Louis Harlan examines the life, actions, and motivations of Booker T. Washington from top to bottom, peeling back the many complicated layers of Washington’s double life. Harlan’s research highlights an often overlooked fact of history, that the historical figures that live on in legend are, at the end of the day, only human, and the motivations behind their choices are rarely simple. We can only begin to understand Booker T. Washington by examining his childhood, his public and private life, the world he was living in, and the company he kept during his work as a black leader in white America.
Harlan presented a detailed portrait of Washington, tracing his life from his early years as a slave to his rise as a national figure and leader of
…show more content…
Washington was a complicated person living in a complicated time. He tried to advance the people of his race in the best way he thought possible, and in secret battled the system of segregation that tried to limit the newly gained political rights of African Americans. He built connections among the most powerful people of his time and used their resources to fund the Tuskegee institute so he could give impoverished African Americans vocational training. Despite advocating for black people to stay within the bounds of segregation and internally sabotaging his political opponents, it's clear that Washington had the interest of his people at heart. But Harlan also makes it clear that Booker T. also had his own interests at heart, seeing as how he went through great lengths to silence his critics and slow down organizations that opposed him. This was likely in the interest of keeping himself at the top since he saw other black leaders as a threat and knew that it wouldn’t look good for him if his inconsistencies were exposed. It’s also worth considering how fear and trauma motivated Booker T. Washington, since he witnessed terrible racial violence and was born in bondage. A less aggressive approach to advancing black rights was ideal to Washington because the threat of racial violence was very real wherever he went, and he sought to curb that violence and protect his people from it in the best way he knew how. Harlan reminds us that Booker T. Washington was a person like the rest of us, and was motivated by several different things and often did stuff he wasn’t proud of. Harlan uses the Washington Papers to show us just how complicated race relations were in Washington’s era, and how men like Booker T. grappled with this unique problem in many different ways for many different