The civilizing mission of Booker T. Washington.

IN AUGUST 1890 THE CHRISTIAN UNION, A NATIONALLY READ MONTHLY, hit the stands containing an incendiary broadside against African American ministers entitled "The Colored Ministry: Its Defects and Needs." That someone would criticize black ministers was not surprising, but the author of the missive was. Booker T. Washington's name on the byline stung. Known as the principal of Tuskegee Institute and an emergent black leader, Washington's reputation gave the critique force and undercut the potential objection that the criticism was rooted in racism. Indeed, he claimed firsthand knowledge and, ostensibly, only altruistic motives. Citing his "direct contact with the colored ministers for eight years in the heart of the South," Washington had "no hesitancy in asserting that three-fourths of the Baptist ministers and two-thirds of the Methodists are unfit, either mentally or morally, or both, to preach the Gospel to any one or to attempt to lead any one." Given that he had explained earlier in the piece that most black ministers were either Methodist or Baptist, Washington's article left no doubt that he regarded the great majority as mentally and morally wanting. (1)

Washington's criticism presents an enigma--no less perplexing than the enigma of Washington himself--because in criticizing ministers he was attacking the leaders of the only institution solely within black control. Yet as almost every writer on Washington has noted, circumspection and shrewd political calculation marked Washington's leadership, and his criticism of ministers, with its risk of internecine conflict, presents no clear strategic goal that makes sense given the historiography on Washington. Of course, little agreement exists among scholars seeking to understand Washington's intellectual and political strategies, and the inability to explain Washington's actions points to a fundamental weakness in the historiography on him. As Louis R. Harlan, his principal biographer, has argued, "Washington emerges from the evidence of his private papers as a man who continually acted out a series of conflicting roles." Harlan's extensive body of work, which reinforced the earlier perspective of August Meier, portrayed Washington as a contradictory figure whose activities bore the mark of concealed ambition and petty vindictiveness, characteristics that have provoked scholarly censure instead of praise. Others have seen a more benign side to Washington's contradictions. More recently, scholarship on Washington has begun to emphasize that his conflicting personae were the result of limited maneuvering room in the dangerous context of the post-Civil War South. Most notably, Robert J. Norrell, a leader in the rehabilitation of Washington, has argued that Washington's political tactics were the result of an extremely constricted social and political environment and that his success as a leader derived in large part from his circumspection and skill in responding to constant and numerous attacks. Rejecting Harlan's use of role psychology to explain Washington's contradictions, Norrell claims that Washington's inconsistencies were the result of the South's deep hostility to black leadership and the resulting ever-present threat of violence, which required all of Washington's tact to hold at bay. Moreover, Norrell argues that by moving beyond the two contexts in which Harlan understood Washington--his influence in Republican politics and the conflict with W. E. B. Du Bois--a different portrait emerges that should produce respectful praise, rather than critical condemnation, even though Washington's maneuvers proved unsuccessful. Others have followed Norrell's path, analyzing Washington in light of the broader thought-worlds of Benjamin Franklin and Max Weber, as a precursor to the third-world developmental strategies of the twentieth century, and as a careful manipulator of the larger cultural ideals of gender and civilization, among others. Broader contexts, so far, have yielded more flattering portraits, and Washington remains a cagey and shrewd leader in the most recent scholarly depictions. (2)

As salutary as the move toward broader contexts is, however, Washington scholars have not broadened the angle of vision far enough, and their exclusive focus on Washington's intellectual positions and performative strategies neglects the important structural determinants of his actions that would help explain his criticism of black ministers. Other scholars not exclusively focused on Washington have sought to understand him in terms of the post-Civil War project of "racial uplift," a fraught concept endorsed by many in the black middle class, yet here too the historiography remains unable to fully explain Washington's claims. Historians of racial uplift argue that Washington and other black leaders adopted a conception of racial developmentalism in which they, as the vanguard of racial improvement, were pulling the race up by modeling proper bourgeois values and respectable social mores to their lower-class black counterparts. The existence of the black middle class, or what was sometimes called the "better class of Negroes," constituted a core argument that black racial development, though lagging behind white standards, created a sufficient basis for the full inclusion of African Americans into the American political system. The project of racial uplift and its attendant politics of respectability, to use the phrase coined by the historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, contained a core contradiction, however. In criticizing the black lower class, proponents of racial uplift made claims about black social mores that were, in Higginbotham's words, "uncannily similar to the racist arguments they strove to refute." Many scholars reach for the language of class to explain these contradictions, arguing with the historian Kevin K. Gaines that the black middle class occupied a liminal space "as both an aspiring social class and a racially subordinated caste denied all political rights and protections." From this standpoint, black uplift was a peculiar combination of middle-class values and racial developmentalism in a simultaneous project to advance black middle-class interests and escape from the enclosures of a racial caste. By drawing distinctions among them, proponents of racial uplift separated themselves from social mores that they criticized, while nevertheless asserting that the entire race was moving upward. (3)

Conceivably, in using the categories of racial uplift Washington was merely using a standard tactic to censure black ministers and, by extension, the lower-class mores of their poor and rural parishioners, separating himself from what he considered embarrassing forms of religious expression that seemed to suggest a lack of black racial and cultural development. However, sensitive as much of the scholarly literature on black uplift is, its scope is limited by an almost exclusive focus on the American cultural and political context. Many scholars of black uplift focus on American political values, the American racial past, and the difficult choices facing black leaders as they sought to counter the barrage of racist stereotypes with positive black counter-images. As a result, the overwhelming impression from the literature is that black leaders faced, in the immortal phrase of Gunnar Myrdal, a unique "American Dilemma." Even Higginbotham, one of the finest scholars of racial uplift, only obliquely acknowledges the continuities between African Americans and other subjugated peoples, instead construing the politics of respectability as a "search for common ground--to be both black and American." Yet African Americans' position in the United States shared a common dilemma faced by all subjugated peoples around the world: how to escape the contradictions that grew out of what the leftist Brazilian pedagogue Paolo Freire has called "the duality of the oppressed." Many global systems of oppression have been shot through with contradictory value systems, structural inhibitions, and multifarious and conflicting group solidarities, which John L. Comaroff, a leading historical anthropologist of South Africa, has called, "the contradictions of colonialism." Moreover, as historians of colonialism have noted, in systems of domination a class of leaders often arises from the subjugated population that shares the colonizers' system of values. These "indigenous collaborators" gain esteem and prestige within the colonial system because they serve as intermediaries between the colonial rulers and the subjugated population, and they are necessarily critical of the traits and cultural systems of the colonized peoples from which they come. As such, they often stand before their own people as promoters of the prescribed systems of behavior and the so-called civilizing missions undertaken by the colonial regime. However, indigenous collaborators are often not able to overcome their own indigenousness, and they remain in a highly contradictory and ambivalent position, neither one with the ruler nor with the ruled. (4)

The post-Civil War South shared many characteristics of colonial regimes, characteristics that offer, at the very least, a suggestive context for understanding Washington's performative strategies and actions. The South as a region lived under military occupation for the better part of twelve years following the Civil War, and the chief governmental agency charged with oversight of the freed slaves was a military organization, the Freedmen's Bureau, administered by the U.S. Army. The benevolent societies of the North worked closely with the Freedmen's Bureau to advance a civilizing mission designed to retrain freed slaves in what they took to be the necessary values of the post-Civil War South. Crucially, however, the civilizing mission in the South was one part of a larger effort by late-nineteenth-century benevolent organizations and church foreign mission societies to bring Christianity and "civilization" to Native Americans, Hawaiians, Filipinos, and other "colored" peoples around the world. As a result, the initiative in the region bears many similarities to the civilizing missions of other imperial regimes. Moreover, in the South the civilizing mission relied on indigenous collaborators, of whom Booker T. Washington was the most significant, to direct aid and exert control over the primary entity of black organization, the African American church. Washington's condemnation of black ministers, in other words, was but one prong of his larger collaboration with the postwar civilizing mission of the North, and his contradictions were not a unique feature of his personality or leadership style but a common characteristic of a system of rule that relied on indigenous intermediaries. However, in the tangled skein of power that was the post-Civil War South, rulership was not stable. With the inauguration of Jim Crow, the regime changed, and control flowed to southern politicians and northern businessmen who were less sanguine about the possibility of black acculturation. Caught in the transfer of power, Washington faced an altered context in which his support for the civilizing mission--with its uncanny similarity to the racist arguments of southern politicians and northern businessmen--had a different political valence than he had originally intended. (5)

Understanding Washington's criticism of black ministers, then, requires understanding the context in which he originally uttered it, because his denunciation took its initial meaning from the North's postwar mission to "civilize" freed slaves. Slaves entered a world of precarious existence on emancipation day, lacking money, land, and, in many cases, the benevolence of their former white masters. Mere survival required effort and ingenuity. To meet the need, an army of volunteers and agents from the benevolent societies of the North poured into the South with the advancing battlefront to effect, in the phrase of the historian Joe M. Richardson, a "Christian Reconstruction." At the head of the group in terms of size and dollars was the mammoth American Missionary Association (AMA). A league of abolitionist societies organized in 1846, the AMA dedicated itself to both the abolition of slavery and the establishment of a Protestant Christian America. In directing post-Civil War northern philanthropy and charting the course of the civilizing mission, the AMA wielded unparalleled influence. In the twenty-five years after the Civil War, the AMA began several institutions of higher education and countless normal schools to train teachers throughout the South. By 1888, of the estimated fifteen thousand black teachers in the South, nearly half had been trained in AMA schools. Moreover, made up primarily of wealthy Congregationalists and Unitarians, the AMA's operating budget, totaling almost seven million dollars between 1861 and 1889, was as large as all other benevolent societies combined. That amount constitutes nearly one-third of all northern benevolence for southern relief over the period. Of course compared to the need, northern philanthropy in the South was a paltry sum, but given the relative scarcity of resources for post-emancipation support, the AMA's commanding financial position made it a dominant policy player before the inauguration of Jim Crow. (6)

