Washington, Booker Taliaferro

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Washington, Booker Taliaferro

Sex:  Male

Born:  Near Hale's Ford, Franklin County, Virginia, United States
5 April 1856

Died:  Tuskegee, Alabama, United States
14 November 1915

Activity/Profession:  Slave, Civil Rights Activist, Educator

1856–1915
Prominent African American who founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and urged blacks to accommodate to life in the white South and concentrate on economic self-advancement.

Washington was born Booker Taliaferro, a slave, in rural Virginia on April 5, 1856. His mother, Jane, was the plantation's cook; his father was a white man whose identity he never knew. Washington worked as a servant in the plantation house until he was liberated by Union troops near the end of the American Civil War (1861–1865). After the war, his family moved to Malden, West Virginia, where they joined Washington Ferguson, also a former slave, whom Jane had married during the war.

Discipline and Efficiency

To help support the family, Washington worked first in a salt furnace, then in a coal mine, and later as a houseboy in the home of General Lewis Ruffner, who owned the mines. In Ruffner's home he came under the influence of Viola Ruffner, the general's wife, who taught him a respect for cleanliness, efficiency, and order. During this time, and despite opposition from his stepfather, Booker attended a school for blacks while continuing to work. At school, he gave himself the last name Washington for reasons still debated by historians.

In 1872 Washington left Malden, traveling on foot to Virginia's Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University), which had opened only a few years earlier as a school for blacks. Its white principal, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, was the son of missionaries to Hawaii and a commander of black Union troops during the war. The South's freed blacks, Armstrong believed, needed a practical, work-based education that would also teach character and morality. Hampton offered not only agricultural and mechanical classes but also training in cleanliness, efficiency, and discipline.

Booker T. Washington established Tuskegee Institute in 1881 and shaped it as a school that emphasized industrial education. Tuskegee was the first black institution of higher learning to have a black faculty.

Photo by Elmer Chickering; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource

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Washington arrived at the school ragged and penniless. He was given work as a janitor, which paid for his room and board, and Armstrong secured a white benefactor to pay his tuition. Washington was a diligent student, adopting Armstrong's credo so thoroughly that many historians have concluded that the rest of Washington's public life was a manifestation of Armstrong's philosophy.

Graduating with honors in 1875, Washington returned to West Virginia to teach. In 1878 he attended Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C., a school that offered decidedly conventional training in the liberal arts. At Wayland, the black students knew little of manual labor, and moreover, seemed uninterested in returning to the South to help rural blacks. Washington's experience at Wayland further convinced him of the rightness of Armstrong's methods. After a year, Washington returned to Hampton, this time as a member of the faculty. His relationship with Armstrong grew closer, and in 1881, when the state of Alabama asked Armstrong to nominate a white principal to head a new school for blacks, he suggested Washington instead.

Establishing Tuskegee

The new school, known as the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) and located in Macon County, Alabama, had been apportioned $2,000 by the state legislature for salaries, but nothing for land or buildings. Washington began classes with a handful of students in a shanty owned by a black church. Intending Tuskegee to be a replica of Hampton, he established a vocational curriculum for both boys and girls that included courses in carpentry, printing, tinsmithing, and shoemaking. Girls also took classes in cooking and sewing, and boys learned crop and dairy farming.

Manners, hygiene, and character also received heavy emphasis, and each day was rigidly structured by a schedule that included daily chapel. The earliest students were set to work building a kiln, then making bricks, and finally erecting buildings. The school sold additional bricks to earn income to pay part of its expenses. Washington secured additional funds from philanthropists, mostly white and mostly Northerners, to whom Armstrong had introduced him.

Much of Washington's work took place beyond the school's walls. He placated the hostile whites of Tuskegee with assurances that he was counseling his students to set aside political activism in favor of economic gains. He also assured skeptical legislators that his students would not flee the South when they completed their education but would instead remain productive contributors to the rural economy. These messages resonated with whites not just in the South but also among Tuskegee's benefactors in the North.

Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who became the most generous donor to Tuskegee during Washington's lifetime, said Washington was “one of the most wonderful men … who has ever lived.” Blacks also praised the man who built a successful school from virtually nothing in the Deep South. By 1890, Tuskegee had trained 500 African Americans a year on a mere 500 acres of land.

