By MÁRIO MAESTRI*
The praise of BT Washington, under the wings of the Democratic Party, as always, is acclimated, in a haphazard way, to the already intoxicated airs of Brazil
Booker Taliaferro Washington was born on April 5, 1856, the son of an enslaved woman who worked as a cook on a small, rustic farm in southwestern Virginia, owned by a slave owner named Burroughs. We have no information about his father, who he suggests was a white man living on a nearby property. At the age of nine, Booker T. Washington was freed, along with his mother, Jane, sister, Amanda, and older brother John, upon the surrender of the South in the Civil War in 1865. He was the only mulatto of the three children of your mother. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.5; GLEDHILL, 2020, 76-7.]
Booker T. Washington and his small family moved to Malden, in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia, where his stepfather and his younger sister's father were. There, he worked, with his family, as a manual laborer, in a salt oven and coal mine, among other hard manual occupations. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.24.] Despite the opposition of his stepfather, who preferred to see him working at the mouth of the furnace, Booker T. Washington attended paid elementary school for a few hours a day and not assiduously.
When, upon introducing himself at school, the teacher asked his name, Booker adopted his stepfather's first name as his surname, seeing that “all the children had at least two names”. To his last name, a “T” was added, for Taliaferro, a name that his mother would have given him at birth, but which had been forgotten. Very soon, due to the need to contribute to family support, he started studying at night, irregularly, paying for teachers who, often, knew little. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p. 34, 36.]
Climbing to success
In 1900, BT Washington wrote his memoirs, Up From Slavery: an Autobiography, when he had already become an educator, businessman and black ideologue of national reference. [WASHINGTON.] In the brief book, produced by the pen of MB Thrasher, host writer white, one of the many writers he would use in his life to produce his writings. Despite its performative objective, the autobiography constitutes a valuable testimony about the last times of slavery, about the times of “Reconstruction” postbellum and about the advent and reign of the despotic apartheid.
Booker T. Washington's reports present very harsh scenarios, with regard to work relations, general conditions of existence, fragile family ties, hopes awakened, and then disappointed, by the period of Reconstruction [1865-1877], known by the enslaved and then free black population in the southern United States. [CLEMENTI, 1974.]
Social and human landscapes that, like other accounts of former slaves, contradict prestigious historiographical works on an almost happy American slavery, where enslaved workers, in incessant negotiations with their enslavers, practically led them by the nose. Pious and fanciful narratives, about a past that tends to have no major contradictions, taken up without delay by Brazilian historians. [MAESTRI, 2015; GENOVESE, 1988; FLORENTINO & GÓES, 1997.]
And, in Booker T. Washington's account, these are reports not produced by the pen of crazy abolitionists or angry leftist historians, always presented with enormous ill will towards the slaveholders, by the current historiographic rehabilitation of American and Brazilian slavery. [GORENDER, 2016.] These are, on the contrary, narratives from a witness who lived through those difficult years, but was interested above all in winning the sympathy of the masters of the new southern order, many of them former slaveholders, and the capitalists of the North, to continue receiving the donations on which he built his little empire. Testimony in agreement with that of countless other captives who left us stories about their lives. [PARKER, 1998; ARMELLIN, 1975.]
Eating paragraphs, sentences and words
Booker T. Washington's autobiography was belatedly known in Brazil, in 1940, under the title Memoirs of a black man, in translation by Graciliano Ramos who, being a radical defender of economy in narrative, did not give in to the temptation of correcting bad literature, thus turning from an exceptional fiction writer into a terrible translator. He himself would confess about the book in question: “The man came straight, made some great observations, and suddenly he was completely confused. All the time, he repeated ideas, used unnecessary words, and made turkey circles. I cut out an infinite number of mistakes, and there are still many left.” [MORAES, apus GLEDHILL, 2020, p. 194; WASHINGTON, 1940, 2020.]
Our greatest fiction writer recognizes BT Washinton's decision and skill, as well as his limited intellectual gifts. Above all, Graciliano Ramos, coming from the sertão, where he watches over despotic coronelismo, which he never stopped denouncing and combating, as a citizen, as a political activist, as a fiction writer, would be horrified by Booker's demand that the exploited and raped black people of the southern The United States would keep its head gacha and “in the elections, vote for the tickets of its former masters”, repeating the halt vote of oligarchic Brazil.
Em Atlantic crossings: Reflections on Booker T. Washington and Manuel Querino, from 2020, English historian Sabrina Gledhill undertakes a broad effort to recover BT Washington. In this important work, she brings together the views on Booker of Graciliano Ramos and WEB Du Bois, the most tireless black activist against the apartheid southern, as they are both communists. An approach that would make both of them proud, even if that is not the author's intention.
As for the proposal, and passant, by the preface to Sabrina Gledhill's book, about a racist Graciliano Ramos, it is better to leave it alone, without comments, so that it dies in its incongruity, like another account of the endless rosary of absurdities produced in recent times, with emphasis on identity authors and the like. [GLEDHILL, 2020, p.194, 19.]
Undertakeblack fingerism
BT Washington's memoirs also allow us to penetrate deeply into the unique praxis and worldview of this black man with an iron will, an unusual sense of opportunity and an unwavering commitment to his success. A protagonist who, for more than two decades, until his death in 1915, and even after, stood out as a pioneering reference for the proposal of black entrepreneurship and the integration of the Afro-descendant community into racist southern society postbellum.
Recalling his years as a free worker almost as a child, Booker T. Washington describes the terror he experienced working in the coal mine, exploited to meet the needs of the lime kilns, where he also worked. He often got lost in the labyrinths of the mine tunnels, where the light he carried would often go out, plunging him into a deep and tenebrous darkness. And accidents due to premature explosions of gunpowder charges and cave-ins were, he pointed out, not uncommon. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.38]
It was, however, while working in the mine that he heard two workers talk about a special school for blacks, opened “somewhere” in Virginia. For him, it was like an annunciation, brought from heaven by two black angels, who revealed to him the existence of a micro paradise for black people on earth. “[…] I immediately decided to go to that school, even though I had no idea where it was, […], or how I was going to reach it […].” [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.43.]
