BiblioVault - Books about 1856-1915

Booker T. Washington in American Memory

Kenneth M. Hamilton

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Since the 1960s, many historians have condemned Booker T. Washington as a problematic, even negative, influence on African American progress. This attitude dramatically contrasts with the nationwide outpouring of grief and reverence that followed Washington's death in 1915. Kenneth M. Hamilton describes how, when, where, and why Americans commemorated the life of Booker T. Washington. For months following his death, tens of thousands of Americans, especially blacks, honored his memory. Their memorials revealed that Washington enjoyed widespread national support for his vision of America and the programs that he imparted to achieve his aspirations. Their actions and articulations provide rich insight into how a cross section of Washington's contemporaries viewed him. From private messages of solace to public pronouncements, countless Americans portrayed him as a revered national icon. Among other characteristics, commemorates voiced their appreciation of his humanitarianism, humility, nationalism, perseverance, philanthropy, progressivism, spirituality, and wisdom. Washington was the leading advocate of the Yankee Protestantism Ethic, which promoted education, and personal qualities such as pragmatism, perseverance, cleanliness, thrift, and the dignity of labor among African Americans.

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Cast in Deathless Bronze

Andrew Rowan, the Spanish-American War, and the Origins of American Empire

Donald Tunnicliff Rice

West Virginia University Press, 2016

In 1898, when war with Spain seemed inevitable, Andrew Summers Rowan, an American army lieutenant from West Virginia, was sent on a secret mission to Cuba. He was to meet with General Calixto García, a leader of the Cuban rebels, in order to gather information for a U.S. invasion. Months later, after the war was fought and won, a flamboyant entrepreneur named Elbert Hubbard wrote an account of Rowan’s mission titled “A Message to García.” It sold millions of copies, and Rowan became the equivalent of a modern-day rock star. His fame resulted in hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, radio shows, and two movies. Even today he is held up as an exemplar of bravery and loyalty. The problem is that nothing Hubbard wrote about Rowan was true.

Donald Tunnicliff Rice reveals the facts behind the story of “A Message to García” while using Rowan’s biography as a window into the history of the Spanish-American War, the Philippine War, and the Moro Rebellion. The result is a compellingly written narrative containing many details never before published in any form, and also an accessible perspective on American diplomatic and military history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Margaret Murray Washington

The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman

Sheena Harris

University of Tennessee Press, 2021

Born enslaved in 1861, by 1892 Margaret Murray Washington of Macon, Mississippi, married the twice-widowed race leader Booker T. Washington and joined the ranks of the rising black middle class. While one cannot discount the accomplishments of her storied husband, Washington’s own successes warrant further exploration. In this first biography of Margaret Murray Washington, author Sheena Harris discusses Washington’s importance as an active clubwoman, educational reformer, and integral partner to her husband and his success with the Tuskegee Institute.

Individual black, female leadership continues to be a blind spot in much scholarly historical literature. Washington was an important educator and clubwoman whose influence emanated from her own planning and actions. As Lady Principal, Washington was sincere and earnest in her campaign to improve Tuskegee Institute. She also transformed her community through her local club organizations. In addition, Washington cofounded the National Federation of Afro-American Women (1895) and the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) (1896). Harris illustrates how Washington improved race relations as a whole through local and national organizations such as the Tuskegee Woman’s Club, the NACW, and 1922 creation of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (ICWDR). Harris explains clearly that Washington took her leadership positions seriously and strategically worked to expand opportunities for blacks through such organizations.

Washington’s life provides a glimpse into the inner workings of the Black Women’s Club Movement and illuminates the experiences of a race woman who came of age during the Jim Crow South. Harris’s biography is a convincing portrait of an under-studied black woman in the early civil rights movement and places Washington within the pantheon of other important women of the era.

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Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915

Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington

August Meier

University of Michigan Press, 1963

An analysis of the ideas of Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, and other black leaders from the turn of the century

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Turning South Again

Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T.

