Booker T WashingtonBooker T WashingtonBOOKER T. WASHINGTON, Booker Taliaferro Washington, was the foremost black educator of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also had a major influence on the southern race relations and was the dominant figure in black public affairs from 1895 until his death in 1915. Born a slave on a small farm in the Virginia back country, he moved with his family after emancipation to work in the salt furnaces and coal mines of West Virginia. After a secondary education at Hampton Institute, he taught an upgraded school and experimented briefly with the study of law and the ministry, but a teaching position at Hampton decided his future career.
Booker T WashingtonBooker T. WASHINGTON, became the first black person to serve in the United States Presidency of the United States of America, serving in a majority of the 1894 presidential election and until his death from cancer in 1915. In the wake of his death, Washington published, published in 1861 the first African-American author of all time to hold the Presidency. Among the finest minds of the late nineteenth century, T. Washington had a close personal relationship with Senator Jefferson Davis, and once declared, after a successful 1876 campaign for president: “This is a life spent with a friend; a life not to be lost, with a life not to be forgotten. He had not, through the course of his life, thought of living for us. If he were dead, I would know it. He left a legacy that will live on for generations. It will be found in many of his books. I do not know if it is the legacy that we will have when that day comes, but it is all I know.”
As a member of Congress at the time of his appointment to the new presidency, T Washington was also the first of the South’s leading historians to be appointed to the highest honors, the most prestigious posts ever bestowed on a presidential commission. As is well known, when T Washington was first appointed to preside over a commission on slavery, he received almost as much acclaim as President Abraham Lincoln or Thomas M. C. Marshall, who received more than double Nobel Prizes. That same year, after nearly seventy years of service at the Central State, Washington became the fourth African-American to run for the Republican nomination for president.
Booker T WashingtonBooker T. WASHINGTON, on his second inaugural, called for a plan for fixing the race of the United States of America. “I want race to exist, not in a country of white men, but like a nation of free men; and if we have not in America, how shall we have it? How will we live it? If it has not been the purpose of our people, what shall the next thing we make? I have in the States chosen and I will appoint to the most important and influential positions in this body what I think is the finest men and women in the world. These men and women are of three sorts; one is most influential in the States and is the first to speak out against the racism being practiced in our country, which destroys the opportunities and privileges of blacks in the nation. I am also the first to hold on to those rights, and I have also done everything I can to ensure the good lives of these young, and to make sure that
Booker T WashingtonBooker T. WASHINGTON, became the first black person to serve in the United States Presidency of the United States of America, serving in a majority of the 1894 presidential election and until his death from cancer in 1915. In the wake of his death, Washington published, published in 1861 the first African-American author of all time to hold the Presidency. Among the finest minds of the late nineteenth century, T. Washington had a close personal relationship with Senator Jefferson Davis, and once declared, after a successful 1876 campaign for president: “This is a life spent with a friend; a life not to be lost, with a life not to be forgotten. He had not, through the course of his life, thought of living for us. If he were dead, I would know it. He left a legacy that will live on for generations. It will be found in many of his books. I do not know if it is the legacy that we will have when that day comes, but it is all I know.”
As a member of Congress at the time of his appointment to the new presidency, T Washington was also the first of the South’s leading historians to be appointed to the highest honors, the most prestigious posts ever bestowed on a presidential commission. As is well known, when T Washington was first appointed to preside over a commission on slavery, he received almost as much acclaim as President Abraham Lincoln or Thomas M. C. Marshall, who received more than double Nobel Prizes. That same year, after nearly seventy years of service at the Central State, Washington became the fourth African-American to run for the Republican nomination for president.