In addition to being a vehicle for northern philanthropy, however, the AMA was a missionary society, committed to inculcating "civilization" in the "backward races" of the South as an accoutrement to its offer of tangible aid. Central to the AMA vision for the remaking of the South was the education and Christianization of former slaves. Prior to the Civil War, slaves had already converted to Christianity in large numbers with the expansion of evangelical Protestantism during the Second Great Awakening, but African American worship rituals involved a combination of Anglo and African forms, most notably antiphonal singing and preaching, during which participants engaged one another in back and forth, call and response. The polyrhythm and syncopation of the call and response echoed African custom and brought the whole group into the Spirit. The AMA looked upon the surviving Africanisms and distinctive worship forms of African American Christianity with distrust and worried that slave religion was an expression of freed slaves' ignorance and supposed viciousness that would burgeon in the South with the high birthrates of African Americans. For example, the AMA's secretary, the Reverend Michael E. Strieby, acknowledged that "[t]he blacks are religious," but he qualified his evaluation. Because he saw "such ignorance among priests and people, and with the diabolical training of slavery almost compelling theft, falsehood, and unchastity," Strieby argued that it was unsurprising that "much of their piety is emotional and immoral." In other words, following the conventional Congregational dictum that a rightly formed religion was the basis of a properly grounded morality, Strieby claimed that black religion did not offer the moral guidance necessary to restrain individual transgression and that the antisocial tendency of the freedpeople increased the risk of racial antagonism. Thus, although Christians should "do more for the distant heathen," Strieby advised his readers that, for the good of the nation, foreign missions ought not to trump the great mission field of "the blacks at our doors." Theodore Woolsey, the ex-president of Yale University and a leader in the Evangelical Alliance, agreed with Strieby, confessing that he was "sorry to be obliged" to believe that as long as southern blacks and their leaders remained illiterate, "their own religion ... will not save them and the country from the evils, which may grow out of collision of races." To save the nation, southern blacks needed to be taught a "sound religion and morality" that would make them "prudent, cautious of offense, kind to all, peaceable." Washington Gladden, another prominent minister who would later become the AMA president and whose name would be synonymous with the social gospel, made the civilizing mission explicit. The South required a moral reconstruction, because "[t]here will be no peace at the South till the South is civilized, and men are not civilized by edict." (7)

What, though, was true Christianity to the AMA? Its answer derived from the profound economic changes already well underway in the North as a result of the industrial revolution. Many scholars have noted that the industrial transformation produced what Eric J. Hobsbawm has called the "conquering bourgeois," whose victory as a class proved in the eyes of many the superiority of the system of values that enabled their eventual triumph. Indeed, the bourgeois ideology, sometimes labeled the ideology of free labor, became the dominant view of northern sectionalism in the lead-up to the Civil War. The proponents of free labor viewed slave labor as morally inferior to free labor since wage earners could rise through their own thrift and industriousness to financial independence in a free labor system. The AMA thought that Protestant (Congregational) Christianity was integral to that system, because such a religion produced the virtues of discipline, moral sobriety, self-control, and seriousness of purpose necessary for economic success. In its most crass form, the success ethic of the AMA meant that those who prospered reaped the just reward for their inner virtue, which resulted in their upward social mobility. Conversely, the poor were poor because of their own thriftlessness, laziness, and self-indulgence. (8)

When they evaluated freed slaves, AMA leaders connected the bourgeois idea of free labor to what they viewed as the former slaves' racial degradation, and slave religion, in particular, became the quintessential expression of former slaves' stunted "racial development" that made them unfit for work in a free labor system. The AMA thought that African American religious ritual represented a fundamental problem for freed slaves because the association regarded the call and response of African American worship as an emotional escapism that failed to offer the foundation for a proper, bourgeois morality. In fact, many feared that what they construed as the emotionalism of black Protestantism actually encouraged idleness and dissolution because it promoted an otherworldly orientation among freed slaves, to the neglect of the present world. To prepare freed slaves for the new economic system, then, the AMA thought that black Christianity, with its surviving Africanisms and ostensibly otherworldly orientation, needed to give way to the liberal Christianity of the AMA as a first step in the acquisition of the virtues necessary for economic success in a free labor system. (9)

The AMA's mission was, moreover, tightly connected to U.S. government policy, and the AMA worked closely with the chief governmental agency charged with oversight of freed slaves, the Freedmen's Bureau. Of course, not all members of the AMA and the Freedmen's Bureau agreed on all issues, but in their official utterances, structural organization, and joint educational initiatives the two organizations often moved as one. At the center of their numerous connections was Hampton Institute, a freedmen's school started by the Union general Samuel C. Armstrong, and it was under Armstrong that Washington received his early training and internalized the values of the civilizing mission. Armstrong grew up in Hawaii under missionary parents and attended Williams College, where he came under the influence of its president, Mark Hopkins, a Congregationalist and leading member of the Evangelical Alliance. After working as the commander of a black regiment from Maryland during the Civil War, Armstrong moved into the Freedmen's Bureau in 1866 as the assistant superintendent for Virginia. Almost as soon as he assumed this new position, he began laying the foundation for what he called an industrial school. His first step was to publish a "Letter of Appeal" in early 1866 in the AMA's magazine, American Missionary, explaining his philosophy of industrial schools and urging their creation to uplift freed slaves in the South. By July 1867 Armstrong had enlisted the support of Oliver Otis Howard, the head of the Freedmen's Bureau, secured $44,000 for the plan, and found a site for his school. In November 1868, following the common practice of deploying Freedmen's Bureau agents as AMA representatives, the AMA commissioned General Armstrong as a missionary in his work at Hampton, solidifying his connection with both organizations. (10)

Armstrong's view of industrial education further demonstrated the connection of racial developmentalism and bourgeois values that dominated the AMA and the Freedmen's Bureau. According to Armstrong, bondage had inculcated slaves with a weakened character, particularly in their desire for work. In part, their desire not to work was a racial trait of "weak tropical races," in which "idleness, like ignorance, breeds vice." To combat those alleged racial traits, Armstrong lifted his plan of industrial schooling directly from his father's missionary practices in the Hawaiian Islands, arguing that freed slaves and island natives both possessed "not mere ignorance, but deficiency of character." Moreover, according to Armstrong, slavery had exacerbated the racial tendency of freed slaves and bequeathed to them "improvidence, low ideas of honor and morality, and a general lack of directive energy, judgment, and foresight." (11)

Following the plan he laid out in his appeal, Armstrong sought to create a school that taught freed slaves necessary skills for the New South and, perhaps most importantly, inculcated them with the character that he concluded had been lost or damaged by their time in slavery. The curriculum omitted all study of the classics. He required students to work, paying for half of their room and board in cash and half in labor. The trustees found benefactors to pay for student tuition, seventy dollars a year per student in 1873-1874. Although on occasion Armstrong put forward the provision of work as a practical necessity so that poor black girls and boys could attend, its economic function was actually secondary to its educational purpose. Admitting that "such an education must be in the outset expensive," Armstrong dismissed economic concerns because the goal of industrial schooling was not economic self-sufficiency. Instead, he saw manual labor as central to the educational process itself because "[c]haracter is the best outcome of the labor system. That makes it worth its cost many times over. It is not cheap, but it pays." (12)

Behind Armstrong's concern for character was the liberal Congregational belief that religion and morality were intimately connected. Armstrong affirmed that Christian conversion was "the starting-point of a better life," but added to conversion was labor, because "if man is to work out his own salvation, he must learn how to work." Summarizing his point, Armstrong declared that "morality and industry generally go together." In Armstrong's view, labor was a powerful moral agent that conferred upon the laborer diligence, honesty, and virtue, thereby offering reformers the perfect tool to reorient the ostensibly deleterious training suffered by the freed slaves under the slave system. Moreover, because of the complex goals of the educational mode, industrial schooling was, as he fully admitted, "parental," with teachers acting as parents, foremen, and instructors to the students in a complex mission to remake freed slaves. (13)

Thus, the AMA's civilizing mission, which Booker T. Washington continued and expanded, was equal parts racist paternalism and classic liberal thought. In the free labor ideal of the nineteenth century, the AMA regarded all people as equal before the law. However, the guarantee of equality was strictly formal, so that as long as the law did not actively discriminate between persons, any structural or substantive claim of inequality was outside the purview of the law. Some individuals might possess better opportunity, family resources, or bargaining positions that perpetuated or resulted in profound actual inequality, but so long as anyone could adopt the necessary values for success in the free labor system, classical liberalism called the system fair. Of course, the civilizing mission had a dark side, and it is not hard to see it as an attempt to acquire cultural control rather than simply an expression of humanitarian concern. Many in the AMA thought that freedom required freed slaves to absorb a specific set of cultural values that would act as an internal system of control. If former slaves as a group failed to internalize those cultural values, the freedpeople posed a threat to the American democratic experiment. Therefore, as the historian Thomas C. Holt has argued of the British civilizing mission in the Jamaican colonies (but with equal applicability to the United States), work-discipline became "both the source and test of internal control, and those who failed to demonstrate that discipline were fit only to be ruled by others." That contradiction would haunt both the AMA and Booker T. Washington's civilizing mission. (14)

Washington came of age when the AMA still exerted a dominant influence on northern philanthropic work in the South, and he received his education at Hampton, where he internalized the values of the civilizing mission. In fact, Washington was Hampton's star pupil, and General Armstrong was so pleased with his protege that in 1881, after the Alabama legislature created a school for African Americans called the Tuskegee Institute, he recommended Washington for the new position of principal. When Washington arrived in Alabama, however, his school existed only in theory, with no buildings, no books, and no teachers. Moreover, the legislature had already set state appropriations before Tuskegee was created, so he had no state-funded operating budget for another full year. To get the school off the ground, Washington sought the advice of his Hampton mentors on a constant basis, stressing "the only way to make this a permanent and successful school is to get it on the labor system as soon as possible." Though he managed to scrape together enough money to buy land, build a school, and hire teachers, his first decade at Tuskegee was difficult, with more students always arriving, more buildings needing to be built, and never enough money. Eliciting funds to keep the school afloat was an almost overwhelming task, and Washington quickly settled into a money-raising role, spending up to six months of the year in the North passing the hat in churches and other venues. (15)

By far, most of Washington's money came from the abolitionist contingent of New England and friends of the American Missionary Association who had previously supported Hampton Institute, and his training at Hampton had well prepared him to collaborate with the AMA and push forward the cultural ideals of the civilizing mission. Seizing on the northern fear of black degradation, he promised his audiences that he would instruct southern African Americans in the moral, religious, and industrial standards that the audiences and he held. Washington put particular emphasis on the issue of black ministers, stressing that because African American clergy were at the center of black religious life (with its ostensibly dubious character), they were among the most important subjects for the civilizing mission. Before a meeting of the National Education Association in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1884, for example, Washington disparaged the "so-called leaders" of African Americans, "who are as a rule ignorant, immoral preachers or selfish politicians," and decried that the average black man had "no standard by which to shape his character." Elaborating on the poor quality of black leaders, Washington rolled out a story that would thereafter become a staple, recounting a visit to a black church near Tuskegee that had two hundred members and nineteen preachers. Noting that the number of preachers was "legion," he alluded to the Biblical story of a man haunted by demons whose collective name was "legion," at once deferring to his audience's religious sensibilities and impugning those of the African American ministry. Moreover, elaborating on Armstrong's connection of character to labor, Washington viewed the movement of so many black men into the ministry as a calculated attempt to get out of manual labor, thereby causing them to miss out on its virtue-inducing properties. At a speech before the Women's New England Club in 1890, after repeating the story of the church near Tuskegee with two hundred members and nineteen preachers, he embellished it with a parable of a defunct man who might well have been a minstrel figure. Washington claimed the work ethic of most black preachers could be summed up by a man in a cotton field at the end of a hot July day who stopped, looked up into heaven, and cried, "Lord, de work is so hard, de cotton is so grassy, and de Sun am so hot, dat I believe dis darkey am called to preach." His use of the vernacular was likewise calculated, stressing both his understanding of and separation from the poor black ministers he was trying to civilize. (16)

