Here is another New Yorker “classic,” written by Kelefa Sanneh and published in the January 25, 2009, issue. To read txhe complete article, check outbothers, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Credit: Waldon Fawcett / Courtesy Library of Congress

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Booker T. Washington fended off black rivals and white supremacists with almost equal fervor.

Booker T. Washington was already a celebrity—a self-made man, and the spokesman for black America—when he arrived at the White House on October 16, 1901, for a dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt. They had plenty to talk about: Washington was a great orator and conversationalist, and he had become one of the President’s most valued advisers. But, almost before the plates were cleared, the form of this meeting had overshadowed its content. Washington had earned his reputation as a racial moderate by assuring white people that he wouldn’t press for social equality, but this dinner looked an awful lot like a strike against segregation; the reported presence of the President’s glamorous seventeen-year-old daughter, Alice, intensified the scandal. Southern newspapers raised the alarm; the Memphis Scimitar announced, with impressive certainty, that the dinner was “the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.”

Both men survived the evening, but it was not soon forgotten. In his third autobiography, “My Larger Education,” Washington tells of a railway trip he took through Florida sometime later. At a stop near Gainesville, a white farmer shook his hand, exclaiming, “You are the greatest man in this country!” Washington demurred and suggested that Roosevelt was the greatest American, but the farmer was having none of it. With “considerable emphasis,” he said, “I used to think that Roosevelt was a great man until he ate dinner with you. That settled him for me.”

Washington loved this story—he sent a newspaper account of it to Roosevelt, who is said to have “laughed uproariously”—perhaps because it reminded him that he lived, and thrived, in a world that didn’t quite make sense. He was born in slavery, in Virginia, in 1856, which meant that he was old enough to remember the morning his family was freed, nine years later. At sixteen, he enrolled in Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, one of the Negro schools that were springing up in the postwar South; his remarks at his graduation ceremony, three years later, were singled out for praise in the New York Times. In 1881, at the age of twenty-five, he became the first principal of a newly established Negro school in Tuskegee, Alabama, and, like many college presidents before and since, he discovered that the job required constant fund-raising. He spent most of the rest of his life giving speeches, building up his own reputation (quickly) and the Tuskegee Institute’s endowment (slowly). Washington’s message—that economic progress was the true engine of uplift for black America, and that black political agitation was “the extremest folly”—was engineered to meet the demands of his time, not the demands of history. (It was also meant to persuade rich people to write checks; Washington’s critics never let him forget that his temple to self-help was built on handouts.) He spent his life in search of consensus, not controversy, and historians have been fighting over him ever since.

In 1972, Louis R. Harlan published the first half of his meticulous two-volume biography, “Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901.” It began with a sneer. “Booker T. Washington has been the schoolbook black hero for more than half a century,” Harlan wrote, and his book aimed to change that, although there was nothing polemical about it. Harlan, a historian at the University of Maryland, brought an exacting skepticism to his task, subjecting myths and anecdotes to forensic examination. (Although Washington remembered taking sacks of corn to the mill as a boy, Harlan concluded that the task “probably actually” fell to his older brother John. And, after quoting a starstruck reporter who described him as “tall, bony, straight as a Sioux chief,” Harlan hastened to add that Washington was “not actually tall, bony, nor very straight.”) Harlan, who edited fourteen volumes of Washington’s papers, used private correspondence to complicate—and sometimes undermine—his subject’s public image. He clearly admired the skill and strategy behind Washington’s rise: the way he got his white neighbors to view his booming black school as a source of regional pride; the way he flattered Northern liberals and soothed Southern segregationists with the same folksy speeches. But, in Harlan’s view, the great race man was also an “artful dodger,” and a not entirely honest broker, forever spying on his critics, punishing his enemies, rewarding his friends, and bribing the Negro press. He got so good at telling people (especially white people) what they wanted to hear that he often forgot what he wanted to say.

The fact that Booker T. Washington’s tactics were finely tuned to the temper of his times helps explain why they were so discordant with the times that followed. Washington’s reasonableness came to be viewed as his mortal sin—he was often portrayed as the enemy of black activism. But these days, when the “schoolbook black hero” is Martin Luther King, Jr., Washington is less threatening, and more likable, than he once was: a slave turned mogul whose life story is easier to admire now that his political philosophy has been eclipsed. And, 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.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Kelefa Sanneh has contributed to The New Yorker since 2001 and has been a staff writer since 2008. He is the author of “Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres.” He is also a contributor to “CBS Sunday Morning.” He came to The New Yorker from the Times, where he had been the pop-music critic since 2002. Previously, he was the deputy editor of Transition, a journal of race and culture based at the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University. His writing has also appeared in a number of magazines and a handful of books, including “Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z” and “Da Capo Best Music Writing.” He lives in New York City with his family.