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ОглавлениеWorking a Lever: Booker T. Washington’s Autobiographies as Tools for Social Change
Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. Institute for Southern Studies University of South Carolina
In his introduction to a reprinting of Up From Slavery, Louis Harlan observes that Booker T. Washington “saw his role as a sort of axis between the races, the only man who could negotiate with each group and keep the peace by holding extremists on both sides in check” (xiv). The striking image of the axis conjures up several different images. One is of an imaginary line dividing blacks and whites in the South, with Washington standing at the center, keeping the line secure so that the two races remain in close proximity but entirely separate. In this I’m reminded of Lillian Smith’s characterization of segregation as the mapping of southern townscapes with lines that were sometimes visible, as with the words “white” and “colored” that stood above public drinking fountains and restrooms, and sometimes invisible, as with the unwritten but strictly enforced laws that established parameters for black conduct and movement. As a keeper of the dividing line, Booker T. Washington stands as the appeaser who successfully works the system for personal and professional gain, while never challenging the grinding oppression of black people. Another meaning of axis, that of an agreement or a pact (as in the Axis powers of World War II), conjures up an image of Washington as an alliance builder between whites and blacks, seeking to construct a more racially tolerant South after the upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In this image, Washington stands as the skillful statesman bringing together opposing sides for discussion, compromise, and action. Neither image is an entirely satisfactory representation of Washington.
But by overlaying the two images—Washington as alliance builder as well as defender of the dividing line—one arrives at a more rich and complicated portrait of Washington, one resembling that which has emerged in much recent scholarship. With this more complicated portrait in mind, I want to explore how Washington constructed himself in his autobiographical writings, particularly Up From Slavery and Working with the Hands, as well as to complicate that portrait by bringing in another image, the lever, to suggest that Washington, all the while that he was publicly defending the South’s dividing line, was at the same time subversively attempting to pry it apart. The subversive work of the lever is most clearly seen in Washington’s discussions of the achievements people gain by working with their hands and by making things. To understand this subversive work—how in the hands of Washington handwork and making became a powerful tool to unhinge the line of segregation—we need first to establish the context in which this destabilizing work takes place, how it fits within the broad strategies Washington used to construct himself in his autobiographies.
As is well known, Washington modeled Up From Slavery closely after Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, a move that not only elevated Washington’s stature but also, by implication, other southern blacks who followed in Washington’s footsteps. Franklin’s influence upon Up From Slavery is probably greater than even generally acknowledged, extending from broad conception down to specific narrative strategies and situations, including the text’s first sentence, “I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia” (1). While of course Washington had no choice in deciding in what county he was born, he certainly had a choice, as James Olney has pointed out, in including its name in his autobiography’s opening words (11), a rhetorical move that heralds Franklin’s guiding presence. That presence is perhaps most apparent in Washington’s construction of Up from Slavery as a conduct book for productive citizenship, though not quite as obviously as Franklin’s. Franklin all but announces his edifying purpose by constructing Part One of his autobiography as a letter to his son, offering fatherly advice and eventually setting himself up as a model of civic duty and social responsibility, to be emulated not only by his son but, by implication, by all Americans. (Franklin doesn’t mention that by the time he began writing his autobiography in 1771, his son was already Royal Governor of New Jersey and obviously needed no such instruction.) Although not using the letter-to-a-child format, Washington nonetheless follows Franklin in presenting himself as a model of productive citizenship, one for blacks to emulate and for whites to admire—or, at least for whites to recognize that Washington, as a representative of black Americans, was a useful citizen, a successful businessman, and a prominent educator. He was not, in other words, what the prevailing racist ideology made of black men: dangerous beasts, un-educable and ravenous.
