A review of Robert J. Norrell’s Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Harvard University Press, 2009)

There’s few more shameful or demeaning things for a black man to be called than an “Uncle Tom.” The term connotes passivity and cowardice and a lack of self-respect. Over the years, one of the most frequent targets of this ugly epithet has been the black leader and founder of the Tuskegee Institute Booker T. Washington (1856–1915). In both the academy and in popular consciousness, Washington is widely associated with the speech he gave at 1895 Atlanta Exposition, soon after to be known as the “Atlanta Compromise.” This was the memorable label given it by W. E. B. DuBois, who accused his rival Washington of accommodating the white power structure and accepting segregation and a lack of political power for African-Americans. It soon appeared that Washington’s reputation was a settled matter. By the time of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, accusations of Washington as a Tom and sellout were especially common.

Robert J. Norrell’s new biography of Washington shows that this conventional wisdom is wrong, even stunningly wrong. But Norrell has not only provided a much-needed revisionist portrait of Booker T. Washington. That would have been enough given the continuing stubborn associations of Washington with accommodation, compromise, and political machinations. Norrell also wraps this revisionism within a compelling, engaging narrative. His book displays a breadth of knowledge about turn-of-the-century politics, race relations, education, and philanthropy. And it connects Washington’s public and private lives in a captivating fashion even with often limited source materials, resulting in a sensitive yet not uncritical biography of the man known as the “Wizard of Tuskegee.”

Born into slavery in 1856, young Booker was shaped by his mother, Jane, and subsequent mentors who embodied industry, thrift, and self-reliance. Throughout his life, he would view these Yankee virtues as the key to his people’s success. Tuskegee Institute, established in 1881, would in time impress them upon thousands of young African-American men and women. But when twenty-five-year-old Washington was named president of the fledgling school, he faced steep challenges: no land or buildings, no students, and little money.

Washington threw himself into the work of building the school. From the Black Belt region of Alabama he recruited students, young African-American men and women at most one generation removed from slavery. Many had been trapped in the vicious cycle of sharecropping or the crop lien system. These economic arrangements forced African-Americans to work land they didn’t own and kept them under the thumb of the former white planter class with no potential to make money for themselves or to work their way out of debt. In most every way, they were still isolated from any real opportunity. Most were either illiterate or barely literate—a heritage of the time when education for enslaved African-Americans was forbidden.

But even as the first class of students at Tuskegee enrolled, Booker T. Washington made it clear that they were expected also to help physically build the developing school. Washington often emphasized the utility, beauty, and dignity of labor in his lectures to students, and was thrilled by the sight of Tuskegee students working side-by-side. Teachers instructed students in various construction trades. Soon, Tuskegee had its own brick-making facility, used for new buildings erected on the growing campus and sold to other builders in the community.

Tuskegee continued along this trajectory, and quickly became known for its focus on industrial education. It taught practical trades, trying, for example, to help poor black farmers make a living and perhaps carve out a bit of autonomy for themselves. From the beginning, Washington’s Tuskegee Institute had its critics because of its educational approach. Some said it aimed too low, and in so doing tacitly acknowledged that blacks weren’t suited for liberal arts education. Washington defended his school against such charges, and Norrell shows that Washington’s philosophy of education and Tuskegee’s curriculum were more flexible than they’re sometimes portrayed.

But on the whole, Tuskegee did emphasize the trades. Washington believed that a “self-help” approach incorporating industrial education was the route toward uplift and success for his people. In his speeches promoting the school, he made clear that he believed in all types of education, including higher education. But for African-Americans just a couple of decades out of slavery, he said, “wealth must accumulate before knowledge can begin.” Indeed, Washington was an advocate of what has been described as black capitalism. Eventually, hundreds of black farmers, businessmen, and teachers would emerge from Tuskegee. Washington used the school to quietly build an infrastructure of black professionals.

To help pay the school’s bills, Washington quickly developed a circle of white patrons who supported Tuskegee. At different times, this group included such prominent figures as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Julius Rosenwald of Sears Roebuck. Their money contributed to Tuskegee’s steady growth. By 1900 the school had over a thousand students— remarkably, more than twice as many as either the University of Alabama or Auburn University at the time. The size of the faculty also increased during this time. And Washington increased Tuskegee’s land holdings, using them for more classroom buildings and fields for agricultural research. Some students were so enthused about their education at Tuskegee that after graduating they took it as a model in establishing their own schools throughout the rural South.

Even as Washington sometimes worked himself to the point of exhaustion promoting Tuskegee on grueling fund-raising and recruiting trips, he also used his position to speak out against injustices suffered by African-Americans. He wrote a letter to the local newspaper objecting to mistreatment of black passengers on trains. He spoke against a rigged legal system that funneled black men convicted of even minor crimes into the convict lease system, which resembled nothing more than slavery. And Washington was especially quick to respond to proposals from white politicians in the South to limit education for black children. As elected officials in New Orleans in 1900 prepared to cancel school for black children beyond the fourth grade, Washington spoke out in opposition. These types of actions, uncovered here by Norrell, show a side of Washington seldom seen before—what Norrell calls his “behind-the-scenes civil-rights activism.”

