Booker T. Washington Delivers a Lesson from Socrates

ABSTRACT

This article examines a lecture that Booker T. Washington delivered to the Tuskegee literary society in order to argue for Washington’s place within a Black Socratic tradition. Readings of this obscure speech invite new understandings of Washington’s habits of public address, including his pedagogical practice as a teacher of rhetoric, and illuminates how rhetors have mobilized the myth of Socrates to galvanize marginalized communities to civic action.

Notes

1. I would like to thank RR reviewers David Holmes and Keith Miller for providing insightful, generous feedback. Their reviewer notes greatly improved the focus and clarity of this manuscript.

2. For example, in 1859, author-activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper assured the abolitionist John Brown that, just as the fatal hemlock failed to negate Socrates’s moral victory over the corrupt elites of antiquity, his impending execution would not extinguish the spirit of his fight for abolition (Harper 49). In 1880, Richard Greener, Harvard University’s first African American graduate and the University of South Carolina’s first African American faculty member, similarly commended Brown, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and other abolitionists for following in the footsteps of Socrates—a “street preacher” who “believed in the immutability of moral truth” and who championed justice even in the face of controversy (qtd. in Mailloux 701). Michele Kennerly discusses the Socratic references found in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” both delivered in the mid-twentieth century (202–04). Most recently, Sean Carter, better known as hip-hop artist Jay-Z, avowed that he was the Plato to Christopher Wallace’s Socrates, a disciple laboring to ensure that the world would never forget his sage’s name (West “How”).

3. In The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African American Reclamation of the West, Eric Ashley Hairston counts “the industrial and economic plans of Booker T. Washington” among African American liberatory projects that “minimized or rejected the classics” (10).

4. There is little recoverable information about the institution’s literary society. Citing an archived institutional bulletin, Cheryl Ferguson, a Tuskegee archival assistant, writes that a literary society was founded at the time of the school’s 1881 founding and served as a place where students “held weekly meetings, in which they ha[d] opportunities for extemporaneous speaking, and of acquiring themselves with parliamentary practices.”

5. Hereafter referred to as “Lessons.”

6. See Geneva Smitherman’s Talkin’ and Testifyin’ and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey for extensive discussions of signifying; See Houston Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance for an excellent discussion of Washington’s donning of the “minstrel mask.”

7. For a sampling of work that discusses Washington’s acts of sabotaging black contemporaries who threatened his authority, see Louis Harlan’s “Booker T. Washington and The Voice of the Negro, 1904–1907” and the introduction of Ira Dworkin’s edited collection of Pauline Hopkins’ nonfiction writing, Daughter of the Revolution.

8. Paul Stob offers an insightful conversation about how geographical realities helped to shape Washington’s rhetorical style.

9. Emphasis in the original text.

10. Joseph C. Price was a noted Black educator and orator.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mudiwa Pettus

Mudiwa Pettus is an Assistant Professor at Medgar Evers College, a senior college of the City University of New York. Her research interests are located at the intersections of rhetoric/rhetorical education, historiography, public intellectualism, and racial politics, with a focus on the Post-Reconstruction/Pre-Harlem Renaissance era. Readers are welcome to contact her at [email protected]