By the hand of his devoted mother, Booker T. Washington was employed, perhaps for a year and a half, as a domestic servant in the house of the Ruffner couple, northerners who owned the salt oven and coal mine where, for little change, he and his family worked hard. . Under the orders of his demanding and detail-oriented Yankee boss, for five dollars a month, he can glimpse the domestic habits of the northern white ruling classes. Exaggerating the colors, for the reasons we will see below, he proposed in his autobiography that the “lessons” he learned there “were as valuable […] as any education I have received […] since then […].” [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.44.]
But that Five Hundred Miles
In 1872, at the age of possibly sixteen, with almost no resources for a three-hundred-mile journey through a state where racism and classism were raging with violence, Booker left to enroll at the “Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute”. The decision with which the young man overcame the multiple obstacles of the journey to reach the school that he saw as an almost paradise speaks of his willpower, creativity and flexibility. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p. 47-48, 62.]
The Hampton Institute, a private normal school for black youth and adults of both sexes, was founded in 1868, on the banks of the Hampton River, in Virginia, by the American Missionary Association. It was led by General Samuel Chapman Armstrong [1839-1893], a black regimental officer during the war. The institution was rooted in the proposals of northern abolitionists to provide elementary education that responded to what they considered to be the needs and capabilities of the freed population. These schools began their activities in a precarious manner, even during the conflict, in the shadow of unionist troops led by abolitionist officers who advanced victoriously into the Confederate states.
The Hampton Institute, today a private university for blacks, was created when hopes were strong for a political and social “Reconstruction” of the southern slave society destroyed by force of arms. At the age of sixteen, after his risky internal journey through the State of Virginia, Booker entered the desired educational institution, a large three-story brick building, which he claimed was the “largest and most beautiful building” he had ever seen. Soon, he was hired as a “caretaker”, certainly a euphemism for “handyman”, as a way of paying part of the cost of tuition, accommodation and food. The majority of the annual fee was paid for by one of the many philanthropists who supported the institution. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p. 53.]
At the Hampton Institute, Booker T. Washington claimed to have been introduced to completely unknown habits: eating “at regular times”, at a table with a tablecloth and napkin; wash in a bathtub; use a “toothbrush”; sleep in a bed with “two sheets”. He proposes that perhaps the “most valuable lesson” learned at the institute was “daily bathing.” [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.58, 60.] Daily acts that he had certainly become accustomed to, even if he did not practice them, during his long service as a domestic servant for the Ruffner family.
Glorious return
In June 1875, Booker T. Washington completed his training at the Hampton Institute, something like a secondary course that prepared him to be an elementary school teacher. After his return to his family home in Malden, West Virginia, surrounded by the admiration of the small town's black community for his social and cultural progress, the young professor did not rest on his laurels. He began to implement the pedagogy and worldview learned at the Hampton Institute, with his Yankee teachers, whose main axes were the civilization of black people through Western hygienic practices; their manual “education for work” and, consequently, the impropriety of their desires for “literary education”. Program that Booker disseminated and implemented with unexpected success by his northern teachers.
For Booker T. Washington, the “toothbrush” would be a more far-reaching “agent of civilization”, standing out among other hygienic habits. [WASHINGTON, 1900, 76.] A practice of no importance for emancipating exploited workers and peasants, but excellent for caring for teeth, as the case of Antonio Gramsci proves. The Italian Marxist thinker discovered this strange instrument, through the hands of his dedicated sister-in-law, when his teeth were already damaged, in prison, where he produced his renowned writings... without ever brushing his teeth! [MAESTRI, 2020, 259, 264, 271.] Not only in Sardinia, but in countless regions of rural and working-class Europe, toothbrushes were little used, if not unknown, even in the 1960s.
In the fall of 1878, Booker T. Washington left to study for eight months at Wayland Seminary in New York. Washington D.C., a city where a large black population flocked in search of better living conditions after liberation. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.90.] Still in Washington DC, he accepted the invitation of a “committee of whites”, to campaign for the choice of the city of Charleston, as capital of the State of Virginia, “just eight kilometers away”. Malden”, where he and his family lived. Accepting the invitation and the assignment, he spent almost “three months lecturing in different parts of the state”. At that time, the young elementary school teacher was already seen by the southern white ruling classes, at least regionally, as an educated, intelligent and, above all, trustworthy black man. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p. 93.]
In the summer of 1879, at the age of 24, he received an invitation from General Armstrong, president of the Hampton Institute, to go and work there as a “teacher”, “pursue some additional studies” and take responsibility for “seventy-five” “savage Indians”, that the school sought in the “Indigenous Territory”, for a pioneering experience. He would, in his own assessment, have performed satisfactorily in the thorny mission, despite the students' resistance to “cutting their long hair, stopping using blankets and stopping smoking”. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p. 98.]
Civilizing savages
For Booker T. Washington, it was essential that the natives abandon those habits, since “no white American would ever” consider another “race” as “completely civilized until” it wore the “white man’s clothes”, ate the “food of the white man”, spoke the “white man’s language” and professed the “white man’s religion”. A vision, from the world of the periphery, still embraced today by many Americans of all colors and skins. He records his fear of possible anti-black racism among his native students, since the population of the “Indian Territory” would have owned “a large number of slaves during the time of slavery”. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.98.]
At the Hampton Institute, Booker T. Washington also worked at a new night school, where students “worked ten hours during the day”, mainly in the institution’s sawmill and laundry, attending “school for two hours at night”, receiving, in return for their hard work, instructional time, food and pocket change. An imbalance between work and education that was part of what he had experienced and learned at the Hampton Institute, considered a fundamental element in the teaching of the black population after slavery. They were, therefore, private, non-public schools for black people, financed substantially with the monthly fees and work of their students and donations from the black and rich community. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.104.]
In 1881, Booker T. Washington experienced a great leap forward in his process of professional and social advancement. That year, on the recommendation of General Armstrong, he was chosen to direct a normal and industrial school for young black people, of both sexes, a proposal made by “some gentlemen from Alabama”, in the blink of an eye, a former slave, converted into a trader and banker, George W. Campbell, and a former slave, Lewis Adams (1842-1905), who had progressed as a free artisan, having learned “three trades during the days of slavery.” [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.121; DU BOIS, 2021, note 83.]
The private school would be opened in Tuskegee, an agglomeration in Alabama, with around two thousand inhabitants, in the Black Belt, “Black Belt”, where, in some regions, the Afro-descendant population outnumbered the white population, by almost six to one. The enormous black population density was due to the fertility of the regional dark lands, which spread across the southern states, hence the name Black Belt. At the time of slavery, he had led to the massive purchase of legions of factory workers, harshly exploited by slave planters. [DU BOIS, 2021, note 204; WASHINGTON, 1900, p.108.]
