This was the first adult book I ever read. In sixth grade I ordered it from a book club for 75 cents. And when it arrived in the mail, in the fall of 1960, I actually read it.
As a twelve year-old growing up in the mountain West I suffered from certain deficiencies as a reader of such material. I had never set foot in the South and was profoundly ignorant of American history. I knew that the South had lost the Civil War, but it had never occurred to me that there might be people still living there. Therefore, I failed to grasp most of what Washington, a son of the South, was trying to convey. It took me twenty years to figure it out.
This book had two messages — one for the Northern elite, and one for the Southern elite. Its message for the Northern elite was that investment in Negro education could pay high dividends for the country as a whole. Its message for the Southern elite was that Negro education did not threaten them.
There is evidence that the messages were heard. Colleges were founded and funded. Northern Protestant denominations extended membership into the South, bringing educational sponsorship with them. Literacy increased. A Negro middle class arose. Ever so slowly, the South began to change. But the change was incremental, and gradual. Too gradual, as we now see.
Part of the problem was a fact that has distinct modern echoes in this age of Trump and populism. The Southern elite was very weak. Reconstruction destroyed the old planter elite, and a replacement for it was slow to arise. Politics in the South after 1876 was dominated not by an elite but by smallholders, illiterate farmers and hardscrabble merchants, people who were barely hanging on. To those people, Booker Washington’s message of cooperation fell on deaf ears. Lacking education themselves, how could they not feel threatened by Negro education? Does this attitude sound familiar? It should. These are the same men who elected Donald Trump president in 2016 and who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021. The problem is not a Southern elite, but the lack of one. The result is what Dean Acheson once called “the revolt of the primitives.”
Booker Washington died in 1915. The Northern elite he wrote for was the old Protestant elite that would retain its grip on American life for yet another two generations. It was only in my generation that new forces took over and moved us beyond Washington’s world.
History takes no prisoners. “Up From Slavery” is therefore a historical relic, written for an audience that no longer exists. Reading it in 1960, I myself scarcely grasped the historical forces that were swirling around me, just as Washington scarcely anticipated them. But while History takes no prisoners, certain fundamental truths about human possibility endure the worst that History can hurl at them. One of those truths is the deeper message of “Up From Slavery,” a truth that Washington understood and that moderns don’t want to hear. It is the same message that Nelson Mandela brought to us in 1990 when he spoke to African-American youth: education is the only real hope. Agitation and combat have their role, but in the long run, education will determine your future. It is the one thing that Trump and the primitives can never take away from you, and that will enable you to overcome.