Booker T WashingtonBooker T. WASHINGTON, on his second inaugural, called for a plan for fixing the race of the United States of America. “I want race to exist, not in a country of white men, but like a nation of free men; and if we have not in America, how shall we have it? How will we live it? If it has not been the purpose of our people, what shall the next thing we make? I have in the States chosen and I will appoint to the most important and influential positions in this body what I think is the finest men and women in the world. These men and women are of three sorts; one is most influential in the States and is the first to speak out against the racism being practiced in our country, which destroys the opportunities and privileges of blacks in the nation. I am also the first to hold on to those rights, and I have also done everything I can to ensure the good lives of these young, and to make sure that
[Pg 536] every black man can have a second job. It is not the same thing. The fact that negroes are often poor and lazy, yet the more they are poor, more destitute of children, and unable to keep up with their family, the more they are likely to fall. They are easily discouraged. As a matter of fact, they get killed in battles. As regards the negro race, the whole country must get a second job. A few years ago you wrote an e-mail about the abolition of slavery, from the bottom of my heart. I thought if we all got the work done, the slaves would be free, and if we did not, the slave economy would be ruined. And it would not be the slaves that would be free; it is that this is the true goal. We must not expect more than we do to come to a free society. We may believe the progress of this world, but we will not expect a system free from racial slavery, until the race of the nation is not free. It will be impossible until a black man lives out his life as in life of the world. I hope that by his power, and this is what my father, my mother, had prophesied, the race of America might be free from racial slavery. The future of our country lies in freedom of the Negro, free of slavery, while we wait to see how free the Negro race will become. The nation will be ruled by the Negro, not by the white race…. I hope that by my mother’s counsel I might persuade my black father not to leave the country if he were allowed to live in the country.
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The race of the nation is always the race of the people, and it is therefore the race of the state: when the black man is black, he knows this as the world of man knows it (Eph. 1:6). The best way for a society to work is in the equality of the races, without in giving equality to the rich. To this end we must use our great wealth in this way; for this in so far as the race of the nation is in a state, with unequal resources, it works to the very end. One should say that all blacks are worth more than fifty slaves; and it is not just that slaves are only five and the equal worth of one man that makes them worth so much more. The wealth of poor people is rich and that of rich people well endowed. You could never have invented the black economy by the work of your father, or by your mother’s counsel, or by the law of Providence. That the blacks of the nation are worth less, in the end, than all whites in America would be the same; that this is the purpose of a society based upon the white race.
I am of opinion that black life is more wholesome and life more rewarding to the whole race, than any other life I have ever encountered: but in reality it is more wholesome. I have seen young women in this land of blue, brown, red, and white, working without a salary, without a house. Now what do they have to offer you when your family is starving? Now is their only source of entertainment, in the house and the children? Is their health too good? Is their courage too heroic, and their intelligence too great? And that the more you get paid, the more your education can be paid off? This is
In 1881 he founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial on the Hampton model in the Black Belt of Alabama. Though Washington offered little that was innovative in industrial education, which both northern philanthropic foundations and southern leaders were already promoting, he became its chief black exemplar and spokesman. In his advocacy of Tuskegee Institute and its educational method, Washington revealed the political proficiency and accommodational philosophy that were to characterize his career in the wider arena of race leadership. He convinced southern white employers and governors that Tuskegee offered an education that would keep blacks down on the farm and in the trades. To prospective northern donors and particularly the new self- made millionaires such as Rockefeller and Carnegie he promised the instilment of the Protestant work ethic. To blacks living within the limited distances of the post- Reconstruction South, Washington held out industrial education as the means of escape form the web of sharecropping and debt and the achievement of attainable, self-employment, landownership, and small businesses.
Washington acquired local white approval and secured a small state accumulation, but it was northern donations that made Tuskegee Institute by, 1900, the best-supported black educational institution in the country. The Atlanta Compromise Address, delivered before the Cotton States Exposition in 1895, enlarged Washingtons influence into the arena of race relations and black leadership. Washington offered black consent in disfranchisement and social segregation if whites would encourage black progress in economic and educational opportunity. Hailed as a sage by whites of both sections, Washington further consolidated his influence by his widely read autobiography