how does Zinn justify the actions of Booker T. Washington?

Question

Howard Zinn "A People's History Of The United States" Chapter 9
plz help i go back to school on wednsay

Answer 1

I found the following excerpt online from Chapter 9:

"In the postwar literature, images of the ***** came mostly from southern white writers like Thomas Nelson Page, who in his novel Red Rock referred to a ***** character as "a hyena in a cage," "a reptile,' "a species of worm," "a wild beast." And, interspersed with paternalistic urgings of friendship for the *****, Joel Chandler Harris, in his Uncle Remus stories, would have Uncle Remus say: "Put a spellin-book in his (sic) han's, en right den en dar' you loozes a plowhand. I kin take a bar'l stave an fling mo' sense inter his (sic) in one minnit dan all de schoolhouses betwixt dis en de state er Midgigin."
In this atmosphere it was no wonder that those ***** leaders most accepted in white society, like the educator Booker T. Washington, a one-time White House guest of Theodore Roosevelt, urged ***** political passivity. Invited by the white organizers of the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895 to speak, Washington urged the southern ***** to "cast down your bucket where you are"-that is, to stay in the South, to be farmers, mechanics, domestics, perhaps even to attain to the professions. He urged white employers to hire Negroes rather than immigrants of "strange tongue and habits." Negroes, "without strikes and labor wars," were the "most patient, faithful, law-abiding and unresentful people that the world has seen." He said: "The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly."
Perhaps Washington saw this as a necessary tactic of survival in a time of hangings and burnings of Negroes throughout the South, It was a low point for black people in America. Thomas Fortune, a young black editor of the New York Globe, testified before a Senate committee in 1883 about the situation of the ***** in the United States. He spoke of "widespread poverty," of government betrayal, of desperate ***** attempts to educate themselves.
The average wage of ***** farm laborers in the South was about fifty cents a day, Fortune said. He was usually paid in "orders," not money, which he could use only at a store controlled by the planter, "a system of fraud." The ***** farmer, to get the wherewithal to plant his crop, had to promise it to the store, and when everything was added up at the end of the year he was in debt, so his crop was constantly owed to someone, and he was tied to the land, with the records kept by the planter and storekeeper so that the Negroes "are swindled and kept forever in debt." As for supposed laziness, "I am surprised that a larger number of them do not go to fishing, hunting, and loafing."
Fortune spoke of "the penitentiary system of the South, with its infamous chain-gang. . . . the object being to terrorize the blacks and furnish victims for contractors, who purchase the labor of these wretches from the State for a song. . . . The white man who shoots a ***** always goes free, while the ***** who steals a hog is sent to the chaingang for ten years."
Many Negroes fled. About six thousand black people left Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi and migrated to Kansas to escape violence and poverty. Frederick Douglass and some other leaders thought this was a wrong tactic, but migrants rejected such advice. "We have found no leader to trust but God overhead of us," one said. Henry Adams, another black migrant, illiterate, a veteran of the Union army, told a Senate committee in 1 880 why he left Shreveport, Louisiana: "We seed that the whole South - every state in the South - had got into the hands of the very men that held us slaves."
Even in the worst periods, southern Negroes continued to meet, to organize in self-defense. Herbert Aptheker reprints thirteen documents of meetings, petitions, and appeals of Negroes in the 1880s - in Baltimore, Louisiana, the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Kansas - showing the spirit of defiance and resistance of blacks all over the South. This, in the face of over a hundred lynchings a year by this time.
Despite the apparent hopelessness of this situation, there were black leaders who thought Booker T. Washington wrong in advocating caution and moderation. John Hope, a young black man in Georgia, who heard Washington's Cotton Exposition speech, told students at a ***** college in Nashville, Tennessee:
If we are not striving for equality, in heaven's name for what are we living? I regard it as cowardly and dishonest for any of our colored men to tell white people or colored people that we are not struggling for equality. . . . Yes, my friends, I want equality. Nothing less. . . . Now catch your breath, for I am going to use an adjective: I am going to say we demand social equality.... I am no wild beast, nor am I an unclean thing.
Rise, Brothers! Come let us possess this land. ... Be discontented. Be dissatisfied. ... Be as restless as the tempestuous billows on the boundless sea. Let your discontent break mountain-high against the wall of prejudice, and swamp it to the very foundation.. . .
Another black man, who came to teach at Atlanta University, W. E. B. Du Bois, saw the late- nineteenth-century betrayal of the ***** as part of a larger happening in the United States, something happening not only to poor blacks but to poor whites. In his book Black Reconstruction, written in 1935, he said:
God wept; but that mattered little to an unbelieving age; what mattered most was that the world wept and still is weeping and blind with tears and blood. For there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor.
Du Bois saw this new capitalism as part of a process of exploitation and bribery taking place in all the "civilized" countries of the world:
Home labor in cultured lands, appeased and misled by a ballot whose power the dictatorship of vast capital strictly curtailed, was bribed by high wage and political office to unite in an exploitation of white, yellow, brown and black labor, in lesser lands... .
Was Du Bois right-that in that growth of American capitalism, before and after the Civil War, whites as well as blacks were in some sense becoming slaves?"