Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements

by Booker T. Washington (editor)

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Genres: History

147 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 2009

About the author

Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, orator, author and the dominant leader of the African-American community nationwide from the 1890s to his death. Born to slavery and freed by the Civil War in 1865, as a young man, became head of the new Tuskegee Institute, then a teachers' college for blacks. It became his base of operations. His "Atlanta Exposition" speech of 1895 appealed to middle class whites across the South, asking them to give blacks a chance to work and develop separately, while implicitly promising not to demand the vote. White leaders across the North, from politicians to industrialists, from philanthropists to churchmen, enthusiastically supported Washington, as did most middle class blacks. He was the organizer and central figure of a network linking like-minded black leaders throughout the nation and in effect spoke for Black America throughout his lifetime. Meanwhile a more militant northern group, led by W. E. B. Du Bois rejected Washington's self-help and demanded recourse to politics, referring to the speech dismissively as "The Atlanta Compromise". The critics were marginalized until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, at which point more radical black leaders rejected Washington's philosophy and demanded federal civil rights laws.

Reviews

[Michael Reynolds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tuskegee was an American missionary agency

Tuskegee was a black town masquerading as a school. It was black power in action and Booker T. Washington was a great American missionary training American missionaries to make black towns that masquerade at schools truly, this was the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1880s after Tuskegee was made Booker T. Washingtonin coated black power