On a sweltering day in 1911, the two men who would change the course of black education in the South met for the first time at the newly-built Blackstone Hotel in Chicago overlooking the shore of Lake Michigan.
Julius Rosenwald, a former peddler of dry goods, had seized an opportunity to join a thriving retail business, Sears, Roebuck and Company, and had propelled it to unimaginable heights. Approaching fifty, he was gregarious and energetic, with a reputation for honesty and generosity that had made him an influential figure in his community and beyond. (Deutsch, pp. 3-4)
Booker T. Washington, born a slave, had risen from his humble origins to become not only an impressive pedagogue but a nationally-known representative and spokesperson for his race. He appeared older than his fifty-six years. He had endured personal heartbreak, decades of overwork, and two sides of fame: acclaim for his accomplishments coupled with criticism and disparagement from fellow blacks for his emphasis on vocational education and his failure to speak out more aggressively against racial prejudice and oppression. Yet he persevered, traveling incessantly, talking to strangers, always on the lookout for a potential benefactor -- like Julius Rosenwald. (Deutsch. p. 4)
There was little evidence in Julius Rosenwald's early years to suggest that by midlife he would be a man of great wealth, a notable philanthropist, and an invaluable friend to a deprived black population.
In an article he co-authored with Elias Tobenkin in the January 5th, 1929 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, he expressed surprise at having found himself in the class of multimillionaire at the age of forty with the capacity to give away large sums of money. (Ascoli, p. 316)
In view of the straitened financial circumstances he and his wife Gussie labored under during the first decade of their marriage, which she described in her correspondence, Rosenwald's biographer cautions readers to regard as apocryphal an oft-repeated remark he is reputed to have made to his friend Mo Newborg around that time: "The aim of my life is to have an income of $15,000 a year -- $5,000 to be used for my personal expense, $5,000 to be laid aside, and $5,000 to go to charity." (Ascoli, p. 54)
Who can say what determines a man's course in life: genetics, destiny, temperament, intellect, will power, mentoring, or just plain luck? Most likely, as in the case of Julius Rosenwald, it's some combination of these traits.
He grew up in a family of shopkeepers. His father Samuel immigrated to Baltimore from Westphalia in Germany in 1854, and, after peddling for two years along the Winchester Trail in Virginia and West Virginia, went to work for the Hammerslough Brothers in their Baltimore-based clothing business. Within months he fell in love with and married the sister of his employers, who immediately dispatched the newlyweds west on a circuitous journey that landed them in Springfield, Illinois. There, while Samuel's dry goods store flourished selling uniforms to Union soldiers and earned him enough to purchase it from the brothers, son Julius was born in 1862, one block from the home of Abraham Lincoln. (Ascoli, pp. 1-3)
At the age of sixteen, Julius decided to drop out of high school and accept a job offer from his Hammerslough uncles, who had moved to New York City and appended to their retail stores a booming men's clothing manufacturing operation. Julius worked as a stock clerk and road salesman for five years; securing a loan from his father Samuel, he then recruited his brother Morris and cousin Julius Weil as partners in their own men's shop, called "J. Rosenwald and Brother." Their strategy of locating a few doors down from the industry leader, Brokaw Brothers, proved to be ill-conceived, as sales were hard to come by. (Ascoli, pp. 6-7)
When a salesman for one of Rosenwald's suppliers showed him sixty orders for men's lightweight clothing that the company was unable to fulfill, Rosenwald saw an opportunity, and acted on it. In spite of his recent failure, he convinced his father to invest $2000 (which was matched by Julius Weil's father) in a men's summer clothing manufacturing venture. (Ascoli, pp. 8-9)
To avoid competing with his Hammerslough uncles, he planted it in Chicago, which had recovered from its disastrous 1871 fire and was now the country's second most populous city. (Deutsch, p. 37)
The fledgling business, Rosenwald & Weil, struggled at the outset. Rosenwald worked long hours, and spent many weeks on the road, traveling to places like St. Louis, Colorado Springs, and Phoenix to display his wares and take orders. He made frequent trips to New York to purchase fabrics and consult with his uncles. Nevertheless, four years after moving to Chicago, in 1890, he found time to fall in love and marry Augusta "Gussie" Nusbaum, herself the daughter of a clothier. (Deutsch, pp. 39-40)
After a brief period of prosperity, Rosenwald & Weil barely survived the Panic of 1893. Rosenwald's old friend from his New York days, Mo Newborg, was a partner in a firm specializing in the manufacture of cheap clothing. Its success inspired Rosenwald to establish a Chicago branch, Rosenwald & Co., fifty percent of which was owned by Rosenwald & Weil and fifty percent by the parent. (Ascoli, pp. 21-22)
While young Rosenwald (he was thirty-two by now) was embarking on a number of false starts, another Chicago entrepreneur was experiencing his own growing pains. In 1886, Richard Sears, a Minneapolis & St. Louis Railroad stationmaster in North Redwood Falls, Minnesota, made his first sale by mail when he purchased a canceled order of watches, drafted and distributed a description of the lot to fellow station agents, and delivered them for resale at a steep discount. Subsequent orders sold rapidly, especially after he shifted to newspaper advertising. In March 1887, Sears moved his fledgling business to Chicago, hired a watch expert, Alvah P. Roebuck, and expanded his line to include watch chains, general jewelry, and even diamonds sold on the installment plan. (Ascoli, pp. 22-23)
Sears had a mercurial personality. Between March 1889 and August 1891, he was in and out of the watch business three times before reuniting with Roebuck in the A. C. Roebuck Company, later Sears, Roebuck & Company, of which he ended up with half ownership. He brought with him the practice of issuing catalogs, which grew from thirty-one pages in 1891, when the company added sewing machines, to 322 in 1894. A broad array of products filled those pages: furniture, dishes, wagons, buggies, shoes, baby carriages, medical instruments, and men and boy's clothing. Sears labored tirelessly, writing all the copy himself. (Ascoli, pp. 23-24)
