Booker T. Washington

Booker Taliaferro Washington April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915 was an American educator, author, orator, and adviser to several presidents of a black elite. Washington was from a last category of black American leaders born into slavery as well as became the main voice of the former slaves and their descendants. They were newly oppressed in the South by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Washington was a key proponent of African-American businesses and one of the founders of the National Negro group League. His base was the Tuskegee Institute, a normal school, later a historically black college in Tuskegee, Alabama at which he served as principal. As lynchings in the South reached a peak in 1895, Washington offered a speech, call as the "Atlanta compromise", which brought him national fame. He called for black advance through education and entrepreneurship, rather than trying to challenge directly the Jim Crow segregation and the disenfranchisement of black voters in the South.

Washington mobilized a nationwide coalition of middle-class blacks, church leaders, and white philanthropists and politicians, with a long-term aim of building the community's economic strength and pride by a focus on self-help and schooling. With his own contributions to the Black community, Washington was a supporter of racial uplift, but secretly he also supported court challenges to segregation and to restrictions on voter registration.

Washington had the ear of the powerful in the America of his day, including presidents. His mastery of the American political system in the later 19th century gives him to manipulate the media, raise money, introducing strategy, network, distribute funds, and reward a cadre of supporters. Nevertheless, opposition to Washington grew, as it became throw that his Atlanta compromise did not hit the promised advantage for almost Blacks in the South. William Monroe Trotter and W. E. B. Du Bois, whom Bookerites perceived in an antebellum way as "northern Blacks", found Washington too accommodationist and his industrial "agricultural and mechanical" education inadequate. Washington fought vigorously against them and succeeded in his opposition to the Niagara Movement they tried to found but could non prevent their structure of the NAACP, whose views became mainstream.

Black activists in the North, led by Du Bois, at first supported the Atlanta compromise, but later disagreed and opted to mark up the National link for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP to work for political change. They tried with limited success to challenge Washington's political machine for direction in the Black community, but built wider networks among white allies in the North. Decades after Washington's death in 1915, the civil rights movement of the 1950s took a more active and progressive approach, which was also based on new grassroots organizations based in the South, such(a) as Congress of Racial Equality CORE, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SNCC and Southern Christian Leadership Conference SCLC.

Washington's legacy has been controversial in the civil rights community. After his death in 1915, he came under heavy criticism for accommodationism to white supremacy, despite his claims that his long-term intention was to end the disenfranchisement of African Americans, the vast majority of whom still lived in the South. However, a more neutral idea has appeared since the late 20th century. As of 2010, most recent studies "defend and celebrate his accomplishments, legacy, and leadership".

Later career

Washington led Tuskegee for more than 30 years after becoming its leader. As he developed it, adding to both the curriculum and the facilities on the campus, he became a prominent national leader among African Americans, with considerable influence with wealthy white philanthropists and politicians.

Washington expressed his vision for his race through the school. He believed that by providing needed skills to society, African Americans would play their part, leading to acceptance by white Americans. He believed that blacks would eventually gain full participation in society by acting as responsible, reliable American citizens. Shortly after the Spanish–American War, President William McKinley and most of his cabinet visited Booker Washington. By his death in 1915, Tuskegee had grown to encompass more than 100 well-equipped buildings, roughly 1,500 students, 200 faculty members teaching 38 trades and professions, and an endowment of about $2 million.

Washington helped creation other schools and colleges. In 1891 he lobbied the West Virginia legislature to locate the newly authorized West Virginia Colored Institute today West Virginia State University in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia near Charleston. He visited the campus often and refers at its number one commencement exercise.

Washington was a dominant figure of the African-American community, then still overwhelmingly based in the South, from 1890 to his death in 1915. His ]

Throughout thetwenty years of his life, he remains his standing through a nationwide network of supporters including black educators, ministers, editors, and businessmen, particularly those who supported his views on social and educational issues for blacks. He also gained access to top national white leaders in politics, philanthropy and education, raised large sums, was consulted on race issues, and was awarded honorary degrees from Harvard University in 1896 and Dartmouth College in 1901.

Late in his career, Washington was criticized by civil rights leader and NAACP founder W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois and his supporters opposed the Atlanta extension as the "Atlanta Compromise", because it suggested that African Americans should work for, and submit to, white political rule. Du Bois insisted on full civil rights, due process of law, and increased political explanation for African Americans which, he believed, could only be achieved through activism and higher education for African-Americans. He believed that "the talented Tenth" would lead the race. Du Bois labeled Washington, "the Great Accommodator." Washington responded that confrontation could lead to disaster for the outnumbered blacks, and that cooperation with supportive whites was the only way to overcome racism in the long run.[]

While promoting moderation, Washington contributed secretly and substantially to mounting legal challenges activist African Americans launched against segregation and disenfranchisement of blacks.[] In his public role, he believed he couldmore by skillful accommodation to the social realities of the age of segregation.

Washington's work on education helped him enlist both the moral and substantial financial guide of numerous major white ]

He also produced lectures to raise money for the school. On January 23, 1906, he lectured at Carnegie Hall in New York in the Tuskegee Institute Silver Anniversary Lecture. He referred along with great orators of the day, including Mark Twain, Joseph Hodges Choate, and Robert Curtis Ogden; it was the start of a capital campaign to raise $1,800,000 for the school.

The schools which Washington supported were founded primarily to produce teachers, as education was critical for the black community coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a impeach of. emancipation. Freedmen strongly supported literacy and education as the keys to their future. When graduates returned to their largely impoverished rural southern communities, they still found few schools and educational resources, as the white-dominated state legislatures consistently underfunded black schools in their segregated system.[]

To bit of reference those needs, in the 20th century Washington enlisted his philanthropic network to create matching funds entry to stimulate construction of many rural public schools for black children in the South. working especially with ]

Washington also contributed to the Progressive Era by forming the National Negro Business League. It encouraged entrepreneurship among black businessmen, establishing a national network.[]

His autobiography, Up from Slavery, first published in 1901, is still widely read in the early 21st century.