The Path Forward: Booker T. Washington

National Achieves

Making Way For Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington’s views on education, racial politics, and the advancement of newly freed African Americans are often framed in opposition to those of W.E.B. Du Bois. On the side of Washington, we get a defense of industrial, hands-on education, self-reliance, and a willingness to temporarily concede robust African American political involvement in favor of more insular, intra-community economic progress. Du Bois, on the other hand, exemplifies the cause of liberal education, robust political activism, and concerted effort to combat racial oppression at the highest intellectual and political registers of society. 

There are indeed significant differences in the views of these magisterial thinkers, and the stark contrast in their framing makes for illuminating reflection on questions of a fundamental sort. How should a people who have been enslaved for centuries under the yoke of a brutal caste system, effectively bereft of all manner of civil rights, political participation, and free economic enterprise, proceed on the path of social advancement within the very nation that once permitted their enslavement? How should the competing, but ultimately interconnected, interests of economic advancement, political recognition, and racial harmony be prioritized, or understood? How might their due recognition as fellow Americans with innate dignity become a tangible reality given their economic and political disadvantages, and the persistence of racial resentment? 

At the same time, some of Washington and Du Bois' differences can become emphasized to a degree that diminishes the perceived relevance of Washington’s proposals to our own day. In a culture committed to the values of liberal education (to whatever degree interest in four-year college reflects this), opening access to higher leadership positions for minorities, and the creed of “dreaming big,” Washington next to Du Bois may very well appear too conciliatory, defeatist, or low in his estimation of his own community. Why should we, in the midst of a paradigm shift in the history of capitalism—marked by automation, information technology, and the still nascent knowledge economy—take calls for industrial education as the main path to advancement seriously? 

I’ll leave the historical debate to scholars better versed in the nuances of these thinkers, and only point out, in the interest of charting a path forward, that Washington had a difficult role to play as both a champion of African American education (which was reprehensible to the white supremacist culture of the south) and a mediating liaison with both the southern and northern elite. In consequence, many of his continuities with Du Bois can get lost beneath the careful, diplomatic oratory that his position called for: 

“There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all. If anywhere there are efforts tending to curtail the fullest growth of the Negro, let these efforts be turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him the most useful and intelligent citizen. Effort or means so invested will pay a thousand per cent interest.” (“Atlanta Exposition Speech,” 1895)

Washington’s diplomatic finesse is evident in the competing aims that this passage manages to wed together so seamlessly. Here, the goal of liberating “the highest intelligence” and “fullest growth” of African Americans comes to the fore plainly enough, but its impact on white listeners is softened by Washington’s use of inclusive, economic language. Instead of posing his educational program as a means of subverting the southern hierarchy (though this would of course follow if his intended results were manifested), he frames it as an investment in everyone’s collective “security.” 

Indeed, the decisive question is not whether some African Americans should pursue vocations at the more prestigious levels of society, but how the prospects of the community as a whole can best be safeguarded in both the immediate and the long run. Much like Burke, he forwards an organic view of society that recognizes both the material and the political interdependence of each vocation on one another:

“We shall need and must have many teachers and ministers, some doctors and lawyers and statesmen, but these professional men will have a constituency or a foundation from which to draw support just in proportion as the race prospers along the economic lines that I have pointed out. During the first fifty or one hundred years of the life of any people, are not the economic occupations always given the greater attention? This is not only the historic, but, I think, the common-sense view.” (“The Case of the Negro,” 1899)

Moments like these, as well as Washington’s own remarkable journey, and private endorsement of civil rights causes in the courtroom, show both his sensitive grasp of the complexities of power in the south, as well as his broad-minded vision for the prospects of African American liberation. He is, in many ways, a conservative reformer par excellence: a master of power whose high-minded magnanimity of vision is only matched by his weathered realism and willingness to undergo each development in civilization with the patience that its complexities require. 

The Path Forward: Applications of Washington’s Thought

As an educator, advocate, and leader, Washington’s primary concern was the task of educating newly freed African Americans and preparing them for what could only be a long and difficult journey towards not just political equality, but meaningful integration in the fabric of American society. Thus, we can think of his philosophy of education as the cornerstone from which positions on other issues, from family and the role of government, to police misconduct, might be inferred. 

Washington’s support for industrial education follows from three interrelated principles. First, he agrees with most western political theorists (from Aristotle and Montesquieu to Locke and John Adams) that political systems and individual psychology need to reflect one another in order to prove sustainable. A democratic system, for example, requires a democratically minded people with a certain degree of moral maturity to survive. Likewise, in order to thrive in a free society, citizens must be equipped with the moral fortitude needed for self-determination and self-mastery in a free society.

