The Age of Booker T. Washington

No account of Negro history or race relations during this period would be complete without some recognition of the role of Booker T. Washington. Negro Historian John Hope Franklin calls this period the age of Booker T. Washington. ^{1John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, p. 390} The “age” began in earnest in 1895, the very year in which James Edson White landed in Vicksburg, and ended in 1915, when both Washington and Ellen White died. Says Negro Journalist Lerone Bennett, Jr.: “In the critical years from 1895 to 1915, Booker T. Washington was the most prominent Negro in America.” ^{2Lerone Bennett Jr. Before the Mayflower rev. ed., p. 276}EGWCRR 44.1

Washington laid his initial claim to the leadership of the Negro community in a speech made at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 18, 1895. Says Dr. Logan of this speech:EGWCRR 44.2

The national fame that Washington achieved overnight by his Atlanta speech constitutes an excellent yardstick for measuring the victory of “The New South,” since he accepted a subordinate place for Negroes in American life. ^{3Logan, Betrayal, p. 276}

For the purposes of this book, the most significant portion of the speech is the portion that Dr. Logan claims has been most frequently quoted: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” ^{4Ibid., p. 279}EGWCRR 45.1

Washington assured his white listeners that the Negro was going to stay in the South, that he was going to work “without strikes or labor wars,” that the Negro people were going to be the “most patient, faithful, law-abiding and unresentful people that the world has seen.” ^5Ibid.EGWCRR 45.2

He amplified his statement about social equality:EGWCRR 45.3

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. ^{6Ibid. p. 280}

Washington’s doctrine was basically that the Negro would start at the bottom, getting an “industrial education,” and thus provide a skilled labor force for the rapidly industrializing South. In fact, he all but gave up aspirations for political and social, even civil rights, in favor of economic advancement, on the somewhat naive assumption, stated in 1907, that “there is something in human nature that compels respect for success regardless of color.” ^{7New York Age, August 22, 1907, p. 2}EGWCRR 45.4

But Washington’s labor theories were rapidly becoming outmoded at the time he enunciated them, ^{8Franklin, op. cit, p. 396} and many of the occupations he was urging Negroes to enter were disappearing at the time he was speaking. ^9IbidEGWCRR 45.5

Washington is treated too harshly, however, if it is not recognized that he did look forward to a time when the Negro would reach complete acceptance and integration in American life. His policy was, to use Franklin’s term, one of “expediency.” ^{10Ibid., pp. 392, 393}EGWCRR 46.1

The reaction of the press, North and South, to Washington’s Atlanta speech was most favorable. Dr. Logan gleaned from Southern newspapers such comments as “hit of the day,” and “most remarkable address delivered by a colored man in America.” ^{11Logan, pg. 281-283} Concerning Washington himself, the papers used the adjectives that were to be applied to Washington again and again, such terms as “sensible” and “progressive.”EGWCRR 46.2

Crisler’s scrapbooks may give a somewhat unbalanced picture of Washington’s fame, since the scrapbooks are so heavy with clippings from the New York Age, a paper which was pro-Washington. But Logan calls the Age’s editor in 1900, T. Thomas Fortune, a “fiery editor.” ^{12Ibid., p. 312} Fiery he may have been, but he was still an intimate friend of Booker T. Washington, so much so that the latter once requested a testimonial dinner with the idea of “paying tribute to Mr. Fortune’s work in some fitting manner.” ^{13New York Age, March 16, 1911 Sc. 6, p. 56} Fortune defended Washington in the pages of the Age when, in June, 1909, Washington was attacked by William English Walling, who shortly afterwards helped organize the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. ^{14Ibid., June 24 1909, Sc. 4, p. 36}EGWCRR 46.3

The Age always gave indications in its reports of Washington’s speeches (which were frequent) of how favorably Washington had been received. When he spoke at Vanderbilt University in 1907, the Age noted that he was the first Negro ever to speak there, and said he discussed his subject “in a way to evoke the greatest applause and most sincere attention from the audience.” ^{15Ibid., April 4, 1907, Sc. 2, p. 3}EGWCRR 46.4

Robert H. Terrell, later appointed a Federal judge, wrote for the Age concerning a speech Washington gave at a Negro Baptist convention:EGWCRR 47.1

As the speaker drove home his mighty truths, ...he must have felt deep down in his soul the sympathetic response that showed itself in every countenance.... Not one of them appeared to lose a single word that dropped from the lips of the eminent speaker. Verily the people believe thoroughly and implicitly in Booker T. Washington. ^{16Ibid., September 19, 1907, Sc. 2, p. 39}

Andrew Carnegie, whose friendship with Washington is another indication of the latter’s fame, spoke before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, Scotland, telling his listeners: “Booker Washington is the combined Moses and Joshua of his people.... He certainly is one of the most wonderful men living or who has ever lived.” ^{17Ibid., November 14, 1908, Sc. 2, p. 50}EGWCRR 47.2

The Selma [Alabama] Morning Times, reporting on a speech by Washington given at the commencement exercises of Alabama University, noted that “he was received by the vast audience with great applause and waving of handkerchiefs. It was some seconds before he could commence, so prolonged was the applause.” ^{18Selma [Alabama] Morning Times May 22, 1903, Sc. 1, p. 3} The Times then reported the typical Washington Speech, urging the Negroes to save money, buy homes, and learn good agricultural methods. The Times concluded:EGWCRR 47.3

“He spoke for an hour and a half and his speech was replete with good things like the above.” ^19Ibid

And so it went. His re-election as president of the National Negro Business League at its 1907 Topeka convention was “the signal for prolonged cheers.” ^{20New York Age, August 22, 1907, p. 2} The resolutions committee at the same meeting presents its report, “sanely,” as the newspaper put it, “reaffirming its belief in commerce, industrial arts and a footing in the soil as the fundamental elements that must finally solve the race problem.” ^21IbidEGWCRR 48.1

