for combatting the oppression of black people.
Many scholars have compared Obama with Martin Luther King Jr. and other towering African American historical icons. For instance, Jelani Cobb has likened parts of Obama’s 1995 autobiography to Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and has pointed out the “historical, personal, and political” connections between Obama and Jesse Jackson. Similarly, Peniel Joseph has identified “striking biographical and political parallels” between Malcolm X and Obama. More than a few emcees have grouped Obama with civil rights icons like Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and King. In his classic track “My President,” Jeezy keenly associated Booker T. Washington, his “homie,” with Obama as members of the black first club. Perhaps Obama would not have been opposed to The Snowman’s observations.
Obama’s highest praise was reserved for John Lewis and King, but he did brand Washington “the leader of a growing civil rights movement,” extolling his discipline, commitment to education as a compulsory passageway to social mobility, and work ethic. “Booker T. Washington ran a tight ship,” he told the 2011 graduates of Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis, Tennessee. Playing historian, Obama created a humorous yet lucid and relatable anecdote about the iconic Washington:
He’d ride the train to Tuskegee and scare some of the new students. This is before YouTube and TMZ, so the kids didn’t recognize him. He’d walk up to them and say, “Oh, you’re heading to Tuskegee. I heard the work there is hard. I heard they give the students too much to do. I hear the food is terrible. You probably won’t last three months.” But the students would reply they weren’t afraid of hard work. They were going to complete their studies no matter what Booker T. Washington threw at them. And in that way, he prepared them—because life will throw some things at you.20
Though they obviously lived during distinctly different times, the lives of Washington and Obama mirror each other in some interesting manners that merit exploration.
To begin, both are biracial, and this complex and at times overly theorized identity lead their contemporaries and biographers to psychoanalyze them, especially in Obama’s case. Both carefully constructed personal histories for public consumption in which they explained how they conceived their peculiar identities. In his widely selling neo-slave narrative Up From Slavery (1901) and his other autobiographies like The Story of My Life and Work (1900) and My Larger Education (1911), Washington rooted his identity in slavery and southern black culture while also, for his white readership, celebrating how white culture positively impacted him. In Dreams from My Father (1995), Obama grappled with how he discovered his blackness while being raised by his progressive white mother and her parents in Indonesia and Hawaii.
Both Washington and Obama were not nurtured by their biological fathers. Washington’s father was reportedly a white man who most likely took advantage of his enslaved mother. Obama’s parents divorced when he was a toddler and his Kenyan father, who died when Obama was twenty-one years old, did not play an active role in his son’s life. Psychologists could claim that, as young men, they longed and searched for father figures. Both found surrogates in elder white men when they were young—Hampton Institute’s founder and Civil War veteran S. C. Armstrong in Washington’s case; with Obama, his maternal grandfather and World War II veteran Stanley Armour Dunham.
On average, Washington traveled six months out of every year. Even so, family was an important dimension of his life. He maintained connections with his immediate family, enjoyed spending time with his children, and embraced the companionship that he shared with his three wives—he outlived his first two wives, Fannie Norton Smith and Olivia Davidson. His third wife, who he married in 1893, Margaret James Murray, served as the “First Lady” of Tuskegee until Washington’s death. She was also a leader in her own right, focusing her energies on matters concerning black women in organizations like the Tuskegee Women’s Club and the National Association of Colored Women.
“It just so happens that I’m fortunate enough to be surrounded by women. They’re the most important people in my life,” Obama wrote candidly in an essay in MORE magazine in 2015. “They’re the ones who’ve shaped me the most. In this job, they are my sanctuary.” Obama testified how he makes it his duty to frequently eat dinner with the family and dubbed First Lady Michelle Obama “the rock” of the family who truly sustains him.21 Like other first ladies, Mrs. Obama was her husband’s political partner and, like Margaret Murray Washington, she initiated many programs for African American women and girls.
Washington and Obama were both thrust into realms of leadership quite rapidly, causing onlookers to wonder, “How did that happen?” Relatively unknown on the national scale until more than a decade after he founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in 1881, Washington became black America’s sanctioned-by-whites leader in 1895 following the death of former slave and elder statesman Frederick Douglass and the delivery of his famous “Atlanta Compromise” oration in Atlanta, Georgia. More of a symbolic leader of black America than Washington, Obama rapidly rose through the ranks before officially announcing his candidacy for president on February 10, 2007.
Historians have not had too much trouble identifying black messiah leader(s) in each generation or major historical phase in the African American experience who not only achieved reverence from the black masses, but also the attention and support of white Americans. Washington and Obama were the most powerful black leaders of their respective times. In 1947, historian John Hope Franklin christened the period from 1895 until 1915 (the year of Washington’s death) “The Age of Booker T. Washington.” Analogously, the eight years of Obama’s presidency are routinely called “The Age of Obama.” Those historical personalities who have eras named after them have celebrity status. Washington and Obama both achieved megastar status, something usually reserved for actors, actresses, musicians, and athletes. As historian Michael Bieze has convincingly argued, Washington was truly a celebrity with his own sophisticated branding and propaganda. After he was elected president, “Obamamania”—the state of being a particularly enthusiastic supporter of Obama—swept across the nation.22
That Washington and Obama had their fair share of detractors and critics within the collective black community and among segments of white America is striking. Washington was attacked by major black leaders of the Progressive Era like Du Bois and his colleagues in the short-lived Niagara Movement, Guardian editor William Monroe Trotter, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, and others. Du Bois and company cried out for Washington to publicly denounce multileveled attacks on blacks’ human and civil rights. “The Intellectuals,” as Washington referred to his faultfinders, echoed some of the concerns raised by Obama’s most fervent critics. Similarly, Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, Julianne Malveaux, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Eric Dyson, and at one time Jesse Jackson and other civil rights veterans, among others, summoned Obama to abandon his strategy of race neutrality.
Although Washington’s and Obama’s unique posts as black leaders were dependent upon white patronage, both were caricatured, vilified, and attacked by white supremacists. Washington was demonized as being a black nationalist by The Clansman author Thomas Dixon Jr., was regularly called a “darkey” and “coon” by racist white southerners, was threatened so much that he at one point hired a private patrol to protect him, and was even brutally beaten by a white man in New York City in 1911.
Obama and Jesse Jackson are the only presidential candidates to have received death threats before receiving a nomination from their party.23 From 2007 until 2017, Obama was the target of assassination attempts and purported conspiracies. Moreover, one only need to type Obama into any Internet search engine to uncover countless hateful and racist depictions of him.
The most overriding connection between Washington and Obama is conspicuous, yet largely overlooked: by virtue of being representatives of “the race,” or black leaders whose power-broking capital and abilities were more often than not subject to white approval and backing, they