Washington never limited himself to criticizing ministers, however, but argued in AMA fashion that black ministers encouraged and relied upon moral degradation among their parishioners. In doing so, he assumed the dominant Congregationalism of the AMA, which viewed religion and morality as integrally related. Reasoning backward, if a person failed to demonstrate proper (bourgeois) character, which required discipline, emotional equilibrium, and conscious, rational control, that person had a defective religion. Washington never tired of pointing out that black Christianity fell very short of the standard, and he frequently derided what he saw as the emotionalism of black Christianity as evidence that many African Americans were not authentically Christian. In his 1890 speech before the Women's New England Club, for example, he conceded that many ministers were religious but argued that their religious sensibility consisted "largely in emotion." In "real practical Christianity," he claimed, they were very wanting. What was true of ministers was equally true of members. Washington warned that although the great majority of black people in the South belonged to a church, "a large proportion of these people" were as far from Christianity as "any people found in Japan or Africa." Lest the audience members miss his point, he reminded them that "Christian heathen ... demand as much missionary's effort as the heathen of foreign fields." With that, he quickly turned to a plea for money to educate the black people of the South to read. (17)

His rhetorical assault on black ministers and their parishioners got the attention of many in the AMA, and Lyman Abbott, a prominent liberal minister, asked Washington in 1890 to contribute an article on African American clergy to Abbott's journal, the Christian Union. Abbott was a central figure in northeastern philanthropic circles, and his publication, formerly edited by the famous preacher Henry Ward Beecher, was a leading organ for northeastern abolitionist sentiment. By publishing his attack in the Christian Union, Washington could present his arsenal of effective critiques before a national audience, because supporters of the AMA mission (and readers of the Christian Union) had spread after the Civil War throughout the South as teachers and administrators in AMA schools. He jumped at the chance, repeating verbatim the story of the church with many ministers and the black man who received the call on a hot day in July. He also expanded his critique, layering statistics with anecdotal observations that resulted in large-scale generalizations, like his claim that "three-fourths of the Baptist ministers and two-thirds of the Methodists are unfit." He particularly highlighted what he saw as the self-serving nature of many African American ministers. Although "not one in twenty" ministers had any standing as businesspeople in their communities, Washington snidely (and somewhat hypocritically given his own fundraising efforts) claimed that much of a black religious service seemed "to revolve itself into an effort to get money." Moreover, while he attacked ministers by charging ignorance and moral vice, he repeated his claim that black religious ritual, cultivated and supported by black ministers, was in fact an expression of their parishioners' ignorance and moral degradation. Because the standard for good preaching was the extent to which a preacher is "able to set the people in all parts of the congregation to groaning, uttering wild screams, and jumping, finally going into a trance," he argued, African American religion pandered to the lowest impulses of the congregation and proved many black parishioners to be "as ignorant of true Christianity ... as any people in Africa or Japan." (18)

Washington's solution was the creation of a theological school that would reform black ministers. After noting that only a small proportion of black ministers had received theological education of any kind, he suggested that a school be established "at some central point in the South, on a thoroughly Christian but strictly undenominational basis, with a one or two years' course covering such branches as would fit a student to get a comprehensive idea of the Bible, to teach him how to prepare a sermon, how to read a hymn, how to study, and, most important, how to reach and help the people outside of the pulpit in an unselfish Christian way." He even went so far as to suggest that $1,500 or $2,500 would be enough to pay for teachers and operate the school, though where the facilities, books, and other teaching materials were to come from, he left to the readers' imagination. (19)

The article, published in August 1890, was already yielding fruit by September. That month a wealthy spinster from New York, Olivia Egleston Phelps Stokes, sent Washington a check for two thousand dollars "to help in the education of colored men of good moral character, particularly those who have the ministry in view." Seeking more, Washington reached out to one of Stokes's acquaintances, Alfred Haynes Porter, to pitch the idea of a Bible School at Tuskegee. Meanwhile, that November he wrote Stokes a letter (now lost) in New York apparently thanking her for her contribution and wondering what her concerns were for colored people in the South. She responded that in her experience of listening to black preachers, she "felt their lack of Bible knowledge in their sermons" and recognized a definite need of "practical Christian instruction." Coming to the point, she asked Washington if he knew "how and where" young colored men could "be best prepared for the Christian ministry?" (20)

Washington responded with characteristic circumspection. Earlier that year, even before the Christian Union article was published, he had already mentioned the possibility of a Bible School to Edgar James Penney, a black Congregationalist minister from Andover Theological Seminary. Tempering Penney's apparent excitement, Washington warned that it would "take at least one or two years to get it on foot." His attempt to woo Penney to Tuskegee was itself part of his method to obtain the school, because Penney, as a Congregationalist, had significant ties to the northeastern philanthropic community and had even requested that his call to Tuskegee be formal and definite so that he could use it to obtain funds from the AMA. In June Washington wrote him a formal offer of employment as campus pastor, while referencing an anonymous "friend in Brooklyn," most likely Alfred Haynes Porter, who was at work on "the other project." Washington assured Penney that, should the plan fall into place, he would be able to slide into a position at the head of the Bible School. Penney accepted the offer. (21)

Holding Penney's acceptance letter and Stokes's inquiry, Washington swung into action, writing to Horace Bumstead, president of Atlanta University, A. N. McEwen, editor of the Montgomery Baptist Leader, and Francis J. Grimke, a mulatto minister and nephew of the white abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimke, for endorsements. McEwen had the clearest idea of Washington's intent, wishing him well in his effort to find "some rich friend to help you in such a work," but all three were unanimous in their support. Having received their backing, Washington moved forward on one final front, announcing the creation of the Tuskegee Negro Conference, which invited "representatives of the masses--the bone and sinew of the race"--to Tuskegee in order to find out the "actual industrial, moral and educational condition of the masses." Predictably, one of the findings of the Negro Conference, which took place in February 1892, was a call to "our generous friends" for their financial contributions to produce "strong Christian leaders who will live among the masses as object lessons." (22)

Washington, a master of publicity at this stage in his career, carefully controlled the press coverage of the first conference. Because he wanted to be absolutely sure that all gave a favorable report, he put off another offer to publish the proceedings by William Torrey Harris, the Hegelian philosopher and U.S. Commissioner of Education. However, Washington was more than willing to allow AMA representatives to report on the conference in their northern newspapers. Writing to his mentor Samuel Armstrong, Washington expressed his gratification at "the great amount of interest shown by the American Missionary Association." He was keenly aware that the AMA's presence would bolster the legitimacy of the proceedings, noting that the organization had sent "three of its strongest men." Moreover, added to the official AMA delegation were reporters from several important northeastern abolitionist newspapers, including the Independent, the Christian Union, and the Congregationalist, which also insured positive coverage. (23)

Having hired a black Congregationalist minister to teach at Tuskegee, confirmed his evaluation of black ministers through the Negro Conference, obtained endorsements of his plan from prominent black leaders, and enlisted representatives of the AMA as (perhaps unwitting) propagandists, Washington moved forward to secure what he had wanted all along: cash to start a Bible School and a building to house it. Negotiations with Olivia Stokes and her sister, Caroline, went well, and they gave input on all aspects of the school from the curriculum to the building. Olivia Stokes wanted the curriculum to be "simple, direct, and helpful," preparing men for rural ministry rather than training pretentious theological intellectuals. Of course, the central component of the curriculum was that would-be ministers had to engage in manual labor along with the rest of the students, thereby addressing any deficiencies of character. In keeping with their desire for simplicity, the sisters rejected the first building plan, claiming it was too elaborate for the plain surroundings of Tuskegee. However, all parties agreed that the Bible School would do nothing but good, and by the time of the first Negro Conference or shortly thereafter, the Stokes sisters had agreed to give additional money to build what was eventually called Phelps Hall, a chapel that would house Phelps Hall Bible School. Washington's strategic maneuvering had brought the deal to a successful conclusion. (24)

Although Washington got what he wanted, his pursuit of the civilizing mission and his characterization of southern black ministers and their parishioners distorted what was, in fact, a heterogeneous body of several million people. The numerous divisions among southern black congregations made Washington's characterization inaccurate, if not opportunistic. Southern black religious life was divided among four different denominations: the African Methodist Episcopal (AME), the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AME Zion), Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME), and numerous independent Baptist congregations. However, an ideological distinction provided the more salient context for Washington's assault. Black elites were divided between what has been called an emancipationist or prophetic tradition and an acculturationist, middle-class position. The acculturationists--who included many urban ministers, black women's rights advocates, and members of the emerging black middle class--advocated an educated ministry who would train their parishioners in a restrained worship style and in the dominant bourgeois ideals advocated by the AMA. The emancipationists, in contrast, sought the transformation of American society (and the place of black Americans in it) through black nationalism expressed in congregational and denominational governance, black communal self-help, pan-African socialism, and, in the twentieth century, the international anti-imperialism expressed by Martin Luther King Jr. The positions were fluid but distinct, and although individual black leaders might move back and forth between them or combine them in various ways, the two positions represented a dialectical impulse that provided a fundamental tension in African American thought. (25)

Washington's criticism of black ministers, then, was an assault on the emancipationist position in the name of acculturation. By impugning those who disagreed with him as either lazy or vicious, he effectively tightened his leadership and strengthened his emerging significance before white, northern philanthropists. Indeed, Washington's assault perpetuated what the postcolonial writer Albert Memmi has called the "Mythical Portrait of the Colonized," in which colonial rulers often portrayed their subjects as lazy, apathetic, and ungrateful. Of course, many black ministers were incensed and viewed Washington's criticism as predatory, self-serving, and opportunist. Others, however, joined the Washington phalanx. Shortly after Washington published his article, Bishop Daniel A. Payne of the AME denomination came to Washington's defense after observing the "various animadversions from North, South, East and West" against Washington's statement. Payne's support was stunning. An acculturationist who avidly sought to stamp out what he saw as the "heathen" practices among southern black congregations, Payne had organized the AME church-planting initiative following the Civil War and personally ordained many of the leading AME ministers in the South. In offering his support to Washington, Payne presented his claims in unequivocal terms, arguing "emphatically, in the presence of the great Head of the Church, that not more than one-third of the ministers, Baptist and Methodist, in the South are morally and intellectually qualified." Moreover, in response to anticipated criticism, he promised to name "name[s], times and places" to substantiate his assertion. (26)

