Thanks TPM and fellow participants for this week's book discussion. My final thought about this conversation is that while I think Norrell is right to insist that we view Washington within his historical context, it is hard to keep him there. I think this is in part because Washington bequeathed a political legacy - numerous and diverse ones, actually - that have shaped racial politics and visions from his time to ours. I think it is in part also because America has not come close to solving its racial problems - if viewed by disparities in income, assets, home ownership, infant mortality, life expectancy, employment, imprisonment, education or myriad other indices. Arguments over how to solve these problems inevitably raise questions about causes and solutions that evoke the competing (and often intertwined) perspectives that we attach to Washington and DuBois.

We now have an African American president who, seen through this long debate, evinces elements that we associate with each. Speaking about the responsibility of the black poor to change their behavior, or of the dignity of labor, he recalls Washington. Speaking as he did in Philadelphia a year ago about structural racism and the legitimacy of black grievance he sounds more like Washington's critics. As president of the United States, clearly Obama signifies far more than racial politics. Yet the fact of his race fundamentally alters the national identity of a country founded in slavery. And with this alteration comes questions of how best to tackle racial problems in changed circumstances. In this questioning, Washington and DuBois continue to cast long shadows, even as the landscape itself changes in profound ways.

First, my apologies for taking up a disproportionate amount of space at the TPM Cafe Book Club. I've been hoping for more entries by others, but I do have one more commentary, which is the following.

In 1964, at the age of 19, I was a civil rights worker in Clarksdale, Mississippi. It was the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and I taught teenagers in a small Freedom School. Our school was a back-up plan, adopted because the voter registration effort had failed; about 100 people had tried to register at the courthouse, but only about ten were accepted.

We wanted to teach black history at the school--a subject we (another young woman from the North and I) were rapidly trying to learn ourselves. We did, however, ask the students what they would really enjoy studying, and the most popular choice was French. I interpreted that choice as a yearning for something outside the constraints of a segregated Mississippi town--a desire that W. E. B. Du Bois would have approved of.

I "discovered" W. E. B. Du Bois in my effort to learn black history. I got the impression that his writings had been neglected or even suppressed, possibly because he became a Communist at some time in his life.

But I have wracked my brain to remember whether Booker T. Washington ever came up in discussions that summer.

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I'd like to add a couple of points about Booker T. Washington. I agree with Washington's critics (if that is a fair term for historians; I'm not sure) that he was wrong about the role of farming in the South. After World War I farm prices collapsed, and the number of farmers as a percentage of the population fell (in fact, the decline in numbers had started earlier). Although farming provided many Americans with a good living during much of the century, it was not an industry on which to build long-term prosperity. (However, later government planning projects, such as the Columbia Basin Project in the 1930s, tried to do just that.)

But Tuskegee was about a lot more than farming. It was about teaching practical trades along with productive work habits. Certainly, many African-Americans who were barely a generation away from slavery benefited from this education. I doubt that even W.E.B. Du Bois thought that an academic postsecondary education was suited for everybody, white or black. Unfortunately, Du Bois' conflict with Washington led to hyperbolic rhetoric and polarization. The rhetoric has cooled, but the polarization apparently continues.

I'm not a historian, so I offer something of an outsider's view. I must ask exactly what it is that Professors Norrell and Luker disagree about.

They agree that Washington should be viewed in the context of his own time. But Luker differs from Norrell by saying that Norrell wrongly offers Washington as a "model of leadership."

The term "model" implies that Norrell is recommending Washington's style as something that we should adopt today. Or perhaps Luker is saying that Washington's model of leadership is inappropriate in a larger, ideal sense. Or perhaps that it was just wrong for his time.

Is that what historiography is about? Is it about evaluating historical figures by comparing them to the present or to some ideal or some preferred alternative that didn't actually happen? Perhaps.

In any case, for me the interesting question is counterfactual, too: Was there another way in which Washington could have succeeded in building Tuskegee, expanding education of blacks throughout the South, and inspiring his generation of African-Americans? If we are going to indulge in "what-ifs," those are the ones I wonder about.

As I wrote in a direct response to Norrell, he does indeed provide an ample evidence of the secret work of Washington, thus providing an important corrective to how Washington's legacy is understood. However, there is a crucial distinction though between public utterance and private action, particularly in the case of a figure to whom most blacks and many influential whites looked to for guidance on the question of black citizenship in America.

