Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (review)

Booker T. Washington remains an enigma to many. During his years of prominence, the 1880s through the early 1900s, nearly every race leader, at some moment in their career, adhered to Washington's policy of race relations and though his critics grew in the twentieth century, his position as the black leader was firmly fixed until his death in 1915. He was viewed as a man of action, a symbolic leader who represented racial pride, self-determination, self-reliance, and progress. Despite this history, throughout the twentieth century, especially in the post-World War II era, the Wizard of Tuskegee and his program have provoked strong, often negative opinions. Washington became viewed as an apologist for segregation and disfranchisement—a backwards leader who was suppressing rather than uplifting the race. Such sentiment has continued despite the publication of August Meier's Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915 (1963) and Louis Harlan's two-part biography, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901 (1972) and Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (1983), all of which present a comprehensive vision of Washington as a race leader.

Robert Norrell's Up From History is the first biography of Washington in a generation. Norrell believes that Washington must be remembered with more complexity and understanding, and argues that previous Washington scholars are partly to blame for the hits his image has taken in the twentieth century. He asserts that these authors were too influenced by their own times—post-war, civil rights, and Richard Nixon era America—and failed to place Washington in his world—the ugly reality of segregation, violence, and the south. By carefully accessing Washington in this violently uncertain world of post-Reconstruction, pre-World War I America, as well as taking black intellectual history outside the protest/accommodationist dichotomy, Norrell has successfully created a new Washington, one that was a talented, inspired, and imperfect political strategist struggling for the betterment of the black community and America as a whole. According to Norrell, Washington was an example to black America of how they could and would survive the "dark present." "By building an institution [Tuskegee Institute] that demonstrated blacks' potential for success and autonomy, he gave them reasons to have faith in the future." (441) He did this along side his own, often clandestine, protestations against the developing Jim Crow system, as well as constantly battling black and white critics alike.

While Norrell's work provides a new, more nuanced biography of Washington and his times, the author could have made more of a statement. Interestingly, while Norrell criticizes Louis Harlan for his portrayal of Washington he relies heavily on Harlan's fourteen-volume collection of Washington's papers, which more than Harlan's biography, have shaped a generation of scholarship. Since their publication, almost all of the works discussing Washington have relied on this collection, and while it is admirable that Norrell develops a slightly new interpretation of Washington from these documents his work could have been strengthened if he had utilized the massive Library of Congress and Tuskegee manuscript collections to a greater degree. In the end therefore, Norrell has produced a solid biography and a fascinating read that adds to one's understanding of Washington and will be debated in the field, but until scholars return to the archives and get outside of Harlan's volumes we will not have a complete reinterpretation of Washington and his times.