I wrote this book because in my view leading American historians have committed the anachronistic fallacy of removing Washington from the context of his life. They have done so out of protest against racial injustice--an understandable motive, but one that casts the Tuskegeean as a foil to African-American protest leaders of the 1960s. In the process, a fair understanding of Washington's career and purpose has been sacrificed. The mainstream view of Washington originated largely with W.E.B. Du Bois, the Tuskegeean's longstanding rival for black leadership. Du Bois survived Washington by nearly a half century and shaped the memory of his avowed enemy. Du Bois insisted that Washington's emphasis on material advancement over political involvement, and on industrial schooling over purely academic education, gave black consent to segregation and discrimination.

What I found was something different: Washington did protest against discrimination by railroads and labor unions. He also spoke our repeatedly against lynching, unfair voting qualifications, and segregated-housing legislation. Washington also constantly raised money for black educational institutions in the South, both industrial schools like his own and more-traditional academic colleges like Fisk University. He led Northern philanthropists to build hundreds of primary schools for black children. He arranged and helped finance lawsuits challenging disfranchisement, jury discrimination, and peonage--though he did it all secretly because such open civil-rights activism would have invited violence against him and his school. And he campaigned openly and constantly against the pernicious images projected in the news media and popular culture about black people, including protesting in 1915 the racist movie The Birth of a Nation.

As the civil-rights movement grew in the 1950s and 60s, however, activists increasingly compared Washington unfavorably to Martin Luther King Jr.'s march into the face of racial bigotry. Lost altogether were the similarities between King and Washington. They shared a commitment to shaping the way white people perceived racial character in order to elicit fairer treatment for black people. Each warned of the danger of hate, the power of love and reconciliation. Just as Washington portrayed black people as decent and moral, King presented them as loving and unworthy of the terrible treatment visited upon them. If King was harder on white people than Washington, he still preached that the worst of them could be redeemed. Both leaders appealed to democratic values as the imperative for reforming race relations, and both prophesied that reform would happen.

The difference was that King pricked the American conscience when the time was right for change. Washington could not defeat the overwhelming white-supremacist power in the South at the turn of the 20th century, a much harsher time.

But it was academics who sealed Washington's legacy. Du Bois's opinions reverberated through the most influential review of Washington's life, in the late Yale University historian C. Vann Woodward's 1951 Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Even more severely than Du Bois, Woodward faulted Washington for not condemning the "prejudices and injustices of the caste system and the barbarities of the mob." Few historians have been more conversant with the historical sources than Woodward, and yet he failed to acknowledge the full circumstances that vexed Washington or to see his strategy. Woodward surely knew that Washington, for his entire career, was fighting a defensive battle to save black education from official abandonment. After about 1890, Southern school districts apportioned funds disproportionately in favor of white students, and at the same time white politicians began to agitate to divide tax funds for education by race, on the assumption that white people were paying large taxes to educate black children. Washington fought furiously and successfully behind the scenes in several state constitutional conventions to keep the school funds from being separated. The millions of dollars in Northern philanthropy that he raised replaced at least some of the money that was taken from black schools through blatant discrimination.

Woodward also knew that by the time Washington de-emphasized voting in his public statements in the mid-1890s--because he believed that during Reconstruction black people had mistakenly sought political office before property or a skill--he was trying to quell white hysteria. Woodward surely understood that, by the time Washington publicly eschewed black political activism (but not the right to vote), Southern states were well on their way to disfranchising black people in new state constitutions. And although the historian covered the anti-black rhetoric of such demagogues as James K. Vardaman, Benjamin R. Tillman, and Thomas Dixon, he made no mention of their condemnations of Washington. With that omission, he left the impression that Washington had more freedom to speak and act than he did.

Louis Harlan--one of Woodward's students, was the next influential interpreter of the Tuskegeean with his biography and the 14-volume Booker T. Washington Papers. Accusing Washington of "a single-minded concern with power," he painted the educator as "a minotaur, a lion, a fox, or Brer Rabbit, some frightened little man like the Wizard of Oz ... a personality that had vanished into the roles it played." Before he began his research, Harlan wrote, he had thought of Washington "entirely in terms of the Uncle Tom stereotype," but the discovery of Washington's secret ways put him in mind of Richard Nixon. Harlan made Washington's "dirty tricks"--for example, Washington spied on his black critics and undermined their efforts to end his leadership by creating competing newspapers and keeping political rivals from getting political appointments--the main theme of the biography's second volume.

Instead of putting those events in the political context of groups competing for power, Harlan situated them in a Manichean struggle between Northern black idealists of "distinction and dignity" and the Tuskegee Machine, ruled by the power-hungry Wizard.

A large part of the problem is that most American historians have a surprisingly narrow view of the styles of black leaders: They must be lions like Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King Jr. The cagey style epitomized by Franklin D. Roosevelt--pragmatic and stealthy--has not been deemed acceptable for a black leader. That is because scholars have tended to view change as the result of protest, especially since the 1960s when activism did succeed in altering the status of black people, women, and other minority groups. That narrow assumption has influenced how scholars view the post-civil-rights years: Because after 1965 protest did not yield more reform legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the subsequent decades have been treated as time of declension and failed idealism, when conservatives hijacked of the pursuit of justice. In fact, American society may have simply returned to its more normative state, when reform comes slowly, in small increments.

Booker T. Washington's focus on the development of human capital through better health, education, morality, and enterprise--while not a substitute for protest--seems irrefutably a good strategy for advancement in American society during all those times when the environment is not conducive to protest movements. Washington himself pursued both protest and evolutionary change.

If Washington's approach was realistic in the difficult racial circumstances he faced, however, it did not change his world. At the time of his death, black people still suffered terrible injustice, as they would continue to do. But his effort to sustain black morale and to promote racial peace in the South must be counted among the most heroic acts in American history.

He constantly encouraged Southerners, black and white, to listen to the better angels of their nature. "I would permit no man to drag down my soul by making me hate him," he advised black people; to white people he said, "You can't keep another man in the ditch without being in the ditch yourself." By building Tuskegee Institute, an institution that demonstrated black potential for success and autonomy, he gave black people reason to have faith in the future.

Indeed, his life itself was an object lesson of progress, of hope that black people could rise to something better. At many levels, Washington's prophecy was correct, and his historical reputation should be revised to reflect that.