Roebuck, however, was not in good health, and was wilting under the stress of a business that, while growing, was deeply in debt in a time of economic uncertainty and whose model -- mail order -- was unproven in the long run. He was uncomfortable with Sears's "constantly changing and evolving schemes." He demanded to be bought out, which compelled Sears to seek not only his replacement but a partner with the wherewithal to provide additional capital. (Ascoli, pp. 24-25)
Early in the summer of 1895, Aaron Nusbaum, Julius Rosenwald's brother-in-law, walked into Richard Sears's office to show him some pneumatic tubes, devices used to speed orders between floors in large stores. Nusbaum was flush with cash; he had recently pocketed $150,000 selling flavored soda water at the World's Columbian Exposition, a concession granted him by department store magnate, Marshall Field, as a reward for locating a trainload of stolen merchandise. "Sears was not interested in the tubes, but he liked the enterprising salesman, and he was looking for an investor." On August 7th, he offered Nusbaum a half interest in the company for $75,000. (Ascoli. p. 25)
Nusbaum was intrigued, but he was reluctant to commit such a large sum. Rejected by one brother-in-law, he went to Julius and asked him if would like a quarter ownership in Sears. (Deutsch, p. 48)
Rosenwald believed that mail order was a concept with a future. He realized that rural customers had few options other than country stores with meager selection and high prices. He saw new products coming to market every day. He witnessed Montgomery Ward's thriving mail order business, which catered to farmers and the members of their fraternal order, the Grange. Finally, he knew his cash requirements would be minimized by the amount Sears currently owed Rosenwald & Co. and its parent for shipments of men's suits. (Deutsch, p. 49)
On August 13, 1895, Sears, Nusbaum, and Rosenwald signed the agreement that made them partners, and, more importantly, brought Julius Rosenwald into company management. (Deutsch, p. 49)
It was an opportune time to be entering this embryonic field of retail. The next twelve years would see the American economy booming. Farmers were flourishing, and willing to spend freely on goods, implements, clothing, and luxuries. The telegraph and a vast railroad network enabled Sears, Roebuck to order, receive, and ship its products swiftly and at a low cost; service to even the most isolated house was now available through Congress's enactment of rural free delivery. (Ascoli, pp. 28-29)
Sears was a brilliant marketer. Harry Goldman characterized him as a "mail-order Barnum" who "could sell a breath of air." His carefully crafted persuasive descriptions, his incredibly low prices, and his imaginative ad campaigns and promotional gimmicks churned out thousands of orders, which doubled from 1895 to 1896. If the volume was enviable, it also overwhelmed Sears's abysmal administration skills. (Ascoli, p. 29; Deutsch, p. 85)
The company's office was hopelessly disorganized. According to an early account, "Kitchen chairs were the seats; dry goods boxes the tables . . . Only two telephones were available; there were no electric lights . . . When Rosenwald came to work in the morning, he would find Sears at his desk in a large room bulging with scattered heaps of merchandise . . . The orders poured in faster than the factories could supply the goods, faster than they could be cleared through warehouses and shipping rooms." (Ascoli, p. 30)
Naturally, such chaotic conditions resulted in hundreds of botched orders and incorrect shipments and numerous returns. A popular joke among employees featured a Sears clerk boasting to his counterpart at the better-established Montgomery Ward, "Heck, we get more goods returned than you folks ship out." As the piles of returned goods rose as high as those ready to be dispatched, bankruptcy seemed a distinct possibility. (Deutsch, p. 76; Ascoli, p. 31)
Rosenwald supplied the discipline necessary to tame Sears's impetuosity and exuberance. Wrote historian Cecil Hoge: "Rosenwald had a feel for internal efficiency as superlative as Sears had for sales." He viewed "business as less a results-driven game than a process of establishing trust -- trust between himself and his staff and between the company and its customers. He did want more orders than he could reliably, accurately fill." It is doubtful Sears, Roebuck would have survived without Rosenwald's focus on operational improvement. (Ascoli, p. 30; Deutsch, pp. 77-78)
While Sears and Rosenwald often clashed over ideology and tactics, their unwieldy partnership continued to thrive. In 1900, sales totaled $10 million ($350 million in 2022 dollars) and surpassed those of its veteran competitor, Montgomery, Ward, whose founders were retiring and whose stodgy ad copy suffered by comparison with Richard Sears's enticing verbiage. (Ascoli, pp. 31-32)
The third partner, Rosenwald's brother-in-law, Aaron Nusbaum, may have been a good administrator, but he possessed an arrogance and ruthlessness that ultimately the other two could not abide. It's unclear who engineered their severance, but it was a stormy one. In May 1901, Sears and Rosenwald offered Nusbaum $1 million for the stock he had purchased six years earlier for $37,500. He accepted, but when the day came to consummate the deal, he demanded $250,000 more. Furious at the betrayal, the buyers had no choice other than to comply. In spite of Gussie Rosenwald's repeated attempts to reconcile her brother and husband, the two never spoke again. (Ascoli, p. 32; Deutsch, pp. 78-79)
With company lawyer Alfred Loeb replacing Nusbaum as head of administrative affairs, Rosenwald overseeing finances, merchandising, facilities, and quality control, and Sears still in charge of marketing, the stage was set for a period of explosive growth. From 1900 to 1905, sales increased at a rate of thirty percent per year, reaching $38 million but exposing and exacerbating two structural problems. (Ascoli, p. 41)
The first was lack of space. Between 1896 and 1901, by relocating and constructing two additions, the company quadrupled its capacity, yet still found it necessary to lease every available foot of warehousing in a six-block radius, which itself proved to be insufficient within a short period of time. (Ascoli, p. 37)
