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Teaching American History with the Booker T. Washington Papers
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by Jerry Thornbery
Gilman School
Baltimore, Maryland
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Now that the 14 volumes of the Booker T. Washington Papers are online, thanks to the efforts of the History Cooperative and the University of Illinois Press, American history teachers have a convenient way to introduce these valuable primary sources to their classes. The Washington Papers are an excellent window through which students can examine the political, social, and racial history of the early twentieth century. The letters offer a panorama of American history from the early 1880s, when Washington was emerging as a black educator, to 1915, when he died the most famous African American of his day.
Booker T. Washington corresponded with a wide range of individuals, including politicians like William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft; racial leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, and Marcus Garvey; literary figures such as William Dean Howells, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Paul Laurence Dunbar; industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller (both father and son); influential journalists like Ray Stannard Baker, Oswald Garrison Villard, and T. Thomas Fortune; and prominent educators such as Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins, Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, John Hope of Morehouse, and Samuel Chapman Armstrong of Hampton. The diversity of this correspondence provides the reader with an excellent overview of the Progressive Era.
The African American Community at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
The papers highlight the divisions within the black community regarding the direction racial leadership should take. What is of particular interest is not that Washington and his main rival, W. E. B. Du Bois, developed a deep-seated dislike for each other; what is of interest is how long these men worked together, making the final break only in 1905 with the founding of the Niagara Movement, an all-black organization that attempted to challenge Washington's leadership.
In fact, until 1905, Washington focused much of his invectives on a group of Northern black "radicals," who were led by a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa and journalist, William Monroe Trotter. It was Trotter's public confrontation with Washington in Boston in July 1903 that first exposed to white Americans the divisions within the black community. This so-called "Boston Riot" (Washington's term, not Trotter's) ultimately forced Du Bois to make a decision about which group he would support and pushed him off the fence he had tried to straddle.
Besides being an educator and race leader, Booker T. Washington was a political boss. From his base of operation at Tuskegee Institute, located in Macon County, Alabama, Washington created what his principal biographer Louis Harlan has described as "an intricate, nationwide web of institutions in the black community that were conducted, dominated, or strongly influenced" by the Tuskegee Machine. Washington and his lieutenants had their hands in many activities: dispensing political patronage; controlling philanthropic grants (both for Tuskegee and other educational institutions and against those run by "disloyal" educators); influencing, subsidizing, and owning black newspapers; engaging in covert civil rights work; and running a large spy network that frequently was involved in espionage against Washington's critics. Above all, those that ran the Tuskegee Machine believed in rewarding BTW's friends and punishing his enemies.
Washington was a complex and devious individual. As Louis Harlan has noted: "Washington's life and thought were layered into public, private, and secret and also segmented according to which subgroup of black or white he confronted. For each group, he played a different role, wore a different mask. Like the proverbial cat, Washington lived nine lives but he lived them all at once. Yet there were so few slips of the mask that it is no wonder his intimates called him 'the wizard.'" The letters help the reader understand the many roles that Washington played.
Using the Volumes with Students
For each volume, the editors have written an insightful overview that places the letters in the context of the time. Each individual who corresponded with Washington or who was mentioned in a letter is annotated somewhere in the volumes of the papers. In addition to letters, the volumes contain pertinent speeches and newspaper and magazine articles that were written by or about Washington and his allies. Each volume contains its own index.
In using these volumes in class, I assign a volume to each student and let them choose 30 consecutive pages of letters. I tell them to skip all speeches, newspaper accounts, and magazine articles, and focus only on the letters. I have them write a paper about what they find in those pages of correspondence. The students are encouraged to draw generalizations about this leader and the age during which he lived. Their papers consider what the letters reveal about the Progressive Era, both from a political standpoint and from a social standpoint.
Students also must discuss Washington's public, private, and secret lives. In examining the public Washington, students look at whether the letters support or refute the ideas expressed in the Atlanta Address of 1895. In looking at the private side of Washington, students consider what the letters tell about Washington as the CEO of Tuskegee Institute, about his family life, and about his political activities. In examining his secret life, students are encouraged to find evidence that shows how Washington worked as a political boss, running his Tuskegee Machine. They are also asked to comment on his secret involvement in civil rights activities.
Of course, not all of those topics will be covered in 30 pages of letters. That is especially true of Volume 2, which centers much of its focus on Washington's early life and his founding of Tuskegee Institute.
Volume-by-Volume
With the exception of Volume 1, which contains most of Washington's autobiographical publications, and Volume 14, which is a cumulative index, the volumes are arranged chronologically. Volume 2 covers the years 1860-89; Volume 3, 1889-95; and Volume 4, 1895-98. The other volumes (5-13) each cover approximately two years.
Volume 14 is an especially valuable tool because the reader can use the cumulative index to see what is contained about any individual in the papers. Students can also use Volume 14 to locate in which volume an individual is annotated. For example, Charles W. Anderson, an African American who was a prominent New York republican politician, served as the principal Northern lieutenant of the Tuskegee Machine. He is annotated in Volume 14, page 154. Yet his correspondence is scattered throughout all of the remaining volumes. Students using Volume 8, for example, might not know very much about Anderson, but with the help of the cumulative index they can quickly find which volume contains the annotation that will identify this individual.
The online edition of the Washington Papers has a search engine, but I have not found it to be useful. For that reason, I would urge individuals to make use of Volume 14 if they want to do a complete search for an individual or event. (For those teachers who prefer hard copies, the University of Illinois Press still sells the entire 14-volume set for $495.)
Further References
For teachers who have little time to explore in detail the age of Booker T. Washington but would like a succinct reference source, Jacqueline M. Moore's Booker T. Washington, W.E.B Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift (Scholarly Resources, 2003) is indispensable. Moore, who studied under Louis R. Harlan, has written an extremely concise book with approximately 125 pages of text, an excellent collection of primary sources, a fine bibliographical essay, and several pages of chronology. She even includes a "note on pronunciation."
Also very helpful are two articles that Louis Harlan wrote more than 30 years ago: "The Secret Life of Booker T. Washington," Journal of Southern History (August 1971), and " Booker T. Washington in Biographical Perspective," American Historical Review (October 1970). Eugene Genovese has written the best short defense of Booker T. Washington: "A Strong Man's Tragedy -- and Ours," National Review (March 1973). This defense was a book review of Harlan's Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901.
Dover Publications has published high-quality but inexpensive ($2 for each edition) editions of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk and Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery.
For teachers who want to explore the topic in more detail, there are several very significant works. They should consult Harlan's prize-winning two-volume biography (Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901 and Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915, Oxford University Press, 1975 and 1986).) and David Levering Lewis's prize-winning two-volume biography of W. E. B. Du Bois (W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 and W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963, Henry Holt & Company, 1994 and 2000). Also useful, although it was published 40 years ago, is a book that shaped an entire generation of scholars: August Meier's Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915. The University of Michigan will release a new edition this fall, with an introduction by Dr. Lewis. It is a shame that Stephen R. Fox's biography of William Monroe Trotter, The Guardian of Boston (Atheneum, 1970), is no longer in print. Used copies are still available, however.
As a graduate student at the University of Maryland, Jerry Thornbery worked for several summers as a low-level intern on the Booker T. Washington papers project. It was there that he gained an interest in the "wizard of Tuskegee." After receiving his Ph.D., he was hired by the Gilman School in Baltimore, where he has taught history for the past 25 years.
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