As of 2010, most recent studies 'defend and celebrate his accomplishments, legacy, and leadership'. However, a more neutral view has appeared since the late 20th century. After his death in 1915, he came under heavy criticism for accommodationism to white supremacy, despite his claims that his long-term goal was to end the disenfranchisement of African Americans, the vast majority of whom still lived in the South. Washington's legacy has been controversial in the civil rights community.

Decades after Washington's death in 1915, the civil rights movement of the 1950s took a more active and progressive approach, which was also based on new grassroots organizations based in the South, such as Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). They tried with limited success to challenge Washington's political machine for leadership in the black community, but built wider networks among white allies in the North. Washington fought vigorously against them and succeeded in his opposition to the Niagara Movement that they tried to found but could not prevent their formation of the NAACP, whose views became mainstream.īlack activists in the North, led by Du Bois, at first supported the Atlanta compromise, but later disagreed and opted to set up the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to work for political change. Du Bois, whom Bookerites perceived in an antebellum way as 'northern blacks', found Washington too accommodationist and his industrial ('agricultural and mechanical') education inadequate. Nevertheless, opposition to Washington grew, as it became clear that his Atlanta compromise did not produce the promised improvement for most black Americans in the South. Because of his influential leadership, the timespan of his activity, from 1880 to 1915, has been called the Age of Booker T. His mastery of the American political system in the later 19th century allowed him to manipulate the media, raise money, develop strategy, network, distribute funds, and reward a cadre of supporters. Washington had the ear of the powerful in the America of his day, including presidents. With his own contributions to the black community, Washington was a supporter of racial uplift, but, secretly, he also supported court challenges to segregation and to restrictions on voter registration. Washington mobilized a nationwide coalition of middle-class blacks, church leaders, and white philanthropists and politicians, with a long-term goal of building the community's economic strength and pride by a focus on self-help and schooling. He called for black progress through education and entrepreneurship, rather than trying to challenge directly the Jim Crow segregation and the disenfranchisement of black voters in the South.

As lynchings in the South reached a peak in 1895, Washington gave a speech, known as the ' Atlanta compromise', that brought him national fame. His base was the Tuskegee Institute, a normal school, later a historically black college in Tuskegee, Alabama, at which he served as a principal. Washington was a key proponent of African-American businesses and one of the founders of the National Negro Business League. They were newly oppressed in the South by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post- Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Washington was from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants.

Between 18, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community and of the contemporary black elite. Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915) was an American educator, author, orator, and adviser to several presidents of the United States.

Booker t washington