Barack Obama’s election to the American presidency would have seemed unimaginable in the second half of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century, but in those decades, the educational and economic foundations of black progress were being laid. The man, probably more than anyone else, responsible for this was Booker T. Washington, a former slave whose lifework was based on the conviction that the key to African-American advancement lay in the cultivation of the individual.1 And in this, he showed the example of his own character.

He was born in 1856 on a small Virginian farm where his mother, Jane, was a slave working as a cook. Aged 9 when the Civil War (and slavery) ended in 1865, Booker and his family moved to Malden, West Virginia, where he worked as a child in the salt furnaces and coal mines. But he escaped from grinding poverty by becoming a houseboy of the leading family in the town; there he developed a burning desire to read and write and so began attending Sunday school at the local African Baptist Church. He went on to attend Hampton Institute, where he learned the art of public speaking and debate, earning part of his tuition and board by working on campus.2

Inspired by the self-help ethos of Hampton Institute’s founder, former Union General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, after graduation Washington embarked on a teaching career. He returned to his home community, where he taught in the local school as well as the Sunday schools at Zion Baptist Church and the Snow Hill salt furnace. During this period, he started a night school and established a public library and debating society.3 But the real turning point in his life came in 1881, when, on Armstrong’s recommendation, he went to Alabama to establish the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University) for the training of black elementary school teachers. Without government funding, Washington and his students financed and built their institute with the help of friends and business contacts, thus creating a center of excellence for the teaching of agriculture, botany,4 mathematics, and astronomy, amongst other subjects.5

When most white Americans (in both North and South) were not prepared to treat blacks as social equals and an increasing number of Southern states were disenfranchising them and enforcing racial segregation in the use of public amenities,6 Washington believed the only practical way forward for his black countrymen was to win the respect of the white majority through hard work, educational and business achievement, and the pursuit of moral excellence. “Brains, property, and character for the Negro,” he declared, “will settle the question of civil rights.”7

Washington’s fundraising and institution-building activities extended beyond securing the future of the Tuskegee Institute. Through constant speaking tours and contacts with charitable foundations and northern philanthropists like Rockefeller and Carnegie, he built thousands of elementary schools for blacks and raised huge sums of money for Howard and Fisk Universities.8 His autobiography, Up From Slavery, was a runaway bestseller and was translated into at least 15 different languages.9 It inspired blacks and evoked sympathy and admiration among whites.10

Fifty years after Washington’s death, some in the Civil Rights Movement faulted Washington for not being more confrontational over matters of racial equality. But he had laid the base for high achievement among his people. For instance, from Fisk came University of Chicago historian John Hope Franklin; from Howard, U.N. ambassador Andrew Young; and Benjamin Davis, the first black Air Force general, was one of the pioneering Tuskegee Airmen in WWII. All were distinguished in their own right, but they stood on the shoulders of Booker T. Washington, a faithful Christian11 who showed that great public servants can arise from the most difficult circumstances – a lesson with lasting power for woefully disadvantaged and oppressed people of every era.

Footnotes:
1
For a brief survey of Booker T. Washington’s life and achievements, see: Jim Powell, “Up From Slavery,” in The Triumph of Liberty (New York: Free Press, 2000), 173-180. Also see Louis R. Harlan, “Introduction,” in Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington (London: Penguin, 1986) vii-xliii.

2
Powell, 174-175 and Harlan, viii.

3
Powell, 175 and Harlan, viii-ix.

4
Washington’s most illustrious recruit to the teaching faculty at Tuskegee was the famous black botanist George Washington Carver, a former slave who established a national reputation as a botanist, helping to increase agricultural productivity in the South by encouraging farmers to abandon the single-crop system and, instead, restore soil nitrogen by planting soybeans, peanuts, and sweet potatoes (Powell, 176).

5
Ibid.

6
Mississippi became the first Southern state to deny blacks the vote in 1890. South Carolina followed in 1895, Louisiana in 1898, and Alabama in 1900. Booker T. Washington worked anonymously behind the scenes to combat these and other attacks on black civil liberties, hiring lawyers to mount legal challenges against Southern state governments and legislatures, but with only limited success. (Powell, 177-178).

7
Powell, 173.

8
Ibid.

9
Harlan, xxxvii.

10
Ibid., xxix-xliii.

11
Earlier in life, Washington spent a year studying theology at Wayland Seminary in Washington, D. C., though little is known about this time. See ibid., x.

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article adapted from Kairos Journal

First Baptist Church of Perryville is located in Cecil County, Maryland.