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Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington, by Robert J. Norrell
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Since the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., has personified black leadership with his use of direct action protests against white authority. A century ago, in the era of Jim Crow, Booker T. Washington pursued a different strategy to lift his people. In this compelling biography, Norrell reveals how conditions in the segregated South led Washington to call for a less contentious path to freedom and equality. He urged black people to acquire economic independence and to develop the moral character that would ultimately gain them full citizenship. Although widely accepted as the most realistic way to integrate blacks into American life during his time, Washington’s strategy has been disparaged since the 1960s.
The first full-length biography of Booker T. in a generation, Up from History recreates the broad contexts in which Washington worked: He struggled against white bigots who hated his economic ambitions for blacks, African-American intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois who resented his huge influence, and such inconstant allies as Theodore Roosevelt. Norrell details the positive power of Washington’s vision, one that invoked hope and optimism to overcome past exploitation and present discrimination. Indeed, his ideas have since inspired peoples across the Third World that there are many ways to struggle for equality and justice. Up from History reinstates this extraordinary historical figure to the pantheon of black leaders, illuminating not only his mission and achievement but also, poignantly, the man himself.
- Sales Rank: #529473 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Belknap Press
- Published on: 2011-04-30
- Released on: 2011-03-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.13" h x 1.33" w x 6.13" l, 1.82 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 528 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
Norrell has provided us with a fascinating portrait of one of the most influential Americans of his age. Rather than the charlatan, enigma, or Uncle Tom that previous biographers have depicted, Washington emerges as a gifted, creative, and flawed activist who struggled for racial uplift while perched precariously on the knife-edge of American racism. Up from History deserves a place beside the very best American biographies. (W. Fitzhugh Brundage, author of The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory)
By carefully and consistently assessing Washington within the context of his own extraordinarily difficult and dangerous time, Norrell not only explodes the still-prevalent civil-rights-era stereotype of Washington as a self-serving accommodationist, but he demonstrates how quickly and thoroughly we lose historical perspective when we begin to impose the expectations of the present without regard for the realities of the past. (James C. Cobb, Spalding Distinguished Professor of History, University of Georgia)
Instead of viewing Booker T. Washington from the vantage point of the modern civil rights era, Robert J. Norrell has placed him squarely in the violent context of late nineteenth-century Alabama (and American) race relations. The result is a compelling new biography that should lead apologists and critics of Washington to see him in a new light. A first-rate read. (Dan Carter, Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina)
This well-written and forcefully argued book will be hotly debated in the profession. (Clarence E. Walker, Professor of History, UC Davis)
A thoughtful biography that, perhaps, signals a new scholarly appreciation of a remarkable man. (Kirkus Reviews 2008-10-15)
To the extent that Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) is remembered at all today, he is usually misremembered, which is a travesty...His unwillingness to practice protest politics, however, has earned him the scorn of many modern-day critics, who dismiss him as too meek in his dealings with whites...In Up From History, a compelling biography, Robert J. Norrell restores the Wizard of Tuskegee to his rightful place in the black pantheon...Many criticisms of Washington in more recent decades have echoed those of his contemporary black nemesis, W.E.B. Du Bois…Much has been made of this rivalry, but the relevant point is that the two men differed mainly in emphasis, not goals...Putting their differences into proper perspective is yet another way that Up From History serves as a useful corrective. (Jason L. Riley Wall Street Journal 2009-01-23)
Few great Americans have been more cruelly treated by history than Booker Taliaferro Washington. He has been mocked, vilified and caricatured, yet by any reasonable measure his life was extraordinary...To see him as anything less than heroic borders on the incomprehensible...No, he wasn't the leader for 1940 or 1960 or today, but it is unfair to him, indeed it is unfair to history itself, to expect him to have been. Robert J. Norrell understands this and has written the story of his life as it actually was lived, not as we might wish it had been lived. Up from History is in all respects an exemplary book, scrupulously fair to its subject and thus to the reader as well. (Jonathan Yardley Washington Post Book World 2009-01-18)
