Booker T. Washingtons Influence on Historically Black...

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON: THE AMBIGUITY OF INFLUENCE ABSTRACT My paper will discuss the continuing influence of Booker T. Washingtons writings on historically black colleges. While my paper will focus on the ways in which the historically black college continues to adhere to the model provided by Washington, it will also explore the ways in which it diverges from the early Hampton-Tuskegee ideal. According to James D. Anderson in The Education of Blacks in the South, both contemporary observers and later historians have portrayed the white south as taking a monolithic view of black education. However, many secondary schools in the south did not emphasize the kind of industrial education advocated by Washington. In the same manner,†¦show more content†¦The first freedmens schools were run by the freedmen and women themselves. Booker T. Washingtons account of his own perseverence in securing his education is poignantly told in Up From Slavery. Yet with Washingtons influence, a shift began from educating students in a liberal arts tradition to an industrial training mode. Unfortunately, by the turn of the century, with the help of the benefactor Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the Hampton-Tuskegee Idea had come to represent the ideological antithesis of the educational and social movement begun by ex-slaves (33). In order for freed slaves to fully participate in a democracy, a classical liberal curriculum was adopted in post-Civil War black, elementary, normal and collegiate schools. As James D. Anderson aptly points out, Black leaders did not view their adoption of the classical liberal curriculum or its philosophical foundations as mere imitation of white schooling. Indeed, they knew many whites who had no education at all. Rather, they saw this curriculum as providing access to the best intellectual trad itions of their era and the best means to understanding their own historical development and sociological uniqueness. (Anderson 29) In fact, black educators like Richard Wright found support in the classics for racial equality; the study of the classics was a means to understanding the