The vindication of Booker T. Washington



Christopher Wolfe’s thoughtful essay at the American Mind on Booker T. Washington, leisure, and work stirred some fond memories from years ago of making a friend by reading a book.

He was an old black man, and I was an old white man. We were both native Angelenos and had been just about old enough to drive when the Watts riots broke out in 1965. But that was half a century and a lifetime ago, and we hadn’t known each another.

If you read ‘Up from Slavery,’ you will be reading an American classic and will be getting to know a man who ranks among the greatest Americans of all time.

Los Angeles is a big place, a home to many worlds. Now we were white-haired professors, reading a book together, and we became friends. His name was Kimasi, and he has since gone to a better world.

We were spending a week with a dozen other academics reading Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, “Up from Slavery.” Washington was born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia, just a few years before the Civil War began. He gained his freedom through Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victory in the war. With heroic determination, he got himself an education and went on to found the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, where he remained principal for the rest of his life.

After Frederick Douglass died in 1895, Washington became, without comparison, the most well-known and influential black American living. By the beginning of the 20th century, as John Hope Franklin would write, he was “one of the most powerful men in the United States.” “Up from Slavery,” published in 1901, sold 100,000 copies before Washington died in 1915.

It is a great American book. Modern Library ranks it third on its list of the best nonfiction books in the English language of the 20th century. But there was a reason why Kimasi and I were reading this great book when we were old men rather than when we were young men back in the riotous 1960s.

Even before Washington died, and while he was still the most famous and influential black man in America, other black leaders began to discredit him and question his way of dealing with the plight and aspirations of black Americans. These critics, whom Washington sometimes called “the intellectuals,” were led by W.E.B. Du Bois, the first black American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard and one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

So successful was this criticism that by the time Kimasi and I were in high school or heading off to college, the most fashionable opinion among intellectuals — black or white — was that Booker T. Washington was the worst of things for a black man. He was an “Uncle Tom.” (How “Uncle Tom” became a term of derision rather than the name of a heroic character is a story for another time.) And so, if Washington’s great book was mentioned at all to young Kimasi or me, it was mentioned in this negative light.

But fashions change, and, as Washington himself taught, merit is hard to resist. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural Address were dismissed and scoffed at by some “intellectuals” in his day; they are now generally recognized by informed and intelligent people around the world as the great speeches they are.

“Huckleberry Finn” scandalized polite opinion when it came out, because it was about an illiterate vagrant and other lowlifes and contained a lot of ungrammatical talk and bad spelling. A couple of generations later, Ernest Hemingway himself declared that “all modern American literature comes from one book” — Huckleberry Finn.

A couple of generations later still, in our own times, skittish librarians started removing the book from their shelves because it used language too dangerous for children.

The study of the past should shed light on what deserves praise, what deserves blame, and the grounds on which such judgments should be made. Americans being as fallible as the rest of mankind, as long as we are free to air opinions, there will be different opinions among us. Some of them may actually be true. And they will change from time to time, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for no reason at all.

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Photo by Graphic House/Getty Images

In recent years, several scholars have helped bring back to light the greatness and goodness of Booker T. Washington. Even fashionable opinion is capable of justice, and no one wants to be deceived about what is truly good and great, so I hazard to predict that it will sometime become fashionable again to recognize Booker T. Washington as one of the greatest Americans ever.

Washington never held political office. But his life and work demonstrated that you don’t have to hold political office to be a statesman and that the noblest work of the statesman is to teach. The soul of what Washington sought to teach was that we, too, can rise up from slavery. It is an eternal possibility.

This was the central purpose of Booker T. Washington’s life and work: to liberate souls from enslavement to ignorance, prejudice, and degrading passions, the kind of slavery that makes us tyrants to those around us in the world we live in.

Washington saw that this freedom of the soul cannot be given to us by others. Good teachers and good parents and friends, through precept and example, can help us see this freedom and understand it, but we have to achieve it for ourselves. When we do, our souls are liberated to rule themselves by reflection and choice, with malice toward none, with charity for all.

If you read “Up from Slavery,” you will be reading an American classic. You will be getting to know a man who, in the quality of his mind and character, and in the significance of what he did in and with his life, ranks among the greatest Americans of all time — even with the man whose name he chose for himself. When we read this great book together in the ripeness of our years, Kimasi, who always winningly wore his heart on his sleeve, wept frequently and repeated, shaking his head, “I lived a life not knowing this man.”

