Coincidentally, today is Booker T. Washington’s 165th Birthday: he was born April 5, 1856. In a time when racial disparities and tension were the real deal, rather than so much of this manufactured nonsense, Washington made this controversial statement in his 1911 book, My Larger Education.

“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

Washington described them as “problem profiteers”, and it is interesting that Booker and Barkley saw this so clearly. There are some people for whom it is more important to drive their agenda than it is to actually get things done and solve problems. If work is accomplished and problems are resolved, it means those profiteers can no longer earn their prestige or dollars. Both Booker T. Washington and Charles Barkley are the latter. Our political class and much of our legacy media are the former. //

It was at a second job in a local coalmine where he first heard two fellow works discuss the Hampton Institute, a school for formerly enslaved people in southeastern Virginia founded in 1868 by Brigadier General Samuel Chapman. Chapman had been a leader of Black troops for the Union during the Civil War and was dedicated to improving educational opportunities for African Americans.

Washington walked the 500 miles from Malden, Virginia to Southeastern Virginia to get to the Hampton Institute. //

Brigadier General Chapman was so impressed by Washington, that he was invited to return to Hampton as a teacher. Chapman then referred Washington for a role as principal of a new school for Blacks in Tuskegee, Alabama: The Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, now known as Tuskegee University. At age 25, Washington took on the task, and was there until his death in 1915.

Washington is too often seen as a supporter of segregationist views, and he and W.E.B. Du Bois famously battled in their writings over this. Washington encouraged Blacks to embrace skilled labor and the trades to build their own wealth as an avenue of integration, rather than Du Bois’s chosen method of pushing to change laws and forcefully integrate into what was at that time, white society.

In an 1895 speech which Du Bois dubbed, “The Atlanta Compromise,” Washington told a majority white audience in Atlanta that the way forward for Blacks was self-actualization to “dignify and glorify common labor.” Washington saw showing through actions and accomplishments that you are a valuable part of contributing society as a wiser path toward desegregation than some of the attempts being made by his contemporaries. Washington encouraged a measured approach, as opposed to blowing up the system:

“The wisest of my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than artificial forcing. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than to spend a dollar in an opera house.” //

So Barkley and Washington embody a powerful work ethic and an insatiable drive that sadly, is lacking in much of what is touted as “success” today. Instead of upping that quotient, some would rather blame a generation of Blacks’ lack of success on racism. //

Bottom line, both men encourage us to: Get our own. Then, OWN it. Then, BUILD wealth and legacy through it.

My people still have not exploited these lessons to their full extent. We’re still fighting the battles that W.E.B. Du Bois waged and that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others fought and won. Both should capture our attention, and where we have allowed that legacy of civil rights to erode, we need to shore it up. But what I most find is a fixation that no progress has been made. When someone like Barkley points out this is not the case and that certain actors are invested in ensuring we stay divided, his premise is questioned and marginalized, rather than examined for its veracity.

Washington had this to say in his autobiographical novel, Up From Slavery, page 103.

I said that the whole future of the Negro rested largely upon the question as to whether or not he should make himself, through his skill, intelligence, and character, of such undeniable value to the community in which he lived that the community could not dispense with his presence.