Booker T. Washington, Builder o - African American History

Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization. 137
24.03.2006
CHAPTER EIGHT
BOOKER WASHINGTON AND THE NEGRO
BUSINESS MAN
IN 1900 Booker Washington founded the National Negro Business League. He
was president of this league from its foundation until his death.
During the winter of 1900, after reviewing the situation at length with his friend
T. Thomas Fortune, the nestor of Negro journalism, and at that time the
dominant influence in the New York Age, who was spending the winter at
Tuskegee, with Mr. Scott and others of his friends, he came to the conclusion
that the time had come to bring the business men and women of his race
together in a great national organization, with local branches throughout the
country. He decided that such an organization might be a powerful agency in
creating the race consciousness and race pride for which he was ever striving.
All the then-existing organizations, other than the sick and death benefit
societies and the purely social organizations, had as their main purpose the
assertion of the civil and political rights of the Negro. There was no
organization calculated to focus the attention of the Negroes on what they were
doing and could do for themselves in distinction from what was being done for
them and to them. All the existing
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associations laid their chief emphasis upon the rights of the Negro rather than
his duties. Mr. Washington held that without in any degree sacrificing their just
demands for civil and political rights a more wholesome and constructive
attitude could be developed by stressing the duties and the opportunities of the
race. He believed it would be helpful to emphasize in an organized way what
they had done and could do in the way of business achievement in spite of race
prejudice rather than what they had not done and could not do because of racial
discrimination. He believed they needed to have brought home to them not how
many of them had been held down, but how many of them had come up and
surmounted obstacles and difficulties. He believed that they should have it
impressed upon them that the application of business methods would bring
rewards to a black man just as to a white man.
The first meeting of the National Negro Business League was held in Boston,
August 23 and 24, 1900. After these sessions Booker Washington made the