What have Booker T. Washington contributed to history and history of African Americans?

Answer 1

Washington believed that the best interests of black people in the post-Reconstruction era could be realized through education in the crafts and industrial skills and the cultivation of the virtues of patience, enterprise, and thrift. He urged his fellow blacks, most of whom were impoverished and illiterate farm labourers, to temporarily abandon their efforts to win full civil rights and political power and instead to cultivate their industrial and farming skills so as to attain economic security. Blacks would thus accept segregation and discrimination, but their eventual acquisition of wealth and culture would gradually win for them the respect and acceptance of the white community. This would break down the divisions between the two races and lead to equal citizenship for blacks in the end. In his epochal speech (Sept. 18, 1895) to a racially mixed audience at the Atlanta (Ga.) Exposition, Washington summed up his pragmatic approach in the famous phrase: "In all things that are purely social we can be separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."

Answer 2

Booker T Washington was a strong advocate of economic self-sufficiency of African Americans.

He wanted Black people to own businesses and property, rather than look to civil rights.

Rather than require that employers hire African-Americans just as they did other groups of people (a problem, especially in his time), he believed that A-A people obtain capital and land for businesses and agriculture.

He felt this was the path to better living conditions for my forbears.

The problem was that many Black people were only marginally alive, a few or one generations from slavery and did not have any collateral to use to get land and business capital.

His solution also did not address the violence of the time.

Hundreds of thousand of African-American people were being killed as they migrated from the Southern states of their ancestors to the North, East, West, and competed with other groups of people (including many European immigrants) for jobs.

A black person could be paid much less, thus was a threat to the population already there. And there was the usual mistrust of our people....

It was during this time the Ku Klux Klan had their highest memberships, which despite popular belief, was highest OUTSIDE of the southern states.

***Edit*** also read his autobiography..you should be able to find it in your city library (especially the main branch)

Answer 3

Perhaps the information found in
these links would be of help to you:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Generation-Mixed/message/991
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Generation-Mixed/message/1399
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Generation-Mixed/message/1402
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Generation-Mixed/message/1747
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Generation-Mixed/message/1400
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Generation-Mixed/message/1570

Answer 4

he was a slave