A Different Drummer

Every year, during Black History Month, we celebrate the triumphs of Martin Luther King Jr., and retell the Gospel According to the Civil Rights Movement. And yet, another, politically incorrect black history, once much better known, goes untold. To the degree that that history is silenced or revised out of existence, black American history, and hence American history, are both diminished, and falsified.

One such politically incorrect hero was Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915). Washington, born into slavery in Virginia to an illiterate but immensely practical and supportive mother, rose to become the unofficial leader of Negro (the term used until well into the 1970s) America.

Upon being emancipated, little Booker Washington (then unaware of his middle name) lacked access to a school, didn't know anyone who knew how to read, and for obvious reasons, did not ask any white folks to teach him to read. So, he taught himself! Washington used the same kind of classic, "blue-back," Webster's spelling book that Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) had used. Eventually, Booker T., still a little boy, was able to attend school, when he wasn't working in the local salt mine to help support his mother, stepfather, and siblings.

Eventually, Washington was able to attend Virginia's Hampton Institute, one of America's first black colleges. Traveling by stagecoach, hitching rides on wagons, and traveling by foot; going days at a time without eating or sleeping; and in Richmond, Virginia, finding work unloading a ship's cargo of pig iron, while sleeping nights under a wooden sidewalk, it took weeks for Washington -- who could not bathe or change clothes -- to reach Hampton. At Hampton -- today Hampton University -- the penniless young man earned his keep doing janitorial work for the school. The plucky workhorse not only graduated from Hampton, but was asked to stay on as a teacher.

Soon thereafter, in 1881, the 24-year-old Washington was asked to found the Tuskegee Institute in the Alabama backwoods. Starting with the burnt-out husk of a plantation "big house," Washington built the buildings that for a generation made Tuskegee -- today Tuskegee University -- America's most influential black institution of higher education. Washington built Tuskegee the old-fashioned way -- with his own bare hands.

Possessing perhaps enough money to contract to have an outhouse built, Washington told his students that they would have to help him erect the school's buildings. Seeing as he had neither bricks nor money with which to buy them, Washington resolved to build a brick-baking kiln. This shocked his students, many of whom had gone to Tuskegee to escape such "common" labor.

The first kiln collapsed on its maiden firing. A second attempt resulted in ... abject failure. The third go-round, too. Fortunately for Tuskegee, Washington did not believe in "three strikes and you're out." While all around him wallowed in despair, Booker T. built a fourth kiln, AND IT WORKED! Not only were all of Tuskegee's early buildings built by Tuskegee students and faculty using the bricks they had baked, but when word got around in the neighboring region as to the superior quality of Tuskegee bricks, white businesses got in line to buy them. Tuskegee became the biggest local supplier of bricks.

(Tuskegee also has a central place in American literary history. One of its most famous alumni, Ralph Ellison (1914-1994), depicted Tuskegee in several early chapters of his seminal novel, Invisible Man. Referred to always as "The Founder," Washington's shadow loomed large over the often surreal proceedings.)

With Washington's successful, 1895 Atlanta Exposition Address before a mixed (if physically segregated) crowd, and the 1901 publication of his inspirational memoir, as told to white ghostwriter Max Bennett Thrasher, Up from Slavery, he became the unofficial leader of black America. Washington's doctrine of self-reliance involved asking little of whites, and saw blacks gaining economic success, and eventually the respect of whites, through their own businesses.

Based on his ability to placate white and black audiences alike, Washington became known as "the Wizard of Tuskegee." Nowhere was that talent more in evidence than in his Atlanta address, where many of his critics and supporters alike had expected him to offend one or both of the races. Instead, Washington propounded the accommodationist doctrine, which the vast majority of Americans of both races accepted, that "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."

While Washington was an accommodationist, he was anything but the "Uncle Tom" that his detractors paint him as having been. Consider the following words from Up from Slavery:

I do not believe that any state should make a law that permits an ignorant and poverty-stricken white man to vote, and prevents a black man in the same condition from voting. Such a law is not only unjust, but it will react, as all unjust laws do, in time; for the effect of such a law is to encourage the Negro to secure education and property, and at the same time it encourages the white man to remain in ignorance and poverty. I believe that in time, through the operation of intelligence and friendly race relations, all cheating at the ballot-box in the South will cease. It will become apparent that the white man who begins by cheating a Negro out of his ballot soon learns to cheat a white man out of his, and that the man who does this ends his career of dishonesty by the theft of property or by some equally serious crime. In my opinion, the time will come when the South will encourage all of its citizens to vote. It will see that it pays better, from every standpoint, to have healthy, vigorous life than to have that political stagnation which always results when one-half of the population has no share and no interest in the Government.

As a rule, I believe in universal, free suffrage, but I believe that in the South we are confronted with peculiar conditions that justify the protection of the ballot in many of the states, for a while at least, either by an educational test, a property test, or by both combined; but whatever tests are required, they should be made to apply with equal and exact justice to both races.