Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 WASHINGTON | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 921 WASHINGTON | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Since the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., has personified black leadership with his use of direct action protests against white authority. A century ago, in the era of Jim Crow, Booker T. Washington pursued a different strategy to lift his people. In this compelling biography, Norrell reveals how conditions in the segregated South led Washington to call for a less contentious path to freedom and equality. He urged black people to acquire economic independence and to develop the moral character that would ultimately gain them full citizenship. Although widely accepted as the most realistic way to integrate blacks into American life during his time, Washington’s strategy has been disparaged since the 1960s.
The first full-length biography of Booker T. in a generation, Up from History recreates the broad contexts in which Washington worked: He struggled against white bigots who hated his economic ambitions for blacks, African-American intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois who resented his huge influence, and such inconstant allies as Theodore Roosevelt. Norrell details the positive power of Washington’s vision, one that invoked hope and optimism to overcome past exploitation and present discrimination. Indeed, his ideas have since inspired peoples across the Third World that there are many ways to struggle for equality and justice. Up from History reinstates this extraordinary historical figure to the pantheon of black leaders, illuminating not only his mission and achievement but also, poignantly, the man himself.
Reviews (6)
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute and author of Up from Slavery, has long been disparaged for his accommodationist policies regarding racial equality following Reconstruction. Norrell offers a more nuanced perspective on Washington's position in the context of the place and time when he sought to improve education for poor blacks throughout the South. The death of Frederick Douglass and Washington's national speaking debut pushed him into the position of black leader and speaker on the Negro problem. Given his own humble background and reliance on the patronage of wealthy whites, Washington was caught between a strategy of placating whites in the violent South and answering demands for a more aggressive posture on racial equality by blacks in the North. He courted the powerful, including U.S. presidents, always with an eye toward supporting Tuskegee and guaranteeing a nonthreatening strategy for racial advancement. His positions and prominence provoked heated debate and fierce rivalry among other leaders, particularly W. E. B. DuBois. Characterizing Washington's strategy as that of the fox rather than the lion, Norrell details more assertive positions behind the scenes, including efforts to halt the disenfranchisement of black voters in the South. An engrossing portrait of a complex man and a challenging time in the history of U.S. race relations.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IF religion is the opiate of the masses, then surely paranoia must be the treasure trove of the downtrodden, a way to discover in the coincidences of a mostly bleak life a golden map of connections where everything sparkles with meaning. Not that there aren't enough opiates and amphetamines floating around Martin Millar's "Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation" to keep the masses fairly happy, too. First published in Britain in 1987, when Millar wasn't yet 30, the book is finally appearing in its first American edition - a development not only welcome but ages overdue. The sometime narrator, Alby Starvation, is a down-on-his-luck amphetamine runner whose main triumphs in life thus far have been to amass a large collection of comics and to cure himself of the ailments brought on by a serious milk allergy. As word of his cure spreads and others also quit drinking milk, it's easy to see how the Milk Marketing Board would decide to send a Brazilian-trained hit woman to kill him. That's just the main part. There are also dueling Chinese video gamers, a grocery manager trying to catch shoplifters so he can afford a pool a person can swim in without actually going anywhere, the lost crown of Ethelred the Unready, various doctors, a psychic nurse, murder victims, a hamster and more, all of whom fit in seamlessly. Possibly more to the point regarding comics, Millar's book comes about as close to a nongraphic graphic hovel as anything I can imagine - a plus for a person like me who is not a particular fan of graphic novels. But Millar's bite-size chapters and the mini-sections within them have much the same effect as the frames of a traditional comic. The form allows for incredible mobility and action; we have to jump with the narrative or