The Business Strategy of Booker T. Washington: Its Development and Implementation by Michael B. Boston (review)

Michael B. Boston (2010) has done Booker T. Washington scholars a great service with his impressive consideration of Washington’s business development strategy for black America. To a large extent, this has been a neglected historiography, as most historical scholarship on Washington considers his apparent accommodative racial political economy relative to the progressive ideologies for black economic progress exemplified by that of W. E. B. Du Bois. In this sense, much of the historiography of Washington and Du Bois borders on hagiography, as both have been cast as philosophical strawmen, which neglects important nuances that could indeed be of substantial consequence for understanding the historical dynamics of black economic progress.

Boston’s real achievement is to place at the forefront how potentially Washington’s black business development strategies were important to the historical dynamics of black economic progress. It is rather puzzling how many scholars minimize the importance of how hostile the American South was to black political enfranchisement at the end of Reconstruction, which placed severe constraints on the feasibility of black political enfranchisement to engender black economic progress. Washington’s pragmatist business development strategy in this sense was well motivated and consistent with the bootstrap yeoman agrarian sensibilities of the American South. In general, Boston makes a solid case for Washington as an entrepreneur of the idea that entrepreneurship and business ownership were crucial for both political and economic progress for blacks, given the constraints imposed by the contingency end of Reconstruction.

In retrospect, Boston’s case for the significance of Washington’s black business development seems understated, as Washington may have been prophetic about the likelihood and efficacy of political enfranchisement relative to property enfranchisement. It was not until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964 that anything resembling serious political enfranchisement of blacks in the American South were realized, almost a century after the end of Reconstruction. Thus, in retrospect, Washington’s assigned low weight—at least publicly—to political enfranchisement relative to property enfranchisement seemed to be a more effective strategy for blacks in the American South for engendering black economic progress.

I find that there are some shortcomings of Boston’s effort that minimize his core thesis that the black business development strategies of Washington were effective strategies for engendering black economic and social progress. Other than in Chapter 1, Boston provides no empirical data to inform his thesis that would allow the reader to assess practically and empirically the extent to which the so-called treatment of a black business development strategy would cause some measure of black economic progress. I am deliberately using the language of quantitative economic history here—or cliometrics—as it has been long been an expectation of social scientists that claims about historical dynamics have at least some compelling descriptive quantitative evidence to support presumably causal historical claims. A compelling appraisal of Washington as an effective advocate of black business development should marshal and provide some empirical evidence. Boston’s efforts in Chapter 1, while they do provide some descriptive evidence of black progress in self-employment in Washington’s tenure, during which he advocated his business development strategies, are not entirely convincing or sufficiently adequate from a cliometric perspective.

The author could have benefitted from considering Gerald Jaynes’s (1985) impressive treatment of how poorly blacks in the American South fared post-Reconstruction under a regime of racialized property rights, and property rights were front and center to Booker T. Washington’s black business development strategies. With respect to black self-employment dynamics, the more recent contribution of Bogan and Darity (2008) could have informed Boston’s analysis of the actual historical dynamics of black business ownership during Booker T. Washington’s tenure as an advocate and champion of black business ownership. The evidence of Bogan and Darity (2008) show that black self-employment rates actually declined during Booker T. Washington...