With his focus on citizenship, Washington constructs his autobiography, as did Franklin, primarily by working through his educational and business achievements, downplaying personal matters and intimate relationships (for instance, Washington names his wives but says very little about them). His discussions, following Franklin’s emphasis on the self-made man, typically focus less on the attainments themselves than on the efforts needed to achieve them. In describing how he overcame the many obstacles facing him, both as an individual and as a leader of Tuskegee (and more generally as one of the most important representatives of African Americans), Washington points to the two issues that best define the vision that everywhere shapes his autobiography: the importance of practical education and of meaningful labor—that is, of doing a job well.
Washington’s portrayal of his childhood and young adulthood concentrates on the incidents that bring him to understand the importance of education and work, which by the end of the autobiography become for all intents and purposes one and the same (work is education, education is work). No episode is more important than the young Washington’s employment by Mrs. Viola Ruffner, a Yankee whose exacting work standards had run off all of her previously hired helpers. Mrs. Ruffner demanded punctuality, honesty, and commitment; everything must run smoothly and orderly. No exceptions, no excuses. “The lessons that I learned in the home of Mrs. Ruffner,” Washington declares in Up From Slavery, “were as valuable to me as any education I have gotten anywhere else. . . . I never see a filthy yard that I do not want to clean it, a paling off of a fence that I do not want to put it on, an unpainted or unwhitewashed house that I do not want to paint or whitewash it, or a button off one’s clothes, or a grease-spot on them or on a floor, that I do not want to call attention to it” (44). Another formative event occurs when Washington shows up unannounced and un-admitted at Hampton Institute in Richmond (having struck out on his own from West Virginia, a journey paralleling Franklin’s youthful bolt from Boston to Philadelphia). He is eventually admitted to Hampton not because of classroom achievement but because of his meticulous sweeping up of a room. “The sweeping of that room was my college examination,” Washington writes, “and never did any youth pass an examination for entrance into Harvard or Yale that gave him more genuine satisfaction. I have passed several examinations since then, but I have always felt that this was the best one I ever passed” (Up From Slavery 53).
Once enrolled at Hampton, Washington came under the sway of its principal General Samuel C. Armstrong, who had developed a curriculum emphasizing education in both the classroom and the workshop. Perhaps the most important thing that Washington learned at Hampton, as he notes in Up From Slavery, is the dignity of manual labor. Washington repeatedly attacks those who believe that the primary goal of education is to deliver people from manual work. For Washington, education should prepare people for productive labor, whatever the profession. Labor done well not only increases one’s earning potential, it also fosters self-improvement and enrichment. Describing his own growth through productive labor at Hampton, Washington observes:
I not only learned that it was not a disgrace to labour, but learned to love labour, not alone for its financial value, but for labour’s own sake and for the independence and self-reliance which the ability to do something which the world wants done brings. At that institution I got my first taste of what it meant to live a life of unselfishness, my first knowledge of the fact that the happiest individuals are those who do the most to make others useful and happy. (73-74)
In all this, Washington sounds a good bit like Franklin, who portrayed himself in his Autobiography as endlessly seeking practical projects to which he could devote himself, such as the creation of better streetlamp. Concerning these projects, Franklin might be understood as the Great Improver, with his efforts directed at bettering himself as well as his society, a perspective resting on the idea that moral virtues are reflected in and reinforced by habits of work. Following Franklin, Washington emphasizes the necessity of labor in improving black people as they progress “up from slavery.” Indeed, Washington argues that perhaps the most heinous legacy of slavery was its vilifying of labor, not only for blacks but also for whites; and so, in order to construct a more prosperous South, both races needed to embrace the importance of manual labor. “The whole machinery of slavery,” Washington asserts, “was so constructed as to cause labour, as a rule, to be looked upon as a badge of degradation, of inferiority. Hence labour was something that both races on the slave plantation sought to escape. The slave system on our place, in a large measure, took the spirit of self-reliance and self-help out of the white people” (Up From Slavery 17). To Washington’s eyes, blacks rather than whites were better fitted for the hard work needed to remake the South, since most slave owners “had mastered no special industry,” while many slaves “had mastered some handicraft” (18).
