Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight

Washington carried such a message through to his last days: material progress by blacks would foment white admiration and, therefore, lead to the truest form of national and racial reconciliation. In a tribute to Harriet Tubman in Auburn, New York, in June 1914, where the former liberator of fugitive slaves had recently died, Washington linked past and present in his peculiar way. Tubman was best remembered, he declared, as a symbol of the “law-abiding Negro,” a leader who “brought the two races nearer together and made it possible for the white race to know the black race.” By reciting the acreage of land ownership and the numbers of houses, grocery stores, dry goods stores, shoe stores, drug stores, and banks owned by blacks fifty years after freedom, Washington found the best evidence that “the work of Harriet Tubman was not in vain.” Tubman had long been a malleable icon of America’s antislavery past. But Washington’s appropriation of this revolutionary activist who broke many laws to liberate slaves, in order to create a narrative of “racial friendship,” showed less the measure of “progress” than the bankruptcy of Bookerite reconciliation.58