structural:summarization, quality:correction, information:highlighting, stylistic:style_transfer
Legacy

Booker T. Washington was so acclaimed as a public leader that the period of his activity, from 1880 to 1915, has been called the Age of Booker T. Washington. Historiography on Washington, his character, and the value of that leadership has varied dramatically. After his death, he came under heavy criticism in the civil rights community for accommodationism to white supremacy. However, since the late 20th century, a more balanced view of his very wide range of activities has appeared. As of 2010, the most recent studies, "defend and celebrate his accomplishments, legacy, and leadership".

Washington was held in high regard by business-oriented conservatives, both white and black. Historian Eric Foner argues that the freedom movement of the late nineteenth century changed directions so as to align with America's new economic and intellectual framework. Black leaders emphasized economic self-help and individual advancement into the middle class as a more fruitful strategy than political agitation. There was emphasis on education and literacy throughout the period after the Civil War. Washington's famous Atlanta speech of 1895 marked this transition, as it called on blacks to develop their farms, their industrial skills, and their entrepreneurship as the next stage in emerging from slavery.

By this time, Mississippi had passed a new constitution, and other Southern states were following suit, or using electoral laws to raise barriers to voter registration; they completed disenfranchisement of blacks at the turn of the 20th century to maintain white supremacy. But at the same time, Washington secretly arranged to fund numerous legal challenges to such voting restrictions and segregation, which he believed was the way they had to be attacked.

Washington repudiated the historic abolitionist emphasis on unceasing agitation for full equality, advising blacks that it was counterproductive to fight segregation at that point. Foner concludes that Washington's strong support in the black community was rooted in its widespread realization that, given their legal and political realities, frontal assaults on white supremacy were impossible, and the best way forward was to concentrate on building up their economic and social structures inside segregated communities. Historian C. Vann Woodward in 1951 wrote of Washington, "The businessman's gospel of free enterprise, competition, and laissez faire never had a more loyal exponent."

Historians since the late 20th century have been divided in their characterization of Washington: some describe him as a visionary capable of "read minds with the skill of a master psychologist," who expertly played the political game in nineteenth-century Washington by its own rules. Others say he was a self-serving, crafty narcissist who threatened and punished those in the way of his personal interests, traveled with an entourage, and spent much time fundraising, signing autographs, and giving flowery patriotic speeches with much flag waving – acts more indicative of an artful political boss than an altruistic civil rights leader.

People called Washington the "Wizard of Tuskegee" because of his highly developed political skills and his creation of a nationwide political machine based on the black middle class, white philanthropy, and Republican Party support. Opponents called this network the "Tuskegee Machine". Washington maintained control because of his ability to gain support of numerous groups, including influential whites and black business, educational and religious communities nationwide. He advised as to the use of financial donations from philanthropists and avoided antagonizing white Southerners with his accommodation to the political realities of the age of Jim Crow segregation.

The Tuskegee machine collapsed rapidly after Washington's death. He was the charismatic leader who held it all together, with the aid of Emmett Jay Scott. But the trustees replaced Scott, and the elaborate system fell apart. Critics in the 1920s to 1960s, especially those connected with the NAACP, ridiculed Tuskegee as a producer of a class of submissive black laborers. Since the late 20th century, historians have given much more favorable view, emphasizing the school's illustrious faculty and the progressive black movements, institutions and leaders in education, politics, architecture, medicine and other professions it produced who worked hard in communities across the United States, and indeed worldwide across the African Diaspora. Deborah Morowski points out that Tuskegee's curriculum served to help students achieve a sense of personal and collective efficacy. She concludes:

At a time when most black Americans were poor farmers in the South and were ignored by the national black leadership, Washington's Tuskegee Institute made their needs a high priority. It lobbied for government funds and especially from philanthropies that enabled the institute to provide model farming techniques, advanced training, and organizational skills. These included Annual Negro Conferences, the Tuskegee Experiment Station, the Agricultural Short Course, the Farmers' Institutes, the Farmers' County Fairs, the Movable School, and numerous pamphlets and feature stories sent free to the South's black newspapers.