Although Washington worked surreptitiously to support various political causes, including voting rights, he publically advocated for social reform through economic advancement rather than political agitation, with impoverished blacks, through education and hard work, achieving financial independence. Not surprisingly, this advocacy came under withering attack from many black leaders, particularly those from the North, including most famously W. E. B. Du Bois; and that criticism only grew after Washington’s death, reaching a crescendo during and after the Civil Rights movement. But as a number of recent historians have pointed out, Washington’s options for improving the South’s black populace during his lifetime were extremely limited. As even Washington’s biographer Louis R. Harlan has noted, “understanding Washington’s message requires an understanding of the era in which he sent it. It was the worst time for black people since slavery, a time of lynchings, race riots, personal humiliations, disenfranchisement, and the deepening and spreading of segregation” (“Up From Slavery as History and Biography” 29-30). David Leverenz has observed that “Washington was not interested in what [Orlando] Patterson has recently called ‘macho suicide.’ Instead of directly confronting the terrorizing practices that preserved white power and privilege, Washington performed a manliness based on self-control and mastery” (160). Such self-control and mastery, as presented in his autobiographies, came only through diligence and hard work, manual and otherwise; photographs of Washington, which were carefully posed and edited (he hired the best photographers available), typically show him either working in a garden or field, suggesting from where he had come, or sitting in dignified pose, suggestive of where his hard work had brought him.
Political agitation, on the other hand, was for Washington a seductive temptation that drew southern blacks away from what he characterized as “the more fundamental matters of perfecting themselves in the industries at their doors and in securing property” (85). Washington believed that blacks and whites could be brought together through economic rather than social relations; that is, as blacks became more skilled as workers, their work would become more valued and appreciated by whites, despite their ingrained racial prejudice. That appreciation would over time evolve into respect, human nature overcoming social conditioning. “My experience is that there is something in human nature which always makes an individual recognize and reward merit, no matter under what colour of skin merit is found,” Washington observes at one point in Up From Slavery (154), and at another he discusses a speech that he had given summarizing the logic of his economic-social gospel:
In this address I said that the whole future of the Negro rested largely upon the question as to whether or not he should make himself, through his skill, intelligence, and character, of such undeniable value to the community in which he lived that the community could not dispense with his presence. I said that any individual who learned to do something better than anybody else—learned to do a common thing in an uncommon manner—had solved his problem, regardless of the colour of his skin, and that in proportion as the Negro learned to produce what other people wanted and must have, in the same proportion would he be respected. (202)
It is precisely this social gospel—of learning to do a common thing in an uncommon manner in order to integrate oneself into the community—that is the foundation of thinking behind Washington’s educational system at Tuskegee, what was known as “industrial education.” “Industrial” as Washington used it did not have the same associations that it has now (large factories, heavy manufacturing, assembly lines); for Washington it meant being industrious, and specifically being industrious in the training for specific tradecraft, such as masonry, carpentry, farming, and husbandry. When talking about industrial education and social change, with students evolving into skilled workers who vitalize themselves and their communities, Washington often, as he does in the following passage from Working with the Hands, used the metaphor of construction, of laying down firm foundations upon which soaring edifices could be built:
One farm bought, one house built, one home neatly kept, one man the largest tax-payer and depositor in the local bank, one school or church maintained, one factory running successfully, one truck-garden profitably cultivated, one patient cured by a Negro doctor, one sermon well preached, one office well filled, one life cleanly lived—these will tell more in our favour than all the abstract eloquence that can be summoned up to plead our cause. Our pathway must be up through the soil, up through swamps, up through forests, up through the streams and rocks; up through commerce, education and religion!
