Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington.

Hall, Stephen G.

Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. By Robert Norrell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. 508 pp. $35.00 hardcover.

Robert Norrell's biography of Booker T. Washington, Up From History is an important contribution to the scholarship on Booker T. Washington. The book's title, clearly a play on Washington's famous autobiography, Up From Slavery, invites the reader to rethink the complex legacy of Booker T. Washington. Like his autobiography, in which Washington uses the trope of the Horatio Alger story (rags to riches) to frame his life, Norrell employs the idea of historical context squarely placing Washington and his actions within the larger context of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. In doing so, he invites students of Washington's life, lay and scholarly, to understand his life on its own terms in contrast to assessments that have emerged since his death. As a result, Norrell's challenge throughout the study is to balance historical and political interpretations of Washington's legacy, a task, for the most part, he admirably accomplishes. In doing so, Up From History, offers an important interpretative first step in revamping the legacy of Booker T. Washington.

Consisting of fifteen chapters, Up From History provides an overview of Booker T. Washington's life. Relying almost exclusively on the Booker T. Washington Papers, compiled by Louis Harlan and Raymond Smock, Norrell's narrative reveals little new regarding Washington's biographical profile. What sets this work apart is Norrell's attempt to tease out the nuances of Washington's life, especially as it relates to his historical and political legacy. He is most effective in using specific events and occurrences to illustrate his point concerning assessing Washington's legacy "up from history" rather than from the vagaries of contemporary interpretations. From Washington's early life as a child growing up in Malden, Virginia, up to his death in 1915, Norrell draws on seminal social, political and racial incidents in Washington's life to highlight the complexity of his story.

According to Norrell, Washington's life and racial leadership style were shaped in the nexus between black emancipation from slavery and the intense white backlash against the policies of Reconstruction. Following the disastrous end of Reconstruction, African Americans were forced to navigate the rocky shoals of race and opportunity for all. Washington's internalist approach mean! racial equality, and opportunity was secondary to the development of African American potential in education and economics. Drawing on the Hampton model, which was steeped in civilizationist ideas regarding racial possibility and the Protestant work ethic, Washington extended and refined this model at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Here he not only acquired vast tracts of land to extend the enterprise, but he involved the students and faculty in the practical work of actually building a school. For Washington, the concept of building extended to the world beyond the university. This task required cultivating the sympathy and respect of white southerners by charting a slow and studied course of black advancement consistent with the dictates of Southern society.

Moreover, he points out, that despite Washington's growing popularity in the aftermath of the speech, his racial agenda, however, modest or accomodationist still occasioned virulent opposition from all quarters of Southern life. Norrell points to numerous incidents in which Washington actually feared for his life. For example, the presence of Pinkerton agents in Tuskegee prior to the 1899 visit of President William McKinley to the campus, suggests the tension and anxiety in the air. Agents investigated several threats on Washington's life. These fears extended to the race collective. Southern white nationalists, as Norrell terms them, a loosely affiliated group of politicians, civic leaders and such as J.K. Vardamann, Ben Tilman, and Tom Watson, used the political arena to limit black advancement through their advocacy of disenfranchisement, and outright terrorism against African Americans, individually and collectively. They, too, wished for Booker's demise and used every device at their disposal to make it a reality. Moreover, Northern whites displayed paternalistic attitudes toward African Americans and the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, proved lukewarm in its support of African American political interests. This is best illustrated in the brouhaha that erupted after Washington dined with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House in 1903. White nationalists were particularly incensed about the dinner and threatened physical violence, including lynching to right the situation.

If social and political relationships with white Southerners and Northerners proved contentious then, Washington fared no better in intra racial relations. The Great Migration, the movement of large numbers of blacks from the rural South to the urban South. North and West and the growth of black populations in these centers coupled with the expansion of the public sphere increased agitation from all quarters of the African American community for rights. Leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois and a group of more strident and politically minded civic leaders and newspaper editors, including newspaperman T. Thomas Fortune and activist Monroe Trotter challenged Washington's program. Although Washington exercised control over many aspects of black and white opinion through the work of the Tuskegee Machine, a secretive system of patronage designed to promote his political and social program for African American, his machine proved unable to stop the juggernaut of increasing rancor on race and its meanings from within and outside of the race. The Atlanta Riot of 1906, spawned by alleged attacks by African Americans on Caucasian women, led to several days of wanton violence and serious property damage in downtown Atlanta. The summary dismissal of an entire regiment of black soldiers for unprovoked attacks on white citizens by Theodore Roosevelt in the Brownsville incident in 1908, further weakened Washington's appeal and his broader power. The continued erosion of Washington's power culminated in the establishment of the Niagara Movement in 1905 and the NAACP in 1909. Although Washington established an uneasy truce with the organization, his power waned. By the time of his death in 1915, the NAACP's agenda of organizational agitation coupled with its public relations arm, The Crisis, edited by none other than Washington's nemesis. W.E.B. Dubois was ascendant and destined over the next fifty years to reshape the nature of American race relations.

In conclusion, finding the appropriate balance between the political and the historical Booker T. Washington is a daunting task. Norrell, for the most part, performs this task well. However. Norrell's study is not without limitations. Although, for the most part, Norrell is adept in balancing the varied facets of Washington's life, he is, at points, overly focused on the larger context of Washington's life, especially his tenuous relationship with white Southerners and Northerners. In this reviewer's opinion, the dynamics of Washington's appeal, and his meaning and relevance to the black community reveal much about his program. More focus on Washington's program and its national and diasporic appeal would be useful here. Recent work by scholars continues to point to the complexity of black responses to Jim Crow, some that were political, but, perhaps, more importantly intellectual in their framing. Mitchell's Righteous Propagation offers a complex portrait of black responses to Jim Crow, but her work foregrounds their proactive and independent articulations on racial theory, gender, masculinity, imperialism, and the attainment of social, political and economic rights. Beyond Washington's message and machinations, Michael Bieze's Booker T. Washington and the An of Self-Representation (2008) persuasively demonstrates how Washington's consciousness efforts to represent himself in photography and other artistic representations point to his awareness and constant engagement with shaping and articulating understandings of race designed to tether industrialism to the best attributes of civilization and modernity. Norrell's book is an important contribution but not the last word on the complex legacy of Booker T. Washington.

Stephen G. Hall, Ph.D.

Case Western Reserve University