Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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Although Washington worked surreptitiously to support various political causes, including voting rights, he publically advocated for social reform through economic advancement rather than political agitation, with impoverished blacks, through education and hard work, achieving financial independence. Not surprisingly, this advocacy came under withering attack from many black leaders, particularly those from the North, including most famously W. E. B. Du Bois; and that criticism only grew after Washington’s death, reaching a crescendo during and after the Civil Rights movement. But as a number of recent historians have pointed out, Washington’s options for improving the South’s black populace during his lifetime were extremely limited. As even Washington’s biographer Louis R. Harlan has noted, “understanding Washington’s message requires an understanding of the era in which he sent it. It was the worst time for black people since slavery, a time of lynchings, race riots, personal humiliations, disenfranchisement, and the deepening and spreading of segregation” (“Up From Slavery as History and Biography” 29-30). David Leverenz has observed that “Washington was not interested in what [Orlando] Patterson has recently called ‘macho suicide.’ Instead of directly confronting the terrorizing practices that preserved white power and privilege, Washington performed a manliness based on self-control and mastery” (160). Such self-control and mastery, as presented in his autobiographies, came only through diligence and hard work, manual and otherwise; photographs of Washington, which were carefully posed and edited (he hired the best photographers available), typically show him either working in a garden or field, suggesting from where he had come, or sitting in dignified pose, suggestive of where his hard work had brought him.