In my opinion we cannot begin at the top to build a race, any more than we can begin at the top to build a house. If we try to do this, we shall reap in the end the fruits of our folly. (29-30)
As Washington’s words suggest here, his ultimate goal with his educational system was to “build a race,” to put together a version of blackness that would challenge, and in time dismantle, the prevailing version of whiteness that was being constructed in the post-Civil War white South. In Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940, Grace Elizabeth Hale examines the means by which the complex dynamics of racial segregation were fabricated, cementing in place a social system founded upon absolute and essential racial difference. While Emancipation might have seemed to open up for southern blacks a world of boundless promise, the system of segregation instead restricted blacks within a tightly contained world, limiting opportunities for self-improvement and restricting mobility, both literal and social. If the southern system sought to obscure and deny the dangerous middle ground of racial hybridity, which stood as a challenge to racial essentialism and the visibility of racial categories, so too did the system seek to keep another middle ground—the middle class—entirely white. “Racial essentialism, the conception of sets of personal characteristics as biological determined racial identities,” Hale writes, “grew in popularity among whites in tandem with the rise of the new black middle class and its increasing visibility” (21).
Hale for the most part dismisses any serious challenge to the segregated system by Washington, arguing that despite his efforts to build a black middle class and “his staggering accomplishments [that] rebuked whites’ illusions of absolute racial difference and black inferiority[,] . . . his accommodationist stance, moralism, and program of industrial education offered no resistance to the expansion of segregation” (25). Not all whites from the period agreed with Hale’s assessment. That many whites in fact believed Tuskegee and Washington’s program of industrial education posed a serious threat to the southern system, in spite of Washington’s public disavowals, can perhaps best be seen in an article by Thomas Dixon, “Booker T. Washington and the Negro: Some Dangerous Aspects of the Work of Tuskegee,” which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1905. Dixon here savagely attacks Washington’s leadership at Tuskegee because he was training blacks “all to be masters of men, to be independent, to own and operate their own industries, plant their own fields, buy and sell their own goods, and in every shape and form destroy the last vestige of dependence on the white man for anything” (qtd. in Norrell 71). To the question of what would southern white man do if the Negro threatened his livelihood, Dixon gives the simple answer: “Kill him!” (qtd. in Norrell 71). Dixon had a few years before he voiced this conclusion in The Leopard Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, when one of the novel’s heroes (a preacher, no less) makes this observation: “Industrial training gives power. If the Negro ever becomes a serious competitor of the white labourer in the industries of the South, the white man will kill him” (335).
But Washington’s educational and social theories, I want to suggest, were even more subversive than Hale or Dixon ever imagined, particularly as seen in his frequent emphasis on hands, handcrafts, and making. While this subversiveness is not always immediately obvious, its disruptive power is almost always there lurking, visible once one begins to look for it. Take, for example, one of Washington’s most infamous comments, from his speech at the Atlanta Exposition (which is printed in its entirety in Up From Slavery): “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress” (221-222). At first glance, this comment seems entirely straightforward: blacks and whites can work together to improve economic conditions in the South, while remaining entirely separate socially. White leaders from across the nation rallied behind Washington’s declaration. But if we return to Hale’s comment about the white South’s construction of whiteness and its fear of hybridity, Washington’s image of a single hand with black and white fingers invokes precisely that hybridity, raising a number of questions that unsettle the foundations of white southern separatism. This is David Leverenz’s point, when he observes that Washington’s image of the hand “subliminally subverts” the social separatism that it seems to stabilize, since any attempt to visualize the hand—how is the hand both black and white?—suggests racial amalgamation. “Is the hand striped, like a zebra?” Leverenz asks, offering ways to visualize it. “Blended, like a mulatto? Which fingers are black, and which are white? How many of each are there? What happens at the base of the black finger or fingers, when the black moves into the palm?” (165). Adding to the disruptive potential of Washington’s image of the hand is the foreboding challenge that he immediately after delivers to southern whites: “Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against you the load downward” (222). How comforting can all this be to white supremacists? And what happens when those hands are made into fists?