Houston A. Baker Jr.

Duke University Press, 2001

In Turning South Again the distinguished and award-winning essayist, poet, and scholar of African American literature Houston A. Baker, Jr. offers a revisionist account of the struggle for black modernism in the United States. With a take on the work of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute surprisingly different from that in his earlier book Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Baker combines historical considerations with psychoanalysis, personal memoir, and whiteness studies to argue that the American South and its regulating institutions—particularly that of incarceration—have always been at the center of the African American experience.
From the holds of slave ships to the peonage of Reconstruction to the contemporary prison system, incarceration has largely defined black life in the United States. Even Washington’s school at Tuskegee, Baker explains, housed and regulated black bodies no longer directly controlled by slave owners. He further implicates Washington by claiming that in enacting his ideas about racial “uplift,” Washington engaged in “mulatto modernism,” a compromised attempt at full citizenship. Combining autobiographical prose, literary criticism, psychoanalytic writing, and, occasionally, blues lyrics and poetry, Baker meditates on the consequences of mulatto modernism for the project of black modernism, which he defines as the achievement of mobile, life-enhancing participation in the public sphere and economic solvency for the majority of African Americans. By including a section about growing up in the South, as well as his recent return to assume a professorship at Duke, Baker contributes further to one of the book’s central concerns: a call to centralize the South in American cultural studies.

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Up from History

The Life of Booker T. Washington

Robert J. Norrell

Harvard University Press, 2011

Since the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., has personified black leadership with his use of direct action protests against white authority. A century ago, in the era of Jim Crow, Booker T. Washington pursued a different strategy to lift his people. In this compelling biography, Norrell reveals how conditions in the segregated South led Washington to call for a less contentious path to freedom and equality. He urged black people to acquire economic independence and to develop the moral character that would ultimately gain them full citizenship. Although widely accepted as the most realistic way to integrate blacks into American life during his time, Washington’s strategy has been disparaged since the 1960s.

The first full-length biography of Booker T. in a generation, Up from History recreates the broad contexts in which Washington worked: He struggled against white bigots who hated his economic ambitions for blacks, African-American intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois who resented his huge influence, and such inconstant allies as Theodore Roosevelt. Norrell details the positive power of Washington’s vision, one that invoked hope and optimism to overcome past exploitation and present discrimination. Indeed, his ideas have since inspired peoples across the Third World that there are many ways to struggle for equality and justice. Up from History reinstates this extraordinary historical figure to the pantheon of black leaders, illuminating not only his mission and achievement but also, poignantly, the man himself.

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You Need a Schoolhouse

Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald, and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South

Stephanie Deutsch

Northwestern University Press, 2015

Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute, and Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, first met in 1911 at a Chicago luncheon. By charting the lives of these two men both before and after the meeting, Stephanie Deutsch offers a fascinating glimpse into the partnership that would bring thousands of modern schoolhouses to African American communities in the rural South in the era leading up to the civil rights movement. Trim and vital at just shy of fifty, Rosenwald was the extraordinarily rich chairman of one of the nation’s largest businesses, interested in using his fortune to do good not just in his own Jewish community but also to promote the well-being of African Americans.

Washington, though widely admired, had weathered severe crises both public and private in his fifty-six years. He had dined with President Theodore Roosevelt and drunk tea with Queen Victoria, but he had also been assaulted on a street in New York City. He had suffered personal heartbreak, years of overwork, and the discouraging knowledge that, despite his optimism and considerable success, conditions for African Americans were not improving as he had assumed they would. From within his own community, Washington faced the bitter charge of accommodationism that haunts his legacy to this day. Despite their differences, the two men would work together well and their collaboration would lead to the building of five thousand schoolhouses. By the time segregation ended, the “Rosenwald Schools” that sprang from this unlikely partnership were educating one third of the South’s African American children. These schoolhouses represent a significant step in the ongoing endeavor to bring high quality education to every child in the United States—an ideal that remains to be realized even today.

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