Hard life of almost free men
In Tuskegee, before applying to the school organization, Booker T. Washington traveled through the region, learning about the harsh and miserable living conditions of the now free black population. It was commonly exploited by sharecroppers and tenants of small plots of land, around three hectares, planting almost exclusively cotton trees. Black peasants covered in debt and with their crops mortgaged, due to fluctuations in cotton on the international market, the high land rents demanded by former slaveholders and the high prices of consumer products purchased from traders. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.115; DU BOIS, 2021, p. 135 et seq.]
“With few exceptions, I discovered that the crops were mortgaged […] and that most colored farmers were in debt.” “In plantation districts […], as a rule, the whole family slept in one room”, also frequently occupied by relatives and household members. “There was rarely anywhere in the hut where you could even wash your face and hands.” “The common diet […] was fatty pork and corn” and, in the worst case, “cornbread and black peas cooked in plain water”. The “sole objective” of the black peasants seemed to him to be “to plant nothing but cotton”, often even “at the door of the hut”. There were houses with “just a fork”. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.114.]
With public funds only to pay the teachers, Booker T. Washington had to raise the school, paid for by the students, from its foundations, in a non-allegorical sense. It was inaugurated on July 4, 1881, in rented barracks, with around fifty students, some of them black teachers from primary schools, with little training. He was supported by a young teacher from Ohio, a very light mulatta, who would become his wife.
In addition to traditional teaching, Booker T. Washington and his future wife resumed the practices and teachings of the Hampton Institute of instilling in students concern for personal care, social behavior, and the love of working with their hands, since, in that institution, they would not believe that black people were in a position to achieve much more. So, it was about four years ago that the “Reconstruction” movement was dismantled, when the “Great Conciliation” was proposed, between the ruling classes of the North and South. With the withdrawal of federal occupation troops from the South, the former slaveholders conquered the past hegemony over the former Confederate states. [GLEDHILL, 2020, 49, 84; WASHINGTON, 1900, p.119 et seq.; CLEMENTI, 1974.]
Cheap work force
Very soon, the Tuskegee Institute established itself on a former slave farm, purchased at a low price, with a loan granted by General JFB Marshall, Treasurer of the Hampton Institute. Having cleared an uncultivated field, teachers and students planted eight hectares. Subsequently, a pottery workshop, a carpentry workshop, a mattress factory, etc. were organized, all driven by the semi-free labor force of the students, generally reluctant to work with their hands, which they had always done, and came in search of training. intellectual, delivered by dropper. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.129-31.]
Of the forty school buildings, small and large, completed in 1900, thirty-six would have been built with the sweat of the students, who desperately sought, during their holidays, to get a job, to cover what they owed to the Institute. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.149.] The emphasis on technical education was more than a healthy reaction to the excessive attraction, in the freed community, for a bookish and humanistic education, seen as a talisman capable of guaranteeing progression without work, as teachers or pastors, as proposed by BT Washinton.
It was also, on the one hand, a reflection of the former southern slave elites, with extensive bookish training, and, on the other, a response to the real possibilities temporarily opened up by Reconstruction. During that period, blacks held political and administrative responsibilities in the South, under the protection of Northern military forces.
In the young professor's proposal, burying one's face in work in agriculture and manual occupations, without other professional, political and civil ambitions, was the best and only path to the emancipation of the southern black community, in a distant and indeterminate period. Without aiming for prominent cultural, administrative or occupational positions or claiming “civil and political” rights, the former captives were supposed to become disciplined and peaceful farmers, blacksmiths, bricklayers, seamstresses, etc., especially in the service of the Southern white propertied classes.
In doing so, BT Washington and his epigones promised, the former captives and their children would achieve, without screams and gnashing of teeth, better living conditions for themselves and the respect of their new masters, who would grant them, voluntarily, without being pressured. , the fullness of civil and political rights… when they considered that their former captives were in a position to exercise them. It was everything the southern ruling classes wanted. Meanwhile, the accelerated Jim Crow Laws and Black Codes, approved in state assemblies and municipal councils, continued to be harshly applied. And black people of all ages were lynched in the southern states, especially Alabama, with unusual cruelty. [CLEMENTI, 1974, p. 85 et seq.]
The capitalists open the guaiaca
The construction of the Tuskegee Institute, in addition to the hard efforts of its students, was initially largely due to donations, which really counted, especially from wealthy southern families. They most commonly saw, in the proposals put forward by the Hampton and Tuskegee institutes, a path that would guarantee order and some progress for the black community kept in submission.
BT Washinton always enjoyed the trust of large segments of wealthy southern ex-slavers and, very soon, of northern capitalists, also enchanted by his preaching against social unrest, against the organization of the oppressed, against strikes and professional agitators. These donors generally shared the view of greater or lesser inferiority of people of African descent, without adhering to extremist supremacist views.
The private institutes Hampton and Tuskegee and similar institutions, supported by the tuition fees and work of the students themselves and by patrons and philanthropists, were seen and presented, by politicians and racist ideologues, as the best and only proposal for excellence in education for the southern black population, respectful of the principles of apartheid and without burdening public finances. BT Washington joined, at the age of 25, as director of the Tuskegee Institute, at the head of which he remained until his death in 1915, during this long period experiencing extremely prominent social, political and economic conditions.
In 1985, some one hundred years after its founding, Tuskegee Institution became the status university, under the same name, which contradicted the pedagogical proposal and worldview of its founder, who never held a university degree. Today, to live, feed, house and pursue an undergraduate degree at Tuskegee University, a student must pay just under one million reais in five years. This should not worry young black people without resources and with university aspirations. He can first enroll in the US armed forces or immediately take out student financing. In the first case, with luck, he returns physically unscathed from some of the many Yankee wars. In the second, he will be financially crippled for a good part of the rest of his life. [https://www.tuskegee.edu/]
Passing the hat
After the first few years, BT Washington dedicated little time to the classroom, spending most of his life in lectures, meetings, conferences, private visits, asking for funds, while never failing to water his garden abundantly. He ended up receiving financial support from philanthropists and enormously important millionaires, among many others, John D. Rockefeller, the first billionaire in history; George Eastman, founder of Kodak; Andrew Carnegie, the “King of Steel”; Julius Rosenwald, one of the owners of Sears stores; Henry H. Rogers, leader of Standard Oil and railway builder.