Washington used Payne's support to further buttress his own position before other black leaders. After receiving Payne's letter, he wrote a rebuttal to his critics in the Indianapolis Freeman, a national black weekly that was sympathetic to Washington, and he appended Payne's letter to his own. The Freeman published both letters together, and the effect was a powerful one-two punch. Washington began his letter by coming directly to the point, assuring his detractors in the first sentence that "no resolutions or actions or words of individuals or organizations will have the least effect in preventing my saying just what I consider to be in the interest of the race and truth," and he defiantly stood by his earlier statements in the face of his critics. He could do so, in large part, because of Payne's influence. Coming to his conclusion, Washington pointed to Payne's letter and asked, "Will any one say that Right Rev. Daniel A. Payne, D.D., LED., senior Bishop of the A.M.E. Church, does not know whereof he speaks?" Moreover, portraying those who disagreed with him as complicit in the corrupt practices of ministers, Washington referenced "friends all over the country in all denominations" who stood ready to create a qualified colored ministry, and he concluded, "Our friends will honor the race far more for being ready to expose corruption than for covering it up." (27)

Thus, Washington's critique worked on two different fronts. First, he presented himself as a trusted reformer before white, northeastern philanthropic circles dominated by the AMA, and second, he used his standing with northeastern donors to tighten control over his black competitors. Multiple papers reprinted Washington's letter to the Freeman, along with Payne's letter of support, leading to a seemingly interminable debate in the black press over Washington's statements. Ida B. Wells, the black firebrand journalist from Memphis, read Washington's letter in the Detroit Plaindealer and felt compelled to commend him on his "manly criticism of our corrupt and ignorant ministry." Others were much less complimentary. The Reverend J. M. Henderson of Detroit complained about the brilliant rhetorical move that Washington had accomplished. "Every self respecting minister who inclines to remonstrate against this wholesale slander upon his class," he explained, is liable to the reponse, "'why do the worthy ministers seek to screen the unworthy?'" What most offended Henderson, however, was Washington's "farcical heroism, with much vanity posing as a great reformer who is prosecuted and threatened on every hand." For Payne, Henderson had only contempt, calling him cynical, out of touch, and old. Others reversed the contempt. One anonymous minister wrote to the editor of the Freeman, "The colored ministry, as a whole, never thought enough of the attempt of the Professor [Washington] to gain notoriety to reply to him; but when such a person as Bishop Payne comes forward with such a statement, it is time for the Southern ministry to rise." (28)

A debate begun in one paper often spilled into another. Wells, reading the Plaindealer in Memphis, reprinted Henderson's rejoinder in her paper, the Memphis Free Speech, and offered the not-entirely-candid editorial comment, "[I]t would seem to an impartial observer that the preachers who have protested against Prof. Washington and Bishop Payne's severe arraignment 'protest too much.'" In turn, the Plaindealer reprinted her editorial critiquing Henderson's letter, and Henderson offered his response, essentially reiterating his earlier objections. A week later, on January 2, 1891, the Plaindealer published an editorial summary of the nationwide remonstration against Washington, noting that "with only a few exceptions every writer on the subject has stooped to traduce Prof. Washington to accuse him of selling his opinions for ill-gotten gains, of slandering his race to curry favor with white men." For example, the Southern Recorder quoted a Bishop Gaines dismissing Washington as "a sycophant, selling out his race for money," and calling upon the Lord to "take charge of our children [at Tuskegee[ ... especially our girls." In an AME Zion paper, Bishop J. W. Hood, one of the earliest AME Zion bishops in the South and a staunch emancipationist, threw his own authority against Washington (while studiously ignoring Payne) in order to repudiate Washington's "wild, random, thoughtless, and as I fully believe, slanderous statement, respecting colored ministers." (29)

The reason Washington struck such a raw nerve, as the Plaindealer perceptively explained, was the common belief that "the history of the church is the history of the race. Its progress is the race's progress." Because criticizing the progress of the church was the same as criticizing the race, Washington's detractors complained that criticizing the race in the face of white hostility was self-defeating. Moreover, because the black church was the only institution solely within black control, it offered an autonomous social space where African Americans, apart from the supervision of their would-be white rulers, could develop and practice what the anthropologist James C. Scott has called the "hidden transcript" that oppressed groups cultivate beneath the surface of public accommodation. Washington's criticism was, therefore, an assault on the black church's status as an autonomous social space and, by extension, its dissident subculture, and his comments threatened to subsume black religious communalism within the bourgeois individualism of industrial market culture. That threat provoked a harsh response from both emancipationists, who resisted the acculturating impulse, and some acculturationists, who had previously been in support of Washington but thought his charge was unfair or unwise. As one AME Zion minister complained, Washington's condemnation raised the question of "which one of the colors he belongs to, for the whites as a rule say better things than these about us as a race." More presciently, another reader in the Plaindealer objected that Washington's censure was too close to that of racists, whose complaints of "Negro immorality" and a lack of "Negro intelligence" were "the lying weapons used by our white enemies to prove our unfitness for the civil and social household." Even to many supporters of racial uplift, Washington's criticism had crossed the line and too closely mirrored the criticism of racist whites. (30)

During the decade after his article was published, Washington did not change his critique but instead expanded his two-front operation (raising money and consolidating his leadership position before northern white philanthropists and among other black elites) by adding more anecdotes and criticism to his arsenal. To a Birmingham audience in 1899 he told a story, repeated often thereafter, about an old black woman who wandered into an Episcopal worship service. Midway through the liturgy, after the rector had begun his sermon, she began to moan and clap in the back of the sanctuary. Her exhibition broke up the service, and a church officer went back to stop the commotion. Switching into the imaginary conversation, Washington parodied both parties: "'What's the matter with you, aunty, are you sick?' 'No, sir; I'se happy; I'se got religion. Yes, sir, I'se got religion.' 'Why, don't you know,' said the officer, without thinking, 'that this isn't the place to get religion?'" Although his story poked fun at both black and white, it also illustrated his often-repeated claim that African American religion was "a mere matter of form or emotionalism." (31)

Deepening his critique, Washington also began connecting the emotionalism of black religion with what he saw as the tendency "to live in the next world." Before the National Unitarian Association in 1894, he claimed that three-quarters of a Negro sermon in the South consisted of an imaginary description of heaven and pointed out the apparent contradiction that "our people like to talk about heavenly mansions, and at the same time are content to live in one-room cabins in this world. They like to talk about golden slippers, and too often go barefooted here." Washington implicitly invoked the success ethic of the AMA, claiming that the otherworldly orientation of African American theology inhibited black parishioners from advancement in this world. After quoting from the hymn "Give me Jesus," which was otherworldly in its lyrics, he explained that black parishioners needed to understand that to have Jesus "in a substantial way" was to "mix in some land, cotton and corn and a good bank account." The result, he proclaimed "by actual experience," was that "the man who has Jesus in this way has a religion that you can count on seven days in the week." (32)

The implication, however, of his praise for a religion "that you can count on" was his connection of African American religious emotionalism with shiftlessness and moral unreliability. Because he claimed that black religion looked to the future and not the present, he intimated that the rules of bourgeois society did not make much of an impression on many black Christians and their moral character was suspect at best. To the 1899 Birmingham audience, Washington reiterated one of his mentor's maxims, "it is mighty hard to make a good Christian out of a hungry man." In case they missed his point, he went on, simultaneously criticizing black religion and showing the menace to those around its adherents: "A negro goes home from church, where he has been shouting and praying, as a negro so loves to do, and if he finds nothing to eat at home, he very generally goes out and finds something to eat before morning." Thus, he at once suggested that black religious worship and piety held a tenuous connection to the black moral code and also insinuated that white property was in peril because of it. If black clerical leaders were retrained to honor work, thrift, and honesty, Washington claimed, the ministers in turn would retrain their parishioners, which would lead to the increasing "civilization" of the race as a whole. (33)

Washington's strategy worked only so long as northeastern philanthropists maintained substantial influence in the South and remained committed to the civilizing mission. When that changed, his troubles would really begin. In 1895 Washington gave the speech that served as a turning point in his prominence as a black leader and in the constituencies he was most concerned to manage. Later dubbed the "Atlanta Compromise" by W. E. B. Du Bois, it catapulted Washington onto the national stage as the preeminent African American leader in the country because he seemed to offer an exchange of black political and social rights for economic advancement. The speech itself was made against the backdrop of the southern embrace of segregation, enforced by law and lynching throughout the South. Washington's speech took its meaning in large part from the hardening southern racial policies, and he equivocated so that different members of the audience could hear what they wanted. Urging black southerners to "cast down your bucket where you are," Washington warned that the "greatest danger" in the leap out of slavery was that black laborers might forget that "we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skills into the common occupations of life." To his southern white listeners, he urged beneficence and tolerance, while assuaging their concern for social mixing. He confessed that black southerners stood ready to interlace "industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one," but he treaded a fine line, agreeing that "in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." Although he rejected "artificial forcing" on the social question, Washington confidently proclaimed that "no race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized." Seemingly trading the political demand of equal rights for economic opportunity, he announced a plan of racial uplift in terms that appealed to white southerners, northern businessmen, and, at least initially, prominent African Americans and that sealed his stature as the preeminent spokesman for black people in the United States. (34)

One of the most significant results of his speech was Washington's increased visibility to northern business philanthropists. The February before he gave the address, Washington met William Henry Baldwin Jr., then the second vice president of the Southern Railway. Baldwin had been born in Boston of abolitionist ancestors but became part of the rising business elite with broad connections within northern business philanthropy. Recognizing his potential benefit to Tuskegee, Washington invited Baldwin to join the board of trustees, and Baldwin accepted after making a thorough inspection of the school. To appeal to the sensibility that Baldwin represented, Washington began retooling his speeches and his image to appeal to business interests of the North and South. In 1900 he began the National Negro Business League, an effort to promote black business that also advertised his business-friendliness to potential donors. Most importantly, he wrote his second autobiography, Up from Slavery, which told a (literally) rags-to-respectability story of self-help and self-reliance that appealed to the business elite. Washington presented himself as a leader who rose to the top by pluck, perseverance, and willingness to work, and utilizing a trope of self-dependence, he portrayed himself as one type of black man in contrast to others, confirming his superiority before business philanthropists as the paramount black leader. (35)

