Booker T. Washington: What’s Really Good?

Capo Status.

If you were like me, you spent the majority of your teenage years with a hefty, heartfelt “fuck you” for Mr. Booker T. Washington. It turns out we might’ve misjudged the man.

Booker T. Washington, the former slave who went on to found Tuskegee University in the heart of the south at a time when lynchings happened somewhere north of way too fucking often, gave a speech in 1895 telling Black folk of his day that it wasn’t the time to fight Jim Crow — to “cast your buckets where you are” — to use what they had and what they knew to eke out their own existences in the part of the country in which they could be hung for looking for a white woman.

Now, if that sounds both sensible and house-niggaish to you, you’re not alone. Noted mustache afficionado W.E.B. DuBois pretty much agreed, dubbing Washington’s speech the “Atlanta Compromise,” and calling Washington’s words too accommodating to the status quo.

For me, in high school, the story stopped there.

Turns out, that Washington had many a wealthy friend and benefactor. And what did he do with a lot of this money? Secretly funded a ton of legal challenges to voting exclusions and segregation in the south.

You know what time it is? It’s time for us to pair this very important historical tidbit with some very ghetto shit, of course!

For all my Harlem/Newark residents, this is for you:

Let’s ignore Jim Jones’ verse, and focus on Juelz, specifically this bar:

So I decided I’mma milk these crackers
For all their milk and crackers
Until I’m rich and these mills don’t matter

It’s a shame rap isn’t hundreds of years old, because if it was, I like the chances that Washington would’ve said exactly this to someone in his inner circle.

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