Booker T. Washington: life, ideas and books

Life

Booker Taliaferro Washington was born into slavery at Hale's Ford, Virginia, in 1856; the date was fixed from evidence found after his death. After emancipation he worked in salt furnaces and coal mines in West Virginia and studied at Hampton Institute. In 1881 he became the first principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, and he built it into a leading school for Black students.

He founded the National Negro Business League in 1900, received an honorary master's degree from Harvard in 1896 and an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth in 1901, and dined at the White House with President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901. He died at Tuskegee in 1915. In 1940 he became the first African American shown on a U.S. postage stamp.

Ideas

Washington held that Black Americans in the post-Reconstruction South would advance through education, particularly vocational and industrial training, through thrift, property ownership and business. In his 1895 Atlanta Address he urged Black and white Southerners to cooperate in economic progress while leaving social questions aside, a speech that critics later called the Atlanta Compromise.

He publicly accepted segregation while arguing that Black economic achievement would eventually earn civil and political rights, though accounts say he privately funded legal challenges to discrimination. He built a political network, which critics called the Tuskegee Machine, and from about 1890 until his death he was the dominant leader of the Black community in the eyes of white officials and philanthropists.

Major works

• The Future of the American Negro (1899).
• Up from Slavery (1901), his autobiography.
• Working with the Hands (1904).
• The Story of the Negro (1909).
• My Larger Education (1911).

Why conservatives read him

Washington's emphasis on self-reliance, enterprise and character has made him a model for conservatives who stress opportunity and local institutions. Up from Slavery is a classic of American autobiography and an inspiring account of effort, and philanthropists such as Julius Rosenwald worked with him to build thousands of rural schools. His economics anticipated modern writers such as Thomas Sowell, who also argues for the importance of skills and cultural capital.

His legacy is disputed. W. E. B. Du Bois and later civil rights leaders criticised him for accommodating white supremacy, and Frederick Douglass stands as the contrasting model of an uncompromising public demand for equal rights. Later historians have offered more nuanced and often more favourable assessments, recognising the narrow room he had to act. Readers should treat his thought as one answer in a long debate, and one of the most influential.