In 1904, Rosenwald and Sears purchased a forty-acre tract about five miles west of Downtown Chicago; in just over a year, five sleek, modern structures sprung from the prairie. The massive administration building housed a restaurant, a hospital, a library, and a savings bank, and provided ample space for manager O. C. Doering to reorganize the company's enormous mail-order operation, which would soon be processing 27,000 pieces per hour. Also on site were a proprietary power plant, a railroad depot, and a facility for printing and mailing catalogs. (Ascoli, p. 38; Deutsch, p. 82)
Naturally, the cost of the expansion intensified the company's unquenchable thirst for working capital. In the spring of 1906, Rosenwald and Sears journeyed to New York to obtain a loan from Goldman, Sachs. Harry Goldman, senior partner, stunned them by suggesting that they sell stock on the open market, an unusual maneuver as few mercantile establishments up to that time had chosen to become public companies. By midsummer the partners had agreed to the idea. Each of the them received $10 million of preferred stock and $4.5 million in cash for the sale of their private shares, which raised in total $30 million. Overnight the two became multimillionaires. (Ascoli, p. 41)
Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald were men of contrasting character and temperament. As described by Cecil Hoge: "Sears was an opportunist and immediate benefit tactician. Rosenwald was a strategist with a long-term plan." Sears maintained that absent a constant barrage of new promotions the business would collapse under the weight of consumer indifference. Rosenwald was convinced that mail order was a fixture in retailing and that Sears's schemes could be counterproductive and too costly. (Ascoli, pp. 44, 49)
Matters came to a head in 1907 when, in the midst of a nationwide recession, Sears, Roebuck's sales declined for the first time in its history. Sears insisted that the already bloated advertising budget be inflated even more, while Rosenwald preferred to focus on cost cutting and price stability. Sears felt constrained by Rosenwald's constant presence and pressured by his criticism. In the fall of 1908, after a two-hour conference between the two, Sears left the premises of the company he had founded, returning only once for a board meeting in November, where he formally resigned as president. He sold his stock to Harry Goldman. After dabbling in a number of businesses, he died six years later at the age of fifty. (Deutsch, p. 85; Ascoli, pp. 48-49)
Julius Rosenwald was poised to lead the company through a period of tremendous growth. During the first five years of his tenure as president, from 1908 to 1913, sales doubled, reaching $90 million with a ten percent profit margin. During the same period, as the possessor of enormous resources, he would launch a secondary career that would almost overshadow the first.
In the late 1890's, Rosenwald and his wife had joined the Reform Temple Sinai, and had immediately come under the influence of its rabbi, Emil Hirsch.
Hirsch believed that Judaism could be reduced to an ethical and moral system. While he adhered to the notion of inalienable individual rights, he maintained those rights should never take precedence over the rights of society. He expanded the Jewish notion of tsadakah, which equates charity with justice, by declaring: "Charity is not a voluntary concession on the part of the well-situated. It is a right to which the less fortunate are entitled in justice." (Ascoli, pp. 51, 53-54)
Emil Hirsch was the guiding force behind Julius Rosenwald's emergence as a philanthropist. Rosenwald made his first significant gift in 1904; it was $6782 (equivalent to $200,000 today) to the University of Chicago -- where Hirsch held a professorship in Hebrew studies -- for the purchase of a private library for the German Department. Other major contributions through 1908 which were likely at the behest of Hirsch included $4000 to the Associated Jewish Charities of Chicago, $35,000 over three years to the Michael Reese German Jewish Hospital, and a mortgage loan (eventually forgiven) for the purchase of a building by the Hebrew Institute. (Ascoli, pp. 54-61)
Julius Rosenwald's attitude toward blacks -- who constituted only two percent of Chicago's population in 1910 and were confined to a ghetto south and west of its downtown loop -- most likely mirrored the prejudices of the day, which regarded them as lacking in motivation, intelligence, and trustworthiness. Then he read a book, An American Citizen: The Life of William Henry Baldwin, Jr., which may have been as impactful in the development of his humanitarianism as his relationship with Hirsch. (Ascoli, pp. 78-79)
The president of Southern Railway, Baldwin aspired to succeed as a businessman without sacrificing personal morality and idealism and to promote the general welfare of his workers. He advocated for unions, donated money for libraries on the rail lines, and fostered the YMCA movement. He "led a life" which "is to my liking" and which "I shall endeavor to imitate or follow as nearly as I can," wrote Rosenwald in a letter to his daughters. "He was a good friend to Booker T. Washington," served on the board of Washington's Tuskegee Institute, and had "made a study of the Negro problem along common sense, helpful lines." (Ascoli, p. 79)
Rosenwald's own interest in the YMCA had been evolving since 1904; ultimately, it was his entree into the realm of black philanthropy. Having met L. Wilbur Messer, general secretary of the Chicago branch of the YMCA and the driving force behind the state-of-the-art facility that had opened in 1893, Rosenwald became so enamored of the organization that through Sears, Roebuck he essentially underwrote fifty percent of the cost of a branch near its new plant, which included dormitories for three hundred employees as well as recreational space. "No philanthropy in Chicago is a greater power for good, or accomplishes better results than the YMCA," said Rosenwald at a 1910 fiftieth anniversary fund drive." (Ascoli, pp. 77-78; Deutsch, pp. 91-92)
Yet in YMCA's in Chicago and other segregated cities across the country, north and south, blacks were not welcome. As of 1900, there were twenty-one black chartered YMCA's, but only five owned their own buildings; the rest operated in private homes or rented rooms. When Rosenwald expressed to a solicitor his interest in contributing to "a YMCA building for Negroes in Chicago," Messer wasted no time in contacting him. In a meeting at the Sears office which included William Parker, the Chicago YMCA business manager, and black minister, Jesse Moorland, the national coordinator of black YMCA's, Messer asked Rosenwald if he would consider a grant of $25,000 to the project. Rosenwald astounded his visitors by offering to donate that amount to any YMCA in any major city that could raise an additional $75,000. (Ascoli, p. 80; Deutsch, p. 92).
