You may have noticed that in his concession speech last night, avowed history buff John McCain made a poignant reference to an event that occurred just about a hundred years ago. On October 16, 1901, President Roosevelt, freshly installed after William McKinley succumbed to an assassin's bullet, did something that to many seemed literally unthinkable -- he invited a black man to dine with him and his family at the White House. "President Roosevelt Proposes to Coddle Descendants of Ham," screamed the headline in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That man, of course, was Booker T. Washington.
There are a lot of things about this situation that are hard for us to understand today, and the fact that the United States has just elected its first black president drives that fact home. While the assertion that political support for Obama speaks to the achievement of a "post-racial" America is still up for debate, it's hard to deny that today we inhabit a racial landscape that our ancestors simply would not recognize.
The same notion applies in reverse -- can you imagine, for example, a newspaper using the term "descendants of Ham" today? The idea is laughable. But it was real. So were lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and simple, consuming hatred, all the more cruel for its sheer casual pervasiveness. This gap in understanding, Mark Baurlein argued in an article for the Chronicle Review in 2003, is responsible for the eclipse in our respect for a man like Washington, whose tactics look to us rather soft and complacent. "To militants such as Du Bois, and to us today," Bauerlein says, "Washington's accommodationism
is an abasement." Du Bois himself had this to say of Washington after his death in 1915: "We must lay
on the soul of this man, a heavy responsibility for the consummation of
Negro disfranchisement, the decline of the Negro college and public school,
and the firmer establishment of color caste in this land." As Bauerlein reports, the man who once commanded the respect of the luminaries of the American intellectual world now barely rates a citation in the scholarly debate on race in America.
The last major biography of Booker T. Washington came out in the 70s -- Louis Harlan's two-volume assessment of the life and times of the man is a great achievement, but it's a study that reflects the negative scholarly consensus of the time. That landscape is about to change a bit with the publication in January of a major new biography of Washington, Robert J. Norrell's Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. Within, Norrell aims to revise our understanding of the man by re-situating Booker T. in the context of his own time, rather than holding him to the standards of an age that might have made him proud, but which he would hardly recognize. In the excerpt below, from the Prologue, Norrell chronicles the posthumous demonization of Washington by subsequent black leaders and historians, whom, he claims, "should have been alert to the fallacy of anachronism, of applying 1960s expectations of protest to a man who had lived two generations
earlier." Booker T's story, he says, "deserves to be told anew," and with the publication of Up from History in January, this forgotten man will get what Norrell believes to be his due.