Washington’s subversive challenge to southern separatism, particularly with regard to education and handwork, can be seen throughout all his autobiographies, but in none more clearly than Working with the Hands, which appeared in 1904 and was marketed as a sequel to Up From Slavery. Working with the Hands covers some of same ground as Up From Slavery, but it focuses much more closely on labor and education. No doubt it was written in part as a response to the ferocious attacks from W. E. B. Du Bois and other black leaders that were directed at Washington’s program of industrial education at Tuskegee. To Du Bois and others, there was nothing “higher” in the higher education that black students were receiving at Tuskegee. In his essay “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” which appeared in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote that education at Tuskegee was “becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life” (39). He characterized it at one point as “industrial slavery and civic death” (42). In another essay from Souls, “Of the Training of Black Men,” written with Washington clearly in mind, Du Bois argued that industrial education was merely a temporary fix to an economic problem, a program for teaching trades and little else, and one that in ignoring the cultivation of higher pursuits of the mind condemned students to stunted lives of toil.
In Working with the Hands, Washington attempted to answer such criticism by enlarging upon an idea that he had only briefly developed in Up From Slavery: that industrial education involved not merely the training of the hands but rather the simultaneous training of the hands, head, and heart. A significant shift in Washington’s conceptualizing of industrial education takes place in this text. In earlier works, Washington had often posed traditional academic education against manual training, as when he often asked what possible use there could be in teaching students mired in abject poverty how to speak French. While Washington’s educational program did not of course altogether ignore traditional education, its focus was always on mastering a trade, not an academic discipline. In Working with the Hands, however, there is a more integrated vision of academic and industrial education, with the two areas working together to create well-rounded, skilled craftsmen. “Mere hand training, without thorough moral, religious, and mental education, counts for very little,” Washington declares in the preface. “The hands, the head, and the heart together, as the essential elements of educational need, should be so correlated that one may be made to help the others. At the Tuskegee Institute, we find consistently that we can make our industrial work assist in the academic training, and vice versa” (v).
Throughout Working with the Hands, Washington points to many ways that academic and manual training together build upon each other. Washington asserts that even the most rudimentary manual training—such as making one’s bed properly, brushing one’s teeth after meals—teaches students the “habits of applied industry” (22) which lay the foundation for success not only in skilled hand training but also in the academic classroom. Moreover, by grounding intellectual pursuits in real-world situations, as was done at Tuskegee, Washington argues that students receive a deeper grasp of the world about them, making them more enthusiastic about learning. “There was,” Washington observes, “a great difference between studying about things and studying the things themselves, between book instruction and the illumination of practical experience” (12). Washington notes how certain fields of scientific study are particularly suited for helping students learn particular tradescraft—biology for those studying gardening and plant cultivation, physics for those studying construction, chemistry for those working with pesticides, solvents, and fertilizers—but he points out that even academic fields with no obvious practical connections are engaged in productive interplays with shop education. Writing was taught at Tuskegee, for instance, as if the students were apprentices learning a craft through hands-on training: first by learning the working principles of the language and then by applying those principles in assignments that were practiced until made perfect. Assignments were often geared toward understanding practical work, as when a student in a broom-making class wrote an essay (cited by Washington) imagining herself as a broom and describing how she was made.
