Up From Slavery and An Invitation To The White House
Washington published five books during his lifetime with the aid of ghost-writers Max Bennett Thrasher and Robert E. Park. They were compilations of speeches and essays:
- The Story of My Life and Work (1900)
- Up From Slavery (1901)
- The Story of the Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery (2 vol 1909)
- My Larger Education (1911)
- The Man Farthest Down (1912)
In an effort to inspire the "commercial, agricultural, educational, and industrial advancement" of African Americans, Washington founded the National Negro Business League (NNBL) in 1900.
When Washington's autobiography, Up From Slavery, was published in 1901, it became a bestseller and had a major impact on the African American community, its friends and allies. One of the results was a dinner invitation to the White House in 1901 by President Theodore Roosevelt.
Eventual Governor of Mississippi James K. Vardaman and Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina indulged in racist personal attacks in response to the invitation. Vardaman described the White House as "so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stable", and declared "I am just as much opposed to Booker T. Washington as a voter as I am to the cocoanut-headed, chocolate-colored typical little coon who blacks my shoes every morning. Neither is fit to perform the supreme function of citizenship." Tillman opined that "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again."
Austro-Hungarian ambassador to the United States Ladislaus Hengelmüller von Hengervár, who was visiting the White House on the same day, claimed to have found a rabbit's foot in Washington's coat pocket when he mistakenly put on the coat; The Washington Post elaborately described it as "the left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit, killed in the dark of the moon". The Detroit Journal quipped the next day, "The Austrian ambassador may have made off with Booker T. Washington's coat at the White House, but he'd have a bad time trying to fill his shoes."
Read more about this topic: Booker T. Washington
Famous quotes containing the words invitation, white and/or house:
“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Every time I embrace a black woman I’m embracing slavery, and when I put my arms around a white woman, well, I’m hugging freedom. The white man forbade me to have the white woman on pain of death.... I will not be free until the day I can have a white woman in my bed.”
—Eldridge Cleaver (b. 1935)
“This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the
Wonderer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by
weeping—page beyond Psalm—Last change of mine and Naomi—to Gods perfect Darkness—Death, stay thy phantoms!”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)