Customer Reviews

Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington

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This intriguing biography of Booker T. Washington provides much needed balance to the cartoon-like image that has been built of him in the past fifty years. BTW unquestionably was a complex man whose successes fueled education and prosperity for African-Americans that would never have occurred otherwise. Dr. Norrell shows that Washington was shrewd, not foolish, and that he acted with cold calculation to improve tangibly the lot of black people in a part of the South that was susceptible to no other approach.

In the Age of Obama, this book may be the first important sign that politically-correct thought does not have to dominate scholarship.

My own views of Booker T. Washington have been shaped by the writings of W.E.B. Dubois and other recent scholars. Norrell's autobiography has helped to change my perspective. By viewing Washington from the environment and times he lived in, I came to understand why his actions were what they were. Growing up as a slave and a poor Southern rural freeman who, with the assistance of well-meaning, but condecending whites, was able to pull himself up he wanted other blacks to also pull themselves up. But he knew, first hand, that the process undertaken by Reconstruction, was a road to failure. DuBois and Trotter, on the other hand, grew up as "free" Northern educated elite. They saw a different way to equality based on their own experiences and fostered in the somewhat isolated environment of upper academia. Norrell does an addequate job of demonstrating the conflict between these two camps and how it was based, in part, on personality conflicts,misconceptions and jealousy over BT's ability to get funding from wealthy Northern whites.
Washington, like DuBois, is not guiltless in his actions. He made many mistakes that had grave consequenses. DuBois, slide into Marxism carried grave consequences for him as well and his views became promenient only after Washington's death. Dispite his faults,Washington was the leader of ex-slaves and the immediate post slavery generation of rural Southern blacks. The values he stood--hard work, good hygiene, honesty, self respect--for are still espoused in many balck churches. And for that he should be honored by all.

I am in the process of writing a book about Auburn University, just up the road from Tuskegee. I am familar with Washington and Dubois and thier arguement. I found that this book gave me another prespective about the role of Washington at his time. We are told as historians to place the actors in their time and place, yet we continue to fail to do that when it comes to Washington and issues of race in general. Norrell's book reminded me to think about what it was like in Alabama in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Knowing what Alabama was like in the mid twentieth century, I can only imagine his stress.

Excellent book, should be read by anyone interested in Washington, southern history and race in the nineenth century.

This work by Professor Robert J. Norrell provides the reader a triple offering. You will, in the first place, find here a biography of Booker T. Washington. You will, secondly, review the times, cirumstances, opportunities and obstacles surrounding and shaping Washington's life. You will, lastly, encounter a courageous historian arguing BTW's seminal place in civil and human rights progress in the USA.

First of all, the biography. The details of Washington's life, including his early years, his marriages, children, the founding and nurturing of Tuskeegee, the challenge of administering the school, his astounding capacity for optimism and hope, the decisive speeches and perspectives he offered on education, race relations, economic advancement and political participation give a relatively full reading on the character and depth of the man. The author uses personal reflections of those who knew and were acquainted with Washington, material from letters, news articles and other intimate references giving us a rounded picture of this very private yet very public human being.

Secondly, you'll discover (rediscover?) the milieu and ethos of Booker T. Washington's life and achievement. Jim Crow rode in the saddle. Jim Crow fought Booker T. at every juncture. Jim Crow and "his" demagogic advocates, like Pitch Fork Ben Tillman, James Kimball Vardaman, their disciples, cultural allies and impact threatened Black education, Black political and voting rights, Black social progress. Lynching anyone considered out of step with Jim Crow norms and oppression served as social contraint. Amid these conditions you will meet the Yankee philanthropists whom BTW solicited for contributions. You will read of Theodore Roosevelt's hosting BTW at the White House for dinner serving as symbol, on the one hand, of respect BTW held among Whites; and then, on the other, Roosevelt's fearing the racist backlash (his daughter Alice sat at table with Washington) and Roosevelt's dropping BTW like a hot potato. You will run into the Black antagonists to BTW's style and approach, W.E.B. DuBois being only one of them, and their contempt for Washington, his goals and means to Black civic respect and participation. Professor Norrell's vivid description of cultural, economic and political resistance to BTW's efforts and objectives throws brilliant light on the dimensions of Washington's perseverence and accomplishment.

And lastly, this book serves as argument. Professor Norrell wishes to rehabilitate the reputation of BTW as a towering pioneer in the gaining of African-Americans' full acceptance into the common life of our nation. His closing chapter, entitled "The Veil of History," takes on DuBois, other Black and White modern intellectuals, historians and critics who, Norrel suggests - nay, asserts - extract Washington from his late 19th and early 20th century Jim Crow circumstances, anachronistically making judgements about BTW's ends and means rooted in political and social perspectives we hold today. Unfair! he says; the mid-and late 20th and early 21st centuries fail to tell the whole truth about Booker T. Washington and his journey "up from slavery." The totality of this well researched, revelatory book serves as potent evidence for his argument.