At one point in Working with the Hands, Washington characterizes Tuskegee’s students as “artisans” (95), a designation that points to another way for understanding the reformist thinking underlying Washington’s industrial education: that its educational philosophy shares ties with the Arts and Crafts Movement that was popular both in England and the United States during this time. While it is probably going too far to designate Washington, as Michael Bieze does, as “Ruskin in the Black Belt” (“Ruskin in the Black Belt” 24), Bieze nonetheless makes a convincing case that Washington was aware of the Arts and Crafts movement and deliberately drew from it, not only to promote himself and Tuskegee, but to humanize the image of black workers and to promote the importance of manual labor for well-being. Evidence of Washington’s ties with Arts and Crafts thinking abounds. A number of Washington’s books, for instance, were lavishly laid out in with recognizably Arts and Crafts designs, contextualizing Washington and industrial education visually, if not specifically, within the Movement. Washington also published in The Fra, the magazine of Elbert Hubbard, an Arts and Crafts proponent and organizer of a workers’ community in Aurora, NY. The Arts and Crafts aesthetic—whose central idea, as Bieze points out—was the “harmonious interplay of labor, art, and morality” (Booker T. Washington 87), certainly dovetailed with Washington’s ideals, with both foregrounding the idea that, in their dedication to craft, artisans transformed themselves and their world. Both movements, moreover, combined utopian idealism with down-to-earth practicality, suggesting that the rituals of everyday lives could themselves be forces for social change.
It is not hard to imagine Washington recognizing the subversive potential offered by Arts and Crafts thinking, even if he did not openly discuss it in his writing. (As far as I know, Washington never commented on Ruskin or other Arts and Crafts’ theorists, though apparently Ruskin was on the reading list for Tuskegee students.) Arts and Crafts proponents, and most particularly William Morris and his followers, saw the movement as offering an alternative social and economic order, one based on a “new industrialism” that focused not on machine production but on the work of craftsmen, who represented the redeeming values of labor, education, and craft, three attributes always touted by Washington. Eric Gill, a British artist and a leading Arts and Crafts proponent, observes in his autobiography that in his commitment to the Arts and Crafts Movement he had sought to create an alternative order, “a cell of good living in the chaos of our world” that would go far “towards re-integrating bed and board, the small farm and the workshop, the home and the school, earth and heaven” (299). Likewise, Washington saw Tuskegee as a safe space for black youth where a similar type of reintegration could take place. Over the long term, Washington hoped that one sort of reintegration would lead to another and broader one: that of blacks within southern society.
That the very act of making itself embodies moral values, and thus possesses the power to humanize both the maker and the world at large, is an idea central to Washington’s conception of industrial education and social change. The title of the first chapter of Working with the Hands is “Moral Values of Handwork,” and in that chapter—and indeed the entire book—Washington discusses how meaningful labor is indeed meaningful: it simultaneously engages head, heart, and hand; or put another way, it engages intelligence, morality, and artisanship. In some ways, this three-way engagement is the foundation of Washington’s most far-reaching and subversive tactic for dismantling the racist structures of southern society, far exceeding that of his public advocacy of economic cooperation between the two races.
The insights of Elaine Scarry help us to understand Washington’s subversive strategy. As Scarry discusses in her magisterial The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, the act of making involves a dual motion, one in which the makers of things project their humanity into the artifact and then receive back the creative force of the object. For this reason Scarry designates the artifact as a lever, “for the object is only a fulcrum or lever across which the force of creation moves back onto the human site and remakes the makers” (307). Scarry describes a two-step process in which acts of making carry the makers forward in endless cyclical progression of uplift. The cycle begins, Scarry writes, after
an existing object, by recreating the maker, itself necessitates a new act of objectified projection: the human being, troubled by weight, creates a chair; the chair recreates him to be weightless; and now he projects this new weightless self into new objects, the image of an angel, the design for a flying machine. Second, just as the sentient needs are projected into objects, so objects themselves contain capacities and needs that sponsor additional artifacts. (321)
But if the artifact can be seen as a lever that recreates the maker, it might also be understood as a lever that has the potential for remaking those who purchase or use the artifact. And here, in the case of Washington and his desire to remake white southern attitudes toward blacks, is the artifact’s revolutionary potential: in the act of labor and making, blacks in effect turn themselves inside out, projecting the richness of their interior lives into the artifact. That richness is levered not only back into the black makers, remaking them in the process, but also outward into the world, including the world of white southern culture. It was the richness and humanity of the black makers that were embedded in the artifact—that is, their interior life rather than their black skin—that Washington wanted white southerners to recognize and acknowledge. Recognition by whites of the humanity embedded in artifacts—and thus in their makers—would begin a process transforming racial attitudes and leading to the creation of a more just and equitable society.
