Booker T. Washington: A Re-Examination

As America watches, with amazement and no small amount of pride, the first-ever presidential campaign featuring a black American as the presumptive nominee of a major political party, a new book examines the ideas and relevance of a leading black American from an earlier time.

Booker T. Washington: A Re-Examination finds Washington s life, accomplishments, and writings to be more important than ever in pointing the way to racial harmony and greater economic and social success for black Americans.

Booker T. Washington (1856 - 1915) was often derided during the 1960s and 1970s because his ideas contradicted the fashionable Progressivism that posited government solutions for all economic and social problems. Yet Washington s ideas were important during his time, and they re even more relevant today, precisely because the United States failed to listen to him during the intervening decades.

By founding and building Tuskegee Institute and other endeavors, Washington worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to strengthen black entrepreneurship, labor skills, personal responsibility, and families. He accepted charitable contributions from white philanthropists, but his efforts were focused on equipping blacks to help themselves and succeed in the world as it was: self-reliance.

Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Lee H. Walker has long been an eloquent and passionate advocate of Booker T. Washington s life and ideas. In June 2006 he convened a three-day symposium in Chicago to examine the great thinker s life, legacy, and philosophy. Twenty-two speakers participated, representing a wide variety of views, in the biggest gathering of academics and activists to discuss Booker T. Washington s agenda in a quarter-century.