These triumphs, however, were underscored by incidents of tragedy in Washington's personal life. His first wife, Fanny Smith Washington, a graduate of Hampton, died from a fall in 1884, after just two years of marriage. His second wife, Olivia America Davidson, also a graduate of Hampton and in chronically poor health, died in 1889. Washington's third wife, Margaret Murray Washington, was a graduate of Fisk University and, like Olivia Washington, held the title of principal of Tuskegee. Margaret Washington helped her husband for the rest of his life and also led regional and national federations of black women.

National Prominence

Although Tuskegee earned him a measure of popularity, Washington did not become a national leader until he spoke at the Cotton States and International Exposition (also known as the Atlanta Exposition) in 1895. In the years preceding the exposition, relations between the races had steadily deteriorated. The South had codified its discriminatory Jim Crow laws, and violence, especially Lynching, was common. In early 1895 Frederick Douglass, the acknowledged leader of blacks in the North and the South, died, and no clear successor had emerged. Washington was the only black speaker chosen to address the mixed-race crowd that September in Atlanta.

He urged southern blacks to “cast down your bucket where you are,” that is, to remain in the South and to accept discrimination as unchangeable for the time being. “In all things that are purely social,” he said, “we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Blacks should first commit themselves to economic improvement, Washington stated; once they had achieved that, he assured his listeners, improvement in civil rights would follow.

The speech, which critics called the Atlanta Compromise, won nearly unanimous acclaim from both blacks and whites. Even the black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, who later broke sharply with Washington's accommodating position, praised Washington's message at the time. Donations from white Americans flowed in larger amounts to Tuskegee, and soon white journalists, politicians, and philanthropists sought Washington's word on all things racial.

In 1898 President William McKinley visited Tuskegee, offering praise that further elevated Washington's stature. Although in public Washington disdained politics, in private he assiduously cultivated his own power. He secretly owned stock in several black newspapers, which he influenced to provide favorable reports about him and Tuskegee. Other black newspapers he quietly cajoled, persuaded, and occasionally coerced into giving him positive coverage. At his heavily attended lectures around the country, he endeared himself to whites by telling stories about “darkies,” blacks who fit racist stereotypes, and portraying them as lovable, gullible, and shiftless. These stories alienated black intellectuals.

In 1901 Washington published his ghostwritten autobiography, Up from Slavery. Told simply but movingly, it is a classic American tale of success through hard work. It became a bestseller and was translated into several languages. Theodore Roosevelt, who had become president that same year, invited Washington to lunch at the White House, prompting a flurry of angry editorials in the white South but further increasing Washington's power and appeal elsewhere. Roosevelt (as did President William Howard Taft after him) sought Washington's advice on racial and Southern issues.

In short time, Washington became a dispenser of Republican Party patronage throughout the South and parts of the North. Blacks soon learned that Washington's endorsement was essential for a political appointment, or for that matter, for funding by white philanthropic groups, who readily deferred to Washington's opinions. Washington, in turn, used his wealth and influence to finance court cases and other activities that challenged Jim Crow laws. He also provided the main impetus for founding the National Negro Business League, which served to promote his Tuskegee philosophy throughout the country.

Stung by Criticism

In 1903 Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk. In one of its essays, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” he criticized Washington for failing to realize that economic power could not be had without political power, because political power was needed to protect economic gains. Moreover, Du Bois believed that Washington's disparagement of liberal arts education would rob the race of well-trained leaders.

Du Bois insisted that in a time of increasing segregation and discrimination, blacks must struggle for their civil rights rather than accommodate inequality. Washington, then at the peak of his power, was stung by Du Bois's criticisms, and “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” paved the way for more open criticism of Washington over the next several years.

The greatest threat to Washington's conservatism and influence came in 1909 with the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP, which sought to address the neglected civil rights of blacks, was a direct challenge to Washington, as was its predecessor, Du Bois's Niagara Movement. Washington tried to stifle the group at first; failing that, he sought a rapprochement. That failed as well as increasing numbers of blacks gravitated to the NAACP and Washington's base of power weakened.

The election in 1913 of Democrat Woodrow Wilson to the presidency dealt Washington another blow, as his duties as dispenser of Republican patronage ended. Washington nonetheless remained prominent until his death on November 14, 1915. At that time, the Tuskegee Institute had a faculty of 200, an enrollment of around 2,000, and an endowment of $2 million.

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