As a historian of the period about which Robert Norrell is writing, I have two fairly strong reactions to his new biography of Booker T. Washington, Up from History. On the one hand, I know Norrell to be a talented and accomplished historian, whose reappraisal of Washington ought to be welcomed by all of us interested in the subject. It is good to be provoked to rethink received orthodoxies. On the other hand, however, I am not persuaded that his reappraisal is persuasive. Unlike a Frederick Douglass or a Martin Luther King, it seems to me that Booker T. Washington as a leader is so time-bound, so locked within his historical context, that there's relatively little he offers that recommends his model of leadership.

Norrell is certainly correct to insist that BTW be seen in his own historical context. In that context, he certainly has a powerful personal story to tell -- albeit one best told by a ghostwriter. Norrell's implication that W. E. B. Du Bois, C. Vann Woodward, and Louis Harlan either didn't know or systematically ignored the harsh racial conditions within which BTW operated is, however, ludicrous. Tell it to Du Bois, who was walking down the street in Atlanta, when he saw the knuckles of a lynching victim hung in a local butcher shop window as a trophy. Tell it to the NAACP's Walter White, who lived through the Atlanta race riot and regularly investigated lynchings for his organization. Or tell it to Woodward and Harlan who taught both Norrell and me much of what we know about those conditions.

Norrell makes much of Washington's offering of positive black accomplishment as his means of holding out hope for amicable race relations in a very bleak hour. He certainly did that and his institutional monument at Tuskegee was his best evidence. He lived, however, near the end -- not the beginning -- of a time when its curriculum in farming and mechanics, home economics and tailoring, could offer a realistic future for black workers in a rapidly changing American economy. One suspects he knew, in the recesses of his mind, that that was true. He didn't send his children through Tuskegee for their education.

Moreover, in his conclusion, Norrell discusses the segregated Tuskegee Veterans Hospital, a federal agency that gave additional strength to the black middle class in Macon County that, as Norrell well knows, vastly increased black resources for resistance to local racial discrimination. He neatly avoids mentioning the Tuskegee Experiment that tested the effect of untreated syphilis on the VA hospital's patients. The Tuskegee Experiment occurred two decades after BTW's death, of course, but I suspect that it would not have occurred if he had not inculcated a deferential attitude toward federal white authorities in the face of local white hostility. It's all the more ironic in light of the possible cause of Washington's own death.

Finally, what are we to make of an African American leader's rhetoric, when he routinely told 'coon jokes to his black and white audiences? To what black accomplishment did they point? How is that to be integrated with our new notions of leadership -- black, white or otherwise?