Review: Booker T Washington: Making of a Black Leader 1856-1901

In this sweeping and concise volume, encompassing the early life and times of Booker T. Washington, his preeminent biographer Dr. Louis R. Harlan, presents a portrait of a man of many faces and a singular devotion, to ever present himself and his purposes, in the very best possible light, given the company and circumstances at hand. Harlan spent the better part of a quarter century sifting through over a million pieces of primary evidence from the estate of the iconic African-American educator and leader, to produce this volume as well as the concluding installment of Washington's biography subtitled, The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915, a decade later. Both were winners of the Bancroft Award in 1973 and 1984 respectively, and the second volume also garnered the Pulitzer Prize as well in 1984. Along with his co-editor, Professor Raymond W. Smock, Harlan also churned out fourteen volumes of the Booker T. Washington Papers (1853-1946) during his tenure with the University of Maryland. Somehow he also found time to serve as the president of the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians and Southern Historical Association during this time, the first historian ever to do so simultaneously. The fruits of his labors have forever enhanced the body of scholarship in the field of African-American studies for which a grateful universally acknowledges him as one of the greatest historians of the 20th century.

In this volume Dr. Harlan gives his readers a chronologically detailed accounting of Washington's life from his birth as a slave in Virginia, “probably in the Spring of 1856” until the occasion which epitomized his iconic rise to national prominence, his famous dinner at the White House with President Teddy Roos...

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... Blacks of the state, writing to a friend at the time, “I am most disgusted with the colored people of Georgia”, who did not even return his mail and wondered openly how far he could or “ought to go in fighting these measures in other states when the coloreds themselves sit down and will do nothing for themselves..”(291)

Given the era of social upheaval which provided the backdrop of social of the writing of this book, which the author was an active participant in, and his obvious tremendous respect for his subject, Harlan's objectivity is refreshing. Dr. Harlan has presented future generations with the first premier scholarly record of a prominent African-American figure that will long be a seminal part of American historiography.

Works Cited

Harlan, Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901. New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1972. Print.