we'll fall out of it. The pleasure here, as in video games, is the rhythm and timing of those leaps. The downside of such a technique is, not surprisingly, that it's tough to be deep and introspective when you're so jittery. "Milk" is a giddy journey, an amusement park ride, an enchantment like "A Midsummer Night's Dream," but it's not the kind of book that inspires brooding. I rather doubt Millar is big on brooding. "Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation" falls almost exactly between a young adult novel in the vivid, visual quality of its sentences and a grown-up one in the desolation of its setting. While at least one person has compared it to the work of Irvine Welsh, Millar was there earlier, along with Flann O'Brien and William Burroughs. What is the book really about? I find it hard to say outside of the experience of reading it. Its charm, in addition to the crisp prose ("Down in Brixton the youth are shambling through the streets wondering where their next drug is coming from"), is in the gradual transfer of information generated by the cat's cradle of paranoia to the real world. Though no characters are saved or learn anything, in the end at least most of them are spared to live on in one fashion or another. Millar has written seven novels since "Milk," and his American publisher, Soft Skull, has issued or is issuing at least a few of them. In its own way, this one may be the best. It's right on that edge between youth and wisdom, cute and serious, words and pictures. If you are the type of person who doesn't like books that announce they're weighty, then read this one; you'll like it. If you read only serious and weighty books, give yourself a break and pick this up. It will remind you of your youth - or somebody's. Jim Krusoe's most recent novel is "Girl Factory." His next, "Erased," will be published this spring.
Choice Review
A quarter century ago, historians Louis R. Harlan and August Meier revised scholarly assessments of Booker T. Washington, unveiling the black educator's Machiavellian life--his backdoor campaigns to fight Jim Crow by financing civil rights cases, his secret political control of philanthropy aimed at black uplift, his surreptitious control of the black press, and his heavy-handed determination to crush opponents. All the while, Washington espoused an up-by-the-bootstraps accommodationist ideology during the age of segregation. Focusing on Washington's educational tours in Mississippi, Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas, and Florida, Jackson (Florida A&M Univ.) maintains that the black leader used these pilgrimages to celebrate African American progress and, especially, black manhood at a time when white supremacists and political demagogues defined people of color as "uncivilized," charging them with degenerating in the absence of slavery. While his chronological organization fosters unnecessary repetition, Jackson's state studies provide important local detail.Norrell's biography defends Washington from ongoing charges of the Tuskegee leader's alleged conservatism and "Uncle Tomism." Accusing Harlan and others of confusing Washington's "style with substance," Norrell (Univ. of Tennessee) celebrates Washington's "sophisticated mind," his leadership skills and accomplishments, his unwavering focus on African American progress, his efforts to raise black morale, and his "prophetic purpose." Norrell charges Washington's critics with understating the obstacles he confronted, his commitment to a protest agenda similar to that of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and his immense popularity with blacks. Unfortunately, Norrell overstates Harlan's criticisms of Washington to bolster his own revisionism. Despite weaknesses, these two books signal a welcome revival of interest in Washington, adding nuance, context, and argument based on a corpus of works published since the appearance of Harlan and Meier's pathbreaking work. They deserve wide readership and will stimulate debate. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Both books--all levels/libraries. J. D. Smith University of North Carolina at Charlotte
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-This revisionist biography will inform readers about the merits of probably the most important African-American man of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Norrell provides a clear representation of the sulfurous hate and mortal dangers facing Washington as he built a major university literally from bare ground in a South that despised successful blacks. Washington was also viciously maligned by northern black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois and T. Monroe Trotter, who never faced the lethal dangers menacing him. He is still a controversial figure, but Norrell's volume provides the milieu necessary for understanding his triumphs and defeats against a climate of hatred and terrorism, and, therefore, the reason the founder of Tuskegee Institute deserves respect. Hundreds of quotes bring his story to life. Congressman Tom Heflin shouted in a campaign speech: "If Booker interferes" in this election campaign, "we have a way of influencing negroes down here when it becomes necessary." Norrell writes that the "threat of lynching" by Heflin "spurred whites to a standing ovation." This biography will give teens a precise and keen experience of what it was like to be a black man in the South during Washington's time.