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

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Why our obsession with true crime isn’t as dark as you think



Social media has a way of humorously exposing humanity’s peculiarities. Using memes, reels, and trending audio, we love to make fun of ourselves.

One trend that’s been going strong for a while now exposes our strange obsession with true crime documentaries, books, and podcasts. There’s no telling how many thousands of Instagram reels and TikToks out there poke fun at normal people pounding popcorn while bingeing a series on Ted Bundy, for example.

Initially, it’s kind of funny. But a deeper consideration reveals a dark question: Why are we so drawn to serial killer stories? What is it about brutality, bloodthirst, and murder that attracts us?

This is one of many subjects author and Daily Wire host Andrew Klavan touches on in his new book, “The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness.”

On a recent episode of “Relatable,” Klaven and Allie Beth Stuckey unpacked this grim query.

While you might think that the duo arrive at an equally grim conclusion, they don’t. Peeling back the layers of this obsession with true crime leads to a paradoxically optimistic verdict: We are captivated by the collision of darkness and the moral order.

In an age when reading, especially the classics, is a dying practice, true crime fills the gap that dark literature used to fill.

Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” or even the biblical account of Cain’s treachery against his brother Abel are all tales that hinge on murder and betrayal. These stories, Klaven says, explore darkness “within that moral order.” Our instinctive recoiling at the murder of an innocent, for example, shatters the atheistic idea of moral relativism, which can actually lead us to God — the source of truth.

Ultimately, “that's what people are looking for in crime,” he tells Allie. “Murder is the place where everybody says, ‘Yes, that is evil'" because there is something in us that understands “the sanctity of the human person.”

But is true crime a good substitute for dark literature?

Not exactly, says Klaven.

“I think that people would be better off if they were reading Dostoevsky more and maybe being titillated by true crimes a little less,” because “it’s when the mind and heart and soul of the artist engage with murder that we see it become something beautiful in this larger context, which is what I think God is doing with the world itself,” he says.

Allie then brings up another good point: Unlike thought-provoking literature that invites us to explore the human condition, true crime often leads to “fear and paranoia.”

“There is some sort of balance between looking at darkness, recognizing it for the objective evil that it is, [contrasting] it to God's goodness, and constantly dwelling on the darkness,” she says, citing Philippians 4:8, which encourages readers to focus their thoughts on what is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, and praiseworthy.

While not denying the truth of the verse, Klavan says that Philippians 4:8 is not synonymous with the “You Can Fly!” song from Peter Pan, which features the lyric “Now, think of the happiest things / It's the same as having wings.”

“You have to remember that Peter Pan never grows up, and if your faith never becomes the faith of a grown-up person, it's not going to stand up very well when you come into contact with the things that really do happen in this world — not just the evil, but also the suffering, the cruelty,” he says. “We believe in a God who was crucified … that's a very, very tragic truth, and yet the very deepest thing that God does for us is contained within that crucifixion.”

“One of the first things it says in Philippians is meditate and dwell on what is true, and what is true is all the beauty we experience, all the good that we experience, all the God that we experience takes place in this very dark world,” he continues.

The best Christian art, he argues, pointing to Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Mozart, and Bach, dealt with the kind of “sorrow and darkness and pain and suffering that Christianity was meant to address.”

However, even non-Christians unknowingly do this. “Many writers who have no faith have produced beautiful works that speak of God because I think any time you tell the truth, you're going to speak of God,” says Klaven. “The arts convey [and] transform this evil and this darkness into a source of light, and I think that that is a beautiful thing.”

To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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Shakespeare’s ‘Decolonizers’ Are Making Much Ado About Nothing

The British may be fine with flushing away their literary patrimony, but Americans should cherish William Shakespeare all the more.

Shakespeare's birthplace, collections to be 'decolonized' over fears his genius evidences British 'cultural supremacy'



The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is an independent charity that cares for the Shakespeare family houses in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, as well as for archival collections relating to his life and works.

Fearful that Shakespeare's globally recognized genius might lead some readers to suspect that not all cultures were created equal, the organization has committed to the process of "decolonizing" its collections and organizational practice to help "create a more inclusive museum experience."

