Reviews Of Books
The Life and Times of Booker T. Washington. By B. F. Riley, D.D., LL.D. Introduction by Edgar Y. Mullins, D.D., LL.D., President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Fleming H. Revell Company, New York, 1916. Pp. 301.
Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization. By Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe. Doubleday, Page & Company, 1916. Pp. 331.
Since the death of Dr. Booker T. Washington, the press has been loud in singing his praises and writers have hurriedly published sketches of his career. These first biographies unfortunately have been inadequate to furnish the public a proper review of the record of the distinguished man. In these two volumes before us, however, this requirement has certainly been met.
The first is a valuable work which must find its way into every up-to-date library in this country. It is an excellent estimate of the services of a distinguished Negro, written by a white man who is unselfishly laboring for the uplift of the black race. "Though of another race," says Dr. Riley, "the present biographer is not affected by the consciousness that he is writing of a Negro." Throughout this work the writer is true to this principle. He has endeavored to be absolutely frank in noting here and there the difficulties and handicaps by which white men of the South have endeavored to keep the Negro down. The aim of the author is so to direct attention to the needs of the Negro and so to show how this Negro demonstrated the capacity of the blacks that a larger number of white men may lend these struggling people a helping hand.
Primarily interested in the bearing of the educator's career on the conditions now obtaining in this country, the author has little to say about his private life, choosing rather to present him as a man of the world. Tracing his career, the author mentions his antecedent, his poverty, his training at Hampton, his first ventures and the establishment of Tuskegee. He then treats with more detail Dr. Washington's national prominence, widening influence, ability to organize, and increasing power. He carefully notes, too, the great educator's chief characteristics, his sane and balanced views, his belief in the cooperation of the two races, and his power to interpret one race to the other. It is mainly this portion of the book that makes this biography a work of incalculable value in the study of the Negro during the last quarter of the century.
The other biography of Booker T. Washington is a somewhat more intensive study of his life than that of Dr. Riley. The authors are Mr. Washington's confidential associate and a trained and experienced writer, sympathetically interested in the Negro because of the career of his grandmother, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." It contains a fitting foreword by Major R. R. Moton, Dr. Washington's successor, and a forceful preface by Ex-President Theodore Roosevelt. The book is well written and well illustrated.
These authors were chosen by Mr. Washington himself with the hope that they would produce "a record of his struggles and achievements at once accurate and reliable." Coming from persons so closely associated with the distinguished educator, the reader naturally expects some such treatment as the "Life and Letters of Booker T. Washington." A work of such scope, however, the authors themselves maintain is yet to be written. Passing over his childhood, early training and education, which they consider adequately narrated in "Up From Slavery," the authors have directed their attention toward making an estimate of the services of the educator during the last fifteen years of his life. Written with this purpose in view the work serves as a complement of Dr. Riley's book which is more concerned with the earlier period.
Each chapter is complete in itself, setting forth a distinct achievement or the manifestation of some special ability. Here we get an excellent account of the making of Tuskegee, the leadership of its founder, his attitude on the rights of the Negro, how he met race prejudice, the way in which he taught Negroes to cooperate, how he encouraged the Negro in business, what he did for the Negro farmer, his method of raising large sums of money, his skill in managing a large institution, and finally an appropriate estimate of the man.