"More and more thoughtful students of the race problem are beginning to see that business and industry constitute what we may call the strategic points in its solution."
Washington was in many ways a distinguished personality, provincially
wise, astute, and certainly diplomatic. A tireless educator, masterful orator
and advocate of black self-improvement, Booker T. Washington's ideas were as
controversial in his day as they are in ours. Born into slavery, he was taken
to West Virginia by his mother soon after emancipation\. There he went to school
at night while he worked in a salt furnace during the day. In May 1881, Washington
became the principal of the newly founded Tuskegee Institute, where he taught
blacks the technical skills he thought they would need in their newly enfranchised
state.
His views on accommodation earned him many enemies in the
black community. Accusations of compromise were commonly hurled at him. Booker
believed that the now freed black person's best chance at success depended on
his or her ability to integrate into white American society. Integration could
only occur after education.
Washington thought that inculcating the values of individual
responsibility, the dignity of work, and the need for enduring moral and spiritual
character were the best means for former slaves to assume their rightful place
in America. And the best way to do this, he argued, was to encourage business,
industry, and entrepreneurialism, and not through political agitation. He therefore
labored incessantly to help blacks become more prosperous through helping them
build an economic foundation, most notably through his founding of the National
Negro Business League.
Sources: Concise Dictionary of American Biography,
Third Edition (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1980) and “Booker T. Washington:
An Uncommon Perspective”, The Boule Journal, Summer 1993 by Archon Theodore
M. Pryor.