Washington’s understanding of the revolutionary potential of the artifact dovetails with his understanding of industrial education, as it too is best understood as a lever, as a tool for immediately improving blacks and eventually improving whites, as they come together to remake the South. “Our school is a lever which has made of several hundred young men and women levers in their turn to lift up their race,” Washington observes (Black-Belt Diamonds 13), acknowledging the first step in his vision—and version—of southern reconstruction. The second step would come later, over time. While Washington certainly misjudged white recalcitrance in acknowledging the humanity of blacks—or maybe he knew all along but didn’t want to let on publicly—he nonetheless constructed through his autobiographical writing a far-reaching and visionary plan for educating both blacks and whites for the remaking of the South into a better place for all its citizens.
And this returns us to Benjamin Franklin, who believed that to make the world a better place future people needed to be first and foremost toolmakers. Certainly both Franklin and Washington were just that, conceiving their autobiographies as tools for improving the lives of their readers. Franklin went so far as to configure himself metaphorically as a book that he, as a printer, could go back and edit, correcting what he called the errata of his life, in an endless process of self-improvement. When he was a young man, Franklin composed an epitaph for himself that drew upon the same metaphorical construction:
The Body of
B. Franklin, Printer;
Like the Cover of an Old Book,
Its Contents torn out,
And stript of its Lettering and Gilding,
Lies here, Food for Worms.
But the work shall not be wholly lost:
For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more,
In a new & more perfect Edition
Corrected and amended
By the Author.
Booker T. Washington, as far as I know, never described himself as a correctible book. But in a sense that is what he strived to present himself in his autobiographies, rewriting his life over and over again, honing and sharpening his narrative, making it into what he hoped would be the most effective tool for opening the way for social change and social justice in the South.
Works Cited
Bieze, Michael. Booker T. Washington and the Art of Self-Representation. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Print.
---. “Ruskin in the Black Belt: Booker T. Washington, Arts and Crafts, and the New Negro.” Source: Notes in the History of Art 24.4 (2005): 24-34. Print.
Dixon, Thomas, Jr. The Leopard’s Spots. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1902. Print.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.
Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography. 1791. The Autobiography and Other Writings. Ed. L. Jesse Lemisch. New York: Penguin Signet Classics, 2001. Print.
---. “Benjamin Franklin’s Epitaph.” Bible.org. 2 February 2009. Web. 20 January 2017. <https://bible.org/illustration/benjaminfranklin%E2%80%99sepitaph>
Gill, Eric. Autobiography. 1941. New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1968. Print.
Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. New York: Random House, 1998. Print.
Harlan, Louis R. “Introduction.” Up From Slavery. By Booker T. Washington. 1901. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. vii-xliii. Print.
---. “Up From Slavery as History and Biography.” Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up From Slavery 100 Years Later. Ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2003. 19-37. Print.
Leverenz, David. “Booker T. Washington’s Strategies of Manliness, for Black and White Audiences.” Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up From Slavery 100 Years Later. Ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2003. 165-187. Print.
Norrell, Robert J. “Understanding the Wizard: Another Look at the Age of Booker T. Washington.” Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up From Slavery 100 Years Later. Ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2003. 38-57. Print.
Olney, James. “The Founding Fathers—Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.” Slavery and the Literary Imagination: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987. Ed. Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. 1-24. Print.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Print.
Washington, Booker T. Black-Belt Diamonds: Gems from the Speeches, Addresses, and Talks to Students. Ed. Victoria Earle Matthews. New York: Fortune and Scott, 1898. Print.
---. Up From Slavery. 1901. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Print.
---. Working with the Hands. 1904. New York: Negro Universities P, 1969. Print.
