Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up From Slavery 100 Years Later.

Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up From Slavery 100 Years Later. Edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 2003. Pp. viii, 227. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8130-28140; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8130-2674-1.)

"This collection is not intended to rehabilitate [Booker T.] Washington's reputation," declares editor W. Fitzhugh Brundage (p. 4). It is a "coincidence," he says, that most of the contributors to Booker T. Washington and Black Progress reach "relatively positive conclusions" about a man who has often been depicted as a duplicitous "Wizard" or an accommodating tool of white industrialists (p. 4). Based on selected presentations from a 2001 University of Florida conference marking the centennial of the publication of Up From Slavery, this important volume covers far more than Washington's autobiography. Indeed, several of the essays in Booker T. Washington and Black Progress might well serve not only as a perceptive introduction to the famous educator but also as an urgent invitation for historians to rethink many time-worn assumptions and conclusions about him.

A collection of essays is seldom of uniform quality. Though all the contributions to Booker T. Washington and Black Progress are valuable, three stand out as particularly good. Robert J. Norrell's brilliant essay offers the most sweeping challenge to the conventional wisdom about Washington. Insisting that the black educator's life must be placed in a context broader than his conflict with W. E. B. Du Bois and his attempts to influence patronage politics, Norrell finds a Washington who--far from being a "conservative" supporter of the southern status quo--"often spoke up for civil and political rights" and, in fact, shared significant "common ground" with Du Bois (pp. 74, 61, 76). "The overarching message that Washington intended," he argues persuasively, "was not acceptance of disfranchisement and segregation but rather a message of progress," a message that he tied to "a defense of black education"--and not just industrial education (pp. 61, 62). His "shrewd and valiant effort to lift his people," though it failed, must be compared to the even less successful alternative strategy of his critics and placed against the backdrop of intense and increasing anti-black feeling (p. 77). Misled by Du Bois, scholars have "confused the style with the substance of Booker T. Washington" (p. 76).

In a sparkling essay on Washington's "pragmatic religion," Wilson J. Moses also takes issue with Du Bois's interpretation of the author of Up From Slavery--a creative "caricature." he says, produced by one of America's "brilliant wielders of the poisoned pen" (pp. 114, 115). The real Washington, according to Moses, was a pragmatist rather than a utilitarian, a "grassroots" Arminian who challenged both "'Calvinistic fatalism" and conspicuous consumption (p. 117). Contrary to "Academic folklore," Washington possessed an ideology "that was clearly conceived, consistently maintained, and imaginatively expressed" (pp. 107-8).

"I'm intentionally being a bit sardonic here," admits Peter A. Coclanis at one point in his breezy, provocative discussion of Washington's economic significance (p. 82). Instead of subjecting Washington's "talk of cleaning, sweeping, dusting, washing, and brushing" to psychological analysis ("Fetish, anyone?"), Coclanis argues that his focus on hygiene should be read in the context of his larger goals, especially black economic development (p. 81). Washington, he says, was promoting practices that made "a good deal of sense" (p. 83). Taking Washington's ideas more seriously than previous scholars, Coclanis insists that the Wizard's teachings were more opportune than opportunistic. "Can there be any serious doubt," he asks, "that, if followed, Washington's admonitions regarding greater self-sufficiency ... and better rural sanitation and hygiene could have helped to break or at least ameliorate African American poverty?" (p. 93). He adds that Washington's focus on the role of values in promoting economic growth bears comparison with the thought of Singapore's Goh Keng Swee and other present-day economists.

Other contributors challenge a variety of approaches to Up From Slavery (or its author). Waldo Martin says that Washington projected a view of blacks "as agents in history, not merely reactive victims" (p. 53). Louis Harlan shows that Washington "was to a large extent the author" of Up From Slavery, despite Max Bennett Thrasher's editorial help (p. 22). Patricia A. Schechter repudiates the notion that there is a "curious silence" about African American women in Washington's autobiography (p. 131). Louise Newman argues that Washington's educational program was a "critical tool in the struggle for racial equality," however "reactionary" it "may appear from the perspective of the twenty-first century" (p. 181). In a fascinating article, Hunt Davis examines the production of a 1929 South African abridgement of Up From Slavery, discovering that despite the goals of white liberals, black leaders read the book as an inspiring example of black autonomy, an illustration "of how black people could have a modicum of control over their lives in white-dominated South Africa" (p. 212).

Only rarely do these essays wander off into special pleading or jargon. Literary scholar David Leverenz, for example, claims that when Washington called Samuel Armstrong "a perfect man," he was invoking "contemporary white middle-class fascination with bodybuilding" and that Washington's citation of St. Paul's athletic training metaphor ("keep under the body") "hints at a homoerotic or conventionally feminine sexual position" (pp. 160, 161).

These are minor flaws in an outstanding book. Overall, Booker T. Washington and Black Progress should provoke vigorous discussion about Up From Slavery and its controversial author. This slender book could well help to complete the reinterpretation of Washington begun nearly fifty years ago by August Meier and continued in the work of Louis Harlan.

Pacific Union College 

ERIC D. ANDERSON