Working Hard Or Hardly Working?

Perhaps no American embodies the archetype of the self-made man more than Booker T Washington. Born into slavery in 1856, Washington was the most famous African-American leader in early 20th century. His autobiography, Up From Slavery, became a bestseller.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Booker T was actually really quite aware of the value of hard work.

ED: This is historian Nathan Connolly.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Not only hard work personally, but through constant pronouncements of the values of hard work. And, again, Victorian/Protestant values for African-Americans to really win over so many whites who were critical to the building of black educational institutions in the South.

ED: In 1881, Washington established the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. There, African-Americans learned trade skills. Washington believed that through education and self-reliance, blacks could get ahead, even in the face of racial discrimination.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Tuskegee becomes such an important institution of, you know, black industry and learning and really of the modernizing– a symbol for the modernizing South, that he’s chosen in 1895 to speak at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition, one of the most important events for demonstrating the future of the South, black and white, for the next century.

ED: In his Atlanta Compromise address, Washington laid out his philosophy of racial uplift. Connolly says the speech hasn’t aged well, but it’s worth revisiting.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And it’s that notion that the South will, through its own technological might, really maintain a certain kind of prominence and visibility and really a return from the fall of the Civil War.

ED: So the Cotton Exposition doesn’t sound like the best marketing ever, but what it really is is basically a World’s Fair. So the thing is that between 1890 and 1910, the all-time peak of lynching, we should point out, Booker T Washington finds himself on a stage in front of not integrated, but both a black and white audience. So what does he say, Nathan?

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Well there really is no one better placed than Booker T Washington to take that stage at the time in 1895. I mean, the South needed to show the world that they did have kind of buy-in from African-Americans in terms of their Southern cultural ways. In the years leading up to the Exposition in Atlanta, so many states had redrafted their state constitutions to actively disenfranchise African-Americans, and so Booker T Washington had to try to find a way to articulate a vision of equality that wasn’t necessarily promising African-Americans, or even demanding from whites, a notion of explicit political power.

ED: Right.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And when he gets on that stage, Booker T Washington tries to walk this very fine line between pushing for a certain kind of black advancement while not troubling whites who might be very concerned about the ways in which African-Americans might want to push for social or political equality.

ED: So how does he thread that needle? How does he, you know, encourage African-Americans, kind of calm white Americans, and yet not back down?

NATHAN CONNOLLY: The most famous line from that speech which really was captured his rhetorical genius, he says, “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,” unquote. And the image there of the hand is absolutely intentional, because it’s the laboring hand that will move the South forward as a region, right? And it’s the fingers that might represent blacks and whites. And they don’t have to necessarily touch to all work in concert.

ED: Right.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Now, to be very clear, you have, obviously, the workspace where you have black and white workers who may be from, you know, the lower classes working shoulder-to-shoulder, but the idea that they would be equal contact, and, again, social contact, in evening events or in parlors, that, as an idea, was considered anathema to the white Southerner.

ED: So it’s interesting, today people often focus on the part of the hand metaphor as separate as the fingers. But you’re saying that the important part is the unity based around the work ethic. That he’s saying, listen, if you’re looking for people who are willing and able and have the brains and the energy to help make the South great, you have them here among you.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Well, I would say that, you know, depending on who is listening that they can latch on to different parts, because certainly for African-Americans who are looking for equal access to, you know, train cars or to swimming or to parks, right, they don’t necessarily like the idea of separate as the fingers, right?

ED: Mm-hm.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And to be very clear, we place a lot of emphasis on Booker T Washington as a kind of singular architect of a particular kind of what some call racial accommodationism, but he was really was an expression of a much wider sentiment of the era that believed in property ownership, that believed in thrift, that believed in kind of work ethic as a way around the problem of disenfranchisement. So the 1895 moment is really a kind of opening of the different approach to politics and political power that African-Americans themselves have to adopt in a place that is still very much mired in racial terrorism and other forms of explicit discrimination.