Although much has been written about Washington's autobiography, the comparison between his leadership and that of minister-politicians is one of the most striking (but neglected) themes of the work, and his rhetorical comparisons figured centrally in his support for the civilizing mission. Contrasting his own work ethic with theirs, Washington again accused black ministers of laziness, which lay behind ministerial ambition and, to some extent, defined ministerial theology. He told the story of a black minister, "one of the numerous local preachers," who tried to convince him that all work was sin because God had cursed labor after the Garden of Eden. The week that Washington found him, he explained, "he seemed ... supremely happy, because he was living, as he expressed it, through one week that was free from sin." He also used the idea of a ministerial call to further undercut ministerial credibility, imputing ministers with manipulation as well as laziness. Though he reiterated his story of the man in the cotton field, he told another of a man in church, surrounded by the worshipping black community. When the call came, "[w]ithout warning the one called would fall upon the floor as if struck by a bullet, and would lie there for hours, speechless and motionless. Then the news would spread all through the neighbourhood that this individual had received a 'call.'" With barely concealed disapproval, Washington acknowledged that if the man were inclined against the divine summons, "he would fall or be made to fall a second or third time. In the end he always yielded to the call." Because almost everyone who received an education also received a call, Washington confessed that when he had earlier longed to read and write he feared that if successful he too "would receive one of these 'calls.'" Lest the reader miss the obvious contrast, Washington pointed out that "for some reason, my call never came." (36)

The biography was very successful, and his public relations campaign was about to pay off. In 1899 Baldwin began an endowment campaign "to relieve the principal, Booker T. Washington, somewhat of the constant daily strain of collecting the money for the daily life of the institution and give him time for the executive work of the school." Before the year was out, Washington held a fund-raising meeting in Madison Square Garden in New York City with the leading lights of business in attendance, including John P. Morgan, Morris K. Jessup, Charles H. Parkhurst, John D. Rockefeller, and Collis P. Huntington. Washington began the meeting by reading a letter from Grover Cleveland expressing his regret that he could not attend and informing Washington that he had secured a matching donation from an unnamed woman in a western city for twenty-five thousand dollars. The sizable contribution encouraged others, and Washington began working over the next couple of years for an even larger amount. For that, Washington's autobiography had already begun to achieve results. After Up from Slavery came out, his publisher, Frank Doubleday, entertained the industrialist-turned-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie between golf shots by reading from Washington's work. Carnegie's interest was piqued, and he promised twenty thousand dollars for a new library at Tuskegee a little over a month after the Madison Square Garden event. Although the gift was fairly routine, since Carnegie gave sums all over the country to build so-called Carnegie libraries, Washington used it to gain more. After the library was built, Carnegie was so impressed by the two-story brick building's low cost of twenty thousand dollars that he began donating ten thousand dollars a year for Tuskegee's operating expenses. (37)

The signs looked promising, but Washington had no idea what Carnegie would do next. At a second Madison Square Garden fundraiser in 1903, Washington made another stab at attracting a large donation. This time Grover Cleveland was in attendance, and Cleveland began the meeting with what he took to be a sympathetic address for Tuskegee's cause. Proclaiming that emancipation did not erase the "racial and slavery-bred imperfections and deficiencies" among Negroes, Cleveland explained that their chief problem was "a grievous amount of ignorance, a sad amount of viciousness, and a tremendous amount of laziness and thriftlessness." He proclaimed his full sympathy with the white South and averred that because nine-tenths of the black population lived in the South, white southerners were "entitled to our utmost consideration and sympathetic fellowship." It was "their material prosperity, their peace, and even the safety of their civilization interwoven with the negro problem." Nonetheless, precisely because "the solution of the negro problem must ... bear the heat of the day and stagger under the weight of the white man's burden," he threw himself behind Tuskegee's goal of helping fit the Negro for "his place" and proclaimed himself a friend of the Negro. Cleveland was not alone in intertwining praise for Washington with racist and denigrating comments about black people. Edgar Gardner Murphy, an Episcopal minister from Montgomery, Alabama, warned forebodingly that "the rotting body" of black ignorance and decay "is polluting the atmosphere we breathe." Nevertheless, he assured his audience, "amid all the bewildering and rasping nonsense of pro-negro sentimentality," Tuskegee stood apart "with incomparable dignity and sanity." Carnegie sat listening in Cleveland's box, and, whatever the philanthropist thought about the speakers' comments, three days later he gave Tuskegee $600,000 in U.S. Steel bonds, one quarter of which were for Washington himself. Calling him "[t]he modern Moses, who leads his race and lifts it through Education to even better and higher things than a land overflowing with milk and honey," Carnegie wanted Washington to be free of pecuniary worries so that he could go about his mission as he saw fit. Finally, Washington's financial worries were over. (38)

Yet as the insidiously racist comments of Cleveland showed, the logic of Washington's civilizing mission had begun to unravel. Of course, Grover Cleveland and others were not relying on Washington when they concluded that southern African Americans lacked a fully formed bourgeois morality, and Washington was not responsible for their criticism. From the antebellum period, southern whites had complained of the putative laziness, immorality, and general unreliability of their slaves, a criticism that continued after the Civil War. Washington consciously advanced the civilizing mission with similar complaints, and although his criticism bore close resemblance to that of racists, it was nevertheless always predicated upon the possibility of black progress outlined by the acculturationist program of the AMA. However, when the AMA's influence in the South diminished, first with the end of Reconstruction and then with the advent of Jim Crow, Washington's civilizing mission acquired a different political valence than it had earlier possessed. Instead, in the words of Kevin Gaines, "Within the repressive New South social and economic order of disfranchisement, political terror, debt slavery, and gerrymandering," the advocacy of racial uplift and the civilizing mission "constituted a measure of ideological collusion with discriminatory ideologies and practices." (39)

The charge of ideological collusion began at the inception of the Jim Crow regime and deepened as the systematic oppression expanded. As early as 1899, Washington received a rebuke from T. Thomas Fortune, the prominent black editor of the New York Age and, at the time, a strong Washington ally. Fortune had read an article in the New York Evening Post that quoted Washington claiming that he was, in Fortune's paraphrase, "more discouraged than ever in your life about your own race." He warned Washington that he could not afford to get discouraged, especially in print, because that would do more "than anything else to discourage the friends of your work and to lessen the financial support of your work." Most importantly, Fortune continued, the Post article "knocks the props from under you by placing you in an attitude of doubt upon the vital question of the race's moral reliability." He admonished Washington that even if he had his doubts, he should have kept them to himself so as not to "give the whole case away." (40)

Instead of acknowledging the problem, Washington initially blamed the AMA, revealing a split that began with Washington's decision to court northern business philanthropy and southern political support. As Washington complained to Francis J. Grimke in 1898, AMA officers "do everything in a sly way to hinder the work at Tuskegee." In response to Fortune's complaint, Washington assumed that the statement had come from a joint press conference following his European trip that the AMA had subsidized, and he explained to Fortune that he was careful to have his secretary by his side in order to verify what was said. At issue, Washington thought, was that "the funds of the A.M.A. have been dropping off lately and they want to place me in the same bag with themselves." However, the AMA's operating budget had begun a slow but steady incline over the prior decade, an incline that would continue into the first decade of the twentieth century even as its political influence diminished. (41)

In fact, the increasing division between Washington and the AMA was about more than money and bore directly on Fortune's criticism. Toward the end of the 1890s, the AMA began to lose confidence in the civilizing mission, which it had originally undertaken in the belief that inculcating freed slaves with a specific set of cultural characteristics would ensure black success in the free labor system. In the early imagination of the AMA, formal equality before the law--with just a minimal level of governmental and philanthropic intervention to retrain the moral character of freed slaves--would yield an upwardly mobile society in which opportunity was the norm. Yet the liberal narrative of progress on which the civilizing mission rested contained a fundamental weakness. Faced with the intransigence of southern racism, which placed all African Americans, regardless of individual characteristics, behind the barrier of a racial caste, many initial supporters of the AMA mission began wondering if a formal definition of equality would ever produce the kind of upward social mobility envisioned by proponents of the civilizing mission. It seemed more likely that southern African Americans would form a laboring proletariat under the rule of their one-time masters. Moreover, some in the AMA began to acknowledge the darker sides of their ideas of progress and racial development, especially when southern racists began using the slow pace of progress to justify segregation. When that happened, the AMA reconsidered its financial and intellectual support of the civilizing mission, and Washington found himself in a quandary from which he would not escape. (42)

At no time was Washington's dilemma more apparent than June 1900, when John Roach Straton, a white, conservative, Southern Baptist minister, launched a salvo against Washington in the North American Review. The essay argued for segregation from the very premises that Washington used to validate his civilizing mission. Straton began by singling out Washington's educational model as the solution that most recognized the truncated extent of black capacity and the slow process of racial development. Among the white minister's many claims, Straton argued that racial development occurred over centuries, that blacks' immorality and criminality showed them far behind the Anglo-Saxon, and that in racial encounters the weaker race often faced destruction. Moreover, Straton claimed that with the abolition of slavery, the Negro found himself in situations for which he was not fit. Because post-Civil War social arrangements departed from the antebellum way of life, black racial development, he argued, had not yet progressed sufficiently to meet the new conditions, and the Negro was "weakening perceptibly in his physical manhood year after year," as well as "degenerating as regards thrift and industry." The proponents of black education were wrong to assume that it could solve the race problem, Straton insisted, because "the true civilizing process is not a sudden and artificial development from without, but a gradual and harmonious growth from within." Because racial contact in the South would prove disastrous to the weaker race, Straton suggested, the "great responsibility" of white people "in the presence of this simple-minded, impressionable and imitative people" required a different social arrangement. Therefore, to protect the Negro race and allow it to develop mentally and morally, Straton urged racial segregation and the large-scale deployment of Washington's educational plan. (43)

Faced with Straton's attack, which in too many ways resonated with his own views, Washington could only lamely respond, "We must not pass judgment on the negro too soon." He did not differ markedly with Straton's assumptions, only his conclusions, and Washington could not deny that his numerous comments criticizing the moral code of black people and the quality of their leaders tended to undermine whatever else he might say about black moral reliability. Moreover, the increasingly derogatory estimations of black potential and character--like Grover Cleveland's charge of ignorance, viciousness, laziness, and thriftlessness--placed Washington in a quandary in responding to Straton, because many of Washington's own white supporters had begun pointing to black immorality and criminality as a reason to deny civil rights to African Americans. His response, then, was very tempered. Washington agreed, "it requires centuries for the influence of home, school, church, and public contact to permeate the mass of millions of people, so that the upward tendency may be apparent." This did not mean that black people were not improving, however, even if it took centuries to show the results. On the delicate subject of black morals, Washington offered no protest and instead conceded that African Americans had a problem, but he shifted the blame. Although he appreciated Straton's "special stress upon the moral weakness of the race," Washington held the system of slavery ultimately responsible. Granting that African American morals were lax, especially in "improper relations between the sexes," Washington explained that because slave owners encouraged lax sexual mores during slavery, "a custom that was fostered for three centuries cannot be blotted out in one generation." The salient point, according to Washington, was not "that the negro has not done better, but that he has done as well as he has." Instead of segregation, Washington counseled that his educational method, "a judicious system of industrial, mental and religious training," would, in time, "solve the race problem." (44)

