Historic Black figures get into Kentucky’s social studies standards – only because the legislature required it
We started out our Black History Month series with an article about the famous Black scientist, George Washington Carver. Carver, like virtually every other scientist and inventor regardless of race, is never mentioned in the current Kentucky Academic Standards for Social Studies. Carver didn’t even make the cut in the proposed revision to the social studies standards currently going through the adoption process.
However, one of the focuses of today’s blog, Booker T. Washington, while also absent from the 2019 teacher created Kentucky Academic Standards for Social Studies, did make the cut in the revision, but only because the legislature demanded it.
Washington, formally named Booker Taliaferro Washington, certainly deserves attention. Born in 1856 as a slave, he later rose to become an educated man and the first president and major developer of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, now known as Tuskegee University.
Among other things, while leading Tuskegee, Washington was instrumental in bringing George Washington Carver and all the things he would create to the campus.
Booker T. Washington also enjoyed a presence far beyond his school’s campus. He played a hand in determining which Black individuals and institutions should receive government patronage and philanthropic support.
Washington believed freed Blacks were best served by first concentrating on education in crafts and industrial skills, feeling those efforts were more important than immediately pursuing full and equal political impact and higher education. He expounded on some of these sentiments on September 18, 1895, in his address at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, an address, thanks to the Kentucky legislature, which all Kentucky students are now going to be required to learn.
To be sure, Washington certainly was not without controversy. His sentiments of accommodation set him at odds with others, perhaps most famously W.E.B Du Bois, another Black man of influence in post-reconstruction America.
In Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others (another paper now required by the legislature to be part of Kentucky’s education program), Du Bois would write, “Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington.” However, Du Bois also would critically discuss Washington’s “old attitude of adjustment and submission,” charging Washington was not properly tending to important matters such as political power, insistence on civil rights and higher education.
Still, despite his shortcomings, even Du Bois admits Booker T. Washington was a major early player in the developing Black society that grew out of the horrible background of slavery. Thanks to the Kentucky Legislature, which by happenstance is currently solidly under Republican control, all of Kentucky’s students will get to know something about both men.
Assembled from multiple sources:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Booker-T-Washington
https://www.biography.com/activist/booker-t-washington