Second, Washington agrees with thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Frederick Douglass in the view that power of a self-sustaining, creative sort is necessary in order to achieve enduring respect from others. Without a foundation of power to stand on, those who hold more power will be remiss in sharing any of it, even when faced with new legal imperatives. Thus for Washington the problem of racial resentment in the south is primarily a problem not of humanitarian atrophy, but inequalities in active power.

Third, Washington agrees with republican thinkers like Locke in the view that property accumulation through skilled, intelligent labor is the most fundamental method of cultivating both moral development (republican virtue) and political power. Property acquisition both requires the formation of discipline and purposeful intelligence, and grants a stake in the political community that can’t be contravened easily. This is part of the reason Washington puts “the useful before the ornamental”—for without a modicum of property, African Americans will not be able to gain a foothold in the political community, or properly develop their own capabilities.   

Taken together, these principles help make sense of Washington’s faith in industrial education. For starters, it promises the kind of formative moral development that African Americans will need in order to be resilient and capable members of American society:

“Most of all, we find the industrial system valuable in teaching economy, thrift, and the dignity of labor, and in giving moral backbone to students. The fact that a student goes out into the world conscious of his power to build a house or a wagon, or to make a harness, gives him a certain confidence and moral independence that he would not possess without such training.” (“The Awakening of the Negro,” 1896)

Furthermore, industrial education promises the kind of marketability, economic mobility, and property accumulation that will begin to equalize power relations with southern whites, thereby breaking down the deeper psychological barriers to true political recognition:

“Friction between the races will pass away in proportion as the black man, by reason of his skill, intelligence, and character, can produce something that the white man wants or respects in the commercial world…We find that as every year we put into a Southern community colored men who can start a brick-yard, a sawmill, a tin-shop, or a printing-office, — men who produce something that makes the white man partly dependent upon the negro, instead of all the dependence being on the other side, — a change takes place in the relations of the races...It is through the dairy farm, the truck garden, the trades, and commercial life, largely, that the negro is to find his way to the enjoyment of all his rights.” (“The Awakening of the Negro,” 1896)

What implications follow from this view? To begin with, it admonishes us to curb our emphasis on four-year college as the main pathway to success. While a wonderful opportunity for some, many that now pursue college would be better off pursuing vocational schooling, particularly in those fields that prove resistant to automation. Provided we corrected for this cultural overemphasis on higher education, and properly got ahead of the challenge of automation, workers in industrial fields could fulfil needed roles in society, get recognized for such, and embody the kind of self-confident dignity that comes with self-employment and the mastery of a craft. 

The aim of increasing industrial self-employment as a vehicle for greater economic and political mobility also applies to the family unit. Self-employment really means family-employment for many Americans, who dream of self-sufficient family units capable of maintaining their own business enterprises, freed from the strictures of wage-labor. Washington’s philosophy would therefore favor policies that encourage job training at the family level, so that families could develop their professional capabilities as moveable units. Such a view admittedly flies in the face of American individualism, but may become more relevant in an increasingly gig-centric economy, where fixed career paths give way to flexible skills-based roles that can be recombined in equally flexible group units. 

If economic mobility is indeed the key to political liberation, then the government should take an energetic, proactive role in the enhancement of economic capabilities and the mitigation of those conditions that leave folks in precarity and distress. This means that it should provide measures to not only help workers bounce back from unemployment, but also to continually enhance the capabilities of workers throughout their professional journey, so that they can reinvent themselves in the face of new social needs. Furthermore, it means enhancing individual self-reliance and adaptability through policies like universal basic income, which lowers dependence on precarious, race-to-the-bottom wage-labor, and encourages the pursuit of crafts that better reflect one’s talents. 

Police misconduct would hardly be a surprising phenomena for Washington, who faced a racist culture far more ominous than our own. But unlike those who view white supremacy as primarily a moral disease, Washington would frame it more as an issue of unequal power (while fully granting its element of moral pathology). Perhaps to a degree that would trouble a more liberal perspective, Washington seems more conservative in his view that meaningful recognition follows from the feeling of equal power, not from the humanitarian impulse. While intermittent gestures of humanity might proceed from the humanitarian impulse, real recognition of an enduring kind can only come from the “object-lesson” of a person's capabilities. 

The upshot for police misconduct is that African Americans must acquire enough economic power to spontaneously command respect on an unconscious level. Granting the importance of police reform and the implementation of higher standards of accountability and transparency, Washington would probably say that the ultimate corrective for this tendency is the empowerment of African Americans as self-possessed citizens who command obvious economic and political leverage. Until then, punitive oversight of police behavior will only provide a patchwork solution.