While Washington puzzled over how to move forward, saber rattling began from other black leaders, who were growing concerned that Washington's continued embrace of the civilizing mission played into the southern white impulse to place all African Americans behind the barrier of race. In 1902 William Monroe Trotter, the radical Boston newspaperman and a future Du Bois ally, denounced what he called Washington's "race belittlement." With outrage and dripping sarcasm, Trotter protested Washington's methods of fund-raising "by his crocodile tears here in the North" in order to open "a little Jim-Crow 'Theological school,' at Tuskegee, to which he points, telling northern white men 'I teach the Negro an industrialized religion too.'" Because Washington knew that the black ministry wielded tremendous influence, Trotter thought that he hoped "to undermine this influence, by telling his followers that 'the minister who has not a bank account is not to be believed or trusted.'" Rising to his climax, Trotter addressed Washington directly in a series of not-entirely-rhetorical questions: "How long, O Booker, will you abuse our patience? How long do you think your scheming will escape us? To what end will your vaulting ambition hurl itself? Does not the fear of future hate and execration ... in no wise move you?" A year later, W. E. B. Du Bois entered the fray with his The Souls of Black Folk. Although Du Bois to some extent shared Washington's distaste for the folk worship practices of rural African Americans, he complained repeatedly of "the distinct impression left by Mr. Washington's propaganda" and was particularly concerned that Washington seemed to think "that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because of the Negro's degradation." The next year Ida B. Wells-Barnett, having changed her mind about Washington, made the break as well. Complaining that Washington had "the ear of the American nation as no other Negro of our day" and was, therefore, instrumental in "molding public sentiment and securing funds," she wondered why he was willing "to injure his race for the benefit of his school" by reinforcing the false conception of black moral unreliability. (45)

The AMA weighed in as well, observing Washington's pronouncements and turning instead toward his rivals. In large part, the AMA's shift was the result of its new president, Washington Gladden. Gladden had wholeheartedly embraced the civilizing mission at first, but as he noted the dramatic rise of lynching and southern racism, he concluded that the mission was inadequate to ensure black success, if not misguided entirely. After he was elected to head the AMA in 1901, Gladden began talking to other black leaders, and in 1903 he made a visit to Atlanta University, where he met W. E. B. Du Bois, who gave him a copy of his newly published book, The Souls of Black Folk. Gladden was so moved that he devoted most of his next Sunday's sermon to the book, asking his audience to "[i]magine yourself living in a civilization whose overwhelming sentiment puts you into a lower nature of being and means to keep you there." Although he acknowledged that Washington's emphasis on "economic efficiency" was a "great need," Gladden observed, "Mr. Washington emphasizes the argument that if the Negro will but succeed in a material way all doors will be open to him. But that is not quite certain. The history of the Jews is evidence that industry and thrift do not disarm race prejudice." In contrast, Gladden claimed that Du Bois's book refuted Washington, explaining to his audience that Du Bois had shown how African American "political degradation" was responsible for whatever "economic inefficiency" existed, not vice versa. Later that year during his AMA presidential address, Gladden expanded on his sermon and drove home the new mission of the AMA. "For this Association," he explained, "the way of duty is very clear. It finds itself now, at the beginning of this century, with a sacred charge to keep.... If ever there was need to hold up the standards of justice and to reaffirm the fact of human brotherhood, that need is now upon us." Those standards of justice included a more substantive equality than the kind that underwrote the civilizing mission, and the AMA dropped its earlier support. Moreover, Gladden aligned his organization with the emerging Du Bois faction in 1904, when he invited Du Bois to address that year's AMA meeting. (46)

Faced with abandonment by the AMA, criticism from other black leaders, and the rather dim evaluations of black character from his own white supporters, once Washington achieved his financial independence in 1903 he began backpedaling. At a celebration of Lincoln's birthday in New York in February 1904, Washington assured his audience that "[f]rom both a moral and a religious point of view, what measure of education the Negro has received, has paid, and there has been no backward step in any state." Though not entirely a ringing endorsement of black moral and religious standards, he continued to fight Straton's assertion that the greater the education black people received, the greater the extent of their criminality. Instead, Washington warned that moral progress should not be judged by the man on the street and promised his listeners that "the moral lines are beginning to be as strictly drawn in my race as in yours, and it must not be forgotten that we are as proud of our race as you are of yours, and that the more progress we make in education, the more satisfaction do we find in our own homes and social circles." (47)

Clearly still bothered by ongoing criticism and the increasingly bestial depictions of black people in the press, in July 1905 Washington contributed an article to the North American Review entitled "The Religious Life of the Negro." Washington warned that many people viewed black religious life as static and unchanging when, in fact, "the Negro people, in respect to their religious life, have been, almost since they landed in America, in a process of change and growth." Having laid the rationale for his change in public statements, Washington recounted the religious history of African Americans from Africa to the United States as a narrative of progress, though elements of his old statements remained. He claimed, for example, "It was natural and inevitable that the Negro Church, coming into existence as it did under slavery, should permit the religious life of the Negro to express itself in ways almost wholly detached from morality. There was little in slavery to encourage the sense of personal responsibility." On the whole, however, his assessment of contemporary black religion was positive, and he consoled his readers that "the leaders of the different denominations of the Negro Church are beginning to recognize the force of the criticism made against it." (48)

Later that year he continued his new direction in an article published in the Independent. Gone was any criticism of black religion or the black ministry. Instead, Washington again defended black improvement, this time gesturing toward "what the Negro himself has been doing during the past forty years ... thru the religious organizations controlled by him." After explaining that more than two-thirds of black adults were members of a church, he moved through each major denomination, Baptist, AME, AME Zion, and Colored Methodist, providing detailed accounts of money spent by each throughout the previous year. Concluding that in the last ten years, "the Negro in America has contributed at least $2,000,000 thru his churches toward his own education," Washington praised what he thought was "a pretty good record for a race of people which was in slavery forty years ago." With that, he tried to drop the issue and move back to more comfortable ground. (49)

Unfortunately, the ground was shifting under him. At no time was Washington's paradox, or his tragedy, more apparent than in 1906, Tuskegee's twenty-fifth anniversary. That May, Washington received near universal acclaim from the business community at a gala in Tuskegee, with Carnegie and others offering laudatory support. Judging by the gala, it would have been easy to conclude that Washington's civilizing mission had fulfilled its original hopes of integrating southern African Americans into the nation as full citizens, a conclusion that would have been disastrously false. Though people of the highest political and economic clout once again surrounded Washington, the threat of lynching and vigilante justice had only increased for many black southerners over the prior twenty years. Indeed, Tuskegee's twenty-fifth anniversary was not the reason that 1906 would be remembered. Instead, that year saw the five-day-long Atlanta race riot in late September, an orgy of violence prolonged by police disarmament of black residents and the decision to deputize two hundred aggressive whites. The riot vividly demonstrated the failure of Washington's strategy, and he made his way to the city two days afterward, completely at a loss for how to respond. After casting about for two weeks, he wrote a confidential letter to the founder of the Philadelphia Tribune, calling for "the leading classes of Southern white people to shoulder the responsibility of the protection of the Negro." Four weeks later he publicly elaborated his new formula at the Alabama State Fair. Trying to calm racial tension, he warned against imputing the laziness and immorality of a segment of black people onto the race as a whole, and he expressed concern that the estrangement of the races would lead to the perpetuation of such confusion, with possibly violent results. As a remedy, Washington encouraged a return "to the old days when there was a closer touch between the best element of negroes and the best element of white people" and urged black ministers to open their pulpits and encourage "the best white ministers and white leaders [to] talk to his people." He was confident of the future, he assured his audience, because he believed that the white people of the South were beginning to realize their duty "to enlighten and civilize" not just the heathens of Africa and Asia but also "the black man that lives right by their side." Washington's civilizing mission had become, in short, the white man's burden. (50)

After the Atlanta Riot, Washington lost all direction, and his civilizing mission reached its sad apotheosis in a talk given six years later. Addressing the Men and Religion Forward Movement, Washington proclaimed that no people should be more interested in Christianizing southern African Americans than "the captains of industry," because "nothing pays so well in producing efficient labor as Christianity. Religion increases the wants of the laborer." Since the man "with the spirit of Christ in his head and heart wants land, wants a good house, wants another house, wants decent furniture," Washington reasoned that people with money in North and South should be interested in black Christianization, which would lead to the advancement of both the race and the economic prowess of the United States. Coming to his conclusion, Washington intoned, "Through the medium of religion let us continue to multiply the wants of the Negro, and they will render six days of honest labor in order to supply these increased wants, and thus become one of the most efficient class of laborers that the world has seen." It was a theme he would stick to for the remainder of his life, vainly trying to forestall violence by calling for the best class of white men to protect, uplift, and Christianize the black people of the South, with a promise that the civilizing mission offered a bright future of mutual enrichment. (51)

By 1906, however, his critics had seen enough. Trotter and Du Bois combined to form the Niagara Movement, whose short three-year life acknowledged the growing rifts beneath Washington's leadership. In 1909, after Du Bois, Wells-Barnett, and Francis Grimke joined with a group of progressive white sympathizers including Oswald Garrison Villard and Mary White Ovington to form the NAACP, the break with Washington was complete. While Washington continued to embrace the civilizing mission, the NAACP turned to federal legal challenges and political mobilization. Oswald Villard summarized Washington's position best in a 1914 letter to another supporter. Villard was one of the few NAACP members who continued to communicate with Washington, but he increasingly lost sympathy with what he took to be Washington's "pitiful position." Complaining that Washington was "like Nero, fiddling while Rome burns," Villard could not explain how "[o]ne right after another is being taken away from the colored people, one injustice after another being perpetrated, and Booker Washington is silent." He was pained in particular because of his personal support for Washington in "raising the Baldwin Fund for him," but Villard was forced to conclude, "His name is getting to be anathema among the educated colored people in the country, and he is drifting further and further in the rear as a real leader." (52)

Tempting though it is to condemn Washington in hindsight, his failure says more about his place in the system of domination of the post-Civil War South than it does about the limitations of his leadership. As Frantz Fanon bitterly explained of his own and others' experience within the colonial system of North Africa, "For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white." The hierarchy of cultural values in a system of domination was, Fanon pointed out, always skewed toward the ones with power. To move forward in a colonial society or to achieve any social status and personal security meant public acquiescence to the dominant cultural values that, according to Fanon, began with the white colonial regime. At the same time, it was patently obvious to Fanon that a black man could never become white, and the marker of racial identity in a society of race-based domination would forever subvert the attempt to achieve status through black acculturation. (53)

During the Jim Crow period, the American South harbored a brutal and oppressive regime of race-based domination similar to the regimes that Fanon and others have described. Washington scholars' somewhat narrow focus on the person of Booker T. Washington--his political strategies, rhetorical techniques, personal psychology, and intra-ethnic rivalries--fails to appreciate the dense system of oppression that Washington had to navigate and within which he was understood. Moreover, simply construing Washington's efforts as part of a "strategy" of "racial uplift" likewise misses the essentially tragic choices he faced, choices that were common in racially oppressive regimes and the result of the structural inhibitions of the post-Civil War South, particularly after Reconstruction.