Years later Wilbur Messer would claim credit for introducing Rosenwald to Booker T. Washington. In a chance encounter on a train, said Messner, Washington asked him to name a prominent white Chicagoan for the Tuskegee board of trustees. Messer not only proposed Rosenwald, he invited Washington to speak at the Chicago YMCA's fifty-third anniversary dinner, May 18, 1911, and he persuaded Rosenwald to host a luncheon for forty-five civic leaders the same afternoon at the elegant new Blackstone Hotel. The honored guest, Booker T. Washington, would be the first of his race to dine at the hotel. (Ascoli, p. 87; Deutsch, p. 97)
Introducing Washington, Rosenwald called him a "wise, statesmanlike leader" who "is helping his own race to attain the high art of self-help and self-dependence . . . and the white race to learn that opportunity and obligation go hand in hand." (Deutsch, p. 96)
Born in 1856 on a farm near the town of Hale's Ford just east of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, the property of James Burroughs, Booker T. Washington wrote that he never knew his father's name, only that he had "heard reports to the effect he was a white man who lived on one of the nearby plantations . . . Whoever he was," he said, "I never heard of his taking the least interest in me or providing in any way for my rearing." That task fell to his mother Jane, who had to scrounge for scraps of bread, meat, and corn to feed her half sister and three children, even though she was her owner's family cook. (Norrell, pp. 17-21)
After emancipation, Jane took her family on a two-hundred-mile trek to Malden, West Virginia, where her putative husband, Wash Ferguson, a troublesome slave from a neighboring farm, had decided to settle, having previously been sent there by his owner to labor in the salt works. Ferguson immediately put Booker and his older brother John to work alongside him (and keep their pay), first in the salt furnace and later in the coal mine that supplied its fuel. (Norrell, p. 22)
Ferguson resisted Booker's pleas for an education, not wanting to forgo his earnings, but finally allowed him to attend the local school for blacks, provided he continue working in the mine. To conform with his classmates, who all had surnames, Booker rejected the "Taliaferro" proposed by his mother (although he kept it as a middle name), and spontaneously seized upon "Washington," thus crafting the image he would thereafter present to the predominantly white, outside world. (Norrell, pp. 23-24)
Booker's real educational advancement occurred during the four years he was houseboy to Viola Ruffner, a white woman from New England whose husband Lewis owned the salt works. Mrs. Ruffner taught Booker how to keep her house clean and orderly, how to tend her garden, how to account for every penny received at market for her fruits and vegetables -- in short, "how to understand what a white person wanted from him and how to deliver it." She instilled in him the values of the Protestant ethic, which, she said, were the foundation of success in a capitalist society: industry, sobriety, frugality, self-reliance, and piety. (Norrell, pp. 25-26)
Having overheard two miners talking about "a great school for coloured people somewhere in Virginia," at the age of sixteen Booker set off on a three-hundred mile journey by foot, rail, and stagecoach to Hampton Institute on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Upon arrival, he was asked by the principal, Mary Mackie, to sweep the recitation room, a task he performed three times as well as dusting the furnishings, thereby gaining admission and a job as janitor. (Deutsch, pp. 13-16)
"The greatest person I ever knew," Booker T. Washington would say about the school's white founder, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the son of a Christian missionary, graduate of Williams College, commander of a unit of black soldiers during the Civil War, and veteran of the Freedmen's Bureau. Armstrong was intent on guiding students toward a proper lifestyle. Their first lessons focused on personal hygiene and grooming. "Be thrifty and industrious," ordered the general. "Command the respect of your neighbors by a good record and a good character." (Deutsch, p. 16; Norrell, p. 32)
For Booker T. Washington, Armstrong was an heroic role model, another white person investing in his success. Armstrong named him co-valedictorian of his graduating class, where, rising to speak, he looked, according to a female classmate, like "a conqueror who had won a great victory." (Norrell, p. 36; Deutsch, p. 17)
Booker returned to Malden in 1875 as administrator of the black school there. He taught ninety children during the day and equal number of adults at night, supplementing their book learning with lectures on thrift, hard work, and cleanliness. Fours years later, after delivering the commencement address at Hampton, which he titled "The Force that Wins," he was invited by Armstrong to join the faculty. (Norrell, pp. 36, 39)
In 1881, Armstrong received a letter asking him to recommend "a well-qualified white man" to organize a black teachers' college in Tuskegee, Alabama. He replied that he knew of no good white candidates, but had "a very competent, capable, clear-headed modest mulatto, sensible, polite, and thorough teacher and superior man, the best we ever had here. I know of no white man who could do better." The inquirers telegraphed back: "Booker T. Washington will suit us. Send him at once." (Deutsch, p. 19; Norrell, pp. 40, 42)
Tuskegee Institute was the brainchild of an influential local black merchant named Lewis Adams, who traded his support of two Democratic state senate candidates for a commitment from the governor and legislature to create and fund a black teachers' college. Booker was enthused about the thirty "earnest and willing" young men and women who showed up on opening day, July 4, 1881, less so about the church building where they met; it was so dilapidated that he had to have a student hold an umbrella over his head when it rained. Three months later he purchased as a permanent site a one-hundred-acre farm consisting of a stable, a kitchen, and a hen house, all needing repair; since the state's annual $2000 appropriation could only be used to pay teachers' salaries, he had to borrow the $200 down payment from J. F. B. Marshall, the Hampton treasurer. (Deutsch, pp. 20-21)
Booker realized from the moment of his arrival that the students would have to build Tuskegee Institute themselves. Not only would they be saving the school money, they would "learn the best methods of labor firsthand . . . prove to blacks that they could accomplish a large, complex task, and demonstrate to whites that blacks were capable of running a sizable enterprise." (Norrell, pp. 61-62)
