Booker T. Washington Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow

From the time of his famous Atlanta address in 1895 until his death in 1915, Booker T. Washington was the preeminent African-American educator and race leader. But to historians and biographers of the last hundred years, Washington has often been an enigma, a man who rose to prominence because he offered a compromise with the white South: he was willing to trade black civil rights for economic and educational advancement. Thus one historian called Washington's time the "nadir of Negro life in America." Where Reconstruction had promised the former slaves freedom and political participation. Southern retrenchment virtually disfranchised black Americans, limited their opportunities for advancement, and dramatically increased racial segregation. Raymond Smock's interpretive biography explores Washington's rise from slavery to a position of power and influence that no black leader had ever before achieved in American history. He took his own personal quest for freedom and acceptance in a harsh, racist climate and turned it into a strategy that he believed would work for millions of freedpeople. Was he, as later critics would charge, an Uncle Tom and a lackey of powerful white politicians and industrialists? Sifting the evidence, Mr. Smock sees Washington as a field general in a war of racial survival, his compromise a practical attempt to solve an immense problem. He lived and worked in the time of an undeclared race war in a young country, and his plan for the future was to find a way to survive and to flourish despite the odds against him. With twenty-four illustration. Book jacket.