-Alan Gropman, National Defense University, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A comprehensive reassessment of the life and career of an African-American whose importance has been almost criminally neglected. At the time of Booker T. Washington's death in 1915, the country widely acknowledged the esteemed orator and author of Up From Slavery, the tireless educator and founder of Alabama's Tuskegee Institute, as the successor to Frederick Douglass. But failing health, a late career scandal and a sustained attack by Northern black enemies who deeply resented his preeminence had already dimmed Washington's star, and his historical reputation has only continued to decline. Amidst the poisonous racial climate of the post-Reconstruction era, Washington favored interracial engagement, stressing the educational, moral and economic development of his people as the surest path toward resolving "the Negro Problem." Washington disavowed any "artificial forcing" of social equality and eschewed overt political engagement, instead emphasizing self-help, group solidarity and education with real-world applications to establish an economic basis for racial harmony. His critics accused him of surrendering his dignity to the white industrialists and philanthropists who supported Tuskegee, of ignoble submission to the white politicians who occasionally threw him crumbs, of practically accepting the alleged inferiority of his race and of wanting to keep the Negro "a hewer of wood and drawer of water." During Washington's last decade, the Niagara Movement and the NAACP had both emerged at least in part to counter his "Tuskegee machine," to challenge his seeming stranglehold on black opinion and to counter his gospel of racial conciliation. The powerful pen and the fiery rhetoric of W.E.B. Du Bois began the work, still ongoing, of diminishing Washington's achievement and his competing vision of black progress. In this measured and sympathetic treatment, Norrell (History/Univ. of Tennessee; The House I Live In: Race in the American Century, 2005, etc.) restores some balance, particularly with his detailed survey of conditions in the South. A thoughtful biography that, perhaps, signals a new scholarly appreciation of a remarkable man. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
African American educator Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), who organized the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, AL, was a sought-after speaker, an adviser to several Presidents, and a voracious reader and writer. Born to an illiterate slave, he overcame the rampant racism of the time to become the "leader of his race," only to be vilified by history as being too accommodating to whites. Norrell (history, Univ. of Tennessee) has written a new examination of Washington's life, the title playing off of Washington's famous autobiography Up from Slavery. Just as Washington worked to escape the figurative and literal shackles of slavery, Norrell works to rescue Washington's life from latter-day depictions of him as an "Uncle Tom" who sought to mollify whites. Norrell argues that Washington's message (education, moral development, financial stability, racial consensus, patience, and optimism) has been unfairly dismissed, with his hard work to improve the lives of black Americans forgotten. The revisionist approach succeeds: as Norrell points out, the values promoted by Washington have helped many oppressed peoples and were an important part of the Civil Rights Movement. Recommended for both academic and public libraries.-Jason Martin, Univ. of Central Florida Libs., Orlando (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Prologue: The Meaning of the Veil | p. 1 |
| 1 The Force That Wins | p. 17 |
| 2 The Model Community | p. 43 |
| 3 The Self-Made Men | p. 61 |
| 4 The Survival of the Race | p. 92 |
| 5 The Settlement of the Negro Problem | p. 115 |
| 6 The Rising People | p. 136 |
| 7 The Lion and the Fox | p. 160 |
| 8 The Train of Disfranchisement | p. 185 |
| 9 The Leopard's Spots | p. 210 |
| 10 The Violence of Their Imagination | p. 238 |
| 11 The Warring Ideals | p. 263 |
| 12 The Tuskegee Machine | p. 288 |
| 13 The Assault by the Toms | p. 311 |
| 14 The Tragedy of Color | p. 339 |
| 15 The Man Farthest Down | p. 359 |
| 16 The Leader of the Race | p. 380 |
| 17 The Morning Cometh | p. 403 |
| 18 The Veil of History | p. 421 |
| Notes | p. 445 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 485 |
| Index | p. 487 |