Henry H. Rogers, one of the richest men in the United States, not only opened his large wallet to Booker T. Washington, but also received him friendly at his summer homes and took him on excursions on his yacht. Among other perks, Andrew Carnegie sponsored Booker's trip to Europe, where he had tea with Queen Victoria, at Windsor Castle, while English imperialism exploited its African colonies, possessions and protectorates to the bone, let's say. [GLEDHILL, 2020, 85.]
Between 1890 and 1915, the year in which Booker T. Washington died, he was certainly the black public man with the greatest notoriety and power, enjoying enormous prestige among the black population and the white ruling classes. In October 1901, he was the first black person invited to dinner at the White House with the president. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), recently elected. The invitation was the subject of violent attack from politicians, newspapers, etc. southern whites, which forced presidential spokesmen to try to reduce the size of the invitation, from a formal dinner to a simple snack.
Among many others, Benjamin Tillman, leader of the Democratic Party and then governor of Mississippi, from 1890 to 1894, shouted that, with Booker dining at the White House, she was “so saturated with the smell”, of a “niggers”, “that the rats fled to the stables”. [DU BOIS, 2021, note. 66.] The angry supremacist outbreak made it clear that BT Washington's relative acceptance was to quiet the regional black community and that it could not, under any circumstances, raise their expectations.
black building
With its relationships, success and, above all, economic resources, BT Washington built a vast “legion” of “unconditional” supporters throughout the country, organized and unorganized, made up of teachers, pastors, journalists, writers, spies, community leaders, black businessmen, supporting, reproducing and defending their proposals. He controlled schools, associations, newspapers, publishers and so on, using his power network and millionaire resources in a reckless and relentless way to hurt black leaders and intellectuals who questioned him. Booker, who despised intellectuals, routinely hired ghostwriters to write their articles, books and laudatory biographies about him. [GLEDHILL, 2020, p. 98, 133.]
His prestige was consolidated and spread in the South and nationally with the famous speech of September 18, 1895, given at the inauguration of the important International and Cotton States Exposition, in Atlanta, Georgia which, at the turn of the century 20, had a million “blacks among its citizens”, more than any other state in the USA. State in which lynchings and violence of all types against the black population were common. [DU BOIS, 2021, p. 138.]
Months before that event, Booker T. Washington had received an invitation to join a committee of around twenty-five prominent white citizens of Georgia who would travel to Washington DC to ask for federal aid for the World's Fair. On the commission, there were three blacks, BT Washington and two bishops, all of them men considered trustworthy. In the capital, he successfully defended, in front of congressmen, that this initiative would bring together and promote the “material and intellectual growth” of the two races, white and black. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.207.]
As part of the Exhibition, a separate pavilion was built, as determined by the apartheid, the “Black Building”, to present the “progress of the black man since freedom”, in the South. All with the support and under the influence of BT Washington. Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes were featured prominently in the “Black Building.” To record the “good feeling” that prevailed “between the two races,” the committee of prominent white citizens of Georgia decided that a black speaker would also speak at the opening of the Exposition. Unanimously, as expected, the chosen one was BT Washington. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.208.]
A unique event
The speech of a black man at an event of such magnitude, in the South and in Georgia, buffeted by apartheid, it was a unique event, of extreme relevance, arousing enormous curiosity and expectation about the content of the chosen one's speech, among the white and black community. BT Washington focused his speech on the need for the convergence of the efforts of the two races for the success of southern society.
He asked the southern businessman and industrialist not to hire workers arrived from the north in the new industries, but to employ black people who, in the past, had, according to him, shown proof of dedication to their enslavers. In exchange, the southern black population would remain subject to white power, until the latter, on its own, decided to grant the citizen rights that had been confiscated from them. And this, when the black community achieved the conditions that, according to racist rhetoric, it lacked to participate in political decisions.
Booker T. Washington presented the proposal to repeat, post-slavery, the scenarios of the past falsely presented as idyllic, by those who had lived off the exploitation of the enslaved, if southern businessmen and industrialists of the new times hired blacks: “[…] you and your family will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding and unresentful people the world has ever seen” – always according to him.
And, he recalled, that, in his view, the southern black people had demonstrated pacifism and domestication, in the past, under slavery. “[…] we proved our loyalty [during slavery] […], caring for your children, watching your mothers and fathers at the sickbed, […] accompanying them to the graves with eyes filled with tears. ” And he concluded, promising, “in our humble way [of being], we will be at your side with” “devotion”, “ready to give our lives, if necessary, in defense of yours” in the new phase of southern life.
The love of the enslaved for the enslaver
Opting for the black worker, the new businessman from the South would not deal with workers of “foreign origin and strange language and habits”, but with the “eight million blacks whose habits” he already knew, “whose loyalty and love” he had tested in the conflicts of the Civil war. Workers who, in the past, “without strikes and labor wars, cultivated their [slavers’] fields, cleared their forests, built their railroads and cities […] and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the South’s progress.” [WASHINGTON, 1900, p. 222; AMEUR, 2010.]
BT Washington embraced the rhetoric of slavers, in the past, and of their equally hypocritical ideologues, in the post-slavery period, of the happy times of southern captivity, when the enslaved would dedicate themselves in extreme ways, working disciplinedly and tirelessly, for their beloved tormentors. Dying for them if necessary. It was time to erase the history of endless violence, ordinary and extraordinary, daily and episodic, that enslaved people had suffered at the hands of slaveholders and their institutions.
Literally, he carelessly erased the memory of the southern captive's incessant resistance, through countless forms of struggle: lack of love for work, appropriation of goods and punishment of slave owners and overseers; revolts, insurrections, etc. It swept under the rug the insane effort to free tens of thousands of captives by fleeing to the North. He obliterated the perhaps forty thousand former captives who had given their lives by joining the Union troops during the Civil War [1861-1865]. Or the possibly more than two hundred thousand who worked for the Federalist troops. [APTHEKER, 1969, 393.] he closed his eyes to the incessant and varied violence against the black population that literally occurred while he was speaking.