Clark Howell, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, penned an editorial which was reprinted in the Battle Creek (Michigan) Sunday Record. His main thrust was an appeal to the North to “just let us alone; that is the whole story.” He set the sentence in all caps, as he did the following:EGWCRR 48.2

The people of the South generally are in hearty accord with Booker Washington and his effort for the settlement of the Negro question. They believe he has struck the keynote, and the Southern people will give him hearty support in his efforts to keep the Negro out of politics and build up the industrial education of his race. ^{22Battle Creek [Michigan] Sunday Record, January 31, 1904, Sc. 2, inside front cover}

Even Benjamin Tillman admitted that Booker T. Washington was “the greatest colored man of this country.” Tillman, racist that he was, explained Washington’s fame, however, by saying that he had inherited his brains and character from his white father.EGWCRR 48.3

Washington’s teachings were viewed as a “solution” to the race problem—in his day, the solution. But certainly there were other “solutions” that had been considered before and were being considered, with various degrees of seriousness. These solutions fitted into a spectrum ranging from a return to slavery to expatriation to Africa, domestic colonization, and systematic distribution, “separate but equal”: civil, political, and social equality; and absorption.EGWCRR 48.4

In the face of all these theories some serious, some merely naive, some “crack-pot”—Booker T. Washington’s “solution” went all but unchallenged. But Washington was not entirely without opposition. His leading critic was W. E. B. DuBois, a young Negro who had been educated at Fisk, Harvard (where he got his Ph.D.), and Berlin. ^{23Franklin, op. cit., p. 33} DuBois rallied a group of Negroes at Niagara Falls, Canada, in June, 1905, to launch the “Niagara Movement.” They drew up a platform calling for, among other things, “abolition of all distinctions based on race.” ^{24Ibid., p. 445}EGWCRR 49.1

The Niagara Movement members met at Harper’s Ferry the next year and issued a similar manifesto, which Howard University professor Kelly Miller described as “scarcely distinguishable from a wild and frantic shriek.” ^25IbidEGWCRR 49.2

DuBois does not figure too prominently in the clippings in Crisler’s scrapbooks until 1909, when the NAACP was organized, and DuBois, the only Negro officer of the infant organization, took over the job of publicity and research. ^{26Ibid., p. 447} This organization resulted from reaction to an Illinois riot. In August, 1908, two months before Mrs. White was to pen her cautions regarding race relation (found in volume 9, pages 204-212), Springfield, Illinois, erupted in a race riot sparked by an alleged rape. White mobs, armed with guns, axes, and other weapons, drove Negroes from their homes, set fire to Negro businesses, and lynched two Negroes, one of them an 84-year-old man who had been married to a white woman for more than 30 years. ^{27Ibid., pp. 443, 494}EGWCRR 49.3

Shocked by the riots, a group of white people, including William English Walling, a writer; Mary White Ovington, a New York social worker; and Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, issued a call for a conference in New York “for the discussion of: present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty.” ^{28Ibid., p. 446}EGWCRR 50.1

The leaders of the Niagara Movement were invited, and the conference of 1909 laid plans for the organization that came to be called the NAACP (formally organized under that name in May, 1910). The New York Age was extremely skeptical. Commenting on the conference, it said that “with here and there an exception, the Negroes attending this conference are those with whom no one has been able to work in harmony.” The editor said, “We certainly hope that these friends [the white organizers] will not become discouraged by reason of their contact with the class of colored people that they met in New York last week, nor feel disappointed.” ^{29New York Age, June 19, 1909, Sc. 4, p. 28} He concluded his piece by saying: “The expressed aims of the conference were good. The evil the Negro delegates accomplished is already apparent. The sum total of good wrought by the conference time alone will demonstrate.” ^30IbidEGWCRR 50.2

As already mentioned, when William English Walling suggested in the June 17th issue of The Independent (1909) that “the exclusive endorsement of Booker T. Washington’s Negro policies, now universal in the North, is tantamount to a postponement of the demand for immediate political and social equality of the races,” the Age fought back with an article by its former editor, T. Thomas Fortune. ^{31Ibid., June 24, 1909, Sc. 4, p. 36} Walling was one of the founders of the NAACP, and the establishment of that organization represented a major break with Washington’s policy.EGWCRR 51.1

Even though the opposition was becoming more vocal, Washington was still in control:EGWCRR 51.2

Despite the fact that there were Negroes who vigorously opposed Washington’s leadership and that there were some valid exceptions to his program for the salvation of the Negro, he was unquestionably the central figure—the dominant personality—in the history of the Negro down to his death in 1915. ^{32Franklin op. cit., p. 397}

The most significant statement of Ellen G. White relative to these “solution” theories (and possibly to Booker T. Washington), is in volume 9, where she says: “Men may advance theories, but I assure you that it will not do for us to follow human theories.” ^{33Testimonies for the Church 9:213} A few pages earlier she wrote: “We are not to be in haste to define the exact course to be pursued in the future regarding the relation to be maintained between white and colored people.” ^{34Testimonies for the Church 9:209, 210} Did she see beyond Booker T. Washington?EGWCRR 51.3

If Washington’s “solution” was a temporary expedient, he did not make its tentative nature clear to his contemporaries, either white or black. Ellen White left no “solution” other than the grace of Christ, but she left no doubt that her position on separation of the races was merely a temporary guideline of expediency to be used “until the Lord shows us a better way.” ^{35Testimonies for the Church 9:207}EGWCRR 52.1

When she wrote that “the time has not come for us to work as if there were no prejudice,” is it not reasonable to assume that she implied that such a time might come? ^{36Testimonies for the Church 9:215}EGWCRR 52.2