The Education of Booker T. Washington

Michael Rudolph West's The Education of Booker T. Washington deserves a place of honor beside Waldo Martin's The Mind of Frederick Douglass (1984). Like Martin, West has recast a historical figure previously viewed almost exclusively as a politician and reformer. Both Douglass and Washington were men of action and of rousing words; neither seems to fit the conventional definition of a man of ideas. Demonstrating that Washington's thought warrants careful, sustained, and respectful scrutiny is West's enduring contribution. Aside from Wilson J. Moses and August Meier, West is the rare historian who recognizes that, taken as a whole, Washington's parables, homilies, anecdotes, jokes, and boiler plate oratory comprise a substantial and important body of thought. Labeling it “Washingtonianism, ” West sets out to locate its origins in the first two decades of Booker's life (pp. 54–57). West's general account of Washington 's childhood as a slave in Virginia and a freed child in West Virginia does not substantially deviate from that told by Louis R. Harlan, Washington's most distinguished biographer. But West's focus on the origins of Washington's thought leads to fresh insights that begin to solve the enigma of Washington that has stumped many observers. For example, West ponders the complexity of Booker's relationship with his mother's common law husband, Washington Ferguson. Washington missed few opportunities to portray his stepfather in ill light, although, as West convincingly argues, Ferguson almost certainly was not the failed parent of Washington's memory. Yet if Washington's efforts at self-improvement were to be fully heroic, he needed his stepfather to be perceived as a failure. At the same time, to the extent that Ferguson failed to be a worthy role model, others, especially several of Washington 's white mentors, could fill that void. Here and elsewhere, West avoids reducing his subject to either a sphinx or a mere mask and instead exposes a complicated fgure with a complex interior life

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• “Why Sit Ye Here and Die”? Counterhegemonic Histories of the Black Female Intellectual in Nineteenth-Century America

  Open Access•Rebecca J Fraser, Martyn Griffin•Journal of American Studies•2020

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