The trust, which came into existence in 1847, acquired early Shakespeare collections from local antiquarians and others from the Stratford-upon-Avon Borough Council and Guild of the Holy Cross. Since appointing its first librarian to catalogue its library and archival materials in 1877, the organization has grown its collection with the help of donations and long-term deposits.

For much of its history, the trust appeared to understand that its function was to preserve Shakespeare's reconstructed birthplace, extol his works, and share England's cultural inheritance with the world. It appears, however, that post-colonialist, post-modern, and other varieties of radical leftist thought have poisoned its mission.

The organization has, for instance, tried to distance itself from the content it is supposed to champion as well as from the hardworking staff who kept the trust going in ages past, noting:

We recognise that the historical materials we hold may represent positions, language, values, and stereotypes that are not consistent with the current values and practices of Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. People accessing our collections may encounter language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful. Some descriptions may have been written by staff, others may have originated from the individuals and organisations that created the records.

The trust appears to have also embarked on a mission of iconoclasm partly as a result of its receipt of funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.

The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation is a leftist grant-making organization committed to "racial justice," "migrant justice," and "gender justice." It is also committed to socially re-engineering Britain's arts scene, specifically by "creating a cultural workforce that is more reflective of UK society, by enabling more people to progress in their career in the arts who identify as D/deaf, disabled or neurodivergent, are from communities experiencing racial inequity, or who are economically disadvantaged."

'Purge the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's interpretative policies and brand narratives of Anglocentric and colonialist thought.'

According to the page for a recent "Global Shakespeare" project funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is working with elements of the South Asian immigrant communities in the West Midlands to "uncover the hidden stories linked to specific objects and re-examine what they can teach us about the impact of colonialism on our perception of history of the world and the role Shakespeare's work has played as part of this."

The Telegraph reported that the iconoclastic initiative comes in the wake of concerns expressed by academic Helen Hopkins that Shakespeare's unparalleled literary genius might be used to push "white supremacy," and that in order to be globalized, Shakespeare must effectively be stripped of his national character.

Hopkins, who collaborated with the trust as an embedded researcher, suggested in 2022 that in the interest of "implementing positive change at the heart of Shakespeare's cultural iconography," namely the trust's museum, it was necessary to "recognise the role Shakespeare has been forced to play in establishing and upholding imperialistic narratives of cultural supremacy; to purge the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's interpretative policies and brand narratives of Anglocentric and colonialist thought; to institute new communicative strategies to address societal inequities that are embedded in imperialism and associated with Shakespeare’s global cultural status."

'They cannot stand that an Englishman is the greatest writer that the world has ever produced.'

Hopkins noted further that it was a tragedy that the trust prioritized Shakespeare over its sub-collection of objects related to the 19th-century Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore but expressed hope that the trust could engage in "decolonial work" and "mark the beginning of a new relationship between itself and the multicultural and global communities it serves." To Hopkins' likely delight, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has made sure to start hyping the foreign poet in the time since.

The trust told the Telegraph in a statement, "As part of our ongoing work, we’ve undertaken a project which explores our collections to ensure they are as accessible as possible."

Critics have rushed to defend Shakespeare following reports of the efforts to downplay the Bard's greatness and identity and the trust's efforts to effectively globalize his town.

"For the last 300 years, Europe and the West have stood head and shoulders above every other civilization," historian Rafe Heydel-Mankoo told GB News. "The most profound and sophisticated music, art, and culture has come from the West, and we need to lose the embarrassment and be proud to admit the genius of the West and celebrate that Shakespeare was an Englishman."

"That's what sticks in the craw of the anti-Western ideologues that run our cultural institutions," continued Heydel-Mankoo, "because they cannot stand that an Englishman is the greatest writer that the world has ever produced, and they will do anything to diminish and downplay that achievement."

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Blown Away

Upmarket European novelists make American publishers look classy; the emptier American fiction becomes, the more snobbish it gets. Reactionary content in the form of social description is not a problem, either. Reaction is to European writers as hypocrisy is to Americans. When a European says the unsayable, he allows Americans to discuss the unmentionable. This must explain why Michel Houellebecq (pronounced "Welbeck") is published in English, and why Annihilation, his latest and possibly last novel, is, though frequently dull and afflicted by the incompetences of literary fiction, very much worth reading.

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