BOOKER TALIAFERRO WASHINGTON
Oil, 1985, 36 x 30 inches
Booker T. Washington,
educational leader, was born in 1856 in Virginia to a white father
and a black mother who was a slave. He was brought up in a dismal
cabin and was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. The family
moved to the neighborhood of Charleston, West Virginia, where
he attended school, and then went off at seventeen to Hampton
Institute, where he worked his way through as a janitor. He distinguished
himself as a student, and in 1881 he was chosen to become the
founding head of a normal school at Tuskegee. After years of hard
work, the school was firmly established. He lectured widely on
educational subjects and became a familiar of such 
national
figures as Theodore Roosevelt, whose dinner table at the White
House he shared. He had become the recognized leader of black
Americans following the death of Frederick Douglass. He advocated
social separation of the races combined with industrial training
and cooperation. For such views he was called the "Great
Compromiser" by friends and such foes as Du Bois and Monroe
Trotter, who demanded immediate and complete social equality.
It was his accommodating quality that brought him, and kept him,
at the place where he dominated the movement for civil rights,
able to raise funds and other support from former slaveholders
of the South and from a broad national community. His Up From
Slavery is his legacy.
Charcoal, 1985, 37 x 30 inches
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