Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington
Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington is one of the best biographies I’ve read. Author Robert J. Norrell, a history professor at the University of Tennessee, has done a fantastic job of trying not only retracing Washington’s life, but also placing his work, his philosophy and mission into proper historical context, unlike many historians and contemporary black leaders.
Washington has been unfairly criticized as an “Uncle Tom” and someone who did more to placate white America than he did for his fellow black citizens. That’s nonsense, and Professor Norrell, with Up from History, has done more than his part to help put Booker Washington in accurate historical context. Washington was a leader. Norrell writes of Washington:
He was a busy man, and the natural impulse of his personality was to do and not to talk–and to look forward, not backward. The past was something to overcome, a place from which one moved on.
Read that again Jesse Jackson, Andy Young, Tavis Smiley, Cornel West, etc. Try studying the life of Booker Washington a little more and the life of Malcom X a little less.
Washington was a capitalist. In fact, Professor Norrell put one of my favorite Booker Washington quotes in Up from History:
“The individual who can do something that the world wants done, will, in the end, make his way regardless of race.”
Notice, President Obama, how Washington stated that the individual (not government) who can do something will make his way in this world.
Folks, I know many of you probably haven’t heard of Booker T. Washington because most high school and college textbooks either don’t refer to him at all or there are two sentences about the fact that he founded Tuskegee Institute, but rarely–if ever–do they articulate his philosophy of the importance of education and emphasis on self-reliance. Now you can see why we don’t hear more about Washington: because he doesn’t fit the liberal idea of what a historical black figure was supposed to have been.
If you read only one book this year, please make it Up from History. Every American–white, black, hispanic, or whatever–can learn from the example that his Booker T. Washington’s life. And there’s no better source than Robert J. Norrell’s Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington.
Below is my interview with Professor Norrell about the book:
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