Booker T. Washington's prayer, in addition to the Southern ruling classes, also targeted the industrialists of the South, since, at that time, the “rich and dominant North, [...] besides being tired of having to deal with the racial problem , was investing a lot in ventures in the South and was open to any form of peaceful cooperation”, as recalled, a few years later, by WEB De Bois, the main left-wing critic of BT Washington and the most astute, erudite and consequential black intellectual of those times. [DU BOIS, 2021, p.76.]
minority blacks
BT Washington equally embraced the southern vision of Reconstruction times, in the immediate post-war period, with pernostic, ignorant and opportunistic blacks, participating in the politics of the former Confederate states, defended and manipulated by northern whites interested only in getting rich. Blacks bewitched by “a seat in Congress or the state legislature”, instead of employing themselves as a productive worker in the fields and cities, on behalf of their former enslavers – as BTWashington proposed.
To the delight of the southern whites present, and not a few absent northern racists, Booker added water to the mill of slander about Reconstruction and radicalized abolitionists. He stated that, in those years, the black population was used opportunistically “as a tool” to help “white men [from the North] to occupy public positions” and to punish “white men from the South”, following the victim narrative of the former -slavers. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.84.]
Reconstruction was a movement that had achieved many initial successes in favor of freed blacks, in the final days of the war and in the following years. Among them, some distribution of the promised land, effective exercise of the right to vote, parliamentary representation, positions in the state administration, construction of schools, among other initiatives. Achievements destroyed by the victory of the southern restorationist movement, after 1875, strongly supported by conservative and racist northern politicians. Booker T. Washington presented, as the essence of Reconstruction, some indisputable marginal excesses, in a way, inevitable, in times of strong social conflict. [CLEMENTI, 1974, p. 193 et seq.]
Without citing them, Booker T. Washington proposed that the “wisest” black men had understood that the “agitation of questions of social equality” was “the utmost madness,” and that civil and political rights were not to be achieved by means of “artificial forces”. In other words, with the pressure from the North, so feared by Southerners, exerted with some success during Reconstruction. Pressure from the federal government that would put an end to apartheid, half a century later. To propose obtaining full citizenship rights, Afro-descendants must first be “prepared” to be able to “exercise” the “privileges” they claimed. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.222.]
BT Washington did much more than reaffirm the views of the southern ruling classes, in the times of slavery, of an enslaved worker faithful and dedicated to his exploiters and torturers. At the end of the 19th century, he allied himself with the defenders of apartheid, which proposed the lack of preparation of black people to exercise the full range of citizen rights that they demanded and fought for. Furthermore, he defended the vocation and destiny of black people, even when free, in manual labor, whether specialized or not. He practically accepted the “supposed inferiority of the black races”. [DU BOIS, 1903, p. 76.]
The fingers of one hand
So that there would be no doubt about his defense of general surrender, made on behalf of the black population, Booker subscribed to the cynical proposal of the white and black communities, living happily, totally separate, put forward by the apartheid. He proposed that, in social life, blacks and whites could live separately, each on their own side, “like the five fingers of a hand”, but they should be united, like the hand that joins the fingers, in the productive world, to the material progress of the two races. Progress that always delivered much more than the lion's share to white property owners. [WASHINGTON 1901; DU BOIS, 1903, p. 64.]
In 1895, two decades ago, the years of Reconstruction had come to an end, when integration into political life and the distribution of land among the black population that had just been freed were proposed and tested. However, concomitant with the end of the conflict was the reaction of the Southern ruling classes, soon supported by conservatives and racists from the North. They reacted successfully against the emancipationist impulse of a black population, which constituted the essential base of the labor force in the South, incapable of attracting workers arriving from Europe.
Especially since the death of Abram Lincoln, on April 14, 1865, with Vice President Andrew Johnson in government, a racist on all sides, the northern conservative proposal for political autonomy, of the former Confederate states and their dominant classes, had won. , as long as they verbalized the recognition of the authority and indivisibility of the federal State. In everything else, they would be autonomous states, like the rest of the country. Decision that paved the way for the consolidation of the political hegemony of former slaveholders over the defeated states of the former confederation. With hands free, as soon as the war had ended, the “black codes”, traditional in the North since colonial times, began to be voted on by the southern legislative assemblies, regulating the lives of free black people.
The “black codes” despotically regulated countless aspects of the life of the black population in the South. They decided in which situations black people could literally be condemned to forced labor; the exploitation of black children, from the age of six, as apprentices; the high fees and licenses for black people to practice certain productive and commercial activities; in some cases, the prohibition on purchasing certain types of properties and so on. The southern white supremacists were sharpening their nails, preparing the attack that followed.
In 1874, with the withdrawal of northern troops from the South and the end of Reconstruction, the accelerated Jim Crow Laws were adopted, institutionalizing the apartheid. The name was due to the song, sung, and the character “Jim Crow”, a ragged old black man, a bit of an idiot, played in a satirical and racist sense, by the southern humorist Thomas Dartmouth Rice (1808 – 1860), with the face painted black [“blackface”].
Economic Function of White Supremacism
The Jim Crown Laws sanctioned the full hegemony of the southern ruling classes over the more than three million black people in the former southern slave states, reinforcing the restriction of black people's right to vote; expanding the difficulties and prohibitions on numerous economic activities; preventing interracial marriages; penalizing coexistence in restaurants, cinemas, libraries, schools, train carriages; prohibiting the use of public drinking fountains and sanitary services, among many other prohibitions. Public authorities and the courts began to explicitly defend white supremacism as desired by the Creator himself and supported by the laws. The US Supreme Court supported and never challenged that legislation.
The ordeal of black people in the South after the war was not born out of the will of white racists. haze of the black man, now free, for mere pleasure, although not a few did it for that reason. The institutionalization of white supremacism, which strived for the black population to internalize and respect it, through the force of violence, had a greater objective. The end of slavery, on January 1, 1863, the defeat in the Civil War, in 1865, the promulgation of the 13th Constitutional Amendment, in the same year, put an end to the factoryization of enslaved workers, dealing a very violent blow to the southern economy, devastated by the war and with hundreds of thousands of deaths in combat.
The previous virtual monopoly of the global cotton trade by the southern states, which saw their lands running out, was coming to an end, without being able to conquer, as they traditionally did, new fertile lands in the West, one of the central reasons for the Civil War. [AMEUR, 2010; ENGELS & MARX, 1970, p. 32 et passim.] After the war, other nations began to export cotton and, in 1880, international prices for the commodity plummeted.