In the age of Obama, Washington seems more than ever like a precursor: a beloved barrier-smasher, sensitive to the rigorous demands of being America's favorite black person. In short, Washington seems due for reappraisal, and in Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington the historian Robert J. Norrell aims to push him back up onto his pedestal--or, at any rate, to pick him up off the floor...Norrell reframes the picture of Washington by emphasizing the extent and ferocity of [white] hostility; he shows how Washington and his critics conspired to make the Tuskegee project seem less controversial, and less brave, than it really was. (Kelefa Sanneh New Yorker 2009-02-02)
The much-misunderstood Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), the most prominent African American leader of his time, is brought back to life in riveting fashion. (Carlin Romano Philadelphia Inquirer 2009-01-23)
It is hard to think of a historical figure more in need of biographical rescue. Yet Washington is an awkward challenge for the contemporary scholar. He is so thoroughly stigmatized as politically incorrect that rescuing him could seem a political act in itself, and even a balanced book could be dismissed as a polemic. But Robert J. Norrell, in his remarkable new biography, Up from History, gets around this problem the old-fashioned way: by scrupulously excavating the facts of his subject's life and then carefully situating him in his own era...Today the brilliance with which he achieved the near impossible is forgotten, while the unfair presumption of his racial capitulation is ubiquitous. Up from History will go far in correcting this. I thought I knew something of Washington's complexity before reading this book. And I had always been fascinated by Dr. Bledsoe in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a darkly ironic sendup of Washington as a merciless pragmatist. But here we see the real man at his interminable labors: incessantly fund-raising for Tuskegee in the North, mapping out political strategy with liberal white philanthropists in Boston and New York, fighting with Northern black elites one day and with white nationalist Southerners the next, and then, back at Tuskegee, riding out on horseback in the early morning to micromanage the college's agricultural operations... Washington understood that his people also dwelled inside a crucible. Norrell's rich portrait makes clear that Washington never stopped seeing himself as the leader of his people. How to help them live in such circumstances? His informing idea was that responsibility--hard work, education, the moral life--brought a degree of freedom and independence even in oppression. The pursuit of excellence would bring blacks an economic currency in the larger world, and thus, ultimately, respect and equality. With more fearlessness than any '60s black nationalist, he saw black Americans as a free-standing people and asked them to compete openly with all others...Washington understood that the loss of good faith was the worst of all things, and when black America was at risk of this, he was the shepherd. Up from History gives back to America one of its greatest heroes. (Shelby Steele New York Times Book Review 2009-02-15)
Robert J. Norrell's Up from History rescues Washington from the most calumnious reputation in black history, revealing him as Race Man extraordinaire. (John McWhorter Forbes.com 2009-02-06)
[Norrell's] book is timely, demonstrating how a man whose father was white and whose mother black, who rose from humble circumstances to achieve great prominence, can tumble to obscurity, his reasonable views drowned out by louder, more radical voices, voices no doubt strained with envy. (Barbara Bamberger Scott Curled Up with a Good Book 2009-02-13)
A fine new biography. (John M. Taylor Washington Times 2009-02-22)
About the Author
Robert J. Norrell is Professor of History and Bernadotte Schmitt Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley Few great Americans have been more cruelly treated by history than Booker Taliaferro Washington. He has been mocked, vilified and caricatured, yet by any reasonable measure his life was extraordinary. He was born into slavery in Virginia in 1856. He never knew who his father was -- though it was generally assumed that the man was white -- and was reared by his demanding but loving mother. After emancipation the family moved to West Virginia, where the boy developed a thirst for education so powerful that in 1872 he traversed the 500 miles to Hampton Institute in Virginia -- this at a time when "travel for an almost penniless young Negro was fraught with stress and uncertainty" -- and soon became an outstanding pupil. Upon graduation he went to Alabama and founded the Tuskegee Institute, which he shaped into "one of the largest institutions of higher education in the United States" and a beacon of hope for African Americans everywhere. From the pulpit this provided him, he preached self-discipline, education, moral improvement and restraint in the face of implacable white hostility that often took violent, indeed murderous, form. For many years, beginning in the early 1890s, he was "the most famous and respected black man in America." Yet for all that, by the late 1890s Washington came under steady, often virulent attack that continued almost uninterrupted until his death in 1915. His most vocal critics were not white but black, led by a small but vocal and well-situated group of "educated, middle-class New England blacks who refused to acknowledge the constraints imposed on southern blacks" and demanded that Washington follow a far more aggressive, confrontational course. In 1901 they were joined