Booker T. Washington

Educators in the 1990s, poised on the threshold of the twenty-first century, are perhaps as precariously situated as a Booker T. Washington. Laden with old problems, escalating new social ills, and unprecedented modern technology, they nevertheless must search for an equalizing hope in the approaching century in ways analogous to slaves set free after the Civil War.

Over a century ago, Washington approached a similar and strategic crossroads, traversing that span from slavery to freedom. It was the dawn of a new age, called "The Age of Booker T. Washington" on the strength of one man's imprint on the events of history. Looking back, Washington recalled that his awareness of enslavement and impending freedom came "early one morning before day." The child Booker had heard his mother's prayers, uttered in the half-light of dawn, for the success of Lincoln's army and freedom for slaves. Like educators moving to a new century, Washington and other freedmen were encumbered with vestiges of a lingering past, unexpected problems, and the blessings of their precarious new freedom, searching for an equalizing hope in emancipation.

The milieu of slavery and Reconstruction after a devastating Civil War was the only inheritance that a nation, founded on purely American notions of equal justice for all, had to offer Booker T. Washington and other freedmen. It was an era of unparalleled social change, and it would take a person like Washington to funnel its Cyclopean energy into a progressive democratization for a disfranchised people through the process of adult education. A maelstrom of physical, social, economic, political, constitutional, and moral altercations was brewing at his birth in 1856 and would continue far beyond his death in 1915. Staking his claim to the American dream, Booker T. Washington shouldered, as well, the responsibilities of leadership intrinsic to that dream, choosing to fight its obstacles on the terrain he knew and loved, the South.

Although his birth marks the start of the Washington era, it was only a prelude to the perplexing problems of slavery and its lingering aftermath. Entangled in the net, as Booker T. Washington put it, a divided nation would begin its wrangling about how to free itself. President Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Congress, and self-serving, sectional advocates would escalate their arguments over the Constitution, states' rights, and the entangling dilemma of holding people in human bondage in opposition to a professed national creed of justice. It is ironic, in retrospect, that Lincoln, often called the Great Emancipator and eulogized as such by Booker T. Washington and many blacks, was at first more predisposed to the notion of colonization, looking for countries like Haiti and Liberia where freedmen could be relocated; it was a solution that Washington himself would abhor and discourage. A southerner by birth, like Booker T. Washington, but opposed to the institution of slavery, Lincoln was unable to shake off his ingrained sympathies for the South and often proposed that southern slaveholders should be justly compensated for any loss of their "property."

Analyzing the "American Dilemma" in 1944, Myrdal viewed the major conflict of the entangling net of slavery as a moral one, an anomaly in the very structure of American society "to the ordinary white man in the North as well as in the South." Two of Myrdal's major conclusions closely paralleled frequent arguments of Booker T. Washington in the late 1800s and early 1900s: any form of slavery, "in spite of all rationalization, was irreconcilably contrary to the American Creed," and, second, the white man's burden of slavery did not rest on the South alone but was an integral part of the "whole complex of problems in the larger American civilization." Strengthened by his adversities, Washington was uniquely qualified to lead, with an uncommonly broad perspective of the nation's racial maladies and a prophetic vision of the implementation of the American creed.