In the fall of 1882, thanks to a $3000 contribution from New York banker Alfred Porter, the three-story, all-purpose academic edifice, Porter Hall, was completed. It was followed in quick succession by two dormitories, three teachers' cottages, and a foundry and blacksmith. During the same seven-year period, enrollment grew to 400 students, Booker acquired 500 more acres of forest and farmland, and a brick works was established, but only after three kiln failures and Booker apocryphally pawning his watch to pay for the fourth attempt. (Norrell, pp. 62-70)
By 1895, Tuskegee owned 1,810 acres, and was home to 800 students, which represented the highest enrollment among institutions of higher education in Alabama and perhaps in the South. Its growth can be attributed to two factors. First, Booker T. Washington was a relentless fundraiser. He crisscrossed the Northeast speaking night after night and knocking on doors to obtain ten and fifteen dollar checks which he rushed into the mail to Tuskegee to cover pressing operating costs. By 1889, he was receiving gifts of $1000 and more from wealthy industrialists, their heirs, and special funds committed to the cause of black education. (Norrell, pp. 67, 93-95)
One of these, the Slater Fund, tied its support to those colleges whose curricula emphasized education in the trades. Quick to adapt to this requirement, Washington became convinced that "donations from the north in the future are going to be more largely than ever devoted to industrial education." Having worked for ten years to prepare teachers to educate blacks, he now foresaw a burgeoning demand for skilled workers in an industrialized, urban economy and opportunities for entrepreneurial blacks to establish their own businesses using the skills they could acquire at industrial schools. By 1890, students were taking classes in fourteen trades including brick making, plastering, painting, carpentry, printing, and shoe making. (Norrell, pp. 96-97)
While good things were happening at Tuskegee, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, conditions for blacks Americans were deteriorating. Southern states rewrote their constitutions, and prevented blacks from voting by imposing such restrictive measures as literacy tests, poll taxes, property requirements, and grandfather clauses. The U.S. Supreme Court essentially codified the social inferiority of blacks, and affirmed the right of states to enforce by law the separation of the races in public places. The Alabama Apportionment Act allowed white-controlled school boards to direct tax receipts disproportionately to the education of white children. Racial violence -- in the form of brutal lynchings and the destruction of black homes and farms -- swept across the South, as whites sought to demonize, intimidate, and subjugate, if not eradicate, those whom they perceived as threats to their social order and economic security. (Deutsch, pp. 56-57; Norrell, pp. 112-113, 115-116)
Could a black man defend his race and still gain the respect of whites? Washington's testimony before a House of Representatives committee in support of funding for a black exhibit at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition earned him an invitation to speak at the Exposition's opening ceremony. The diverse audience would include sympathetic white northerners, suspicious white southerners unwavering in their prejudices, and hopeful blacks seeking a leader and spokesperson. (Deutsch, p. 50; Norrell, p. 122)
Though only five minutes, Washington's speech of September 18, 1895, is the most famous of the hundreds he delivered in his lifetime. It represented his attempt to articulate a solution to the Negro Problem different from that espoused by many whites -- removal or erasure. He recalled the parable of the sailors lost at sea and out of drinking water. Hailing a passing ship and instructed to "Cast down your bucket where you are," they found themselves in the midst of huge, flowing, fresh-water river. With that one metaphor, Booker was telling blacks that the opportunities for bettering their living conditions were in America, their home, rather than in some distant colony, and he was reminding white capitalists that their best source of labor was not immigrants but the native blacks who have "tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the earth." (Norrell, pp. 124-126)
To counter the notion that free blacks had declined in character and
morality since the end of slavery, Booker emphasized their achievements, and
predicted greater progress provided racial animosities could be
mitigated. He "described blacks as faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful," belying the contemporary opinion that "they were idle, criminal, immoral, and hostile to whites." To allay the anxieties of whites, he conceded that black enfranchisement had been a mistake, and disavowed any claim to social equality. Instead he called for "education of head, hand, and heart" that would yield material progress for both races. (Hoffschwelle, p. 12; Norrell, pp. 124-126)
Employing another vivid image, he raised his hand with his fingers spread wide apart, and, referring to black and white southerners, exclaimed: "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet as one in all things essential to mutual progress." Then he dramatically closed his hand into a fist. (Deutsch, p. 52; Norrell, pp. 124-126)
"The speech made Washington an instant national celebrity." A black teacher from Tennessee, William J. Cansler, writing to Washington, called him "our Moses destined to lead our race out of the difficulties and dangers which beset our pathways and surround us on all sides." Frederick Douglass had died six months earlier, and Cansler concluded by asserting, "Upon you has fallen the mantle of the illustrious Douglas[s]." Prominent black journalist, T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age echoed that sentiment in his own letter. "You are the best equipped of the lot of us to be the single figure ahead of the procession," he wrote. (Norrell, pp. 130, 134; Deutsch, p. 53)
The accolades were not universal. "Bishop Henry Turner predicted that whites would use Washington's statement disclaiming social equality as evidence that blacks willingly accepted inequality," that they would assent to second-class citizenship in return for schools and jobs. Calvin Chase, editor of the Washington Bee, accused Washington of taking positions that were death to blacks and elevating to whites. He called the speech an apology for southern outrages, a claim that would be seconded by W. E. B. Du Bois, who labeled it the Atlanta Compromise. (Norrell, p. 134; Deutsch, p. 53. Hoffschelle, p. 12)
Booker T. Washington intuited that his only real power as a racial leader emanated from the bully pulpit. He was a remarkably effective public speaker. "He carefully attuned his speeches to the moment. He delivered them conversationally . . . usually with no podium . . . and only a note card in his pocket." He offered his pro-black perspective with humility, sincerity, and a dose of humor and rustic storytelling reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln. He spoke out against the separation of school funds, the humiliations of railroad travel for blacks, and the demeaning coverage of the Negro in the press. He continued to exude optimism, telling dignitaries at a Harvard commencement in 1896: "We are coming," by means of hard work in industrial shops and on farms, study in colleges and industrial schools, and habits of thrift and economy. (Norrell, pp. 136-148)
