Booker T Washington Influence

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“Haitians themselves are largely at fault for their unhappy situation:” Booker T. Washington and news of the United States occupation of Haiti

On July 28, 1915, the United States began a military occupation in Haiti. The intervention was part of long-term U.S. strategies to install more direct control over Caribbean and Latin American republics. African-American critics were quick to response to this new demonstration of U.S. supremacy in hemispheric affairs. One such critics was Booker T. Washington, famous educator and activist.
Although Booker T. Washington was known for his conciliatory views to race relations in the United States (and by the end of his life was increasingly challenged by a group of more “radical” black intellectuals such as W.E.B. Dubois), he was still a much-respected and influential public figure. Like many black Americans in 1915, though his views seemed ambivalent at
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Washington even today in popular U.S. imagination, his positions on the Haiti matter as it unfolded in the later months of 1915 might not seem too surprising. However, dismissing Washington’s positions as that of an accommodating figure may make difficult to appreciate that other important African American intellectuals also supported, at various points, the U.S. occupation of Haiti. Indeed, W.E.B. DuBois, who would later go on to fearlessly defend the cause of Haitian sovereignty in the Crisis (journalist organ of the NAACP), also wrote a letter to President Woodrow Wilson months before expressing his general approval for the occupation, but much like the Tuskegee wizard, was worried about excessive use of violence. While it seems difficult to predict how Washington’s position about the U.S. occupation of Haiti would have evolved, especially following James Weldon Johnson’s influential investigation in 1920, his writings still serve as important testimonies of African Americans often uncertain and complex reactions to U.S. policies in