But Washington’s efforts to defend African-Americans had to be performed with care because of the remarkably dangerous and challenging times in which he lived. They were marked by rigid racial segregation (“Jim Crow”), sharecropping, and political disfranchisement. Norrell characterizes the ideology of much of the white South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as “white nationalism.” Most white southerners could not conceive of blacks being equal in any way—politically, economically, educationally, or socially. And those black men, like Washington, who spoke against or in any way resisted this racial regime risked physical danger. White supremacists such as Alabama congressman Tom Heflin, South Carolina senator Ben Tillman, and Mississippi governor James Vardaman kept a close eye on Washington and made veiled threats against him because of his work at Tuskegee.

The greatest fear of many white southerners was the specter of “social equality,” often code for romantic or sexual relationships across the color line. One response was seen in popular minstrel shows that tried to demean and infantilize black men, depicting them as incapable of basic adult responsibilities. At the other extreme, southern newspaper columnists and cartoonists depicted black men as beasts who would ravish white womanhood if given the chance. The press was always on the lookout for any contact between a black man and a white woman, no matter how casual or inconsequential.

Washington attracted this type of attention when in 1901 he accepted an offer to dine at the White House with President Theodore Roosevelt. He had hoped that the meeting would produce more support for Tuskegee and a few political appointments going to qualified African-American applicants. But the public perception of the dinner quickly spun out of Washington’s control. Roosevelt’s seventeen-year-old daughter joined the group and the press immediately broadcast this scandalous news. This showed, white critics claimed, that Washington believed in absolute social equality, even miscegenation. More newspaper writers asked accusatory questions about what Washington was teaching students at Tuskegee. Shaken by the firestorm, Roosevelt distanced himself from Washington afterward. And to make matters worse, Washington also lost ground among his black critics. They saw a self-aggrandizing “king-maker” taking a huge risk in meeting with the president, and coming away with nothing.

Other perceived challenges by blacks during Washington’s lifetime also attracted attention and sometimes violent responses by whites. The turn of the century saw lynch mobs rise up all over the country to enforce vigilante justice on those accused or suspected of crimes. Moreover, black men who persisted in trying to vote despite opposition, who drove a hard bargain in the marketplace, or who in any way were perceived as trying to exercise power, might draw the attention of lynch mobs. One mob even rushed onto Tuskegee’s campus looking for a man whom they accused of stirring up ideas about equality among blacks, but Washington had already whisked him out of town to safety.

Other cases of racial tension and paranoia during this time ended with deadlier consequences. Driven by economic and political competition and sensationalized rape allegations spread by newspapers, particularly vicious race riots erupted in Wilmington, North Carolina; Atlanta; and Springfield, Illinois. These American-style pogroms were intended to strike terror into African-Americans, and greatly challenged the latitude of black leaders such as Booker T. Washington. After recounting several of this era’s episodes of racial violence, Norrell grimly notes: “Each event demonstrated in deadly ways the great dangers of being black in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century.”

Against this backdrop of racial discrimination and violence, the divisive feud between Washington and W. E. B. DuBois about what strategies African-Americans should pursue in moving forward comes off as tragic. Washington and DuBois are sometimes portrayed as eternal foes in part because of their very different backgrounds. The former grew up in poverty and with little formal education, while the latter was a member of the African-American elite and a Ph.D.-holding academic. But Norrell shows that the two men had a friendly relationship for some time, even after Washington’s address at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition. There, Washington presented the same face of black America that he had in leading Tuskegee: able, hardworking, and posing no threat to white Americans. He criticized what he called “artificial forcing” by blacks and conceded some instances of segregation if members of both races advanced together. In one of the most-cited lines of his speech, Washington described the relationship between blacks and whites: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

Norrell acknowledges that Washington’s speech in Atlanta exaggerated the racial harmony and interdependence that existed between whites and blacks, but explains that he was trying to buy time. He understandably showed a friendlier face here than he did when writing pointed letters protesting racial injustices. In time, though, DuBois and other black critics centered in Boston came to see Washington as conceding too much, and a deep rift developed. Washington’s “self-help” approach was set against DuBois’s focus on the using the “talented tenth” among African-Americans. DuBois and his allies would eventually go on to establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), from which they gleefully excluded Washington or anyone associated with him. They came to reject any materialist strategy in the cause of racial uplift, instead choosing to focus almost exclusively on legal and political strategies. William Monroe Trotter, editor of the Boston Guardian and a friend of DuBois, regularly hurled insults at Washington in his newspaper, calling him a traitor, trimmer, coward, and the “Benedict Arnold” of the race.

