Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington

This is a fanstastically well-written biography of Booker Washington, at times, reading like big-selling biographies like  John Adams . While it is a biography, Robert Norrell's objective (hence the title) seems to be a redeeming of Booker Washington from the very one-sided treatment he often gets (as a sell-out, a conservative, or naive). Unlike these depictions, Norrell depicts Washington as a man skillfullly attempting to move a 'race' forward in a South that didn't take kindly to black success.We go form Washington's early years (covered well by Washington's TWO memoirs) to the building of Tuskegee to Washington's attempts to 'lead' the black race in public consciousness. Washington was a tireless fundraiser, enlisting the aid of many rich white industrialists, for his Tuskegee Institute, as he would later be a tireless champion of black uplift. Washington travelled across the country giving speeches extolling the virtues of hard work, economic self-determination, and racial harmony. He worked tirelessly to promote black (industrial and academic, contra popular belief) education and crusade against various Southern attempts at black disenfranchisement. He was the first black man to dine with the President (Theodore Roosevelt) and family (for which he paid dearly by arousing deep ire among white Southerners). Washington acquired enough political respect to aid in making several recommendations on political appointments (leading to a very public death threat made against Washington by a then-sitting US Senator).Perhaps because of Washington's success, he managed to anger both Southern white,s who saw Washington as a threat, and Northern blacks, who often saw Washington as too meek. Norrell, in fact, spends a lot of time discussing the relationship between Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, which went from quite friendly and collegial to highly tense. Norrell dissects carefully the (what one must call) smear campaign waged by Du Bois and others (like Monroe Trotter) to depict Washington as a kind of sell-out who quested for personal power but did little for 'real' black progress. In truth, Norrell shows, Washington quite frequently took the same positions as Du Bois and other Northern blacks; he just did it in a very cautious and often behind-the-scenes way so as not to counterproductively alienate or demonize whites.To tell the truth, while I've always been a fan of Washington, this book caused me to rethink my comfort with Washington, perhaps not in the way Norrell intended. In the end, as Norrell admits, Washington's almost-singular focus on agitating for black economic rights failed as much as it succeeded. Washington, it seems, took for granted that the American capitalism he believed blacks could use to gain economic freedom would be enough - that blacks who could prove their ability would not be discriminated against in hiring, that whites would not use law to make it exceedingly difficult for blacks to have a 'fair shake' in the market. But whites, time and again, did push back using law and market pressures to maintain their 'supremacy' in the market. And while Washington did not neglect the political, he time and again focused on economic freedoms as if the same tactics already used by whites to keep blacks out of the market would be used in the future. (Ironically, this also proved Washington's scepticism toward government solutions right, as whites invariably used POLITICAL power whenever blacks WERE gaining economic footholds by their own merits.)Long and short: this is an outstanding biography, both well-written and very thoughtful. It is easily one of the best books I've read this year, and one which helps give some nuance to a true American hero who deserves a rehearing.

Norrell's terrific biography places Washington in his historical context: the spokesperson for Negroes (the accepted term during Washington's time), following the death of Frederick Douglass. The author shows that history has not been kind to Washington, and his reputation was besmirched by such intellectual luminaries as W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, his previous biographer, John Harlan, and C. Vann Woodward. Other reviewers have expressed better than I could the false dichotomy of DuBois the intellectual firebrand and Washington the obsequious Uncle Tom, so I will not elaborate.The author destroys this myth and shows that Washington fought courageously for civil rights during an era when funding for African-American schools in the South was never certain. Washington eventually had to hire security guards and to take extended trips from Tuskegee to protect the lives of himself and his family.Washington spent his first nine years alive as a slave while DuBois grew up in the relative safety of New England, where he excelled in university, while Washington graduated from Hampton Institute, which due to poor funding and its inhospitable Southern surroundings, offered an education little better than middle school.Much of Washington's work for civil rights was behind the scenes because of the rise of the KKK, backlash from Reconstruction, and the mercurial President Theodore Roosevelt who turned his back on Washington because he needed support from Southern politicians. To confront racism and lynchings directly was a sure way to lose your credibility and life.Washington died from kidney failure and hypertension, likely attributed to a bad diet and stress. He literally died fighting for civil rights. He was memorialized as a hero for African-Americans in 1915 when he died. So should he be remembered today--as Norrell concludes--as a hero who did as much as anyone could to promote the interests of African-Americans, during a time when there was little enthusiam for their acceptance in the United States.

This book is great revisionist history. Contra the impression I got in college in the late sixties, Booker T. Washington was heroic. The public mood in his time and place were such that he had to be a courageous, precariously balanced stud. The venom of his white southern opponents was vicious. Also his black opponents! Ninety percent of the blacks of his time (1856-1915) lived in the south, and Washington saw their progress as going by way of learning better farming methods and trades, chiefly. By contrast his northern black (Harvard) opponents in their racially more comfortable surroundings thought political activism was the thing. It's still an issue of course.The idea I was brought up with that Washington was some kind of retrograde influence or Uncle Tom is nonsense. The author uses a good term: anachronistic fallacy. Judging someone in your historical context rather than his own. This was in the preface. The last chapter also takes a birds-eye view. The rest is all straight history, sympathetic but not overly so and an eye-opener as to the mood of the times.Washington saw the whole picture and actually did finance a lot of political challenges, but had to do so secretly. He was always playing to his local, reactionary Alabama/southern political scene and to the more generous national one at the same time. MLK was great, but he was surfing by comparison!Washington had a pretty good sense of humor. I found myself imagining Morgan Freeman doing for him what Hal Holbrooke did for Mark Twain in "Mark Twain Tonight," his one-man theatrical show of Twain's writings. The author has his occasional quips, too.