Washington thought he recognized the power structure, and his failure brought into clearer focus its essential contours. His civilizing mission hoped that African Americans' acceptance of white, Christian, bourgeois values would, in time, compel southern and northern whites to accept African Americans' full citizenship, because, as he explained in his Atlanta Compromise speech, "no race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized." (54) He was not alone in that assumption, of course, and his collaboration with the AMA assumed that the mere adoption of specific cultural values would ensure African American economic success. However, his faith in acculturation misunderstood the degree to which racism formed a barrier to black aspirations. As the federal courts granted white southerners autonomy to establish segregation, the AMA lost its faith in the civilizing mission while Washington more firmly embraced it, touting his use of religion to create proper bourgeois subjects, whose moral standards and industrial work ethic would redound to the mutual enrichment of all. His parody of southern black religious practice, his incessant drumbeat about black moral degradation, and his constant maneuvering to solidify his racial leadership through elimination or control of his rivals all imploded at the end, when segregationists began pointing to ostensible black moral degradation as further reason to strip southern African Americans of their remaining civil rights. That does not make Washington responsible for segregation, of course, and white racists criticized what they saw as the moral failings of black southerners long before Washington came on the scene. Yet his support for the civilizing mission does explain the ambivalence that has greeted his historical legacy. Washington aided the mission to his own people, failed to recognize when it became improvident, and in the process came to speak more for the oppressors than the oppressed. Such was the tragedy of Booker T. Washington.

(1) Booker T. Washington, "The Colored Ministry: Its Defects and Needs," Christian Union, 42 (August 14, 1890), 199-200, in Louis R. Harlan et al., eds., The Booker T. Washington Papers (14 vols.; Urbana, 1972-1989), III, 72 (first quotation), 72-73 (second quotation). This essay was written with the financial support of a 2005 summer stipend from the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and revised while I was on a Liebmann Fellowship from the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Foundation. I wish to thank W. Fitzhugh Brundage for suggesting that I study Washington's anticlericalism. I am also indebted to the article's anonymous referees and to Genna Rae McNeil and the audience commentators at the Fall 2005 UNC History Department Research Colloquium for their criticism of an earlier draft of this essay.

(2) Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, II, xxviii. See also Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901 (New York, 1972); Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (New York, 1983); August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker 72 Washington (Ann Arbor, 1963); and Robert J. Norrell, "Understanding the Wizard: Another Look at the Age of Booker T. Washington," in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up From Slavery 100 Years Later (Gainesville, 2003), 58-80. For an excellent collection of the most recent (and some of the best) reappraisals, consult the other essays in Brundage, ed., Booker T. Washington and Black Progress. See also Kevern Verney, The Art of the Possible: Booker T. Washington and Black Leadership in the United States, 1881-1925 (New York, 2001); Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Creative Conflict in African American Thought: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey (New York, 2004), 141-84; and Michael Rudolph West, The Education of Booker 72 Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations (New York, 2006).

(3) Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 185-229 (quotation on p. 203); Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Polities, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1996), xiv. See also Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York, 1999), 51-55; Jacqueline M. Moore, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift (Wilmington, Del., 2003); and Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny After Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, 2004). The first and second phrases in quotation marks are ironic designations.

(4) Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York, 1944); Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 188 (second quotation); Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans, by Myra Bergman Ramos (New York, 2000), 55 (third quotation); John L. Comaroff, "Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience: Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa," in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997), 165 (fourth quotation). On the place of indigenous collaborators in colonial systems, see Jurgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, trans, by Shelley L. Frisch (Princeton, 1997), 63-67 (fifth quotation on p. 65); Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, 1997), 112-19; Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, vans. by Howard Greenfield (1965; new ed., London, 1990), 186-90; and Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans, by Charles Lam Markmann (New York, 1967), 10-12. A U.S.-centric focus even permeates American linguistic convention. When describing black populations residing in other parts of the New World, it is not unusual for American scholars to use the phrases "Afro-Cuban," "Afro-Brazilian," "Afro-Carribean," and, more generally, "Afro-Latino." Because black Americans also belong to the broad African diaspora, it would seem natural to use the linguistically parallel phrase "Afro-American." Instead, the phrase "African American" is the predominant designation for the black population in the United States. The lack of linguistic parallelism mirrors the frequent disjuncture in scholarly arguments about black Americans and other black people around the New World. Rather than considering black Americans as a subset of the larger diasporic group, the phrase "African American," precisely because of the linguistic disjuncture, highlights the twin and exceptional status of being American and black. I use the term "African American" rather than "Afro-American" in this article out of deference to the style guidelines of the Journal of Southern History.

(5) For a related argument in favor of viewing the program of black uplift as a civilizing mission, see Kevin Gaines, "Black Americans" Racial Uplift Ideology as 'Civilizing Mission': Pauline E. Hopkins on Race and Imperialism," in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, N.C., 1993), 433-55. Also see Jeremy Wells, "Up from Savagery: Booker T. Washington and the Civilizing Mission," Southern Quarterly, 42 (Fall 2003), 53-74. Both quotations are ironic designations.

(6) On the operating budget of the AMA compared to other benevolent societies, see Ralph Luker, Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885-1912 (Chapel Hill, 1991), 13. For a general history of the AMA and its predominance in teacher training, see Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861-1890 (Athens, Ga., 1986), 119 (second quotation). On the AMA's plan of operation and concern for the region, see Michael E. Strieby, ed., The Nation Still in Danger; or, Ten Years After the War (New York, 1875). The first quotation is an ironic designation.

(7) Strieby, ed., Nation Still in Danger, 6 (third and fourth quotations), 7 (fifth quotation), 8 (sixth and seventh quotations), 11 (eighth through eleventh quotations), 15 (twelfth quotation). On slave religion, see Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (New York, 2004); and Charles Joyner, "'Believer I Know': The Emergence of African-American Christianity," in Paul E. Johnson, ed., African-American Christianity: Essays in History (Berkeley, 1994), 18-46. First and second quotations are ironic designations.

(8) Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962; reprint, New York, 1996), 3 (quotation); Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (2nd ed.; New York, 1995), 11-39.

(9) Many writers have noted the bourgeois character of nineteenth-century civilizing missions. See Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire, 2-4, 10-11, 18-33, 59-86, 167-72, 181-86, 352-53; Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution. Vol. I: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, 1991); Thomas C. Holt, "'An Empire over the Mind': Emancipation, Race, and Ideology in the British West Indies and the American South," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York, 1982), 288-300; Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 14-16, 214, 228, 236, 244; and Philip D. Curtin, ed., Imperialism (New York, 1971), 177-247. At the same time, scholars across the ideological spectrum have begun interrogating what in the 1970s had become conventional wisdom: that race and class constitute contradictory modes of analysis. As Barbara J. Fields explains, "Class and race are concepts of a different order; they do not occupy the same analytical space, and thus cannot constitute explanatory alternatives to each other.'" Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in Kousser and McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction, 150. Reflecting Fields's insight, a flourishing literature has begun to show the myriad ways in which race, class, and even gender intersect to form complex, imbricated fields of power, particularly in colonial contexts. See, for example, Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-nineteenth Century (New York, 1978); Stuart Hall, "Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance," in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris, 1980), 305-45, esp. p. 325; Paul Gilroy, "There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack": The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London, 1987); Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore, 1992), 308-9; John Solomos and Les Back, Racism and Society (New York, 1996), 88-94; Ann Laura Stoler, "Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31 (January 1989), 134-61; Susan Thorne, "'The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable': Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain," in Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire, 238-62, esp. pp. 247-54; Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C., 1995), 10-16; and Gaines, Uplifting the Race, xiii-xvi, 1-17. The quoted phrase is an ironic designation.

(10) On Armstrong's history in Hawaii, schooling under Hopkins, and early maneuvering to establish Hampton Institute, see Robert Francis Engs, Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited: Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Hampton Institute, 1839-1893 (Knoxville, 1999), 1-69. On the practice of dual AMA and Freedmen's Bureau appointments, the multiple personnel and ideological connections between the two organizations, and Armstrong's maneuvering and AMA commission, see E. Allen Richardson, "Architects of a Benevolent Empire: The Relationship between the American Missionary Association and the Freedmen's Bureau in Virginia, 1865-1872," in Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations (New York, 1999), 121, 133-36, 139. See also Richardson, Christian Reconstruction, 101-2.

(11) Samuel Chapman Armstrong, "Lessons from the Hawaiian Islands," Journal of Christian Philosophy, 3 (January 1884), 213 (first through third quotations); Francis Greenwood Peabody, ed., Armstrong's Ideas on Education for Life (Hampton, Va., 1926), 44 (fourth quotation).

(12) For Hampton's curriculum, cost, and benefactors, see M. F. Armstrong and Helen W. Ludlow, Hampton and Bs Students (New York, 1874), 168-69. For Armstrong's views on the cost and benefits of industrial education, see Peabody, ed., Armstrong's Ideas on Education for Life, 23 (first quotation), 18 (second quotation).

(13) Armstrong, "Lessons from the Hawaiian Islands," 213 (third quotation), 214 (first, second, and fourth quotations).

(14) Holt, Problem of Freedom, 308-9 (quotation on p. 308). On the internal tensions of liberalism, see also Uday S. Mehta, "Liberal Strategies of Exclusion," in Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire, 59-86. The issue of liberalism's relation to exclusionary public policy is a subject of debate, however. For an opposing view, see Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, 1997), 1-39.

(15) Washington to James Fowle Baldwin Marshall, June 29, 1881, in Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, n, 134 (quotation); Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 109-56.