Norrell defends Washington from these types of accusations without ever becoming a cheerleader. He’s measured and fair-minded throughout, showing Washington’s virtues and shortcomings. Even where readers might disagree with the decisions Washington made—as Norrell himself sometimes does—they’ll see them in context, that they were made under almost perpetual duress. Norrell shows Washington often in the midst of genuine dilemmas in which there was no one solution that would both help advance African-American opportunity and keep him protected from accusations of consorting with racists.

Moreover, Norrell demonstrates the potential in Washington’s materialist-based racial uplift strategy implemented at Tuskegee. Even if DuBois came to see it as a foolish diversion for blacks, some prominent white supremacists feared its influence. Thomas Dixon, whose Ku Klux Klan novels would inspire the racist movie Birth of a Nation, wrote about the threat posed by Washington’s ideology in a 1905 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. He said that in his work with black students at Tuskegee, Washington was “training them all to be masters of men, to be independent, to own and operate their own industries, plant their own fields, buy and sell their own goods, and in every shape and form destroy the last vestige of dependence on the white man for anything.” He worried that Washington represented a threat, despite speeches such as the one he delivered at the Atlanta Exposition.

Toward the end of his book, Norrell includes an impressively lively historiographical section (no mean feat). He shows how prominent scholars of African-American history over the past several decades came to shape the popular association of Booker T. Washington with compromise and cowardice. Remarkably, one historian overtaken by the spirit of the age even presented Washington as an exemplar of Nixon-style “dirty tricks.” Norrell makes clear here that “presentism”—the use of ideas or beliefs from the present to determine how one evaluates the past—has warped our understanding of Tuskegee’s founder. Many of the sharpest critiques of Washington were deeply influenced by historians’ understanding of the civil rights movement. But that wouldn’t fully emerge until forty years after Washington’s death. Norrell is entirely convincing concerning how presentism has skewed our view of Washington.

Yet there’s more to this issue. For one thing, presentist critiques of Washington have drawn on a narrow and incomplete understanding of the movement itself. Although racial integration was a significant focus of the civil rights era, it did not entirely and completely constitute the movement, as is often assumed. Consider, for example, the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision of 1954. With its conclusion that separate schools are inherently unequal, the Warren Court’s decision serves as a symbol of the end of the color line and the increased government support for racial integration. But its history is more complicated. For some time, the plaintiffs in what would become the Brown case demanded equitable support and better facilities for the all-black schools their children attended—not necessarily integration. Only later did the case evolve toward this end. Other efforts, too, within the civil rights movement were as much focused on the building up and strengthening of the black community as on integration. So it appears that the presentist cases against Washington for being insufficiently committed to civil rights rests on an incomplete history of the civil rights movement.

Moreover, it’s striking to note that today’s presentism would cast Washington in a quite different light than did the presentism of the 1960s and 1970s, when the previous generation of historians writing on Washington created the influential portrait of him as a compromiser and coward. Then, what might be called the “civil rights paradigm” was at its peak. For understandable reasons, the movement was seen to be at the center of African-American history. Whatever individuals, organizations, and ideas that had contributed to the movement were placed center stage. Conversely, whatever was irrelevant or contradictory to the civil rights paradigm—such as Booker T. Washington—was dismissed or ignored.

Much has changed. Although we continue to learn much about the history of the civil rights movement, there’s also a sense among scholars that it’s not the key to unlock every question about African-American history. Relying on the civil rights paradigm, for example, can tell us much about politics and race relations, but less about developments in economics, religion, culture, and the internal life of black communities—important topics in their own rights. As the peak of the civil rights movement recedes further into the past, scholars are less likely today to dismiss black capitalism out of hand merely because it’s associated with Booker T. Washington. When the civil rights paradigm held sway, talk of blacks practicing self-help and uplift sounded meek and passive. It seemed to give a pass to the American political structure, which had systematically excluded blacks. But today we recognize, as did both friend and foe of Washington in his lifetime, that power can come from commerce and capital as well as from political organizations and legal reforms.

And as many contemporary black leaders look toward the future, the civil rights paradigm has been further complicated and questioned. Bill Cosby is only one of many prominent figures who have suggested that a focus on family and community life, and not solely more civil-rights-style organizing and protesting, holds the key to success for African-Americans. So perhaps a “post–civil rights paradigm” of some type is in the making. If so, the life of Booker T. Washington will certainly be looked to for inspiration.

This is but one of many reasons to read Robert Norrell’s masterful biography. Too often, Booker T. Washington has been viewed as a fleeting figure on history’s stage, emerging only to debate W. E. B. DuBois about segregation and then retreating. Norrell allows readers to see the man in full. They meet a man who won the respect and friendship of as fierce a judge of character as Mark Twain and who inspired hundreds of black parents to name their sons “Booker T.” as a tribute. Readers, too, will have new respect for the Wizard of Tuskegee as a result of Norrell’s portrait.

James B. LaGrand is an assistant professor of American history at Messiah College.

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