Saturday, September 18, 2010

Quote of the Day (Booker T. Washington, on “Questions of Social Equality”)


“The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.”—Booker T. Washington, “The Atlanta Exposition Address,” delivered September 18, 1895

Frederick Douglass had been dead less than a year when Booker T. Washington appeared before a white audience at the Atlanta Exposition on this date in 1895. It’s a safe bet, however, that the fiery abolitionist leader—who, on Independence Day in 1852, excoriated his countrymen for excluding blacks from the promise of freedom—would have found little to his liking in this speech.

A further irony: with the accommodationist message of his address, Washington, a former slave, became the leading spokesman for African-Americans, a position he held until his death, after two more decades of tireless work. (To that phrase “tireless work,” I should also include the adjective “ineffectual” and "frustrating," because Washington, an inveterate lecturer, had to become used to separate-but-equal—and substandard—accommodations on his numerous travels.)

Especially after the civil rights movement, Washington was dismissed as an Uncle Tom by many revisionist historians, notably his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, Louis Harlan. (For a small sample of the latter’s work, see his summary of the educator in this entry from The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture). More recently, historian Robert Norell, in Up From History, has attempted to restore some balance to this sometimes overly harsh skepticism, noting the incredibly harsh environment then faced by African-Americans, including Washington himself in Tuskegee’s home state, Alabama. (Earlier that year, he had saved the life of a local African-American lawyer from a white mob, but only by refusing to acknowledge he had hidden the man in his own home.)

In certain ways, the key to Washington’s position might be found in one sentence quoted above: “No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.” That touching absolute faith in the marketplace continues to reverberate today (you can almost hear the voice of black conservative columnist Thomas Sowell speaking that line), but I’m afraid that it is contradicted by the facts of history.

One of the few businessmen who did confirm Washington’s belief was Gus Busch, who really did not care about the color of the fans of the team he owned, the St. Louis Cardinals, as long as they drank his beer. But far more often—and especially in the six decades between Washington’s so-called “Atlanta Compromise” and the young Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott—American businessmen have been anything but enlightened when it came to the marketplace and human rights.

A final irony of this address: The refrain “cast your buckets where you are” came to be associated with what blacks would give up, but Washington also used it to undercut the relative position of another group: immigrants. White businessmen need not look to other white, foreign-born workers for cheap labor, he promised: They could get the same thing from native black workers—except that, in the case of the latter—a “patient” group—capitalists need not worry about the strikes then beginning to take hold in America.

In his desperate attempt to assure the survival of African-Americans, then, Washington ended up using his considerable prestige to undermine the status of his own race and immigrant whites. “Up From Slavery”? Perhaps, but not by much.

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