ED: You know, Nathan, and so he’s faced with a paradox by the 1890s– now we’re here 20 years after Reconstruction– that so many opportunities are closed to black people just by the color of their skin. They’re never given a chance at advanced jobs or jobs that require a lot of training, jobs that have responsibility.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: That’s right. One of the deep ironies– in the many deep ironies of American race relations is that after slavery is when African-Americans really get stained with the reputation of being lazy. And so it becomes really important, one, to demonstrate that African-Americans, as a people, are not averse to work at all, but, in fact, are deeply committed to labor in the name of social uplift.

Secondly, in many instances, when black folk are not deliberately being denied jobs, they’re being forced into very coercive labor relationships.

ED: Right.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And it really does incentivize the notion of entrepreneurship and owning one’s own business, to be free from evil bosses or managers or other kinds of landlords–

ED: Sharecropping.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Sharecroppers. Exactly. And folks who would look to exploit African-American dependency on white capital.

ED: So there’s a power within Washington’s speech that’s even greater than it’s apparent. It’s not just work hard for other people, it’s work hard for yourself, for your own family, for your own African-American community.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Precisely. Precisely. And it’s really through demonstrating that black people can accumulate wealth and capital and that white political figures and other kinds of folks can benefit from that black industry that Washington’s own political calculus is born. He believes that, you know, very strongly that property ownership and entrepreneurship and industry and innovation can come from black sectors in ways that would actually make white life better in the South as a whole. And so both white and black listeners are finding a utility in the way that Booker T Washington framed the race problem and linked it to the work ethic as a kind of emancipatory aspect of American life.

ED: And this speech becomes the foundation for ever mounting fame by him. He becomes a confidant of presidents of the United States. He’s welcomed into the circles of power in Washington. He works behind the scenes against segregation, disfranchisement, and gets away with it.

And his autobiography that tells this story and that has the Atlanta Exposition speech within it becomes a bestseller for white as well as black audiences in the first part of the 20th century. So I think a lot of people remember the metaphor of lower your buckets where you are, right? Rather than dreaming of some other kinds of rights, put down your buckets where they are.

And so you can see why people liked that. Yeah, stay right where you are–

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Right.

ED: –and don’t bother us.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Yeah. I mean, and it’s really critical that these are words being spoken by a black man in a Southern political context.

ED: Right.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: It’s enough, you know, for many whites to simply have Southern senators or, you know, white politicians who can say that blacks really enjoy their social station in the South. But to have someone of accomplishment, and someone of clear, you know, intelligence say that this is the way that the South will go forward, that really does cause it, for lack of a better word, to go viral, right?

I mean, you have Northern newspapers and Southern newspapers that are running reprints of the speech. You know, many people are talking about it as being one of the great pieces of oratory in the 19th century, likening it to the Gettysburg Address. And there are a number of ways in which, you know, many African-Americans themselves are trying to look at the speech as a blueprint.

ED: Mm-hm.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And it’s really critical for Booker T Washington’s own biography that he was someone born under slavery. And in that he does lay out an important narrative about the greatness of America and his ability, through his work ethic, to leave the humble beginnings of a Virginia cabin, slave cabin, and rise to the dais at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition in 1895 or to dine with presidents, by the time you get to the turn of the century, then any African-American can achieve similar heights from similarly humble beginnings.

ED: So, Nathan, when all is said and done, how do we evaluate the impact of Booker T Washington on our understanding of the American work ethic?

NATHAN CONNOLLY: So I think we should evaluate him, one, as someone whose commitment to the work ethic had a long-standing influence over the ways in which African-Americans tried to demonstrate their equality across the 20th and even into the 21st century. Now, he as a symbol never really fare too well coming through the 1960s. No one there is really going to overtly talk about accommodation in the face of Jim Crow. And so he becomes a less attractive symbolic character as we move through the 20th century. But it’s certainly the case that between the 1890s and really the 1930s, there isn’t a more important symbolic figure to kind of the black American project of social uplift than Booker T Washington.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ED: Nathan Connolly’s a historian at the Johns Hopkins University. He’s the author of A World War Concrete– Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida.