Those who have visited the museum may have spotted the display board mentioning Andrew Carnegie’s support of African-American education, and one of its leading figures, Booker T. Washington. In recognition of Black History Month (UK), let’s find out more about his achievements.
Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Virginia in 1856. After emancipation following the American Civil War, he attended schools in Hampton (Virginia) and in Washington DC. In 1881 he was hired as principal of the newly founded Tuskegee Institute, a technical-vocational school in Tuskegee, Alabama. When Washington arrived in Tuskegee, he discovered that the school existed in name only - neither land nor buildings had been acquired. Undaunted, he began fund-raising and with a loan secured from his old alma mater, Hampton Institute, purchased some land and an abandoned brick factory. Within a few years, the students had made enough bricks to build a classroom, a dining hall, a girl’s dormitory and a chapel.
Image: Carnegie Library at Tuskegee Institute (ACBM 1986/22)
According to Washington’s autobiography, he first approached Andrew Carnegie to solicit funds to build a library for Tuskegee Institute in 1890, but was turned down. He contacted Carnegie again in December 1900 and this time managed to secure $20,000 funding. It is unclear what caused Carnegie to change his mind. Perhaps he felt more generous, knowing that the sale of his steel empire (which was publicly announced in early 1901), would generate him unimaginable wealth? Or perhaps technical-vocational education was fresh in his mind, as he had only just created a technical institute (now Carnegie Mellon University) for the city of Pittsburgh. Or perhaps Carnegie was heartened by Booker T. Washington’s pledge that: “the money which you would give would not only supply the building, but the erection of the building would give a large number of students an opportunity to learn the building trades, and the students would use the money paid to them to keep themselves in school”.
Carnegie visited the Tuskegee Institute library in 1906 and was impressed by the size of the building and quality of the work, especially considering the relatively small nature of his donation (in comparison, he donated $150,000 in 1904 to build a library for Penn State University). He decided to donate a further $600,000 in U.S. Steel bonds to the Institute, and offered an individual grant for Booker T. Washington. Washington became the leading figure for black technical-vocational education and attracted funding from numerous other philanthropists such as John D. Rockefeller and George Eastman. However, Washington’s achievements were not held in high regard by other African-American leaders, such as William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, who criticised Washington for being too moderate and not campaigning for radical change in racial inequalities.
While advocating for change in the American South in the early 1900s was challenging and Booker T. Washington’s cautiousness may be understandable, one does wonder if philanthropists like Carnegie should have done more to seek to address racial inequality. For example, this could have included offering more funding not only to technical schools but to Black liberal arts colleges, or asking towns in which he helped build libraries to guarantee admission to people of all races and nationalities. We cannot change Carnegie’s past, but we can change our own present and future. Which path will you choose?
