BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
1856 - 1915

Washington, Booker Taliaferro (b. April 5, 1856, Franklin County, Va.; d. November 14, 1915, Tuskegee, Ala.), African American founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, who urged blacks to accommodate themselves to the white South and concentrate on economic self-advancement; supported by influential whites, he became the most prominent black American of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Washington was born Booker Taliaferro, a slave, in rural Virginia. His mother, Jane, was the plantation's cook; his father was a white man whose identity he never knew. Washington worked as a servant in the plantation house until he was liberated by Union troops near the end of the Civil War. After the war, his family moved to Malden, West Virginia, where they joined Washington Ferguson, also a former slave, whom Jane had married during the war.

In 1872 Washington left Malden, traveling on foot to Virginia's Hampton Institute, which had opened only a few years earlier as a school for blacks. Its white principal, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, was the son of missionaries to Hawaii and a commander of black Union troops during the war. The South's freed blacks, Armstrong believed, needed a practical, work-based education that would also teach character and morality. Hampton offered not only agricultural and mechanical classes but training in cleanliness, efficiency, discipline, and the dignity of manual labor as well.

The Tuskegee Institute, in Macon County, Alabama, had been apportioned $2000 by the state legislature for salaries, but nothing for land or buildings. Washington began classes with a handful of students in a shanty owned by a black church. Intending Tuskegee to be a replica of Hampton, he established a vocational curriculum for both boys and girls that included such courses as carpentry, printing, tinsmithing, and shoemaking. Girls also took classes in cooking and sewing, and boys learned farming and dairying.

These triumphs, however, were underscored by pockets of tragedy in Washington's personal life. His first wife, Fanny Smith Washington, a graduate of Hampton and girlfriend since Malden, died from a fall in 1884, just two years after their marriage. His second wife, Olivia Davidson Washington, also a graduate of Hampton and in chronically poor health, died in 1889. Washington's third wife, Margaret Murray Washington, was a graduate of Fisk University and, like Olivia Washington, held the title of lady principal of Tuskegee. Margaret Washington helped her husband for the rest of his life and also led regional and national federations of black women.

Although Tuskegee earned him a measure of popularity, Washington did not become a national leader until he spoke, in September 1895, at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. Over the previous several years, relations between the races had steadily deteriorated. The South had codified its discriminatory Jim Crow laws, and violence, especially lynching, was common. Earlier in the year, Frederick Douglass, the acknowledged leader of blacks North and South, died, and no clear successor had yet emerged. Washington was the only black speaker chosen to address the mixed-race crowd in Atlanta.

The speech, which critics called the Atlanta Compromise, won nearly unanimous acclaim from both blacks and whites. Even the black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, who later broke sharply with Washington's accommodating position, praised Washington's message at the time. Donations from white Americans flowed in larger amounts to Tuskegee, and soon white journalists, politicians, and philanthropists sought Washington's word on all things racial.

In 1898 President William McKinley visited Tuskegee, offering praise that further elevated Washington's stature. Although in public Washington disdained politics, in private he assiduously cultivated his own power. He secretly owned stock in several black newspapers, which he influenced to provide favorable reports about him and Tuskegee. Other black newspapers he quietly cajoled, persuaded, and occasionally coerced into giving him positive coverage. At his heavily attended lectures around the country, he endeared himself to whites by telling stories about "darkies" — blacks who fit racist stereotypes portraying them as lovable, gullible, and shiftless. These stories alienated black intellectuals.

In short time, Washington became a dispenser of Republican Party patronage throughout the South and parts of the North. Blacks soon learned that Washington's endorsement was essential for any political appointment or, for that matter, for funding by white philanthropic groups, who readily deferred to Washington's opinions. Washington, in turn, used his wealth and power secretly to finance some court cases and other activities challenging Jim Crow laws. He also provided the main impetus for founding the National Negro Business League, which served to advocate his Tuskegee philosophy throughout the country. Some observers referred to the powerful Washington as the Wizard of Tuskegee, and to his operation as the Tuskegee Machine.

The greatest threat to Washington's conservatism and power came in 1909 with the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP, which sought to address the neglected civil rights of blacks, was a direct challenge to Washington, as was its predecessor, Du Bois's Niagara Movement. Washington tried at first to stifle the group; failing that, he sought a rapproachment. As that, too, failed, increasing numbers of blacks gravitated to the NAACP and Washington's base of power began to weaken.

The election in 1913 of Democrat Woodrow Wilson to the presidency dealt Washington another blow, as his duties as dispenser of Republican patronage came to an end. Washington nonetheless remained personally prominent until his death in 1915. At that time, the Tuskegee Institute had a faculty of 200, an enrollment of 2000, and an endowment of $2 million.