By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Oct 2 2011, 12:00 PM ET
Hmmm:
The history teacher in our family recently completed a tour of the
Martin Luther King Jr. complex on Auburn Avenue. Throughout the King
memorial site, she noticed, a pantheon of civil rights greats
throughout U.S. history are lauded -- with one glaring omission.
Booker T. Washington, the first great leader of African-Americans
in the post-slavery era, who emphasized economic self-reliance above
all else -- including the immediate pursuit of social equality -- is a
nonperson at the King Center. He is an invisible man.
Some might consider the historical slight to be inconsequential.
But it goes some distance toward explaining the hurdle that still
faces Herman Cain and his -- so far -- surprisingly successful quest
for the GOP presidential nomination.
Jim Galloway, the author of the column, doesn't really bother to
explain what, specifically, Washington can tell us about Cain. It's
implied that Cain has no black following because African-Americans
have turned away from the self-help model of leadership, and more
toward a protest model.
I can't speak for the King Center, but in the black pantheon, Booker
T. Washington is anything but an invisible man. There are scores of
schools named after him across the country, and parks stretching from
Charlottesville to Harlem. There are statues of him in Cleveland,
Franklin, Virginia and Tuskegee, Alabama where he founded an HBCU.
The black poet Dudley Randall, wrote a really bad poem about his
debate with W.E.B. Du Bois which black kids, like me, were forced to
recite at the point of the bayonet. My middle school divided groups of
classes into teams, each named after a black hero. Only Booker T
Washington got two teams (The "Booker T" team and the "Washington"
team.)
Moreover, the ideas advanced by Washington, surely contested in his
time, weren't exactly heretical in the history of black education. No
less than Frederick Douglass once argued against sending black
freedman to learn "Greek and Latin" in favor of more practical
vocations:
Accustomed as we have been to the rougher and harder modes of
living, and of gaining a livelihood, we cannot and we ought not to
hope that in a single leap from our low condition, we can reach that
of Ministers, Lawyers, Doctors, Editors, Merchants, etc. These will
doubtless be attained by us; but this will only be when we have
patiently and laboriously, and I may add successfully, mastered and
passed through the intermediate gradations of agriculture and the
mechanic arts. Besides, there are (and perhaps this is a better reason
for my view of the case) numerous institutions of learning in this
country, already thrown open to colored youth...
We must become mechanics; we must build as well as live in houses;
we must make as well as use furniture; we must construct bridges as
well as pass over them, before we can properly live or be respected by
our fellow men. We need mechanics as well as ministers. We need
workers in iron, clay, and leather. We have orators, authors, and
other professional men, but these reach only a certain class, and get
respect for our race in certain select circles. To live here as we
ought we must fasten ourselves to our countrymen through their every-
day, cardinal wants. We must not only be able to black boots, but to
make them. At present we are, in the northern States, unknown as
mechanics. We give no proof of genius or skill at the county, State,
or national fairs. We are unknown at any of the great exhibitions of
the industry of our fellow-citizens, and being unknown, we are
unconsidered.
Sound familiar? Douglass was, at that point, attempting to raise funds
for a vocational school, a dream which Washington would fulfill.
Black Republicans like to reconcile the fact that belong to the party
of Obama Waffles and birtherism, but citing Booker T. Washington as a
model. But whereas these Republicans tend to draw their support almost
entirely from whites, Booker T. Washington was the dominant black
leader of his time. Washington, much like the dominant black leader of
our time, was biracial. He built a black institution, that educated
black people, and took his message to black audience. In short,
Washington was a legitimate organic black conservative, rooted in the
black community, propelled forth by his relationship to that
community.
The actual roots of Herman Cain's "brainwashed" critique lay not in
the words of Washington, but in another political tradition--the
tradition of telling white populists what they like to hear:
I am firmly rooted in the conviction that negroism, as exemplified
in the American type, is an attitude of mental density, a kind of
spiritual sensuousness...
The negro not only lacks a fair degree of intuitive knowledge, but
so dense is his understanding that he blindly follows weird fantasies
and hideous phantoms. So great is his predilection in this direction,
that he appears incapable of understanding the difference between
evidence and assertion, proof and surmise. These facts warrant the
conclusion that negro intelligence is both superficial and delusive,
because, though such people excel in recollections of a concrete
object, their retentive memories do not enable them to make any
valuable deductions, either from the object itself, or from their
familiar experience with it.
That's William Hannibal Thomas a black man, who in his time, had seen
his share of racism and sacrifice. But Smith ultimately decided to
side with the white populists of his time, as opposed to against them.
Smith enjoyed about as much black support then, as Herman Cain enjoys
now. He found no quarter in the black community--least of all from one
Booker T, Washington-- "It is sad to think of a man without a
country," Washington wrote of Smith. "It is even sadder to think of a
man without a race."
Within black leadership, the span of Washington's political progeny is
rather stunning. It includes black nationalists like Marcus Garvey
(who cited Washington as influence) and Malcolm X (whose parents were
Garveyites.) It includes Bill Cosby and Barack Obama (as I argued
here.) And it includes my Black Panther father, who used to force-feed
us doses of Up From Slavery. There is, as there always has been, a
large number of black conservatives. That they largely happen to vote
Democratic says more about the GOP then it does about "brainwashing."
The notion of self-help and economic power is deeply seductive and has
always had strong appeal in the black community. It's comforting to
think that black people abandoned it because they were seduced by wild-
eyed activists. In fact no one did more to discredit Washington's
ideas than the white populists who answered his call for conciliation
with the worst wave of home-grown terror in American history, and the
government officials who, at every level, either looked away or joined
in.
And yet when you look at the debates over how Obama addresses black
audiences, it's clear that Washington endures.
--
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