Reshaping the Image of Booker T. Washington

By ROBERT J. NORRELL

A historian sheds light on the accepted biography

Any scholar taking on a well-studied topic approaches the existing literature with some trepidation. But anxiety turns into fear when you become convinced that the main line of interpretation is seriously in error — as I discovered while writing a revisionist biography of Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute and the recognized leader of American black people from 1895 until his death in 1915.

He has