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At one point in Working with the Hands, Washington characterizes Tuskegee’s students as “artisans” (95), a designation that points to another way for understanding the reformist thinking underlying Washington’s industrial education: that its educational philosophy shares ties with the Arts and Crafts Movement that was popular both in England and the United States during this time. While it is probably going too far to designate Washington, as Michael Bieze does, as “Ruskin in the Black Belt” (“Ruskin in the Black Belt” 24), Bieze nonetheless makes a convincing case that Washington was aware of the Arts and Crafts movement and deliberately drew from it, not only to promote himself and Tuskegee, but to humanize the image of black workers and to promote the importance of manual labor for well-being. Evidence of Washington’s ties with Arts and Crafts thinking abounds. A number of Washington’s books, for instance, were lavishly laid out in with recognizably Arts and Crafts designs, contextualizing Washington and industrial education visually, if not specifically, within the Movement. Washington also published in The Fra, the magazine of Elbert Hubbard, an Arts and Crafts proponent and organizer of a workers’ community in Aurora, NY. The Arts and Crafts aesthetic—whose central idea, as Bieze points out—was the “harmonious interplay of labor, art, and morality” (Booker T. Washington 87), certainly dovetailed with Washington’s ideals, with both foregrounding the idea that, in their dedication to craft, artisans transformed themselves and their world. Both movements, moreover, combined utopian idealism with down-to-earth practicality, suggesting that the rituals of everyday lives could themselves be forces for social change.