The Future of the American Negro: Booker T. Washington's Views on Blacks and Whites (Timeless Classic Books)
- ISBN-10
- 1456405233
- ISBN-13
- 9781456405236
- Series
- The Future of the American Negro
- Pages
- 112
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2010-12-15
- Authors
- Booker T. Washington, Timeless Books
Description
Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 - November 14, 1915) was an American educator, author, orator and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915. He was representative of the last generation of black leaders born in slavery and spoke on behalf of blacks living in the South. Washington was born into slavery to a white father and a slave mother in a rural area in southwestern Virginia. After emancipation, he worked in West Virginia in a variety of manual labor jobs before making his way to Hampton Roads seeking an education. Booker T. Washington's "The Future of the American Negro" (1899) brings together in a single volume a number of his public addresses after the Atlanta Exposition address and articles in The Independent, Atlantic Monthly, Appleton's Popular Science Monthly, and other periodicals. This was the closest Washington ever came to an inclusive and systematic statement of his social philosophy and racial strategy.Washington stressed by repetition the economic means to black advancement and the philosophy of self-help, mutual aid, and education. He pronounced Reconstruction a failure because of its political approach, its wrong kind of education for blacks, and its encouragement to the freedmen to begin at the top instead of at the bottom. He stressed the mutual interdependence of whites and blacks in their common southern homeland. While he urged blacks to make themselves useful to whites as a means of gaining the full civil and political rights currently denied them, in occasional bursts of frankness, he admonished those whites who practiced discrimination, exploitation and violent repression against blacks.
