"If blacks are to achieve the fullness of the American Dream, we need to move beyond political agitation and re-embrace the agenda of Booker T. Washington: education, self-reliance, character, and entrepreneurship." June 2008 |  |
Booker T. Washington: A Re-Examination finds Washington's life, accomplishments, and writings to be more important than ever in pointing the way to racial harmony and greater economic and social success for black Americans. Booker T. Washington (1856 - 1915) was often derided during the 1960s and 1970s because his ideas contradicted the fashionable Progressivism that posited government solutions for all economic and social problems. Yet Washington's ideas were important during his time, and they're even more relevant today, precisely because the United States failed to listen to him during the intervening decades. By founding and building Tuskegee Institute and other endeavors, Washington worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to strengthen black entrepreneurship, labor skills, personal responsibility, and families. He accepted charitable contributions from white philanthropists, but his efforts were focused on equipping blacks to help themselves and succeed in the world as it was: self-reliance. Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Lee H. Walker has long been an eloquent and passionate advocate of Booker T. Washington's life and ideas. In June 2006 he convened a three-day symposium in Chicago to examine the great thinker's life, legacy, and philosophy. Twenty-two speakers participated, representing a wide variety of views, in the biggest gathering of academics and activists to discuss Booker T. Washington's agenda in a quarter-century. Their contributions have been edited and updated to form Booker T. Washington: A Re-Examination, published by The Heartland Institute. The book considers Washington's legacy as a way toward, in Walker's words, "a New Agenda that can advance the black community, an agenda that will help blacks solve the problems that break up too many families and undermine economic security. "If blacks are to achieve the fullness of the American Dream," Walker says, "we need to move beyond political agitation and re-embrace the agenda of Booker T. Washington: education, self-reliance, character, and entrepreneurship." Robert L. Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, said of the book, "This outstanding collection of essays provides new insights into Booker T. Washington's views about self-reliance and economic advancement and offers some provocative ideas about their significance for the 21st Century." John McWhorter, a senior fellow for the Manhattan Institute, agreed. "Somewhere between 1960 and 1970, black America fell for the peculiar notion that claiming helplessness is a way of being strong," McWhorter wrote. "This book eloquently reminds us that when it came to black pride, Booker T. Washington left footsteps too big for the Stokely Carmichaels of the world to ever fill." |
