In this book of essays written by community leaders, edited by Rebecca Carrol. She explores Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, as she poses the question: Uncle Tom or New Negro?

Why did Booker T. Washington choose to use such submissive language during his "Atlanta Exposition Address" promising the south a submissive Negro. Even today those who would support Booker T., prescience, cringe at the reading of that address.

But those of us that will take the time to digest that address as a whole, in my opinion, will find solace in Washington's intent. Which of us, is so lucky that we can say we've never found our selves in a situation, so desperate for a chance to prove we have the wherewithal to rise to expectations.

Below is a sample of that speech.

Cast down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them...you will find that they'll buy your surplus land...and run your factories.

While doing this, you can be sure, in the future, as in the past, that you and your families would be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law abiding, and uneventful people that the world has ever seen...

In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

Taking the time to recognize the period of time in Atlanta, i.e. Blacks weren't afforded the liberties realized in the North. In this speech Washington seem to convey a recognition that the mountain Black folk had to climb was the derogatory perceptions of whites.

"In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress"

These words were obviously meant to put white fears to rest. Putting Atlanta aside for a moment. It is instructive that the emancipation in the North, New York for instance, was delayed for 15 years over the issue of equality. Emancipation, yes, equality, no. (See One drop of Blood by Scott Malcomson reviewed earlier in these pages).

Looking back from where we now stand it is unfathomable to us that the man would ingratiate himself like that. How he must have agonize over the realization that whatever else he may have thought or felt. The progress of his people dictated the need to deal with white fears and other perception.

When you're between a rock and a hard place. What is paramount, is a change in environment.

And so the question is asked, was Washington a new Negro or was he an uncle Tom? Perhaps Washington recognized  that he had to do what it took to get his people a start. And that beating the drum of equality would have been a frustrated endeavor in the Atlanta environment of the time.

Was W.E.B Du Bois right and Booker T. Washington wrong? I think they were both right, but operating under different circumstances. Du Bois advocated intellectual advancement in the Northern activist environment. Washington saw the need for rudimentary skills as the more pertinent need of his people. The quickest way to prove themselves and gain respect, in an environment that demeaned the negro.

History has  been good to Washington

Through out this book of essays a statement by John Bryant, founder, Chairman and CEO of Operation Hope, hit it right on the head for me. "...Black America is the only group of people in the world today that created a political power base before creating an economic one." And we continue to this day to suffer from that deficit. As we look around us now you'll be hard pressed not to say Washington was unto something.

The wisest among my race understands that the agitation of social equality is the extremest folly, and that the progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than as the result of artificial forcing...The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just [now] is worth infinitely more that the opportunity to spend a dollar in a opera-house.

I suspect Booker T. Washington understood the pride, that come in the value of achievement, through pulling one's self up by one's boot straps. And the respect garnered as a result. He knew his people could prove themselves, if they could just get their foot in the door, in a manner of speaking.

It is my considered opinion that Booker T. Washington had the prescience of sight, and that history has vindicated him. Look around you for all the BS about gains, for to many of us, the tide is not rising. Because we still don't understand what Booker T. Washington was trying to do.