As America watches, with amazement and no small amount of pride, the first-ever presidential campaign featuring a black American as the presumptive nominee of a major political party, a new book examines the ideas and relevance of a leading black American from an earlier time.
Booker T. Washington: A Re-Examination finds Washington s life, accomplishments, and writings to be more important than ever in pointing the way to racial harmony and greater economic and social success for black Americans.
Booker T. Washington (1856 - 1915) was often derided during the 1960s and 1970s because his ideas contradicted the fashionable Progressivism that posited government solutions for all economic and social problems. Yet Washington s ideas were important during his time, and they re even more relevant today, precisely because the United States failed to listen to him during the intervening decades.
By founding and building Tuskegee Institute and other endeavors, Washington worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to strengthen black entrepreneurship, labor skills, personal responsibility, and families. He accepted charitable contributions from white philanthropists, but his efforts were focused on equipping blacks to help themselves and succeed in the world as it was: self-reliance.
Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Lee H. Walker has long been an eloquent and passionate advocate of Booker T. Washington s life and ideas. In June 2006 he convened a three-day symposium in Chicago to examine the great thinker s life, legacy, and philosophy. Twenty-two speakers participated, representing a wide variety of views, in the biggest gathering of academics and activists to discuss Booker T. Washington s agenda in a quarter-century.
Lee H. Walker is president of The New Coalition for Economic and Social Change and a senior fellow of The Heartland Institute. He is chairman of the Illinois State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He is a director of the Black United Fund of Illinois and the Gidwitz Center for Urban Policy at National Louis University, and former chairman of the board of the American Fund and trustee of the Foundation Board for the University of the Orange Free State (South Africa).
Walker is a commissioner of the Illinois Transatlantic Slave Trade and the State of Illinois Amistad Commission. He's a member of the editorial board and an editorial writer for the Chicago Defender and a former monthly columnist for Crain's Chicago Business. He is also a member of Sigma Pi Phi, Delta Alpha Boule (Northern Illinois), Chicago Chapter of National Guardsmen Inc., and Chicago Chapter of the National Black Journalists. In 2001 he received the Pioneer Award from the Republican National Committee. He was the 2002 National President of the National Guardsmen Inc. He is listed in Who's Who Among Black Americans.
Walker graduated from Fordham University, New York City, majoring in economics, with additional studies at the University of Chicago, New York University, Brooklyn College, and Alabama State University. In 1975, Walker was elected vice president of the Brooklyn, New York chapter of the NAACP. He worked for 10 years as director of labor relations for a shopping center management company before joining Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1970. He was an executive at Sears for 23 years, the first 10 in the New York buying office and the next 13 in the national headquarters in Chicago. Walker accepted an early retirement offer from Sears in 1993 and since then has worked full-time as president of The New Coalition for Economic and Social Change.
Since 1981, Walker has served as a member of the Community Development Board of the University of Chicago's Office of Special Programs. He is a former member of the Illinois Board of Higher Education and the Chicago State University Foundation; a trustee of the Illinois State Community College System; a commissioner with the Midwestern (10 States) Higher Education Commission; and a member of the Community Advisory Panel of WTTW-TV (PBS). Between 1990 and 1992 he was chairman of the Merit Advisory Board of the Department of Personnel of the Office of the Secretary of the State of Illinois.