(16) "A Speech before the National Educational Association," July 16, 1884, in Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, II, 261 (first through fourth quotations); "A Speech Delivered before the Women's New England Club," January 27, 1890, ibid., III, 27 (sixth quotation); Mark 5:9, 5:15; Luke 8:30 (fifth quotation). On the place of linguistic appropriation and accommodation in colonial systems, see Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, 173-74; and Fanon, Black Skin. White Masks, 17-40. On what he calls the "public transcript" that exists in systems of domination, a script that Washington largely followed and exploited in his public utterances, see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), 1-13 (quotation on p. 4).

(17) "A Speech Delivered before the Women's New England Club," January 27, 1890, in Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, III, 27.

(18) Washington, "The Colored Ministry: Its Defects and Needs," ibid., 72 (first quotation), 73 (second through fifth quotations).

(19) Ibid., 74. Italics in original.

(20) Olivia Egleston Phelps Stokes to Washington, September 20, 1890, ibid., 83 (first quotation); Olivia Egleston Phelps Stokes to Washington, November 5, 1891, ibid., 180 (second through fifth quotations).

(21) Washington to Edgar James Penney, April 30, 1890, ibid., 52-53 (first quotation on p. 52); Washington to Edgar James Penney, June 13, 1891, ibid., 156-57 (second and third quotations).

(22) A. N. McEwen to Washington, November 30, 1891, ibid., 198 (first quotation); Francis J. Grimke to Washington, November 28, 1891, ibid., 196-97; Horace Bumstead to Washington, November 29, 1891, ibid., 197; "A Circular Announcing the Tuskegee Negro Conference," January 1892, ibid., 209-10 (second and third quotations); "The Declarations of the First Tuskegee Negro Conference," February 23, 1892, ibid., 218 (fourth and fifth quotations).

(23) Washington to Samuel Armstrong, February 26, 1892, ibid., 220 (first and second quotations); Washington to William Torrey Harris, May 4, 1892, ibid., 226.

(24) Stokes quoted in Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 197. Also see "An Announcement of the Opening of Phelps Hall Bible School," November 1892, in Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, III, 271.

(25) On the struggle over acculturation in African American religious life, see Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (Chapel Hill, 1997), 107-36, 167-96; Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 185-229; Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 146; White, Too Heavy a Load, 51-55; Reginald F. Hildebrand, The Times Were Strange and Stirring: Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation (Durham, N.C., 1995), 75-118; and William E. Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865-1900 (Baton Rouge, 1993), 253-306. On the prophetic mode of African American religious thought, see Stephen W. Angell and Anthony B. Pinn, eds., Social Protest Thought in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1862-1939 (Knoxville, 2000), xiii-xxxi; Cornel West, "The Prophetic Tradition in Afro-America," in Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude Jr., eds., African American Religious Thought: An Anthology (Louisville, 2003), 1037-50; Henry H. Mitchell, Black Belief: Folk Beliefs of Blacks in America and West Africa (New York, 1975); Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree, 191-252; and Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism (Garden City, N.Y., 1972), 103-86.

(26) Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, 145-55 (first quotation on p. 145); Daniel A. Payne to Washington, November 3, 1890, in Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, III, 97-98 (second, third, fourth, and fifth quotations). On Payne's desire to stamp out vestigial, African worship forms, see Harvey, Redeeming the South, 112; and Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree, 261-52.

(27) Washington to the Editor of the Indianapolis Freeman, November 22, 1890, in Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, 111, 101 (first quotation), 102 (third quotation), 103 (second and fourth quotations).

(28) Ida B. Wells to Washington, November 30, 1890, ibid., 108 (first quotation); J. M. Hen derson, "Not Good Authority," Detroit Plaindealer, December 12, 1890 (second, third, and fourth quotations); "Doesn't Like Bishop Payne's Letter," Indianapolis Freeman, December 13, 1890, p. 1 (fifth quotation).

(29) For Wells's editorial, see "Again the Ministry," Detroit Plaindealer, December 26, 1890 (first quotation). For the Plaindealer's summary and editorial, see Detroit Plaindealer, January 2, 1891 (second, third, and fourth quotations). Also see J. W. Hood, "Prof. Booker T. Washington's Statement Carefully Considered," Star of Zion, January 15, 1891 (fifth quotation); and G. W. Clinton, "Prof. Booker T. Washington and Bishop Daniel A. Payne on the Colored Methodist and Baptist Ministry," AME Zion Church Quarterly, 1 (January 1891), 132-33. I am indebted to Matt Harper for alerting me to the Star of Zion and the AME Zion Church Quarterly contributions to the debate.

(30) Detroit Plaindealer, January 23, 1891 (first quotation); Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 108-35 (second quotation on p. 120); Rev. W. J. Benjamin, "Can't Hold His Peace," Star of Zion, January 8, 1891 (third quotation); D. A. Straker, "Time to Call a Halt," Detroit Plaindealer, January 2, 1891 (fourth, fifth, and sixth quotations). On religion as a refuge for the oppressed, see Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, 167. On the different standards of behavior in closed circles of the colonized and in social situations that include both colonizer and colonized, see Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 17.

(31) Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, V, 67n2 (first quotation); "A Speech at the Institute of Arts and Sciences," September 30, 1896, ibid., IV, 212 (second quotation).

(32) "A Speech before the National Unitarian Association," September 26, 1894, ibid., III, 477 (first and second quotations), 478 (third through seventh quotations).

(33) Ibid., 478 (first quotation); "Extracts from an Address before the Birmingham Lyceum," March 20, 1899, ibid., V, 66 (second and third quotations). Fourth quotation is an ironic designation.

(34) W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (1903; new ed., New York, 1999), 35 (first quotation); Washington, "The Standard Printed Version of the Atlanta Exposition Address," September 18, 1895, in Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, III, 584 (second through fourth quotations), 585 (fifth and sixth quotations), 586 (seventh and eighth quotations).

(35) See W. E. B. Du Bois to Washington, May 16, 1900, and Washington's opening and closing speeches before the National Negro Business League, in Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, V, 526, 600-605.

(36) Washington, Up From Slavery, ibid., I, 287 (first and second quotations), 257 (third through sixth quotations).

(37) "An Endowment Campaign Pamphlet," ca. January 13, 1899, ibid., V, 8 (quotation); Grover Cleveland to Washington, December 3, 1899, ibid., V, 283-84. On Doubleday's reading to Carnegie and its effects, see Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 133-34.

(38) "Grover Cleveland on the Negro Problem," New York Times, April 15, 1903, pp. 1 (first through fifth quotations), 2 (sixth quotation); Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, VII, 119n1 (seventh through tenth quotations); Andrew Carnegie to William Henry Baldwin Jr., April 17, 1903, ibid., 120 (eleventh quotation). For the extended behind-the-scenes maneuvering to convince Carnegie to change the original terms of his bequest, see the flurry of letters, ibid., 100-127.

(39) Gaines, "Racial Uplift Ideology as 'Civilizing Mission,'" 440 (first quotation), 450 (second quotation).

(40) T. Thomas Fortune to Washington, September 16, 1899, in Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, V, 208. Italics in original.

(41) Washington to T. Thomas Fortune, September 18, 1899, ibid., 209 (second quotation); Washington to Francis J. Grimke, May 8, 1898, in Carter G. Woodson, ed., The Works of Francis J. Grimke (4 vols.; Washington, D.C., 1942), IV, 51 (first quotation). On the increasing budgets of the freedmen's aid societies between 1890 and 1910, see Ronald C. White Jr., Liberty and Justice for All: Racial Reform and the Social Gospel (1877-1925) (New York, 1990), 63.

(42) On the limitations of classical liberalism in addressing racist inequality, see Gaines, Uplifting the Race, xi-xxi. (42) On the limitations of classical liberalism in addressing racist inequality, see Gaines, Uplifting the Race, xi-xxi.

(43) John Roach Straton, "Will Education Solve the Race Problem?" North American Review, 170 (June 1900), 785-801 (first quotation on p. 792, second and third quotations on p. 793, fourth and fifth quotations on p. 801).

(44) Washington, "Education Will Solve the Race Problem: A Reply," North American Review, 171 (August 1900), 221-32, in Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, V, 615 (first and second quotations), 614 (third quotation), 616 (fourth quotation), 616-17 (fifth quotation), 613 (sixth quotation), 624 (seventh quotation), 612 (eighth quotation).

(45) [William Monroe Trotter], "Washington and the Ministers," Boston Guardian, September 13, 1902 (first through fifth quotations); Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 44 (sixth and seventh quotations); Ida B. Wells-Barnett, "Booker T. Washington and His Critics," World Today, 6 (April 1904), 521 (eighth through tenth quotations).

(46) White, Liberty and Justic for All, 132-41 (first through sixth quotations on p. 138, seventh and eighth quotations on p. 139). The AMA's shifting positions paralleled similar movements among humanitarians and missionary enthusiasts in Great Britain, although not on precisely the same timeline. See, for example, Andrew Porter, "'Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery, and Humanitarianism," and "Religion, Missionary Enthusiasm, and Empire," in Andrew Porter, ed., Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. III: The Nineteenth Century (New York, 1999), 198-221, 222-46.

(47) "A Lincoln's Birthday Address in New York City," February 12, 1904, in Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, VII, 432 (first quotation), 435 (second quotation).

(48) Washington, "The Religious Life of the Negro," North American Review, 181 (July 1905), 20-23, in Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, VIII, 333 (first quotation), 334 (second quotation), 335 (third quotation).

(49) Washington, "Negro Self-Help," Independent, 59 (November 23, 1905), 1207-8, ibid., 445 (first quotation), 448 (second and third quotations).

(50) Washington to Christopher James Perry, October 5, 1906, in Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, IX, 86 (first quotation); "Excerpts from a Speech at the Alabama State Fair," October 27, 1906, ibid., 107 (second through fifth quotations). For a contemporary account of the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration, see "An Account of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of Tuskegee Institute by Jesse Max Barber," May 1906, ibid., 15-24. On violence and the conflicted colonial consciousness, see Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 55. On the rise of lynching, see W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana, 1993).

(51) "Extracts of an Address before the Men and Religion Forward Movement," April 21, 1912, in Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, XI, 527.

(52) Oswald Garrison Villard to Robert Russa Moton, March 9, 1914, ibid., XII, 472 (first through third quotations), 473 (fourth and fifth quotations). On Washington's connection and response to the NAACP, see Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 359-78. On the many currents swirling around the formation of the NAACP, see James M. McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton, 1975), 368-94; and White, Liberty and Justice for All, 169-86.

(53) Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 228. See also Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, 192.

(54) Washington, "The Standard Printed Version of the Atlanta Exposition Address," September 18, 1895, in Harlan et al., eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, III, 586.

MR. SEHAT is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.