by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, who was rapidly on the way to becoming the country's leading black intellectual and who wrote a stinging review of Washington's immensely popular autobiography, Up from Slavery. Du Bois said that Washington's emphasis on industrial training for blacks at Tuskegee was a denial of their potential for intellectual growth and a capitulation to "triumphant commercialism and the ideals of material prosperity." Washington was admired by Southern whites, he said, but "among the Negroes, Mr. Washington is still far from a popular leader." The first charge was an oversimplification of Washington's strategy for black advancement, and the second was patently untrue -- in 1901 Washington was not merely admired but venerated by American blacks -- but Du Bois's eloquence and his high position among the black and white intelligentsia carried the day. Washington came to be viewed as an "Uncle Tom" who was more interested in appeasing Southern whites than in confronting them, who believed that "racial conflict was so clearly destructive of the interests of black people that it made little sense to engage in it," who emphasized education, deportment and cooperation as the most effective strategies for blacks. Norrell, who is professor of history at the University of Tennessee and the author of numerous well-regarded books and articles on race relations in the United States, believes that Washington has been a victim of what goes by the awkward name of "presentism," the human tendency to view the past in terms of present assumptions and expectations. Thus, when the civil-rights movement flowered in the 1960s, Washington, with his acceptance of gradualism and his willingness to seek the favor of prominent whites, was dismissed as "an unworthy hero, one who had sold out his people to racist white power." This view already had found its way into the history departments, largely because of the mocking depiction of Washington ("the master of Tuskegee") in C. Vann Woodward's hugely influential Origins of the New South (1951), a view adopted by "a large continent of admiring students who became the next generation of influential historians of the South." Norrell continues: "Many academic historians had themselves been activists, and certainly nearly all admired the achievements of civil-rights protest. Activism became an imperative among many historians who came of age in the 1960s, and activism dictated protest driven by idealism, not measured appeals to slow prescriptions based on material and educational improvement. A presumption entered the thinking and writing that protest was the correct, and for most the only legitimate, means of improving minority conditions. By the mid-1960s Washington was understood to have been the enemy of activism, the Uncle Tom who delayed the day of freedom. From then on, the present-mindedness of historians writing about race went mostly unquestioned." As one who came of age in 1960, who shared the movement's impatience for change, and who greatly admired Vann Woodward's work, I reflexively accepted the received opinion of Washington. Norrell persuades me that I was wrong. He has granted Washington what Du Bois, Woodward and so many others have willfully denied him: He sees Washington in the context of his own times and declines to judge him by the ostensibly more enlightened moral assumptions of our own. Certainly, Washington was not a perfect man; his fascination with politics led him into alliances and commitments of questionable value to his cause, and at times his willingness to curry the favor of whites led him into embarrassing self-abnegation. But he was the great African American leader of the day, a man who gave inspiration and hope to millions and played no small role in altering white perceptions of blacks, a remarkable accomplishment at what may have been the worst time for blacks in American history. Apart from his mother, probably the two most important people in Washington's early life were white. One was a woman named Viola Ruffner, a New Englander living with her husband in West Virginia who hired him as a houseboy and, once she recognized his abilities and ambition, "helped him become the intelligent, responsible, hard-working, independent young man he wanted to be"; she instilled in him "what the German sociologist Max Weber later called the Protestant ethic, which taught that the values of industry, sobriety, thrift, self-reliance, and piety accounted for success in modern capitalist societies." These lessons were powerfully reinforced by Samuel Chapman Armstrong, a former union general and an "unabashed paternalist" who founded Hampton Institute, a college for black students, and "might have represented for Booker the white father who had never claimed him." Among the instructions he issued to students were "Be thrifty and industrious," "Command the respect of your neighbors by a good record and a good character," "Make the best of your difficulties" and "Live down prejudice." He "emphasized the evils of slavery and the essential goodness of the American republic," but he "demonstrated no ill will toward white southerners" and preached reconciliation. His influence on Washington was incalculable: "Hampton reinforced his experience that a job well done resulted in new and larger opportunities. Just as good performance as a houseboy for Mrs. Ruffner had led to the opportunity to be her fruit salesman, and an excellent performance of janitorial work had got him admitted to Hampton, so did diligent schoolwork earn him the opportunity