Authors

Louis R. Harlan has edited The Booker T. Washington Papers in fourteen volumes (1972–89). William L. Andrews has edited a Norton Critical Edition of Up From Slavery (1996). August Meier’s Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915 (1963) and John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (1967) are two early and still useful background books. The standard critical biography is by Louis R. Harlan: Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1865–1901 (1972) and Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (1983). Robert B. Stepto’s chapter on Washington’s Up From Slavery in his Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (1979) is a classic analysis. James M. Cox’s chapter “Autobiography and Washington” in his Recovering Lost Ground: Essays in American Autobiography (1989) is very perceptive. James Olney’s essay on Frederick Douglass and Washington in Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersad’s (eds.) Slavery and the Literary Imagination (1989) is also an important study, as is Kevern Verney’s The Art of the Possible: Booker T. Washington and Black Leadership in the United States, 1881–1925 (2001). Also useful are “Strategies and Revisions of Self-Representation in Booker T. Washington’s Autobiography” by Donald B. Gibson, American Quarterly (1993), and the essays of Gibson and Maurice Wallace in Michael Moon and Cathy N. Davidson’s 1995 Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill. In Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re- Reading Booker T., by Houston A. Baker, Jr. (2001) is sharply critical of Washington’s relations to and ideas about whites. Related work includes Creative Conflict in African American Thought: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey, by Wilson Jeremiah Moses (2004); Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (2005) by Eric Foner and Joshua Brown; and Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (2006) by David Brion Davis, each of which furnishes contexts for Washington’s thought. The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations by Michael Rudolph West (2005) presents the “intertwined history of an idea and a man,” Booker T. Washington as the very progenitor of “race relations,” not simply a “black conservative” or pragmatist. Uncle Tom or New Negro?: African Americans Reflect on Booker T. Washington and Up From Slavery 100 Years Later, edited by Rebecca Carroll (2006), which includes the complete text of Washington’s autobiography with twenty essays by various critics exploring the continuing debates over Washington and his relationship to African Americans, highlighting both his controversial ideas and his complexity. There are many juvenile biographies of Washington as well as numerous posters of him available on the internet.

Though born a slave in Hale's Ford, Virginia, Booker Taliaffero Washington would grow up to be the most influential speaker of his time on American race relations. After the Civil War, he worked several manual jobs in West Virginia, but eager to get an education, he traveled five hundred miles by foot to attend the Hampton Normal Agricultural Institute, which had been established to train black students as teachers and tradesmen. Washington graduated with honors and went on to teach Native Americans. In 1881, he was hired as principal by the Alabama school that under his leadership would become the Tuskegee Institute. He rose to national prominence with his 1895 Atlanta Exposition speech, in which he hoped for peaceful coexistence between the blacks and the whites of America, a hope that some felt diminished opportunities for African American protest and advancement. Washington traced the remarkable stages of his life in his autobiography, Up From Slavery (1901).