From the time of his famous Atlanta address in 1895 until his death in 1915, Booker T.
Byrd Center for Legislative Studies at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia..
He is now director of the Robert C.
House of Representatives.
From 1983 to 1995 he served as the first official Historian of the U.
S.
Washington Papers.
Smock is co-editor, with Louis Harlan, of the fourteen-volume Booker T.
About author(s): Raymond W.
He lived and worked in the midst of an undeclared race war, and his plan was to find a way to survive and to flourish despite the odds against him.
Smock sees Washington as a field general in a war of racial survival, his compromise a practical attempt to solve an immense problem.
Was he, as later critics would charge, an Uncle Tom and a lackey of powerful white politicians and industrialists? Sifting the evidence, Mr.
He took his own personal quest for freedom and acceptance within a harsh, racist climate and turned it into a strategy that he believed would work for millions.
Smock \'s interpretive biography explores Washington\'s rise from slavery to a position of power and influence that no Black leader had ever before achieved in American history.
Thus one historian called Washington\'s time the "nadir of Negro life in America." Raymond W.
But to historians and biographers of the last hundred years, Washington has often been described as an enigma, a man who rose to prominence because he offered a compromise with the white South: he was willing to trade civil rights for economic and educational advancement.
Washington was the preeminent African-American educator and race leader.
From the time of his famous Atlanta address in 1895 until his death in 1915, Booker T
