Black History Month

Today is the last day of Black History Month so I’d like to leave you with this ‘Lest we forget,’ ‘We the people’ who helped to build this fine nation, did not ask for much and, was given less; ‘Black people resisted’ only to be tortured, killed or see below:

(Please note this is the OLD ENGLISH spelling)
TO BE SOLD on board the Ship Bance•Island, on Tuesday the 6th of May next, as Afbley•Ferry; a choice cargo of about 150 fin healthy NEGROES, juft arrived from the Windward & Rice Caft. –The utmoft care has already been taken, and Shall be continued, to keep them free from the leaft danger of being infected with the SMALL-POX, no boat having been on board, and all other communication with people from charles•Town prevented.
Auftin, Laurens, & Applely.

Booker T. Washington Educator and founder of Tuskegee Institute (1858-1915) Booker Taliaferro Washington was the foremost black educator of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He also had a major influence on southern race relation and was the dominant figure in black public affairs from 1895 until his death in 1915. Born a slave on a small farm in the Virginia backcountry, he moved with his family after emancipation to work in the salt furnaces and coal mines of West Virginia. After a secondary education at Hampton Institute, he taught an upgraded school and experimented briefly with the study of law and the ministry, but a teaching position at Hampton decided his future career. In 1881, he founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute on the Hampton model in the Black Belt of Alabama. Though Washington offered little that was innovative in industrial education, which both northern philanthropic foundations and southern leaders were already promoting, he became its chief black example and spokesman. In his advocacy of Tuskegee Institute and its educational method, Washington revealed the political adroitness and accommodationist philosophy that were to characterize his career in the wider arena of race leadership. He convinced southern white employers and governors that Tuskegee offered an education that would keep blacks “down on the farm” and in the trades. To prospective northern donors and particularly the new self – made millionaires such as Rockefeller and Carnegie, he promised the inculcation of the Protestant work ethic. To blacks living within the limited horizons of the post-Reconstruction South, Washington held out industrial education is the means of escape from the web of sharecropping and debt, and the achievement of attainable, petit-bourgeois goals of self-employment, land ownership, and small business. Washington cultivated local white approval and secured a small state appropriation, but it was northern donations that made Tuskegee Institute by the 1900’s, the best supported black educational institution in the country. The Atlanta Compromise Address, delivered before the Cotton States Exposition in 1895, enlarge Washington’s influence into the arena of race relations and black leadership. Washington offered black acquiescence in disfranchisement and social segregation if whites would encourage black progress in economic and educational opportunity. Hailed as a sage by whites of both sections, Washington further consolidated his influence by his widely read autobiography, Up From Slavery (1901), the founding of the National Negro Business League in 1900, and control of patronage politics as chief black advisor to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Washington kept his white following by conservative policies and moderate utterances, but he faced growing black and white liberal opposition in the Niagara Movement (1905), and the NAACP (1909), groups demanding civil rights and encouraging protest in response to white aggressions such as lynching, disfranchisement, and segregation laws. Washington successfully fended off these critics, often by underhanded means. At the same time, however, he tried to translate his own personal success into black advancement through secret sponsorship of civil rights suits, serving on the boards of Fisk and Howard University, and direction philanthropic aid to these and other black colleges. His speaking tours and private persuasion tried to equalize public educational opportunities and to reduce racial violence. These efforts were generally unsuccessful, and the year of Washington’s death marked the beginning of the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North. Washington’s racial philosophy, pragmatically adjusted to the limiting conditions of his own era, did not survive the change. Hover Tuskegee is one of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) that has continues to operate and has expanded oppreciatively.