On Booker T. Washington’s birthday, revisit Kelefa Sanneh on the beloved barrier-smasher, author, and orator.
Booker T. Washington was already a celebrity—a self-made man, and the spokesman for black America—when he arrived at the White House on October 16, 1901, for a dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt. They had plenty to talk about: Washington was a great orator and conversationalist, and he had become one of the President’s most valued advisers. But, almost before the plates were cleared, the form of this meeting had overshadowed its content.
Washington loved this story—he sent a newspaper account of it to Roosevelt, who is said to have “laughed uproariously”—perhaps because it reminded him that he lived, and thrived, in a world that didn’t quite make sense. He was born in slavery, in Virginia, in 1856, which meant that he was old enough to remember the morning his family was freed, nine years later.
The fact that Booker T. Washington’s tactics were finely tuned to the temper of his times helps explain why they were so discordant with the times that followed. Washington’s reasonableness came to be viewed as his mortal sin—he was often portrayed as the enemy of black activism. But these days, when the “schoolbook black hero” is Martin Luther King, Jr.
With an emphasis on discipline and practical knowledge, Tuskegee was meant to be an oasis of stability in a shifting world. The prolonged death throes of slavery had been followed by the accelerated rise and fall of Reconstruction: black men, some formerly enslaved, were swept into political office and then swept out almost as fast, as if history had suddenly been speeded up and then thrown into reverse.
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