperation and economic advancement. But almost 70 years after the dawning of the civil rights era, might it not be time to remind ourselves of the ultimate source of dignity? Rights are critical, as even Washington conceded, but has our near obsession with them allowed us to devalue the need to teach future generations about the importance of developing their own skills and inner fortitude?

Booker T. Washington insisted that, “[n]o race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.”

Surely such wise counsel can benefit any young person of any background at any time.

Fear and Loathing in South Carolina

(Denmark Vesey Memorial, Hampton Park, Charleston, SC. Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)

Charleston, South Carolina

My first stop in Charleston was to pay my respects to Denmark Vesey—a formerly enslaved carpenter who had bought his own freedom in 1799 with the winnings from a lucky lottery ticket. He was hanged in 1822—along with 34 other accused men—for his role in planning a revolt that prosecutors claimed was to involved the raping of white women and the execution of white enslavers. Though it never came to pass, the plot haunted slave holders for decades.

Americans talk way too much about hatred—or love—when discussing the history of this country’s race relations. However, fear and greed have always been more critical determinants of how whites have treated blacks throughout U.S history. Greed is what created slavery and subsequent forms of economic subordination. Then came the fear. Whites feared the wrath of those they subordinated. The extent of their fear was often determined by demographics. During and after slavery, regions with black majorities—like the Mississippi Delta—were generally the places where whites were most fearful of black revolt, which therefore justified—in their minds—the more brutal treatment of African Americans.

Charleston, the capital of American slavery, was another such place. From the early 18th to the mid-19th-century, African Americans made up the majority of Charleston residents. The social hierarchy was pyramid-shaped with a thin layer of high-living whites at the top, a free black community in the middle, and a broad base of enslaved blacks at the base.

Those facts alone help explain the hysteria that whipped through Charleston when Vesey’s rebellion was revealed. It also sheds light on white South Carolinians’ hysterical response to John Brown’s raid and why the Palmetto State was the first state to secede after Abraham Lincoln was elected.

But there was something more intimate occurring beneath the numbers. Slaveholding was so widespread in Charleston by the mid-19th century that 3 out of 4 white households owned at least one slave. That meant, as historians Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts elegantly put it, “that most white residents interacted on a daily basis with someone who had every reason to despise them or even wish them dead.”

Vesey was a sixty-year-old carpenter when he was executed for plotting an insurrection. News of the foiled plot led whites to tighten slave supervision and further limit whatever meager liberties free blacks had enjoyed. In short: Subordination led to anger, which led to fear, which led to insurrection, which led to fear, and even more cruel subordination, which led to fear.

According to one contemporary observer, after Vesey’s execution Charleston “seemed to be in a permanent state of siege.” Less than forty years later, the start of the Civil War further heightened fears of slave insurrections.

But there’s a wrinkle in this story. In 2020, historian Michael P. Johnson, a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, published a paper questioning whether the insurrection wasn’t a fantasy concocted by Charleston’s ambitious mayor, who became quite the hero for conducting what Johnson calls ‘the deadliest civilian judicial proceedings in American history.”

Whatever the truth, it wouldn’t have been the first or last time whites projected their own sins onto African Americans and conjured up hypothetical black revenge to justify the further tightening of their control.

Erected in 2014, the statue of Vesey, which was vandalized in 2021, now stands in the middle of a park named after a Confederate general.

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