The crisis was general. The war had practically taken place over the separatist territories. Confederate currency lost any value. The value of land fell “abruptly”, “especially in the most decidedly” slave states. Former slave planters, traditionally undercapitalized, were unable to rebuild and technologically advance plantations and, above all, pay monetary wages to former captives. Along the Cotton Belt, small plots of land were handed over to former captives, in the form of leases or partnership contracts. [CLEMENTI, 1974, p. 129-138.]
Even under the harsh conditions of land rent, in the form of leasing or partnerships, the new social relations of production meant for the former enslaved people an advance, albeit a relative one, compared to the times of slavery. They were not imposed on former captives against their will. On the contrary, they expressed their desire to become free peasants. By giving up a large part of the production they produced to free producers, the former slave owners saw their incomes fall. It was therefore necessary to create conditions that prevented individual or, even worse, collective claims for the reduction of lease and partnership contracts.
Nova sweediness
However, to reinvent the southern rural economy, even at a lower level than in the past, it was necessary for white landowners to keep the three million southern blacks free, chained to the South, under the harsh conditions of employment and existence. The internalization, by the black population, of fear and terror towards the new white supremacist order, was a semi-institutional element of social reorganization postbellum, essential to her.
The planned or erratic actions of associations such as the Ku Klux Klan, such as lynchings, were functional and necessary for the proper functioning of the apartheid and, therefore, the maintenance of the black population in submission to their exploiters. The Klan's main function was to keep the black population in the South, prevent them from demanding higher wages and, if possible, reduce them to pre-war conditions, even if formally free. [HAAS, 1966.]
In this process, it was also associated with the exercise of hard power, softpower. In other words, on the one hand, the black population remained in fear of harsh repression for any disrespect towards southern institutions. On the other hand, they tried to convince her that her path was to live the best possible life and take advantage of what an immutable reality offered her. The long tradition of paternalistic treatment from the times of captivity, especially regarding domestic captives and those in administrative positions, was now applied to some segments of cooperative Afro-descendants, with prestige and leadership.
The difficult exercise of gently convincing the black population about the goodness of the new order, or the inevitability of surrendering to it, counted on the collaboration of black leaders, pastors, itinerant preachers, journalists, and black ideologues, paid by the services provided. Booker T. Washington did not invent the proposal of inevitable surrender as the exclusive path for the black population, he was just its most brilliant and convincing defender.
No shame
In 1894, at the Universal Exposition in Atlanta, Alabama, the proposals for universal suffrage, land distribution, civil rights for former captives, seen by Reconstruction advocates as a means of civilizing the oligarchic society that had emerged from slavery, and maintaining the federal political monopoly, were seen as issues of the past. At that time, the “memories and ideals of the [civil] war” were objects of southern slander and anathematization, which remains, even today, through various justifications and mediations, as part of the common sense of broad sectors of the population and society. American historiography, not exclusively Southern. [DU BOIS, 2021, p. 63; CLEMENTI, 1974, p. 193 et seq.]
At the time of BT Washington's famous speech, in Atlanta, Georgia, the determinations of the apartheid, of living “separate but equal”, and the anti-black pogroms continued to recur. Proposals that enjoyed support among broad social sectors in the North, where the black issue assumed a secondary character, since labor needs were met by the tide of workers arriving from Europe, not a few former workers from Old World industries.
BT Washington's speech enshrined, in the name of the regional black population, respect for apartheid as the only possible development strategy for those oppressed communities in the southern states. He proposed the renunciation of the struggle for political and civil rights, which would be granted – he stated –, at the initiative of the southern white dominant classes, when they judged that the black community had the cultural and material conditions to enjoy them. Until that moment came, which never happened, they had to work as diligent, disciplined, obedient and respectful workers, under the orders of their now white employers.
Not in my name
Faced with the demand from conscious black leaders and intellectuals to speak out clearly and energetically about the situation of black people in the South, BT Washington proposed, without hesitation, that the civil rights claimed should not come, as we have seen, from pressure exerted from or North – “foreign” or “aliens” –, but due to the concession “by the whites of the South themselves”.
Booker T. Washington went deeper. He proposed that, after the voluntary and unpressured granting of civil rights to the black population, it would be the Southern whites themselves, who would protect the blacks in the “exercise” of their “rights”. And, if that were not enough, he stated, in 1894, in Georgia, the land par excellence of lynchings, that “there were signs” that the process of granting the rights of the southern black community, by white racists, had already begun, even if “in a slight degree.” And the example he set was his success and acceptance by the so-called southern racist elites. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.235.]
O apartheid It would be overthrown, a century later, due to the strength of the mobilization of the black population, especially in the South, supported by radicalized white abolitionists. The decision was also influenced by the political-ideological need of Yankee imperialism, in its global struggle against socialism, embarrassed to point to American society as the greatest paradigm, while the indiscreet resound of the shackles of wage slavery in the country could be heard. “The enemies of the United States did not miss an opportunity to record the imposture of a foreign policy”, the “export of 'democracy'”, to which the black population had no right. [CLEAVER, 1969, p. 8; LIGHTFOOT, 1969.]
In short. BT Washington advised southern blacks to “behave modestly in relation to political demands”, hoping to gain some economic gains and the trust of their oppressors with their manual labor. He promised that, after traveling the long and endless road of voluntary servitude, the racists and southern explorers would grant him, on their own, without pressure, the “full recognition of his political rights”, as we have seen. What's more, they would be the protectors of the freedom granted, just as they had policed its confiscation. He accepted as fair and necessary the limitation of voting rights in the South to those who owned property or had an institutional education, or both. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.235.]
Professional labor agitators
Booker T. Washington not only supported the apartheid, as he was against workers' strikes, declaring in his autobiography that the “miners” of the State of Virginia “were in a worse situation at the end of a strike”, and that he would have known, in that region and in the strike to which he referred, “ miners who had considerable money in the bank”, who had disappeared, under the influence of “professional labor agitators”. He proposed that the “interests” of “employers and employees” would be the “same”. [WASHINGTON, 1900, p.69, 172.] Words that cherished their millionaire protectors in the North.
BT Washington's speech in Alabama, known as the “Consensus” or the Atlanta Compromise,” received a warm reception among the racist white listeners of the Exposition and was reported widely in Southern newspapers, with laudatory editorials and articles. The also positive reception in the North facilitated Booker's contacts in the territorial heart of the capitalist world, from where large donations arrived. His school facilities grew and he built himself an imposing three-story stately home on the campus of the Tuskegee Institute, where he received distinguished visitors.
