Booker T Washington

For every exalted leader it is often said, "he was not without flaws." Perhaps when referring to Booker T Washington, it would be more accurate to say, "he was not without virtues." Through his autobiography, we see a man raise himself Up From Slavery to succeed in a white man's world. At first glance, it's easy to assume Booker T Washington was an adequate, if not impressive leader for the black race. Yet upon a closer examination, it is easy to find his thinly veiled motives - completely selfish in nature. His ambitions, and the ambition of the black race in the late 19th century, do not fully coincide. An assessment of Washington's leadership skills shows him to be a surprisingly adept bureaucrat, although a divergent force as a representative for his race.

On a surface level, Booker T Washington indeed did make progress for African Americans. We cannot fault him for his great strides in educating an almost completely uneducated race. Washington claims that there were over six thousand men and women from Tuskegee alone that were working all over the South at the time of the books publish (202). The success of these students was due in great part to the realistic outlook of Booker T Washington. By insisting that each and every student perform manual labor, he prepared them for life much more thoroughly than could ever be accomplished in the classroom alone (135). By becoming a skilled in tasks manual labor, Washington believed you were perfectly in line for a comfortable life. In his words, "any man, regardless of colour, will be recognized and rewarded just in proportion as he learns to do something well" (181). As an educational role model, Booker T Washington was a tremendous success.

In addition to his contributions in education, Washington was a persuasive advocate for the peaceful coexistence of the black and white races. He was in no doubt as to the fact that America was controlled entirely by the white majority. He thus urged his black brethren to be "fast in learning the lesson that he cannot afford to act in a manner that will alienate his Southern white neighbors from him" (75). Washington knew that in order to lift the race from its plight, they needed the help of white people. White men were entrenched in industry, banking, farming, merchandising - virtually every aspect of American business life. To gain support, he worked diligently to win white people over to the idea that the improvement of blacks would also improve their own standing (111). Again, we see Washington's leadership skills at their pinnacle. By forcing the idea that blacks must work to integrate into white America, he began to pave the way for the advancement of the race.

For as much good as Booker T Washington did, he, at the same time, did a great deal of harm. Despite painting himself as an august man, consumed with the betterment of his race, Washington had ulterior motives. It would appear that what he wanted more than anything else was to be seen, in all aspects, as white. The accusations of being an "Uncle Tom" are justified. What places Washington in this idiom is his utter denial of any white indiscretions against the black populace before and after the Civil War. He makes the outrageous claim that "the black man got nearly as much out of slavery as the white man did" (37). He blandly says the Ku Klux Klan was banded to "regulate the conduct of coloured people" (71). Later, he makes the dubious claim that in his entire life, he was never once insulted by a white