From Booker T. Washington to Clarence Thomas

Conservatism as ideology and practice among black people in the United States, can be traced back to the late 19th century South with the emergence of Booker T. Washington. The pre-eminent black leader of his times, Washington was at once conservative, accommodationist, and nationalist.

From the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a school established to teach industrial education to blacks, Washington engaged in race complicity with white employers and governors, offering to keep blacks “down on the farms” and in the trades. The focus on industrial education and Protestant work ethic attracted the attention of prospective Northern donors, particularly the Rockefellers and the Carnegies, who made the Tuskegee Institute one of the best supported black educational institutions in the country.

Washington’s views represented one side of the great debate with W.E.B. DuBois, a founder of the NAACP and a leading intellectual of the time. While Washington appealed for accommodation, Dubois advocated political protest, cultural uplift, and autonomy among black people.

Washington’s speech at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition set the stage for what was to propel him into the spotlight as national leader for blacks in the eyes of white America. He disavowed any claim that black people had to political activism, social inclusion, and civil rights. “In all things that are purely social,” Washington said, “we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” He added, “The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.”

Washington’s conservatism was predicated on his “love for the South and his faith in the Southern white man’s sense of justice,” according to historian August Meier. He deprecated agitation and protest and believed that black people should be conciliatory about their conditions and life chances. Washington was satisfied with “separate but equal” facilities. He was more concerned with the harm that lynching did to whites, their moral fiber, economic conditions, and the reputation of the South.

While Washington advocated self-help, thrift, and racial solidarity among black people, he did so within the context of Southern race relations and their exclusionary practices. Washington blamed black people for their own condition, asserting that they were a backward race. His stress upon economics was primarily directed toward the rising black middle class of his day.

Between 1881, the founding of Tuskegee Institute, and his death in 1915, Washington held sway among blacks and within dominant white circles as the quintessential black conservative. According to historian Louis R. Harlan of the University of Maryland, Washington further consolidated his power with the founding of the National Negro Business League in 1900, publication of his autobiography Up From Slavery in 1901, his celebrated dinner at the White House in 1901, and his control of patronage politics as chief black advisor to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

He kept his white following by conservative policies and moderate utterances. But Washington fended off critics like DuBois by using his political connections and public stature to undermine their efforts.

Within a decade of Washington’s death, black people — especially black intellectuals led by DuBois, Washington’s chief nemesis — began to fashion an activist-centered ideology for the “New Negro.”

Urbanization, the consolidation of industrialization by the end of the first quarter of the 20th Century, the Harlem Renaissance, and the emergence of a black business and professional class by the late 1920s brought an end to Washingtonian conservatism. Collective action and group solidarity in politics, economics, and cultural life pushed black political thought far beyond conservatism. The Garvey Movement and identification with Africa provided the trajectory for activist protest politics that would last well into late 20th century.

A Goldwater Republican

Conservatism as an ideology among blacks re-emerged in the 1960s.

George Schuyler’s Black and Conservative, published in 1966, provided an explicit rendering of black conservatism. Schuyler had achieved early note as a critic of the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement. Though he had been a socialist at the time, he ridiculed the culturalist goals of the Harlem Renaissance.

As a journalist with the Pittsburgh Courier, Schuyler had achieved a great deal of influence and respect within black intellectual circles. Later he would disavow that influence for linkage with official American conservatism.

In 1964 Schuyler endorsed ultraconservative Republican Barry Goldwater for president. He also used the financial resources of leading conservative groups to promote their ideas and to run for public office. Though Schuyler was not as prominent as Booker T. Washington, his explicit conservatism evolved at a critical juncture in the civil rights movement. Schuyler did not have the institutional and organizational appeal of Washington, but his conservatism represented a linear connection to Washington and served as a nexus to the new black conservatism of the 1980s.

Reagan Republicans

With the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency in 1980, new black conservatives emerged. They were intellectuals and, for the most part, baby boomers who had benefited from the gains of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. These new black conservatives opposed affirmative action, public welfare, equal opportunity, racial protest, and labor agitation. They argued that black people’s problems were due, in large part, to their own pathologies and a psychology of dependency on the national government. Moreover, they argued that black people had failed to commit to the capitalist profit-oriented ethos, slavery and racial segregation notwithstanding.

Chief among these conservatives were Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Glenn Loury, Clarence Pendleton, and Clarence Thomas. Sowell, Williams, and Loury are economists. Pendleton, now deceased, served as president of the San Diego, California, Urban League and Chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission under Reagan. Thomas served in the Reagan administration as Head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Education. In 1991, after a very tumultuous and controversial confirmation hearing where he was accused of sexual harassment, Thomas was confirmed as President Bush’s appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Clarence Thomas Conservatives

The black conservatives of the 1990s emerged during the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas. Today, incumbent Gary Franks of Connecticut and J.C. Watts of Oklahoma represent black conservatives in the U.S. Congress. They have established a political action committee: Black America’s PAC. And black conservatives have several national publications including the magazines National Minority Politics and Destiny.

This group is younger and has relatively less formal education than its predecessors. It is a more vociferous group in its condemnation of the black masses. Much like Schuyler, this group embraces and promotes popular white right-wing rhetoric.

Black conservatism has not triumphed over political and public discourse among black people in the United States. Rather, its emergence at particular junctures of the past 100 years may well correlate with changes in institutional and racial policies. The emergence of Washington in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was strategic in suppressing Reconstruction policies that would make black people autonomous.

In the 1950s and the 1960s, when black people demanded the end of de facto and de jure racial segregation, black conservatism once again emerged. It fostered a black perspective against institutional and organizational change. The civil rights and black power movements represented the bulwark against conservatism for nearly 30 years.

Today, with marginal racial progress but some legislative reforms and inclusion in public life, black conservatism has once again emerged to retard efforts to sustain such change and shifts. It is too early to tell where this new brand of black conservatism will lead, but if history is any indication, it will, like the conservatism of Washington on Schuyler, fade in the face of black struggles for full political and economic rights and participation.