Booker T Washington and Black Capitalism

UNEMPLOYMENT AND poverty are the plight of millions of Black workers in today's America. Yet paradoxically, Black political power has grown in the decades since the height of the civil rights and Black Power movement. This is because political power without economic power is empty.


But what kind of economic power? Many Black political leaders argue for a version of "Black capitalism"--that increased economic power within the confines of the capitalist system is the way to improve the lot of the mass of Black workers.


While starting with a correct premise--that political power is not enough--the conclusion that more Black business is the answer is mistaken. Nor are these ideas new. In fact, they have historical roots in the "self-help" philosophy of Booker T. Washington.


Washington was an emancipated slave who became the most prominent spokesperson for Blacks at the end of the 19th century. In 1880, Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a technical school to train Blacks for skilled work.


Tuskegee stressed training to instill not only skills, but the "proper attitudes" and values--like hard work, sobriety, subservience to employers--in its students. Perhaps this was why Washington wrote that Tuskegee "has no warmer and more enthusiastic friends anywhere than it has among the white citizens ... throughout the state of Alabama and throughout the entire South."


Later, Washington created the Negro Business League, with the intent of creating a Black capitalist class. At a Business League conference in 1910, Washington called league members to be missionaries "in teaching the masses to get property, to be more thrifty, more; economical, and resolved to establish an industrial enterprise wherever a possibility presents itself."


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