As violence escalated across the South -- epitomized by the Wilmington riot of 1898 during which as many as 300 blacks were killed by whites intent on regaining a voting majority and the emasculation and live burning of accused killer and rapist Sam Hose -- Washington was compelled to tread a fine line between angering whites for protesting too strongly and exasperating blacks for not speaking loudly enough. Subjected to intense criticism from both groups, he struggled to craft a forceful, credible, encouraging message. In late 1899, he told the Memphis Commercial Appeal that he believed in time that blacks would earn and receive full equality in American life. In defiance of recent tragedies, he concluded, "I do not think we have any reason to despair." (Norrell, pp. 163, 170-171, 181-182)
Washington's quandary was typified in his response to Alabama's constitutional convention, which convened in May 1901 with the primary purpose of disenfranchising blacks. Other than drafting a petition "warning of bad consequences for the wrong decision," there was little he could do but watch white men deploy every tactic they knew to remove blacks from politics: the poll tax; a test for the prospective voter on his knowledge of the constitution; an assessment of the applicant's character by a county board of registrars; and the grandfather clause, which exempted a prospective voter from any and all qualifications if his grandfather had fought in the war. (Norrell, pp. 204, 206)
Accepting the futility of trying to defeat it, he stayed out of the ratification campaign, which ultimately erased ninety-eight percent of blacks from the voting rolls. "His silence came at the cost of his being viewed as weak or even tacitly condoning the injustice." (Norrell, pp. 205, 208)
With the political avenue a dead end, Washington turned to the power of the pen to reverse the downward course of black morale, to stem the rising tide of white antipathy to blacks, to address the vicious images of blacks. He issued press releases emphasizing positive news about himself and other African Americans. He submitted editorials, often as a ghost writer, decrying the shameful treatment and erroneous depiction of blacks. He composed magazine articles -- "The Awakening of the Negro"; "The Case of the Negro"; "Signs of Progress of the Negro" -- highlighting black achievement and promoting industrial education. And he authored three books -- The Future of the American Negro; The Story of My Life and Work; Up From Slavery -- narratives of black progress in both philosophical and personal terms. (Norrell, pp. 210-217)
In Up From Slavery, Washington used simple prose and a straightforward style to tell the story of his life, omitting drama, metaphor, and vivid description. In order to attract white readers, he acknowledged that slavery had enabled blacks to learn utilitarian skills, the English language, and the tenets of Christianity. These were hardly sufficient, however, to counter its bleak legacy: blacks deprived of a stable family unit, education, meaningful work, and the capacity for self-rule. While acquiescing in the popular view that Reconstruction and black voting at the time had been a mistake, he indicted white reactionary groups like the Ku Klux Klan for gratuitous violence, and defended black officeholders and carpetbaggers as useful and honorable. He refused to compromise his optimism, pointing to his own trajectory and "blacks' emerging self-mastery" as evidence "that the race is constantly making slow but sure progress materially, educationally, and morally." (Norrell, pp. 218-220)
Selling 30,000 copies in its first year, Booker T. Washington's autobiography was an instant success, and has never been out of print since its publication. It enjoyed a wide audience, but had a special appeal to wealthy men who saw in the author a mirror image of themselves: self-made, from humble beginnings, hard-working, single-minded, and successful. It became a perpetual fundraising machine for Tuskegee Institute, eliciting generous checks from financiers, industrialists, and their heirs. "Give the man a library," said Andrew Carnegie to his assistant upon reading the book, and a neoclassical edifice sprung from the ground, inaugurating the steel magnate's largess to the school; it eventually grew to over one million dollars. (Deutsch, p. 65; Norrell, pp. 222-223, 274)
One of the most controversial episodes in Washington's career was his dinner with Theodore Roosevelt and his family at the White House by invitation on October 16, 1901, barely one month after the president had succeeded to the office upon the assassination of his predecessor, William McKinley. While Roosevelt denounced lynching, objected to the political exploitation of race by white nationalists, and believed that educated blacks should vote, he never entirely shed his mantle of bigotry. In his self-congratulatory memoir of the Spanish-American War, The Rough Riders, he accused black soldiers (falsely, it turned out) of panicking and fleeing the battlefield. He thought Washington could be useful in garnering support for the Republican Party by recommending candidates for patronage appointments who, if not black, might be sympathetic to the plight of the black man. (Norrell, pp. 240-241)
Predictably, the ploy backfired, as a firestorm of hysteria blazed across the south, where many were incensed by the thought (and sight) of these two powerful men violating entrenched rules of social behavior which forbade race mixing. "The most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States," scolded the Memphis Scimitar. The editor of the Richmond Times interpreted the dinner as the president's condoning "Negroes mingling freely with whites in the social circle and white women receiving attentions from Negro men." Perhaps the most vitriolic curse was that pronounced by Senator Ben Tillman of South Carolina: "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again." (Deutsch, pp. 66-67)
If Washington had lost control of his image among whites, he continued to forge ahead with the purpose that had taken him to the White House in the first place: the naming of federal appointments in the South. His influence reached a point where his approval became a prerequisite for selection by Roosevelt. Washington enmeshed himself in Republican politics because he had concluded that, disenfranchised, their primitive schools stripped of public funds, blacks had no other means of participating in the American democracy. (Norrell, pp. 252-255)
