Did Booker T. Washington Escort a White Woman? Don't Blame Booker Unduly, 1905

"Don’t Blame Booker Unduly," From The Gold Leaf, Henderson, Thursday, Sept. 14, 1905.

Coincidently with the report of the resignation of former Mayor Drennen of Birmingham as a member of the board of trustees of Tuskegee Institute on account of the Booker Washington-John Wanamaker demonstration at Saratoga, August 13, Booker Washington wired to Birmingham, August 20^th, his discovery of “misleading and false reports in Southern newspapers” referring to the occurrence, and saying “I did not escort any female member of Mr. Wanamaker’s family to or out of the dining-room.” His correction of that part of the report—which report was published originally in a New York newspaper August 14^th, and thence circulated in the South—and his accompanying explanation hardly graze the question upon which turned the criticism of those Southerners who in the past in a mistaken conception of the situation, were prone to stand by Booker Washington when placed by accident or by incident in false positions, even at the risk of being themselves misunderstood. Such Southerners have long since discovered their mistake, and yet they are not inclined to blame Booker unduly. Their feelings toward him are rather those of regret at another and signal exhibition of reasons for hopelessness about the negro in some particulars. Nor do they unduly blame Wanamaker. They know his exceeding narrow limitation and recognize that as a partner of Robert C. Ogden he could not fail to be interested in the annual $12,000 Wanamaker advertising Ogden train, and to be misled by the reception given to that train in the South.

Wanamaker, in entertaining Washington as his guest, could not possibly have intended to affront a great body of whites at the South. He undoubtedly is aware of the views of his partner, Ogden, on the race question, and could not have escaped the impression naturally created by the rapturous intimacy with Odgenism of “representative” and “distinguished Southern educators,” of “Educational statesmen,” etc., who have been co-agents or co-workers with Booker for Ogdenism in the cause of the “democratization of the South” banking upon special interest in the negro on the part of individuals who never will know the negro. It was perfectly natural for Wanamaker, of pious mind, to attribute such ecstatic intimacy to anything but a misguided philosophy, or interest in a salary list provided by millionaire “Philanthropy,” or an overweaning desire for notoriety on the part of individuals who had been pondering upon great problems in “lonely isolation,” or even the instinct to play petty politics and to ride upon an apparent wave of popularity. His inclination to take that view of the outgivings of the “representative Southerners” in train of Ogdenism must have been strengthened by a statement last spring of a young president of a Virginia institution, to the effect that the support of Ogdenism embraced everything in the South “except provincial narrowness, petty animosity, selfish motive and ignoble purpose,” and that its representative gathering was “dominantly made up of leading men of our own Southern country who are devoted to the traditions and the ideals of our fathers, who are not ashamed of the land that gave them birth, and who, in keeping faith with the past, are also loyal to their American citizenship and ready for the new duties of this new day, and for the manifest destiny that awaits them.”

If Mr. Wanamaker is thoroughly acquainted with his business partner’s career in “philanthropy” during the past 40-odd years, and if he has carefully read all the literature of Ogdenism, he cannot be blamed unduly for regarding the ephemeral error of a limited class in Southern education as final conviction at the South, for thinking that the glare of noise pyrotechnics below the Potomac was the dawn of a new American, and, falling into the consequent mistake that Booker at the North was the manifest destiny of the negro of the South, for endeavoring in smooth and snug “philanthropy” to hasten the time appointed. Hence the blame for Booker’s being concerned in an event which can only be to the detriment of his race must be laid primarily at the doors of those Southern whites pictured as “representative,” who fell into the snare of Ogdenism, willingly or unwillingly, and who in some cases are doubtless as sorry for themselves as their friends are for them.