PERFIDY AND CALUMNY: RUEFUL BLACK SCHOLARS AND BOOKER T.

The historical scandal on the name of, and on the honor of, Booker T. Washington, which is falsely attributed to his so-called "Atlanta Compromise" speech of 1895, by certain black scholars, deceitfully ignores several preexisting facts and conditions. First, there was the widespread lynching, murder, voter suppression of freedmen by white terrorists in the South, during which economic peonage was re-imposed upon many blacks. Second, there was the shutting down of the Freedmen's Bureau, before "Reconstruction" was complete, and before the Confederates' "abandoned lands" were redistributed to the newly freed men. Third, the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, resulted in the withdrawal of the remaining federal troops from the South, enabling and signaling the negation of the blacks' Constitutional rights under the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Fourth, there was the plunder of, raid upon, and the closing of the Freedmen's Savings Bank that same year by Republican, Wall Street speculators (our then-liberal "friends"), in which Freedmen lost millions in their hard-earned saving, and lost confidence in saving itself; this money never having been recouped! Fifth, there were the negative Supreme Court decisions, starting with The Slaughter-House case, through The Civil Rights Cases of 1881, which overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, deeming it unconstitutional. Sixth, there was the "Exodus Movement" in the 1880's, when blacks fled the South en masse forlornly looking for relief in Kansas, Nebraska, anywhere but the South! All of these preceded Washington's 1895 "Atlanta Exposition" address, now sadly suborned! Such calumnies on Washington's great works and enduring legacy are despicable. They besmirch law, history, education, and African American culture. In fact, they are analogous to the parallel, equally wrongful vilification of the character, "Uncle Tom," in Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous, 1852 novel, with whom Washington is too often ignorantly confused and cruelly conflated, by those who have not read, nor analyzed beyond the surface, if indeed, they have ever read anything, of consequence, at all! Such in personam perfidy upon Booker T. Washington is part our continuing plight as a people! Whom we should sanctify, we vilify. Whom we should vilify, we sanctify! Marcus Garvey, a Washington votary, Founder of the UNIA, and Jamaican emigrant's legacy has suffered the same plight as Washington's, at the hands of the same scholars and historians of rueful African descent!