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 described as an enigma, a man who rose to prominence because he offered a compromise with the white South: he was willing to trade civil rights for economic and educational advancement. Thus one historian called Washington's time the "nadir of Negro life in America." Raymond W. 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 within a harsh, racist climate and turned it into a strategy that he believed would work for millions. 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 midst of an undeclared race war, and his plan was to find a way to survive and to flourish despite the odds against him.
Raymond W. Smock is a historian, editor, and biographer who served as the first official historian of the U. S. House of Representatives from 1983 to 1995. Currently he is the director of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, West Virginia, which sits on the banks of the Potomac River about 70 miles from Washington, DC. His latest book is Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow (2009).
With Louis Harlan, he co-edited the fourteen-volume Booker T. Washington Papers. Smock has had careers in academia, in business, as president of Instructional Resources Corporation, and in government service, as the historian of the U. S. House of Representatives. He was senior historical consultant to the twenty-six part public television series A Biography of America and historical consultant to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. He is a graduate of Roosevelt University in Chicago and earned a Ph.D. in American history at the University of Maryland in College Park. He resides in Martinsburg, WV with his wife Phyllis.
