Booker T. Washington : biography
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.".
Marriages and children
Booker T. Washington with his third wife Margaret and two sons. Washington was married three times. In his autobiography Up From Slavery, he gave all three of his wives credit for their contributions at Tuskegee. His first wife Fannie N. Smith was from Malden, West Virginia, the same Kanawha River Valley town where Washington had lived from age nine to sixteen. He maintained ties there all his life. Washington and Smith were married in the summer of 1882. They had one child, Portia M. Washington. Fannie died in May 1884.
Washington next wed Olivia A. Davidson in 1885. Born in Virginia, she had studied at Hampton Institute and the Massachusetts State Normal School at Framingham. She taught in Mississippi and Tennessee before going to Tuskegee to work. Washington met Davidson as a teacher at Tuskegee, where she was promoted to assistant principal there. They had two sons, Booker T. Washington Jr. and Ernest Davidson Washington, before she died in 1889.
In 1893 Washington married Margaret James Murray. She was from Mississippi and had graduated from Fisk University, a historically black college. They had no children together, but she helped rear Washington’s children. Murray outlived Washington and died in 1925.
Legacy
Washington was held in high regard by business-oriented conservatives, both white and black. Eric Foner argues that the freedom movement of the late nineteenth century changed directions so as to align itself with the new with America’s new economic and intellectual framework. Black leaders emphasized economic self-help and individual advancement into the middle class, as a more fruitful strategy than political agitation. Washington’s famous Atlanta speech of 1895 marked this transition, as it called on blacks to develop their farms, their industrial skills and their entrepreneurship as the next stage in emerging from slavery. He repudiated the abolitionist emphasis on unceasing agitation for full equality, advising blacks that it was counterproductive to fight segregation at this point. Foner concludes that Washington’s support in the black community was strongly rooted in its widespread realization that frontal assaults on white supremacy were impossible, and the best way forward was to concentrate on building up the economic and social structures inside segregated communities. Eric Foner, ‘’Give The Liberty! An American History’’ (2008) p 659 C. Vann Woodward concluded, "The businessman’s gospel of free enterprise, competition, and laissez faire never had a more loyal exponent."
People called Washington the "Wizard of Tuskegee" because of his highly developed political skills, and his creation of a nationwide machine based on the black middle class, white philanthropy, and Republican Party support.
