r was an unknown white man. A former slave who had become a successful farmer, and a white politician in search of the Negro vote in Macon County, obtained financial support for a training school for blacks in Tuskegee, Ala. When the board of commissioners asked the head of Hampton to send a principal for their new school, they had expected the principal to be white. Instead Washington arrived in June 1881. He began classes in July with thirty students in a shanty donated by a black church. Later he borrowed money to buy an abandoned plantation nearby and moved the school there. By the time of his death in Tuskegee in 1915, the institute (now a university) had some 1,500 students, more than 100 well-equipped buildings, and a large faculty. Washington believed that blacks could promote their constitutional rights by impressing Southern whites with their economic and moral progress. He wanted them to forget about political power and concentrate on their farming skills and learning industrial trades. Brick making, mattress making, and wagon building were among the courses Tuskegee offered. Its all-black faculty included the famous agricultural scientist George Washington Carver. Washington was preeminently a man of his times, a man not only having a rare sense of historical timing but one who, in the words of Du Bois, enjoyed "a thorough oneness with his age." Living in a period of unprecedented economic and industrial expansion, Washington sought by every device, covert and overt, to involve the recently freed Black man in America's economic expansion. In attempting to achieve this objective, he became very much the pragmatic realist. Apparently Washington received the white world's acclaim because what he attempted to do did not disturb the status quo; he provided minimal Black achievement within traditional political and economical structures. By 1910 it was evident Washington had been granted more power than any Black man has ever...
