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“We can be as separate as” the pages of the book: Booker T. Washington and the Work of Autobiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Antonio T. Bly
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Extract

“No Race Can Prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities,” cried Booker Taliaferro Washington, melodramatically standing on top of the center platform at the International and Cotton States Atlanta Exposition. His towering physique conservatively dressed in a grayish black suit, Washington projected a profound, yet quiet, dignity. His hands were inordinately large, and his hazel-colored eyes betrayed a difficult past, complicated by the peculiar characters of race and Southern predicament.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 26 , October 2001 , pp. 163 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2001

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References

NOTES

1. Washington, Booker T., Up From Slavery, in The Booker T. Washington Papers: The Autobiographical Writings, ed. Harlan, Louis (Urbana: University pf Illinois Press, 1972), 1: 331Google Scholar.

2. Ibid., 332.

3. Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk, in Three Negro Classics, comp. John Hope Franklin (New York: Avon, 1965), 241Google Scholar.

4. Gow, Joseph D., “The Two Faces of Booker T. Washington: A Rhetorical Analysis of the ‘Ideological Tension’, in The Story of My Life and Work and Up From Slavery” (MA thesis, University of Alabama, 1985), 1–59Google Scholar.

5. Meier, August, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 103Google Scholar.

6. Ibid., 102–5; and Young, Alfred, “The Educational Philosophy of Booker T. Washington: A Perspective for Black Liberation,” Phylon 36, no. 3 (09 1976): 227–33Google Scholar.

7. McElroy, Frederick L., “Booker T. Washington as Literary Trickster,” Southern Folklore 49, no. 2 (1992): 91–103Google Scholar; and Gibson, Donald B., “Strategies and Revisions of Self-representation in Booker T. Washington's Autobiographies,” American Quarterly 45, no. 3 (09 1993): 370–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Booker T. Washington to J. L. Nichols and Company, 04 26, 1901, Booker T. Washington Papers (hereafter cited as BTW Papers), Library of Congress (DLC)Google Scholar.

9. John A. Hertel was a partner in the subscription-book publishing firm J. L. Nichols and Company, which published Washington's first autobiography (Tebbel, John and Zuckerman, Mary Ellen, The Magazine in America, 1740–1990 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 134–35Google Scholar).

10. Walter Hines Page to Booker T. Washington (hereafter, BTW), October 14, 1896, BTW Papers, ed. Harlan, Louis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 4: 226Google Scholar.

11. Copper, John Milton Jr, Walter Hines Page: The Southern as American, 1855–1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 159–61Google Scholar.

12. Ibid., 116–17.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., 144–45.

15. Samuel Sidney McClure to BTW, August 2, 1899, BTW Papers, ed. Harlan, Louis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 5: 168Google Scholar.

16. Lyman Abbott to BTW, 12 9, 1899, BTW Papers, DLCGoogle Scholar.

17. Brown, Ira V., Lyman Abbott: Christian Evolutionist — A Study in Religious Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 41Google Scholar.

18. Abbott, Lyman, Reminiscences (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), 275–76Google Scholar.

19. James Lawrence Nichols, founder of J. L. Nichols and Company, died in 1895, but the company continued to use his name (Wallace, William Stewart, ed., Dictionary of North American Authors [Toronto: Ryerson, 1951], 328Google Scholar).

20. The household guide: or home remedies and home treatment for all diseases in man or beast (1891), Search light on health: how to love, how to court, how to marry and how to live (1894), The business guide (1896), Life and times of William E. Gladstone (1898), Picture puzzles, or, How to read the Bible by symbols (1899), The life and work of Dwight L. Moody (1900), Safe Citizen (1901), and The farmer's manual and complete cotton book (1901).

21. BTW Papers, 1: xvi–xviiGoogle Scholar.

22. Harlan, Louis, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 243Google Scholar.

23. Ibid, xvii; and Bresnahan, Roger J., “The Implied Readers of Booker T. Washington's Autobiographies,” Black American Literature Forum 14, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 15–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. John A. Hertel to BTW, 11 15, 1897, BTW Papers, 4: 341Google Scholar.

