Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington, and: Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow (review)

Rising to prominence with his 1895 speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, in which he outlined to a largely white southern audience a gradual plan for racial uplift through mechanical education and hard work, Booker T. Washington soon came to be the most recognizable black American. The death of Frederick Douglass that same year, coupled with Washington’s rise to prominence, marked an important turn in black leadership styles. Whereas Douglass agitated and challenged the slave system, the rise of the oppressive Jim Crow system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century led Washington to adopt a more conciliatory tone in relations with whites and to promote a modest plan for civil rights and economic advancement. Praised by whites at the time as reasonable, Washington’s philosophy of accommodation soon raised the ire of less patient black leaders, and complicated his place in historical memory. Born enslaved in Virginia in 1856, Washington lived and worked as a youth in the southern West Virginia coalfields and later taught school at Malden. After gaining an education at the Hampton Institute, he founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama to train teachers and provide vocational skills, and enjoyed cordial relations with numerous influential men, including Theodore Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie, who provided financial support for Washington’s activities. In 1901 he achieved literary fame with his second autobiography, Up from Slavery, which was the most widely read black narrative of the post-slavery era. Following his death in 1915, Washington slipped from the national consciousness, but in 2009 two very able scholars resurrected his life story in biographies aimed at both scholarly and popular audiences.

Appearing as a part of Ivan R. Dee’s Library of African American Biography series, Raymond W. Smock’s Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow, is the slimmer of the two volumes and appropriate for adoption in undergraduate courses. Although documentation is omitted from books in this series, Smock’s scholarly background as a long-time editor of the Booker T. Washington Papers is evident in his detail and analysis. The solid “note on sources” that follows the text directs readers to a host of important writings on Washington and African American leadership in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and will likely be of better use to student readers than a traditional bibliography. Robert J. Norrell’s Up from History offers a more comprehensive and openly sympathetic examination of Washington’s life. A professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Norrell is a native Alabaman who has published extensively on race relations and civil rights in the Deep South. Well documented in traditional scholarly style, Up from History has nevertheless received popular notice, being listed as a top read by both Booklist and the Washington Post. Despite their different approaches, both biographies shed new light on the life of this important American educator and black leader.

Emphasizing Washington’s role as a black leader, Smock follows the lead of the late Washington Papers’ editor, Louis R. Harlan, whose two-volume biography has long been considered the standard. Through a critical lens, Smock compares Washington’s more conciliatory leadership style to that of “challengers” such as Frederick Douglass. Although Washington is often best remembered for accommodating the prejudices of white society and urging a slow, patient approach to civil rights gains, Smock demonstrates that Washington waged a “secret life” as a shrewd challenger, often working outside the public eye to affect real change (13). He argues that Washington’s image has waxed and waned with the changing tide of civil rights activism and race relations across the century since his death. On the eve of the modern Civil...