Strategies and Revisions of Self-Representation in Booker T. Washington's Autobiographies

Abstract

IN THE SPRING OF 1960 IN A SALVATION ARMY USED-GOODS STORE IN Providence, Rhode Island, I purchased for twenty-five cents a copy of a book, then unfamiliar to me, by Booker T. Washington, The Story of My Life and Work. ' I knew who Washington was because my black teachers in the racially segregated primary school I attended in Kansas City, Missouri, in the late 1930s and 1940s had subverted the citywide curriculum to ensure that the black students at Wendell Phillips Elementary School would be introduced to black history and literature. Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, and of course Booker T. Washington were well known to me when I entered college. I did not study them, or any other black person or subject, in college or in graduate school, however, for there were none in the curricula of the colleges I attended. I read The Story of My Life and Work and put it on the shelf where it remained (metaphorically) for nearly twenty-five years.