25. Harlan, , Booker T. Washington, 243Google Scholar.

26. BTW Papers, 1: xviiiGoogle Scholar.

27. Webber to BTW, 01 16, 1899, BTW Papers, 5: 11–12Google Scholar.

28. BTW Papers, 1: xixGoogle Scholar.

29. Max Bennett Thrasher to BTW, 04 20, 1898, BTW Papers, 4: 405–06Google Scholar; and personal communication with Thrasher, Max Bennett, 03 23, 1899, BTW Papers, 5: 59–60Google Scholar.

30. Harlan, , Booker T. Washington, 246Google Scholar.

31. Ibid.

32. Lyman Abbott to BTW, 10 1, 1900, BTW Papers, DLCGoogle Scholar.

33. Cooper, , Walter Hines Page, 152–55Google Scholar.

34. Ibid., 156.

35. Ibid., 156–57.

36. Ibid., 158.

37. Ibid., 159.

38. Ibid.

39. Wilson, Harold S., McClure's Magazine and the Muckrakers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 98–99Google Scholar; Tebbel, John, Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 95–97Google Scholar; and Becket, Margaret, “Doubleday and Company,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Dzwonkoski, Peter (New York: Gale Research, 1990), 49 (part 1): 138–39Google Scholar.

40. Ibid., 160–61.

41. Walter Hines Page to BTW, 01 5, 1900, BTW Papers, DLCGoogle Scholar.

42. Walter Hines Page to BTW, 01 19, 1900, BTW Papers, 5: 417–18Google Scholar.

43. Ibid., 418.

44. BTW Papers, 1: xxivGoogle Scholar.

45. John A, Hertel to BTW, 11 6, 1900, BTW Papers, 5: 689Google Scholar.

46. Walter Hines Page to BTW, 03 4, 1901, BTW Papers, ed. Harlan, Louise (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 6: 48Google Scholar.

47. Hertel to BTW, April 30,1901, BTW Papers, DLC.

48. BTW to John A. Hertel, 04 26, 1901, BTW Papers, 6: 96Google Scholar.

49. Max Bennett Thrasher to BTW, 01 9, 1900, BTW Papers, 5: 408–9Google Scholar; and Lyman Abbott to BTW, 10 1, 1900, BTW Papers, DLCGoogle Scholar.

50. Gibson, “Strategies and Revision,” 386.

51. BTW Papers, 1: 11Google Scholar.

52. Ibid., 216.

53. “The Story of My Life and Work: Booker T. Washington's Other Autobiography,” Black Scholar 21, no. 4 (Fall 1991): 37Google Scholar.

54. BTW Papers, 1: 12Google Scholar.

55. In the article “Strategies and Revisions” (386–87), Gibson cogently argues that Washington borrows stylistic from Frederick Douglass's Narrative.

56. According to Robert B. Stepto, authentication is literary device where the text incorporates supportive documentation, be it letters, prefaces, tale, etc., as means by which to validate itself and therefore its author (“Narration, Authentication, and Authorial Control in Frederick Douglass' Narrative of 1845,” in African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Andrews, William L. [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993], 26–35Google Scholar; and From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991], 32–51Google Scholar). In this regard, Washington uses letters and transcribes speeches in his autobiography as a way of corroborating the events of his life story.

57. BTW Papers, 1: 57–58Google Scholar.

58. Ibid., 316–17.

59. Ibid., 335.

60. Hackenberg, Michael, ed., Getting the Books Out: Papers of the Chicago Conference on the Book in 19th Century America (Washington: Center for the Book/Library of Congress, 1987), 46Google Scholar.

61. Tebbel, , Between Covers, 161, 166–70Google Scholar.

62. Webber to BTW, 01 16, 1899, BTW Papers, 5: 11–12Google Scholar.

63. BTW to John A. Hertel, 11 16, 1901, BTW Papers, 6: 320Google Scholar.

64. Harlan, , Booker T. Washington, 252–53Google Scholar; and BTW Papers, 1: xxxiv–xxxvGoogle Scholar.

65. Lowry, Richard S., “Littery Man”: Mark Twain and Modern Authorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 44–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; 62, 67.

66. Meier, , Negro Thought, 101Google Scholar.

67. Carroll, Lewis, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (New York: Signet Classic, 1960), 66Google Scholar.