Read One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) for Free Online Page B

school’s upcoming bicentennial. The new structures included a dining hall whose administrators accepted Battle onto their staff. His place was clear. He was to meet the needs of the best and brightest of white America’s sons of privilege. Blacks worked but did not study at Yale; only forty-five were enrolled in the school’s undergraduate college in the century that started in 1850. 28
    In the third week of October 1901, a bulletin shocked America: Theodore Roosevelt had dined in the White House with Booker T. Washington. No president had ever afforded such hospitality to an African American. It seemed impossible to Battle, but it was true. Washington had been a guest in the national residence.
    Son of a black cook and a white man, Booker Taliaferro Washington had been born into slavery. Following the Civil War, as a sixteen-year-old, he labored in a saltworks and a coal mine. After two miners talked about a school where blacks could work to pay their way, he made a five-hundred-mile trek to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in eastern Virginia.
    With a mission of training blacks to become teachers, Hampton instilled a Congregationalist work ethic born of a sense that slavery had conditioned its former prisoners to be lazy and hedonistic. Washington excelled, and he discovered his life’s work as the creative genius behind the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
    Relying on student labor, he built the school from almost nothing and became a proponent of providing blacks with an industrial education, essentially training students to be tradesmen, such as carpenters and masons. Washington had no shortage of applicants, but he did have a shortage of money. He became adept at fund-raising, eventually recruiting as patrons Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan. America’s industrialists were happy to give to the right black man, and Washington fit the bill. In 1895, while Roosevelt was president of New York City’s board of police commissioners, Washington introduced the country to his philosophy in a groundbreaking address that essentially offered a racial bargain with four terms:
    He accepted the dominant white view that blacks were ill-prepared to participate in American citizenship.
    He rejected any insistence on immediate civil and political rights.
    He called on whites to bring blacks into the economic mainstream by supporting the kind of skills-based education offered at Tuskegee.
    And he took on faith that American society would become welcoming once blacks were productive members of the labor force.
    The enduring image drawn by Washington in this “Atlanta Compromise” was that of the races as separate fingers on a united hand. He told his white audience:
    As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. 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.
    Whites heard from Washington the ratification of their superior place in society. Blacks heard the coming of a leader to replace the deceased Frederick Douglass. Praise flowed from seemingly all quarters. President Grover Cleveland sent a congratulatory note: “Your words cannot fail to delight and encourage all who wish well for your race.”
    The judgments of history have been harsher to a man who came to be known both as the “Wizard of Tuskegee” and as “The Great Accommodator.” On the one hand, Washington was a master political tactician and educator; on the other, he avoided antagonizing whites even