to shine at commencement. His personal experience validated his faith in the Protestant ethic. Hampton proved again that some whites would help a young black to rise in the world. He had a hero in General Armstrong and other role models in white teachers who opened new worlds of knowledge to him and wanted him to succeed." Today that may seem dated and even demeaning, but it wasn't today. It was a distant and unimaginably difficult yesterday in which the barriers to a young black living in poverty were so high as to seem insuperable and the animosity of whites was so intense as to shrivel the soul. The historical truth is that the help of whites was essential to Washington's rise, a truth that explains his lifelong pursuit of white mentors, allies and benefactors. His creation of Tuskegee Institute is one of the epic accomplishments in American history, and the students whom he sent out to other places to establish institutes of their own spread the message of black education and determination throughout the country, the South especially. To see him as anything less than heroic borders on the incomprehensible. Nothing that he did was easy. He walked forever on "a tightrope between candor and survival," between whites and blacks. He learned "that the only role open to him was that of the fox. To play the lion was to invite disaster. It was a bitter lesson that showed the limits on his ability to lead his race. A black leader who could not speak freely was not able to pursue equal racial and educational advancement. But if he owned up to that fact, he would be accepting that blacks' hopes for improvement were futile, and he knew that progress would not grow from despair." Still, he was the leader to whom blacks across the nation looked for guidance and inspiration, and he provided as much of both as circumstances permitted at an incredibly difficult time. No, he wasn't the leader for 1940 or 1960 or today, but it is unfair to him, indeed it is unfair to history itself, to expect him to have been. Robert J. Norrell understands this and has written the story of his life as it actually was lived, not as we might wish it had been lived. Up from History is in all respects an exemplary book, scrupulously fair to its subject and thus to the reader as well.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Up From Revisionism
By TS Lloyd
My own views of Booker T. Washington have been shaped by the writings of W.E.B. Dubois and other recent scholars. Norrell's autobiography has helped to change my perspective. By viewing Washington from the environment and times he lived in, I came to understand why his actions were what they were. Growing up as a slave and a poor Southern rural freeman who, with the assistance of well-meaning, but condecending whites, was able to pull himself up he wanted other blacks to also pull themselves up. But he knew, first hand, that the process undertaken by Reconstruction, was a road to failure. DuBois and Trotter, on the other hand, grew up as "free" Northern educated elite. They saw a different way to equality based on their own experiences and fostered in the somewhat isolated environment of upper academia. Norrell does an addequate job of demonstrating the conflict between these two camps and how it was based, in part, on personality conflicts,misconceptions and jealousy over BT's ability to get funding from wealthy Northern whites.
Washington, like DuBois, is not guiltless in his actions. He made many mistakes that had grave consequenses. DuBois, slide into Marxism carried grave consequences for him as well and his views became promenient only after Washington's death. Dispite his faults,Washington was the leader of ex-slaves and the immediate post slavery generation of rural Southern blacks. The values he stood--hard work, good hygiene, honesty, self respect--for are still espoused in many balck churches. And for that he should be honored by all.
31 of 34 people found the following review helpful.
Finally, a balanced look at BTW
By Marion H. Smith
This intriguing biography of Booker T. Washington provides much needed balance to the cartoon-like image that has been built of him in the past fifty years. BTW unquestionably was a complex man whose successes fueled education and prosperity for African-Americans that would never have occurred otherwise. Dr. Norrell shows that Washington was shrewd, not foolish, and that he acted with cold calculation to improve tangibly the lot of black people in a part of the South that was susceptible to no other approach.
In the Age of Obama, this book may be the first important sign that politically-correct thought does not have to dominate scholarship.
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Consultant and Author
By Arthur L. Slotkin
I am in the process of writing a book about Auburn University, just up the road from Tuskegee. I am familar with Washington and Dubois and thier arguement. I found that this book gave me another prespective about the role of Washington at his time. We are told as historians to place the actors in their time and place, yet we continue to fail to do that when it comes to Washington and issues of race in general. Norrell's book reminded me to think about what it was like in Alabama in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Knowing what Alabama was like in the mid twentieth century, I can only imagine his stress.
Excellent book, should be read by anyone interested in Washington, southern history and race in the nineenth century.
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