Washington, Booker T.

Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856–1915) was born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia in 1856. His duties included taking water to slaves working in the fields. Later, he worked in the salt and coal mines of West Virginia, but at the age of 16, Washington entered the Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute in Virginia. He was noted for his abilities by former brigadier general in the Union Army, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the principal, who then mentored and trained him in the Hampton model of Negro education. The Hampton Institute prepared teachers for training Black workers across the South, a systematic approach to mitigating the disenfranchisement and economic subordination of African American people. Armstrong was committed to economically and politically stabilizing the South and advocated a belief that Black people were most suited for manual labor and the vocational trades. Despite persistent protest emanating from the Black press and Black leaders interested in higher and professional education, the 1880s saw industrial programming surge with the course of studies offered in Black colleges and secondary schools. Booker T. Washington was chosen to lead a new school in Tuskegee, Alabama.

On July 4, 1881, Washington formally opened Tuskegee Institute. The school not only launched its teacher training and industrial trades curriculum, it offered extension courses for the community surrounding the school and annual conferences for farmers, and developed popular night classes for laborers. Tuskegee grew rapidly, from its first student body of 30. With an emphasis on skilled trades and an all-Black faculty, Tuskegee became, 25 years later, one of the largest and best-supported educational institutions in the United States. It seeded an extensive network of other industrial schools by preparing educators who migrated throughout the country and spread many of the same beliefs as Washington and the Tuskegee Institute.

Washington's 1895 speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition, in Atlanta, moved U.S. President Grover Cleveland to write a letter of commendation for the Black speaker. Washington's message was clear: being patient with existing conditions, while staying rooted in the South. Blacks should eschew civil rights, political power, and attempts for racial equity. The future for Black development, according to Washington, was in the security of industrial [Page 1065]training, starting businesses, acquiring land, and developing the necessary skills of good conduct, thriftiness, and cleanliness. Wielding more political power than any other Black American of the era, Washington offered answers to the postslavery problems of poverty and lack of education for African Americans, the problem of the relationship between the Black and White races, the “Negro Question.”

Downgrading civil and political rights in the list of Black priorities, Washington's leadership supported an agenda of solidarity and institution building, small-business development and industrial education. Opposition to this accommodationist view was expressed by many, including the president of Atlanta University, John Hope; William Trotter, founder of the Boston Guardian; W. E. B. Du Bois and members of the Niagara movement, an activist group of professionals and college-educated African Americans that promoted an end to racial discrimination in education and public life. But Washington's voice often dominated the public discourses, especially in the South.

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