The New Yorker:

Booker T. Washington’s Lessons Before there was a Black American President, Black America had a President. The barrier-smasher, author, and orator was born on this day in 1856.

By Kelefa Sanneh 

Booker T. Washington was already a celebrity—a self-made man, and the spokesman for black America—when he arrived at the White House on October 16, 1901, for a dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt. They had plenty to talk about: Washington was a great orator and conversationalist, and he had become one of the President’s most valued advisers. But, almost before the plates were cleared, the form of this meeting had overshadowed its content. Washington had earned his reputation as a racial moderate by assuring white people that he wouldn’t press for social equality, but this dinner looked an awful lot like a strike against segregation; the reported presence of the President’s glamorous seventeen-year-old daughter, Alice, intensified the scandal. Southern newspapers raised the alarm; the Memphis Scimitar announced, with impressive certainty, that the dinner was “the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.”

Both men survived the evening, but it was not soon forgotten. In his third autobiography, “My Larger Education,” Washington tells of a railway trip he took through Florida sometime later. At a stop near Gainesville, a white farmer shook his hand, exclaiming, “You are the greatest man in this country!” Washington demurred and suggested that Roosevelt was the greatest American, but the farmer was having none of it. With “considerable emphasis,” he said, “I used to think that Roosevelt was a great man until he ate dinner with you. That settled him for me.”

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