I found this biography, as you can tell, inspiring and mind-clearing.
Five Stars: Easy!!

I read a review of this book in the NYT book review and decided that I had to find out how one of my most admired Americans came to be labeled an "Uncle Tom." I visited Tuskeegee Institute when I was fresh out of college in the 50's, and I stopped to ask the way from a white man standing outside his plantation house. "What ya' want to go there for?" That was long after Washington's death, and still the intense racism. Anyway, the book was very well-written and factually accurate. I felt I was getting a whole history of the Black race from slavery on up to the present day. He was a giant in his own time and in the history of this country--a man who never gave up his quest for peace and reconciliation between black and white. A man of great power and dignity.

I, for one, have been hostage to the stereotypical view of Booker T. Washington as an Uncle Tom. This first-rate history has totally changed my take. It's splendidly written. Just one paragraph (Page 83):
"Booker strongly condemnded the sharecropping system, saying in 1886 that the crop lien system robbed black farmers of nearly half their earnings. Blacks were tired of working hard all year and getting nothing for it. It was impossible under the sharecropping system to escape debt and gain independence. Many had reached the conclusion that their only option was to move west. Too many indebted black farmers landed in the convict lease system, in which prisoners were leased to private contractors to work on railroads, mines, or farms. The system resulted in appalling inhumanity, as in the case of the Georgia prisoner whose feet rotted off when he was forced to work without shoes on chain gang during winter. Convict leasing, Washington declared, failed to make 'a better man when released, but rather a worse onw'."
I am still reading this remarkable book that is adding greatly to my undertanding of the complexity of American race relations.

Norrell's terrific biography places Washington in his historical context: the spokesperson for Negroes (the accepted term during Washington's time), following the death of Frederick Douglass. The author shows that history has not been kind to Washington, and his reputation was besmirched by such intellectual luminaries as W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, his previous biographer, John Harlan, and C. Vann Woodward. Other reviewers have expressed better than I could the false dichotomy of DuBois the intellectual firebrand and Washington the obsequious Uncle Tom, so I will not elaborate.

The author destroys this myth and shows that Washington fought courageously for civil rights during an era when funding for African-American schools in the South was never certain. Washington eventually had to hire security guards and to take extended trips from Tuskegee to protect the lives of himself and his family.

Washington spent his first nine years alive as a slave while DuBois grew up in the relative safety of New England, where he excelled in university, while Washington graduated from Hampton Institute, which due to poor funding and its inhospitable Southern surroundings, offered an education little better than middle school.

Much of Washington's work for civil rights was behind the scenes because of the rise of the KKK, backlash from Reconstruction, and the mercurial President Theodore Roosevelt who turned his back on Washington because he needed support from Southern politicians. To confront racism and lynchings directly was a sure way to lose your credibility and life.

Washington died from kidney failure and hypertension, likely attributed to a bad diet and stress. He literally died fighting for civil rights. He was memorialized as a hero for African-Americans in 1915 when he died. So should he be remembered today--as Norrell concludes--as a hero who did as much as anyone could to promote the interests of African-Americans, during a time when there was little enthusiam for their acceptance in the United States.

This book is great revisionist history. Contra the impression I got in college in the late sixties, Booker T. Washington was heroic. The public mood in his time and place were such that he had to be a courageous, precariously balanced stud. The venom of his white southern opponents was vicious. Also his black opponents! Ninety percent of the blacks of his time (1856-1915) lived in the south, and Washington saw their progress as going by way of learning better farming methods and trades, chiefly. By contrast his northern black (Harvard) opponents in their racially more comfortable surroundings thought political activism was the thing. It's still an issue of course.

The idea I was brought up with that Washington was some kind of retrograde influence or Uncle Tom is nonsense. The author uses a good term: anachronistic fallacy. Judging someone in your historical context rather than his own. This was in the preface. The last chapter also takes a birds-eye view. The rest is all straight history, sympathetic but not overly so and an eye-opener as to the mood of the times.

Washington saw the whole picture and actually did finance a lot of political challenges, but had to do so secretly. He was always playing to his local, reactionary Alabama/southern political scene and to the more generous national one at the same time. MLK was great, but he was surfing by comparison!

Washington had a pretty good sense of humor. I found myself imagining Morgan Freeman doing for him what Hal Holbrooke did for Mark Twain in "Mark Twain Tonight," his one-man theatrical show of Twain's writings. The author has his occasional quips, too.

This is an excellent book on the life and times of Booker T Washington. It is interestingly written and very informative.

Up From History is a nice companion to Up From Slavery. The author is an expert on Booker Washington and should be taken very seriously.