It wasn't merely that Washington was silent on the matter of political struggle. He repeatedly claimed in public speeches and writings that blacks had been foolish after slavery to focus on political freedom, wrong now to focus on grievances. It would be difficult to argue that Washington, who dominated black public discourse and had the ear of some of the most powerful whites in the country, did not set the national terms of struggle for black civic inclusion, regardless of his private actions. Other leaders were forced to operate on the ideological landscape he fashioned, or resist his hegemony.

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I'm not sure how Ralph Luker knows what Vann Woodward and Louis Harlan taught me, but the fact is I read their writing in the 1970s and 1980s but subsequently had occasion to study some of the same issues and came to different conclusions which I argue, based on evidence, in my book. In fact I suggest in my book that Woodward and Harlan were aware of most of the evidence I present but chose to emphasize other contexts about BTW's life that I believe skew understandings of the Tuskegeean toward highly negative conclusions. Dr. Luker in fact is fairly typical of recent academic attitudes in his dismissal of Washington's relevance, based on misinformation and anachronistic judgment. All of Washington's children went to Tuskegee Institute and two went to liberal arts schools in addition--a fairly accurate reflection of BTW's acceptance of all kinds of education for black people. I didn't discuss the Tuskegee syphilis situation because it originated long after he died and we don't know how he would have responded.

Dr. Luker reflects the intense partisanship in the academy in defense of the attitudes of W.E.B. Du Bois.

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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.

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Joseph Lowndes questions how severe the restraints were on Washington's actions.

"In Norrell's account, Washington faced hostility and opposition no matter what he did. . . . 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."

His point is that Washington was criticized for everything he did--so maybe he could have chosen different policies; thus his accommodationist stance was chosen, not inevitable.

Perhaps, but was another strategy even possible? Washington had one clear success--the creation of Tuskegee and its satellites. Could even that have been achieved if he had taken overt political action or challenged whites on the issue of social equality? Antagonists could have burned his school down with impunity. All they needed was justification.

One piece of evidence against Washington's having a great deal of agency is that Washington's Boston detractors did not end up accomplishing very much. After Washington died, they didn't become the leaders of African-Americans and they didn't change the South. The successes of the NAACP, which W. E. B. Du Bois helped start, came about many decades later. This is the way it seems to me, but I'm interested in challenges to this view.

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.

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I'd like to share my understanding of what is different about Up from History. As I see it, Norrell responds to two major problems with historians' treatment of Booker T. Washington.

One is the fact that historians such as C. Vann Woodward and Louis Harlan championed protest as the way to deal with mistreatment of African-Americans. Their "presentism" (viewing the past through the lens of their times) made Booker T. Washington's efforts to accommodate Southern whites look like a weak and losing strategy, even though it may have been the only one that could have enabled an institution like Tuskegee to survive.

The second and related flaw is that historians interpreted Washington's strategy not merely as unwise but also as morally wrong, even cowardly--and thus Washington himself as morally lacking. He was, said Harlan curtly, "schooled in slavery, trained to moderation, accustomed to compromise." Harlan also described Washington as a "feral, power-hungry" man, head of the "octopus-like Tuskegee Machine," a man of "multiple personalities" and "no quintessence. At the center of his intellectual maze was a hall of mirrors...."

To Norrell, however, the evidence about Washington's life is consistent with quite a different character--that of an upright man committed to doing what he could to make former slaves a secure and successful part of American society in the South. Norrell believes that the historians overlooked the viciousness of the environment in which Washington lived.

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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.

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This week at Book Club, we have Robert J. Norrell, history professor at the University of Tennessee, discussing his work Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. The book is the first full-length biography of Booker T. Washington in some time and re-examines the life and controversial strategies of this leader of the African-American community. Among the topics given renewed attention are the huge influence Washington wielded in the black community and larger American society and the precarious position he occupied between white supremacists on one side and competing black leaders on the other.

Joining him are Joe Lowndes, political science professor at the University of Oregon; Jane Shaw, President of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy; Ralph Luker, history teacher and author on race and on religion; and Bruce Kleinschmidt, attorney and librarian. Join us!