Thanks TPM Café Book Club for inviting me to discuss Norrell's "Up From History." In this substantial and well-written new biography of Booker T. Washington, Norrell vividly describes the increasingly vicious landscape of white supremacy in the American South in the decades after Reconstruction. In doing so he effectively demonstrates the constraints within which Washington worked. The potency of antiblack hatred was such that any sort of advance advocated or practiced by Washington or any southern African American was fraught with danger. This, for Norrell describes the limited nature of Washington's avowed program, and the necessity of acting in secret for anything beyond that. Thus the strong criticism to which Washington was subject at the time and since then are misguided and unjust.

I came away with a greater appreciation of the extraordinary range of Washington's activities and of the enormous obstacles he faced. I am left with both historical and political questions, but for this post I'll concentrate on the historical. I am not fully convinced by the strong claims about historical inevitability which are at the heart of the book.

To begin with, the fact of white racial constraints does not lead directly to an explanation of why Washington advocated certain courses of action and not others. In Norrell's account, Washington faced hostility and opposition no matter what he did. The establishment and subsequent growth of the Tuskegee Institute was taken as a threat by local and regional whites. Indeed, as he shows, the very idea of industrial education was itself attacked repeatedly throughout Washington's career. He was also threatened by white southerners for involving himself in the Republican party and influencing many of Roosevelt's appointments. There are other examples here, but the point is that Washington was criticized and threatened for any number of things he did even as he became a national celebrity, and the unquestioned spokesperson for black America. If this is true, then perhaps he had more agency than Norrell gives him credit for. In other words his denigration of political struggle and his public call to eschew the fight for social equality was, in fact, more of a choice than a constraint. It was certainly consistent with his economic philosophy. Seen this way, it does not seem at all unreasonable for Ida Wells, DuBois, Monroe Trotter and others to criticize his accommodationism, and to oppose the central tenets of his message to both blacks and whites. For them, this extraordinarily powerful leader was advocating one set of strategies that would therefore shut out others. And in an age of white terror and black civil death, there was much at stake in which path one chose. As Washington's black critics argued at the time, black acquisition of property was meaningless absent the concomitant struggle for political rights, because without it there was nothing to stop that property from being taken at gunpoint, nothing to stop the lynching of blacks who were able to advance economically.

Another question about historical inevitability is raised by Norrell's post. If I understand right, he argues that Washington did what was in the realm of the possible at a time when political change had simply been foreclosed. Then, as later in the post-civil rights era, the U.S. was in its "more normative state, when reform comes slowly, in small increments." Perhaps it is true that political agitation does not immediately lead to change, but agitation in one moment can have crucial effects later on. Critics of Washington's reconciling and materialist strategy founded the NAACP, which as we know had an enormous impact on racial politics across the twentieth century. Then as now, what constitutes the possible is never a foregone conclusion.