Washington's patronage activities and public prominence raised the hackles of some northern blacks. William Monroe Trotter, a Harvard graduate and founder of the Boston Guardian, accused him of belittling blacks, of exaggerating their shortcomings to curry white favor, and of promoting the appointment of white men to office in place of blacks. When Washington's daughter Portia failed to return to Wellesley College for her second year, Trotter attributed it to a "genetic defect" and to her father's "well-known antipathy" to academia. (Norrell, pp. 265-26)
On a different plane but equally damning was the critique of Washington by sociologist and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others," which he included among his collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. Du Bois said Washington had won the favor of whites by encouraging blacks to surrender political power, civil rights, and higher education in exchange for economic opportunities. Washington's program, he wrote, "practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro race," absolves whites of any responsibility for the Negro problem, and places the burden of blacks' progress entirely on their own shoulders. Washington's resistance to higher education demeaned blacks by condemning them to a "servile caste" of manual laborers and artisans and denying "bolder and brighter minds . . . the key to knowledge." (Deutsch, p. 68; Norrell, pp. 277-279)
Unbeknownst to his black critics, Washington's quiet efforts to advance the cause of black equality belied their disparaging accusations. He funded attorney Wilford Smith's five lawsuits on behalf of black Alabamian Jackson Giles claiming that provisions in the 1901 state constitution denied Giles the right to register and vote and violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. An order by federal judge Thomas G. Jones, whom Washington had sponsored, enabled the case to reach the U.S. Supreme Court; it faltered, however, when Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that the Court could not enforce a judgment against the state of Alabama and that relief could come only from its legislature or the U.S. Congress. (Deutsch, p. 69; Norrell, pp. 261, 297)
Smith and Washington did achieve a victory when the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of a black man on the grounds that the jury of his "peers" included no qualified blacks and sent it back to Alabama for a retrial. Washington was also vindicated when, in January 1905 following Roosevelt's reelection, the Senate confirmed his choice for revenue collector for the Port of Charleston, a black physician named William Crum. The nomination had been bitterly opposed by the Southern press and Senator Tillman, who warned, "We still have guns and ropes in the South, and if the policy of appointing Negroes to office is insisted upon, we know how to use them." (Deutsch, p. 69; Norrell, pp. 257, 307)
The year 1905 marked a turning point in Booker T. Washington's career, as a series of events converged to tarnish his image as the leader of the race. In July, Du Bois and Trotter convened at Niagara Falls twenty-nine black professionals from New England and Midwest whom they deemed the "Talented Tenth." In a blatant attempt to co-opt Washington, they issued a manifesto basically reiterating the principles articulated at a similar gathering held eighteen months earlier in New York City when Du Bois and Washington had supposedly reconciled: affirmation of the right to vote; lifting of racial restrictions in public venues; and support for academic and industrial training. Where the Niagara Movement openly challenged Washington was in its call for vocal protest: "Through helplessness they may submit, but the voice of ten million Americans must never cease to assail the ears of their fellows, so long as America is unjust." (Norrell, pp. 321, 356)
At the same moment white-nationalist propagandist Tom Watson took aim at Washington in his Magazine. In the most widely-quoted of his many vituperative editorials, responding to Washington's plaudits for rising black literacy rates (which he said were higher than those in European countries), he refuted those statistics as excluding "all the ignorant blacks in Africa and the Caribbean." When Europeans were building a civilization, wrote Watson, "your people were running about in the woods, naked, eating raw meat . . . steeped in ignorance, vice and superstition, with an occasional lapse into human sacrifice and cannibalism." (Norrell, pp. 323-324)
In August, the Saturday Evening Post printed a devastating article by Thomas Dixon that summarized the white-nationalist case against Washington. Dixon was the author of two popular novels, The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman, both "anti-Negro melodramas of Reconstruction with a strong emphasis on black soldiers' and freedmen's lust for white women." In his essay he reiterated the sentiments expressed by his fictional characters. "Booker T. Washington's educational mission was a subterfuge for racial equality and amalgamation." He was training blacks to be independent, to own and operate their own businesses and farms, to compete with whites in an industrial economy rather than work for them. This path would end in tragedy, wrote Dixon, since before the white man would allow the black man to be his master, he would kill him. (Norrell, pp. 325-326)
Later that year, Washington's trusted confidant and adviser, William Henry Baldwin, Jr. -- the man whose biography had captivated Julius Rosenwald -- died at the age of forty-two. A member of Tuskegee's board of trustees since the late 1890's, Baldwin had contributed not only his financial and managerial acumen but also access to America's wealthiest men, many of whom he personally solicited. His own attitude toward blacks had evolved from a paternalistic acceptance of their inferior social status to a deeper understanding of the ferocious hostility they faced from southern whites intent on suppressing their basic civil rights. He lamented the neglected state of their public schools, and suggested federal assistance as a remedy. The loss of Baldwin's counsel would impair Washington's fundraising efforts and handicap his decision making in the future. (Deutsch, p.73; Norrell, pp. 156, 312-313)
In September 1906, reacting to spate of black-on-white rape allegations that had roiled the city for over a month, a white mob gathered in downtown Atlanta, and invaded first the black saloon district and later the middle-class neighborhood of Brownsville. When blacks mobilized to defend themselves, the state militia was called in to restore order; after three days of violence, the death toll stood at thirty blacks and two whites. Although Washington immediately traveled to Atlanta, where he facilitated conciliatory meetings between black and white leaders who pledged fair treatment for blacks, he was made a scapegoat for the riot's horror and ugliness. Harshly criticized for recommending against retaliation with force and for refusing to demand federal intervention, he not only energized his enemies, he disappointed his supporters. (Norrell, pp. 340-345)
