Booker T. Washington and the Left

Leftist historians must lie and quote Booker T. Washington out of context to make their version of history work. They act like we can’t imagine ourselves in 1895 listening to Washington make his Atlanta Exposition address and that no one will carefully read what Mr. Washington said, or that we won’t read what Mr. Washington himself wrote about his speech in his autobiography and in subsequent letters. No sir, they just call it the Atlanta Compromise speech and claim that Washington was conceding to the racists in the South.

Kevin Levin goes so far as to say Washington spoke in “front of a white audience” when in Washington’s autobiography he says that when “I arose to speak, there was considerable cheering, especially from the coloured people.” Levin is either a liar or a terrible historian. Most other leftist historians refer to the speech in front of a “mostly white” audience. In 1890 blacks were 47% of the Georgia population. Did they expect that one generation from freedom it would have been a majority black audience at an industrial exposition? They really didn’t read the speech. That was Washington’s point.

Washington must be minimized because he does not fit their narrative. His view on Reconstruction makes this clear.

“I felt that the Reconstruction policy, so far as it related to my race, was in large measure on a false foundation, was artificial and forced. In many cases it seemed to me that the ignorance of my races was being used as a tool with which to help white men into office, and that there was an element in the North which wanted to punish the Southern white men by forcing the Negro into positions over the heads of the Southern whites.”

It is all about politics. Washington was not a radical or a revolutionary so anything he said or did is discounted. That he is so loathed by the left is indicative of how right he probably was.