Existing comment:
Educator Booker T. Washington
Born a slave in Virginia, Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) became one of the most popular and influential black leaders in the United States between 1895 and his death in 1915. Washington founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in 1881 and built it into one of the nation's best-known colleges. In 1900, he organized the National Negro Business League to foster black entrepreneurship. With an extensive network of supporters, Washington influenced black federal appointments, funds for black colleges, and the editorial policies of several newspapers.
In his speech before an integrated audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, in September 1895, Washington proposed a compromise in which African Americans would minimize agitation for political rights in exchange for vocational training and participation in the economic development of the New South. While his proposals won him considerable national support from the black community and from white industrialists, politicians, and philanthropists, it did little to improve the political condition of African Americans. Few knew that Washington secretly financed challenges to Jim Crow laws. Washington's accommodationist policies led to the education of many and the establishment of many schools but violence and discrimination against blacks increased. By the twentieth century, a resurgence of violence led to a sharp increase of lynchings as well as race riots in Wilmington, North Carolina (1898); Atlanta, Georgia (1906); and Springfield, Illinois (1908). |