The proposal for the de facto surrender of the black community to the apartheid He soon received some harsh criticism from black intellectuals and leaders. You had to be brave to criticize a true sacred cow, with lion's claws. Criticism was quickly semi-stifled due to the success of many of Booker's initiatives, where others had failed, and above all due to the strength of the consensus he aroused, fueled by the support he received from the white, southern and northern political and business world.
Against the “Atlanta Consensus”
In 1897, the black intellectual William Edward Burghardt Du Bois – WEB Du Bois –, born in Massachusetts in 1868, doctor from Harvard and Berlin, and university professor for many years, reconsidered the first evaluation he had made of the Atlanta speech in 1895, and broke off relations with BT Washington, suffering the usual retaliation against dissidents. Above all, he criticized him for his anti-intellectual, anti-political proposals, against the fight for political and civil rights and the integration of the southern black population into subalternization. Du Bois, an accomplished writer, proposed that BT Washinton was the “most notable Southerner since Jefferson Davis”, the president of the Confederacy of defeated southern states! [FOHLEN, 1973, p. 39.]
In 1903, Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk [The souls of black people, in the Brazilian edition we used], a classic study on the American black issue. In a true act of courage, he dedicated a chapter of the book to a general critique of Booker’s proposals – “About Mr. Booker T. Washington and others.” He noted the problem, and the danger, in questioning the action of a black public man who he proposed to be, at that time, the “only spokesperson recognized by his 10 million peers [American black population], and one of the prominent figures in a country of 70 million inhabitants”. [DU BOIS, 2021, p. 66.]
Du Bois drew attention to the fact that such was the strength of white supremacist extremism in the South that the southern black population was in danger of being reduced to “semi-slavery”, especially in rural areas, due to “pressure from capitalists”. For him, BT Washington's preaching disarmed the effort to achieve political and civil rights, reinforced the proposition of the racial inferiority of black people and placed the responsibility for their progress on their own forces. [DU BOIS, 2021.]
Du Bois's valuable article on BT Washington also recorded his critical agreement with the program of emancipation of the southern black population through professionalizing “education through work”, proposed by BT Washington, as long as it was universalized and complemented with middle-higher and higher schools for young people more capable blacks. Without leaving aside the essential demand for the full right to vote and full civil and political rights for the southern black population, which Booker proposed as negative.
Rights to rwealth
At the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century, in the United States, it was difficult to fully understand the deep economic-social mechanisms of the capitalist order that kept a huge portion of the black population in economic and social submission. Reality that, mutatis mutandis, it lives on, on another level, to this day, even after the achievement of civil rights in the 1950s. The only feasible program for substantial economic emancipation of the southern black community, at the time Du Bois was writing, was the resumption and generalization of little distribution of land among former captives, tested during Reconstruction, with support from financial institutions for new farmers.
A program that is difficult to advance due to agreement, at different levels, with the racist worldviews of a large portion of the southern and northern white working class, largely consolidated by defensive considerations of the labor market, unfounded and disseminated by the world of capital. However, even at that time, Du Bois reveals, in detail, highlighted in the chapter “On the Black Belt”, of his aforementioned book, the socio-economic relations of domination that kept the southern rural population in poverty.
In 1905, two years after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois moved towards the construction of a systematic and organized critique of BT Washington's positions, calling for a meeting of radicalized young black people, in a hotel in Niagara Falls, Canada, after they had not been accepted, in a hotel, on the American shore. The group, which assumed the name of the Niagara movement, under the direction of Du Bois, established a program that demanded the abolition of racial distinctions, full political rights, the dignity of black workers and spoke out harshly against the apartheid, lynchings, oppression and discrimination of the black population at work. In other words, a political platform in radical and explicit opposition to BT Washington's orientation.
Celebrating revolutionary violence
In August 1906, the Niagara movement organized a second meeting to celebrate the birth of John Brown, the white abolitionist, with extreme radical action against slave owners and slavery. On May 25-26, 1856, John Brown and his family and followers, black and white, became nationally known when they promoted the so-called “Pottawatomie Massacre”. They executed, in cold blood, five hardened slavers during the “Kansas War”, which defined the free character of that state. The terrorist attack literally terrified the Kansas terrorist slavers, putting them on the defensive. An act later defined by the former escaped slave and prominent abolitionist leader Frederick Douglas, as “a terrible medicine for a terrible disease”. [SCHENONE, 1984; DOUGLASS, 1962, 1982.]
After his victorious participation in the Kansas War, John Brown organized an armed assault against the federal arsenal in Harper's Ferry, in the northwest of the state of Virginia, again with family members and black and white abolitionists, thinking of starting an armed struggle that would lead to a general uprising. of the enslaved. After conquering the arsenal, the radicalized abolitionists were defeated by federal troops in tough combat, in which, among others, two of John Brown's sons died.
On December 2, 1859, John Brown was hanged, at the beginning of the Civil War. During that confrontation, on troop marches and in camps, unionist soldiers sang the song “John Brown Body's”, aware that they were continuing the saga of the old abolitionist, in the armed struggle in the War in Kansas and in the assault on Harper's Ferry arsenal. It was precisely on the field of honor in Harper`s Ferry that the Niagara group met for their second meeting, dedicated to the radical abolitionist. [DU BOIS, 2021, note 113.]
Birth of the NAACP
In 1909, a group of organized anti-racists, mostly white, called a meeting to celebrate the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. Among the guests was the Niagara group. At the meeting, the bases for a “National Association for the Progress of the Colored Population” were defined, a euphemism then in use to avoid using the term African or black [nigga], considered derogatory. The multi-racial Association mobilized to fight for education and defense of the general and particular rights of the black population. Tensions between the NAACP and Booker never stopped growing.
Acting mainly at the legal level and in cities, the NAACP opened offices across the United States and initially distinguished itself by hiring black lawyers to defend the Afro-descendant community in court. Reality treated by American cinematography. However, even expanding the number of its members and its intervention, like other associations defending and promoting the black community that emerged in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, the NAACP achieved few results when confronted with the cohesion of the Apartheid in the south of the USA, which had important support in the north. [FOHLEN, 1973: 36-41.]
