Works of Booker T. Washington - Booker T. Washington [219]
Marriages and children
Booker T. Washington with his third wife Margaret and two sons.
Washington was married three times. In his autobiography Up From Slavery, he gave all three of his wives credit for their contributions at Tuskegee. He emphatically said that he would not have been successful without them.
Fannie N. Smith was from Malden, West Virginia, the same Kanawha River Valley town where Washington had lived from age nine to sixteen. He maintained ties there all his life. Washington and Smith were married in the summer of 1882. They had one child, Portia M. Washington. Fannie died in May 1884..
Washington next wed Olivia A. Davidson in 1885. Davidson was born in Ohio and studied at Hampton Institute and the Massachusetts State Normal School at Framingham. She taught in Mississippi and Tennessee before going to Tuskegee to work. Washington met Davidson when she was a teacher at Tuskegee. She became the assistant principal there. They had two sons, Booker T. Washington Jr. and Ernest Davidson Washington, before she died in 1889.
Washington's third marriage was in 1893 to Margaret James Murray. She was from Mississippi and was a graduate of Fisk University, also a historically black college. They had no children together, but she helped rear Washington's children. Murray outlived Washington and died in 1925.
Politics and the Atlanta Compromise
Washington's 1895 Atlanta Exhibition address was viewed as a "revolutionary moment" by both African-Americans and whites across the country. He was supported by W.E.B. Du Bois at the time but years later the two had a falling out due to difference in direction over the remedy required to reverse disenfranchisement. After the falling out, Du Bois and his supporters took to erroneously referring to the Atlanta Exposition speech as the "Atlanta Compromise" speech to illustrate their belief that Washington was too accommodating to white interests.
Washington advocated "go slow" accommodationism. This required African-Americans to accept the sacrifice of political power, civil rights, and higher education for the youth that existed in the current system. His belief was that African-Americans should "concentrate all their energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South." Washington valued the "industrial" education, as it provided critical skills for the jobs then available to the majority of African-Americans at the time. It would be these skills that would lay the foundation for the creation of stability that the African-American community required in order to move forward. He believed that in the long term "blacks would eventually gain full participation in society by showing themselves to be responsible, reliable American citizens." His approach advocated for an initial step towards equal rights, rather than full equality under the law. It would be this step that would provide the economic power to back up their demands for equality in the future. This action, over time, would provide the proof to a deeply prejudiced white America that they were not in fact "'naturally' stupid and incompetent."
This stance was contrary to what many blacks from the North envisioned. Du Bois wanted blacks to have the same "classical" liberal arts education as whites did, along with voting rights and civic equality. He believed that an elite he called the Talented Tenth would advance to lead the race to a wider variety of occupations. The source of division between Du Bois and Washington was generated by the differences in how African-Americans were treated in the North versus the South. Many in the North felt that they were being "'led', and authoritatively spoken