criticism of
Up From Slavery
by
Booker T. Washington

Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington. It began at the time when war memories and ideals were rapidly passing; a day of astonishing commercial development was dawning; a sense of doubt and hesitation overtook the freedmen’s sons,—then it was that his leading began. Mr. Washington came, with a simple definite programme, at the psychological moment when the nation was a little ashamed of having bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes, and was concentrating its energies on Dollars. His programme of industrial education, conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to civil and political rights, was not wholly original; the Free Negroes from 1830 up to wartime had striven to build industrial schools, and the American Missionary Association had from the first taught various trades; and Price and others had sought a way of honorable alliance with the best of the Southerners. But Mr. Washington first indissolubly linked these things; he put enthusiasm, unlimited energy, and perfect faith into this programme, and changed it from a by-path into a veritable Way of Life.

Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things,—

First, political power,

Second, insistence on civil rights,

Third, higher education of Negro youth,—
and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:

1. The disfranchisement of the Negro.

2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.

3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.

These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington’s teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment. The question then comes: Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic No. And Mr. Washington thus faces the triple paradox of his career:

1. He is striving nobly to make Negro artisans business men and property-owners; but it is utterly impossible, under modern competitive methods, for workingmen and property-owners to defend their rights and exist without the right of suffrage.

2. He insists on thrift and self-respect, but at the same time counsels a silent submission to civic inferiority such as is bound to sap the manhood of any race in the long run.

3. He advocates common-school and industrial training, and depreciates institutions of higher learning; but neither the Negro common-schools, nor Tuskegee itself, could remain open a day were it not for teachers trained in Negro colleges, or trained by their graduates.

It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to acknowledge that in several instances he has opposed movements in the South which were unjust to the Negro; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabama constitutional conventions, he has spoken against lynching, and in other ways has openly or silently set his influence against sinister schemes and unfortunate happenings. Nothwithstanding this, it is equally true to assert that on the whole the distinct impression left by Mr. Washington’s propaganda is, first, that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because of the Negro’s degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro’s failure to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his future rise depends primarily on his own efforts. Each of these propositions is a dangerous half-truth.

Mr. Washington sized up the situation with the certainty and celerity of a genius. He based his policy upon the ruins of the policy that had been exploited. He avoided controversial issues, and moved, not along the line of least resistance, but of no resistance at all. He founded his creed upon construction rather than upon criticism. He urged his race to do the things possible rather than whine and pine over things prohibited. According to his philosophy, it is better to build even upon the shifting sands of expediency than not to build at all simply because you cannot secure a granite foundation. He thus hoped to utilize for the betterment of the Negro whatever residue of good feeling there might be in the white race. Tuskegee Institute, which is in itself a marvelous achievement, is only the pulpit from which Mr. Washington proclaims his doctrine. Industrial education has become so intricately interwoven into his policy that his critics are forced into the ridiculous attitude of opposing a form of training essential to the welfare of any people. For reasons of policy, Mr. Washington has been provokingly silent as to the claim of higher education, although his personal actions proclaim loudly enough the belief that is in his heart. The subject of industrial and higher education is merely one of ratio and proportion, and not one of fundamental controversy.

Mr. Washington’s bitterest opponents cannot gainsay his sincerity or doubt that the welfare of his race is the chief burden of his soul.

Although overtly Washington minimized the importance of the franchise and civil rights, covertly he was deeply involved in political affairs and in efforts to prevent disfranchisement and other forms of discrimination.

For example, he lobbied against the Hardwick disfranchisement bill in Georgia in 1899. While his public ambiguities permitted Southern whites to think that he accepted disfranchisement if they chose to, through the same ambiguities and by private communications Washington tried to keep Negroes thinking otherwise. [...] Again, while Washington opposed proposals to enforce the representation provisions of the fourteenth amendment (because he felt that the South would accept reduction in representation and thus stamp disfranchisement with the seal of constitutionality), he was secretly engaged in attacking the disfranchisement constitutions by court action. As early as 1900 he was asking certain philanthropists for money to fight the electoral provisions of the Louisiana constitution.

He had to employ a series of ghost writers to meet the demand for books and articles. Unfortunately, however, under his instructions the ghost writers merely paraphrased Washington’s earlier utterances, thus freezing his public thought in outmoded patterns. His mind as revealed in formal public expression became a bag of clichés.

Washington’s mind or psyche as the directing force of his private actions, on the other hand, was kaleidoscopic in its changing patterns and apparent lack of a central design. The source of this complexity, no doubt, was being a black man in white America, with the attendant dualism and ambivalence that black people feel. Washington’s life and thought were layered into public, private, and secret and also segmented according to which subgroup of black or white he confronted. For each group he played a different role, wore a different mask.

In each of these compartmentalized worlds Washington displayed a different personality, wore a different mask, played a different role. At Tuskegee he was a benevolent despot. To Northern whites he appeared a racial statesman; to Southern whites he was a safe, sane Negro who advised blacks to “stay in their place.” To Southern Negroes he was a father, to Northern blacks a stepfather; to politicians he was another political boss. In his paradoxical secret life he attacked the racial settlement that he publicly accepted, and he used ruthless methods of espionage and sabotage that contrasted sharply with his public Sunday-school morality.

In calling Washington’s style purely inertial, I mean that he writes as if language were matter rather than energy. The words are things which, added one to another, do not record so much as they build the narrative life upon the line that the structure of his life has taken. Thus the events which Washington recounts are not so much dramatized as deadened into matter with which to make the narrative. They are being set steadily in place by the narrator, as if he were constructing the model of his life. The pain, fear, anguish, self-doubt, and anxiety which attended Washington’s life are there, of course, but they are muted into the very matter of the narrative. This tendency to treat language as material causes Washington’s narrative consciousness to seem literally housed in his narrative.