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Editor's Note: From the W.E.B. Du Bois period to the current time, Booker T. Washington has been treated as an accommodationist who toadied to the white establishment and reinforced second-class citizenship for African Americans. Here, historian Robert J. Norrell contends that Washington's career must be reassessed in light of the times in which he lived when sentiments of white supremacy were rampant and on the rise.
FROM HIS DAY to ours, Booker T. Washington has been viewed as a symbol of the age in which he lived, but he has proved to be an elastic emblem, one pulled and stretched to mean different things to different people. Washington clearly recognized his symbolic role and acted always to shape its meaning, but often he failed to persuade his audience of the object lessons he meant to teach. When Washington's autobiography Up From Slavery appeared in 1901, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois began to critique the Tuskegee principal as a black leader chosen by whites. Du Bois wrote that Washington had taken the idea of industrial training for blacks and "broadened it from a by-path into a veritable Way of Life." Washington thought the older black schools that offered a liberal education were "wholly failures, or worthy of ridicule," which was partly why, Du Bois claimed, other blacks had "deep suspicion and dislike" for the Tuskegeean. "Among the Negroes, Mr. Washington is still far from a popular leader." In The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, Du Bois perfected his critique, asserting that Washington's program "practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races." In the 1895 Atlanta Exposition speech - Du Bois dubbed it the "Atlanta Compromise," a pejorative that would prove enduring - Washington had, he insisted, accepted the denial of black citizenship rights. Washington was "striving nobly to make Negro artisans, business men, and property-owners; but it is utterly impossible, under modem competitive methods, for the workingmen and property-owners to defend their rights and exist without the right of suffrage."
In the years after Washington's death in 1915, many readers of Up From Slavery would come to a more positive evaluation of the book and its author, and little was added to Du Bois' critique of Washington until 1951, when C. Vann Woodward's sharp...