29 December 2008
Booker T. Washington: The Quest for Economic Independence
Key leader champions practical skills as key to future advancement
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
The failure of Reconstruction and the rise of legal segregation forced African Americans to make difficult choices. The overwhelming majority still lived in the South and faced fierce, even violent resistance to civil equality. Some concluded that direct political efforts to assert their civil rights would be futile. Led by Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), they argued instead for focusing on black economic development. Others, including most prominently the leading scholar and intellectual William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois, insisted upon an uncompromising effort to achieve the voting and other civil rights promised by the Constitution and its postwar amendments.
Born into slavery, Booker T. Washington was about nine years old at the time of emancipation. He attended Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute — today’s Hampton University — in southeastern Virginia, excelled at his studies, and found work as a schoolteacher. In 1881 he was offered the opportunity to head a new school for African Americans in Macon County, Alabama.
Washington had concluded that practical skills and economic independence were the keys to black advancement. He decided to ground his new school, renamed the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University) in industrial education. Male students learned skills such as carpentry and blacksmithing, females typically studied nursing or dressmaking. Tuskegee also trained schoolteachers to staff African-American schools throughout the South. This approach promised to develop economically productive black citizens without forcing the nation to confront squarely the civil rights question. A number of leading philanthropists, such as the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, steel producer Andrew Carnegie, and Sears, Roebuck head Julius Rosenwald, all raised funds for Tuskegee. The school grew in size, reputation, and prestige.
In September 1895, Washington delivered to a predominantly white audience his famous Atlanta Compromise speech. He argued that the greatest danger facing African Americans
is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life. … 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.
Not surprisingly, many whites found soothing a vision in which blacks concentrated on acquiring real estate or industrial skill rather than political office, a vision that seemingly accepted the Jim Crow system. As Washington put it in his Atlanta address: “The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.”
But close study of Washington’s speech suggests that he did not mean to accept permanent inequality. Instead, he called for African Americans gradually to amass social capital — jobs “just now” were more valuable than the right to attend the opera. Or, as he put it more bluntly: “No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.”
Washington was the nation’s leading African-American figure for many years, although increasing numbers of blacks gradually turned away from his vision. One problem was that the postwar South was itself a poor region, lagging behind the North in modernization and economic development. Opportunity for southerners, black or white, simply was not as great as Booker T. Washington hoped. His gradualist posture was also unacceptable to blacks unwilling to defer to some unspecified future date their claims for full and equal civil rights.