On November 7, acting on instructions from President Roosevelt, Secretary of War William Howard Taft dismissed 167 black soldiers from their infantry regiment at Fort Brown, Texas. Three months earlier, shots fired in the nearby town had killed a bartender and injured a policeman. The soldiers, who had been threatened, beaten, and accused of assaulting a white woman since their arrival at the fort, immediately came under suspicion. Despite uniform denial by the soldiers and the presence of purely circumstantial evidence, probably planted, the U.S. Inspector General, a South Carolinian, after investigating the matter, alleged a conspiracy of silence among the soldiers, pronounced them guilty without a trial, and recommended that they all be discharged. (Norrell, pp. 346-347)
Summoned to a meeting at the White House on October 30, Washington pleaded with Roosevelt to postpone any action until he could conduct his own investigation, but was ignored, which served to reinforce his previous inference that the president was a latent racial bigot. While the affair won Roosevelt new respect in the white South, it ignited the wrath of blacks across the country and of their defenders in the northern press; Oscar Garrison Villard, editor of the New York Evening Post, wrote that "the dismissal of the troops renounced blacks' patriotism and the rights that flowed from it." As for Washington, in what may have been the worst mistake of his public career, he refused to disavow the president's decision, most likely out of loyalty for past favors. It was a misplaced loyalty, however; in the eyes of black Americans and their white liberal advocates, Roosevelt would forever be tainted by what one historian has deemed a "gross miscarriage of justice," and Washington, his ally and adviser, could not evade the stain. (Norrell, pp. 346-351)
In August 1908, disgruntled whites became enraged at the removal of two black men -- one charged with rape, the other with murder -- from a Springfield, Illinois jail. A mob lynched two black merchants, destroyed at least forty black homes and several black-owned businesses, and ransacked countless more. Washington issued a condemnation of the riot, but "violence against blacks anywhere in the United States undermined his leadership position." (Norrell, pp. 380-381)
Nine months later, prompted by three reform-minded social workers, Oscar Villard assembled a group of settlement-house workers, professors, lawyers, journalists, and clergymen -- among whom were Washington critics W. E. B. Du Bois and William M. Trotter -- for the inaugural meeting of what would eventually be called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In the months and years ahead, determined to displace him, the organizers of the NAACP would relentlessly impugn Washington for his political activism and allegiance to the Republican Party and, in the words of Du Bois, for his policy of "non-resistance, giving up agitation, and acquiescence in semi-serfdom." (Norrell, pp. 386-389)
Washington's reputation was further sullied as the result of a bizarre incident that occurred on the evening of March 19, 1911, when he was assaulted on West 63rd Street in New York City. A man named Henry Ulrich, who lived in an apartment there with his girl friend, Laura Alvarez, observed Washington enter and leave the lobby three times, accosted him, slugged him, chased him down the street, and struck him with a bystander's walking stick before the police intervened. Ms. Alvarez accused Washington of making a lewd remark to her -- "Hello, Sweetheart" -- which he denied, claiming he was attempting to meet an accountant at the building. Washington filed charges against Ulrich, but in the subsequent trial, two judges ruled for acquittal on the grounds that Ulrich's motive was not proved. Washington was never able to explain his presence at the scene to the satisfaction of his white or black enemies, one of whom, William Trotter, wrote that the affair and its attendant "charges of drunkenness and seeking after white women . . . does great injury to the entire colored race." (Norrell, pp. 394-398)
Persevering under a relentless barrage of defamation, Washington's advocacy of black education never faltered. In vain, he pleaded with the white northern press to publicize its pitiable state. "The average white child in the South had at least three times as much spent on him as the typical black child, and in the Black Belts of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana the ratios were usually much higher . . . Most rural black education took place in ramshackle frame structures, often old churches. The pittance provided for teachers made it difficult for schools to stay open more than a few months." Washington sent evidence of the widening disparity to Oscar Villard in July 1905: "You will note in the enclosed letter this man says the in his district $15 per capita is allowed every white child and 35 cents per capita for every Negro child." (Norrell, pp. 271, 313)
It took six years, but in 1911 Washington encountered the man who would become his champion: Julius Rosenwald. After their luncheon at the Blackstone Hotel, they adjourned to a lengthy dinner at the Auditorium honoring the founding of the YMCA and attended by four hundred guests. Washington assured the audience that "any inferiority in blacks was not intrinsic but the result of two hundred fifty years of slavery . . . and could be overcome." He foreshadowed the model that would launch a white philanthropist and a thousand black communities on a school-building mission when he compared blacks' financial support for their own YMCA buildings to that for their churches. "We inherited no church houses since we became a free people," he said. "Within forty-five years we have erected 35,000 churches and in 90% of cases the money . . . has come out of our pockets." (Deutsch, p. 97)
Rosenwald responded "that he was particularly gratified by the work he had been able to do with the YMCA because 'it has the tendency toward bringing together the two races which have to live side by side. And in my opinion there is no problem which faces the American people that has more importance than this problem of how to have these two races live congenially and try to uplift each other.'" (Deutsch, p. 98)
The stage was set for a momentous partnership. For the peddler and the pedagogue were two men who, as their life stories revealed, understood that, while words could motivate minds, action could transform lives.
REFERENCES
Ascoli, Peter M. Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Deutsch, Stephanie. You Need a Schoolhouse: Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald, and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011.
Hoffschwelle, Mary S. The Rosenwald Schools of the American South. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006.
Norrell, Robert J. Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. Cambridge: the Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2009.
