“In stern justice, we must lay on the soul of this man, a heavy responsibility for the consummation of Negro disfranchisement, the decline of the Negro college and public school and the firmer establishment of color caste in this land.” Such was W. E. B. Du Bois's damning indictment of Booker T. Washington in his obituary for him in the December 1915 issue of the NAACP journal The Crisis.Footnote 1
The judgment of recent historians has, for the most part, been almost as unsympathetic. Admittedly there have been exceptions, most notably Robert Norrell's important revisionist study Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (2009). More generally, however, scholarly assessments of Washington over the last half-century have been largely negative. Louis Harlan's two-volume biography, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 (1972) and Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (1983), was particularly influential in this respect. A southern liberal, Harlan portrayed Washington as a Machiavellian character, ruthless in suppressing opposition within the African American community, whilst subservient in his dealings with southern whites. Moreover, Harlan viewed Washington's patient conservatism and accommodationism as hopelessly unrealistic and anachronistic.
Popular perceptions of Washington at the time of his death, on 14 November 1915, could not have been more different. In an original new study Kenneth Hamilton analyses the outpouring of public grief for the Tuskegeean in the weeks and months that followed his passing. Chapter 1 examines death notices published on the announcement of Washington's demise and messages of condolence received by family and close associates. The latter, coming “from people in every region of the nation,” highlight the sense of loss in both black and white communities and all sections of society, rich or poor. “So wide spread is the grief and sorrow among our people,” noted W. H. Walcott, a Tuskegee Institute instructor, “that I doubt if they have ever mourned the death of any national character as they are mourning Dr Washington's” (18).
Later chapters focus on events organized for Washington's funeral and subsequent memorial services for him that continued for “the better part of a year” (125). A final chapter and epilogue examine the reasons for the “Sanctification of Washington” (154) and the motivations of those who sought to honour his memory.
Predictably, Washington's supporters within the African American community sought to use “their public glorification of his memory to help perpetuate political and financial aid from key white philanthropists” and “to inspire the white masses, particularly southerners, to become more tolerant of striving African Americans” (97). In wider society Washington's life represented the vindication of deep-seated American values such as determination, steadfastness, hard work, and the belief that the United States was a land of opportunity in which even those of most humble birth had the chance to succeed.
Hamilton further argues that Washington had a particular appeal to northern whites because he embodied a secularized form of the “Yankee Protestant ethic.” This promoted “asceticism, calling, charity, humility, perseverance, pragmatism and sobriety,” as well as placing “significant emphasis on cleanliness, education, efficiency, honesty, orderliness, promptness, service, steadiness, thrift, systematic work, and the dignity of labor” (16). After the Civil War northern missionaries sought to transform traditional southern culture and values by indoctrinating freed black slaves to become “as much like white middle-class New England Protestants as possible” (16).
The extent to which Washington's career genuinely represented the fulfilment of this vision is open to question. If Washington was indoctrinated in the secular values of the “Yankee Protestant ethic,” why did he not also internalize its religiosity? Moreover, although Washington projected a public image of Sunday school morality this represented only one facet of his personality. Louis Harlan has shown that Washington also had a “secret life” in which he was prepared to resort to duplicity and the ruthless persecution of perceived opponents to achieve his objectives.
Such reservations notwithstanding, Booker T. Washington in American Memory provides fresh insights into a comparatively little-explored aspect of his life and career. It also serves as a reminder that in evaluating Washington's place in history he should be judged not by the aspirations of the 1950s and 1960s but by those that were realistically attainable in his own era.
