BOOK/MEDIA REVIEWS

Abstract

Booker T. Washington Rediscovered, edited by Michael Scott Bieze and Marybeth Gasman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012, 265 pp., $34.95, paperback.Booker Taliaferro Washington was bom April 5, 1856 on a tobacco plantation in Hale's Ford, Virginia. He was bom physically enslaved by legal practice and cognitively shackled by the absence of systemic educational access for descendants of Africa in America in the nation's nineteen southern and Border States. Despite this delimited beginning, his name is both recognized and lauded in the space as an African American academic, orator, and statesman. In fact, he is regularly described as one of the two dominant leaders of African American educational philosophy along with William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (Brown, Ricard, & Donahoo, 2004).Booker T. Washington died November 14, 1915 on the campus of Tuskegee State Normal School-a school he dedicated 34 years to developing, promoting, and advancing (Anonymous, 1931; Brown, 1999). In the article The Politics of Industrial Education: Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee State Normal School, 1880-1915, Brown (1999) argued that Booker T. Washington should be acknowledged for making higher education an integral part of the movement to gain economic freedom and dignity for African Americans in the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth centuries.While there exist a general consensus of biographical facts regarding Booker T. Washington, the literature is overwhelmingly silent on the intellectual dimensions of his epistemological and philosophical approaches to education, race, and society. In the edited compendium, Booker T. Washington Rediscovered, Michael Scott Bieze and Marybeth Gasman offer a smorgasbord of reference material on Booker T. Washington's thoughts and writings. volume also presents opinions and accounts of Mr. Washington with a chronologic-hermeneutic blend. Furthermore, they provide facsimiles of original documents produced by, for, or on Washington. While the volume is not a scholarly treatment of Washington, it is a reference book with a bounty of primary source documents that allow the reader to engage Washington unfiltered.The book is divided into nine parts: Autobiography, Speeches, Education, Work, Philanthropy, Aesthetics, Race, Religion, and Politics. Each of these parts is populated with original source documents that are presented in the manner they would have been viewed at the moment and time they were drafted or published. majority of the volume is a collection of archival treasures typically viewed only by appointment within cloistered special collections of a university library or private reading guild. Further, a complementary resource to the published volume is available at Johns Hopkins University Press website.It is clear that the editors have made an extraordinary effort to present each original piece in a sequence that is thematic and logical. However, this sequencing has the unintentional consequence of presenting the readings in a chronology that forces the themes on to the life of Booker T. Washington. Social and behavioral scientists may take umbrage with the lock-step development and maturation of Washington's ideas and activities. Moreover, the voices of the editors appear primarily within the Introduction and Conclusion. In these truncated compositions, Bieze and Gasman use broad brushstrokes to raise their scholarly concerns with the public history of Booker T. Washington. In the Introduction, they accurately assert that the reduction of Washington to the static roles of college founder, social pragmatist, and skilled orator ignore his complex thinking, orchestrated self-image, and keen political savvy.Furthermore, within the introductory essay the editors invite the reader to use the pages of the text to engage their Socratic litany of questions myopically presented as dualistic options. …