The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.11, page xix, in Introduction, U. of Illinois Press

The page presentation framework of the Booker T. Washington papers is designed to provide researchers worldwide with searchable access to the thousands of pages comprising the fourteen volumes, most of which are out of print. Adapted from the National Academy Press's Open Book framework, this framework allows searching down to the page level, provides sorting of search results chronologically, enables easy navigation across multiple volumes, and allows page-by-page local printing (via PDF) of every page.

[ Top of Page ]

[ Home ]

[ Contact Us ]

[ Help ]

OCRed data provided for searching only.
INTRODUCTION iN THE YEARS COVERED BY this volume, Booker T. Washington personalRy and his Tuskegee Machine suffered systemic shocks from which they only partially recovered. The volume begins with the UIrich incident. It ends during the presidential campaign of ogre, when Washington's personal liking for Theodore Roosevelt was in conflict with his loyalty to the Republican party and to William Howard Taft, the party nominee. On the night of March :8, age I, a white man named Henry Albert UIrich brutally beat Washington with a cane and brought about his arrest on the charge of molesting UIrich's wife and peeking through the keyhole in the vestibule of his apartment in a West Side district of uncerta~n reputation in New York City. Washington said he was in the neighborhood In search of the auditor of Tuskegee Institute, and when the police found out who Washington was they released him and charged UIrich with assault. Many aspects of this incident are ~nexplicable, and after a long-delayed trial the assailant was acquitted by the split decision of a three-judge court. During the wave of sympathy for Washington that followed news of the assault, Oswald Garrison ViBard tried to bring about a rapprochement between the Tuskegean and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Washington was wiring to exchange delegates between the NAACP and the National Negro Business League, but when Wash~ngton's black enemies in the NAACP supported a resolution of sympathy but blocked an expression of faith in Washington's innocence in the UIrich incident, the efforts at accord broke down. In February of ~ ~ Washington purchased a house on Song Island that became his summer headquarters. It was well that he did so, for ax