Just over three decades after its foundation, when the fight for the civil and political rights of the black population intensified, the NAACP already had five hundred thousand members. It would then play an important role in the final fight for the civil rights of the Afro-descendant population. Rosa Parks [1913-2005], the black worker who became famous when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, on a public bus, in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, was a member and activist of the Association.
Du Bois, one of the fathers of so-called Pan-Africanism, participated intensely in the leadership of the NAACP, where, in the early days, the majority of directors were white. He was, from the beginning, editor of the newspaper The Crisis, of the NAACP, which, with its first issue in 1910, reached a circulation of one hundred thousand copies. Author of a monumental work, the black American intellectual and activist ended his long and fruitful life in the Republic of Ghana, at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah [1909-1972], an admirer of his preaching, leader of the decolonization movement in that country and his first president, 1960-66.
Communist Party of EUA
Du Bois died on August 27, 1963, in Accra, capital of the Republic of Ghana, at the age of 95. Two years before he died, seeing the end of his days approaching, he completed his march in defense of socialism, signing up for the Communist Party of the United States. At that time, the fight in that country against the intervention of Vietnam was growing exponentially and, three years later, on October 15, 1966, in the city of Oakland, in northern California, two young black men, Huey Newton [1942-1989], and Bobby Seale [1936], founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, later the Black Panther Party. Among the referential readings of the two black university students was, prominently, Du Bois. On the contrary, BT Washington was seen as a traitor to the impoverished black population.[ABU-JAMAL, 2006; CLEAVER, 1970.]
In the South and in the country, the prestige of BT Washington and his preaching grew supported by the multiplication of paid elementary rural schools for blacks, founded with resources from millionaire financiers, where black teachers taught, who embraced the theses of the so-called “Atlanta Agreement”. , that is, the accommodation of the population to the apartheid. In addition to the students trained in black private schools who achieved some success, a minority in the true sea of needy, the materialization and philosophy of BT Washington's preaching strengthened racial separatism and hampered the struggle for racial integration of public schools, achieved through mobilization of the black population and white abolitionists, in the 1960s, as remembered.
BT Washington's prestige and power received a strong counterattack, between the black population and its white supporters and financiers, with serious interracial conflicts, in August and September 1906, in the cities of Atlanta, capital of Georgia, where Booker T. Washington presented his famous proposal, the “Atlanta Agreement”, and Brownsville, Texas, when racists and white supremacists attacked the black population with fury, highlighting the fallacy of BT Washington's proposals on strategic submission to the apartheid for its overcoming. In the 1960s, with the rise of black militancy in the USA, BT Washington was often accused of being a real-life “Uncle Tom”, who had sold his soul for prestige, glory and economic success.
Tell me who you hang out with
In 1911, Booker T. Washington's “moral reputation” came into question when he was arrested, after being attacked, on charges of inappropriate behavior with the white wife – in fact, lover – of a white janitor who was a bully. Despite being the one attacked, it was Booker T. Washington who ended up in prison. The problem arose when he had difficulty explaining what he was doing, a married man, on a Sunday, in a white neighborhood, next to the red-light district of New York. It is believed that he was looking for a white prostitute or, more possibly, his lover, also white.
He was also accused of being a faker and a hypocrite, for “wanting to keep black people at a low academic level, with exclusively professional education”, but sending his “children to excellent colleges”. This did not guarantee them the “academic success” that their father “must have dreamed of”. He also financed his daughter's piano studies with a private teacher in Germany, when she failed in her studies in the USA. At a young age, he ensured the training of his brother and sister, taking pride in the professional success they achieved. [GLEDHILL, 2020, 100 et seq; Washington, 1901.]
BT Washington passed away on November 14, 1915, at the age of 59, with ample tribute paid to him by the dominant classes he had always served, with emphasis on the southern classes. “When he passed away, he owned at least two houses, one in New York State and the other on the Tuskegee Institute campus,” already mentioned. One of his bitter enemies proposed that, after his death, a “professor at the Institute […] committed suicide by jumping from a building on the campus […]”. Right or wrong, Booker specialized in marrying female professors at the institution. [GLEDHILL, 2020, 100-103.] Despite his death, for many years, his enormous prestige among the black population remained untouched, support and acceptance that tended to decline sharply, when the struggles of the black community intensified for civil and social rights after World War II.
Towards the end of time
At the end of the 1980s, the world experienced a general retraction in social struggles and the world of work, with the global victory of the liberal counter-revolution, proposing the “end of history”, the death of social emancipation, the eternity of capitalist exploitation . In this downward spiral of civilization, in the United States, defeatist proposals for the integration and social accommodation of exploited black populations into the capitalist order regained vigor.
As part of these new times that were born old and senile, a large campaign was undertaken to rescue the anathematization that had been experienced by the defeatist and collaborationist preaching of BT Washington, in the recent past, when anti-racist and social struggles were advancing in the USA. A corollary to BTWashington's resuscitation campaign has been the deconstruction, albeit generally oblique, of WEB Du Bois, intellectual luminary of the black community in the three Americas. [GLEDHILL, 2020, p. 140.]
It is proposed, as is traditional, that BTWashington's crooked acts must be understood in the spirit of his time, in an attempt to pave the way to elevate him, by leaps and bounds, as a pioneer and reference of black “entrepreneurship” of our days. , today more ambitious than yours, beyond low. Black entrepreneurship and identity are currently cutting-edge policy for the Democratic Party and imperialism. All musty clothes from the past, laid out in the sun, for a new use as party attire.
Social surrender that seeks to enchant the popular black community once again, counting, to this end, today, with the support of the State and the large capitalist monopolies, as in the past. And as is quite normal among us, the return, in the USA, of the praise of BT Washington, under the wings of the Democratic Party, as always, is acclimated, in a haphazard way, to the already intoxicated airs of Brazil, presenting him as a black figure highlight to follow. Let's light a candle to Negrinho do Pastoreio so that, among the hundreds of BT Washinton Tupiniquins, at least one, just a little one, emerges, De Bois Tupinambá.
* Mario Maestri is a historian. Author, among other books, of Sons of Ham, sons of the dog. The enslaved worker in Brazilian historiography (FCM Editora).
References
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Mário Maestri, 76, from Rio Grande do Sul, is a historian. He is the author, among other books, of Sons of Ham, Sons of Dog. The enslaved worker in Brazilian historiography. Porto Alegre: FCM Editora, 2022. https://clubedeautores.com.br/livro/filhos-de-ca-filhos-do-cao
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