Last Monday was Martin Luther King Day, preparatory to Black History Month in February. On cue, the media is already filled with informative Black history, a subject that is of interest to me.
One PBS program I watched in the Black Experience series was “Making Black America.” (Incidentally, much of the funding for these Black documentaries comes from Bank of America – you know, the one founded by Amadeo Giannini whose CEO is Irish and has every ethnic group except Italian on its Board.) The program highlighted the post-Civil War era and the building of a new Black America. The one name that dominated that era was Booker T. Washington.
His original name was Booker Taliaferro, born into slavery with a White father. His mother told him his father lived on another plantation in Virginia and made sure Booker knew his surname was Taliaferro. There is a good chance that his father was a Taliaferro, and not some hired hand.
Our Institute has written much about the Taliaferro clan, originally Venetians who emigrated to England in 1562, and whose scion Robert bought land in colonial Virginia in 1651. So prominent was the name in Southern history that two Speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives carried it from their maternal side – Robert Taliaferro Hunter (1861-62) and Sam Taliaferro Rayburn (1940 -1962). Actress Glenn Close is also a Taliaferro. (The Taliaferro story can be found in The Italic Way issue XXXVII.)
The fact that Booker was half White and yet a slave piqued my interest about the ‘morals’ of slaveholders. Wholesale rape of Black slave women was a fact of life; even White plantation wives knew or feared that their husbands and sons coupled with the help regularly. Famously, Thomas Jefferson crossed that line and even kept his resulting issue as slaves on his plantation.
How did any White slave-owner make his own children slaves and have the gall to face them every day? In the case of Booker, there may have been an arrangement between Master Taliaferro and Master Burroughs (his mother’s owner) to keep Booker and his mom on the Burrough’s slave inventory. Outta sight…
When I say wholesale rape, it is borne out in the U.S. Census records. Until 1850, the census didn’t list “mulatto” as a racial category. But from 1850 to 1930 it did, the numbers were getting huge. I accessed the 1850 census record for Fairfax County, VA and found almost one-quarter of the slaves were listed as “mulatto.” Is it any wonder that the average Black in America is 25% White? The American Black is quite lighter in skin tone than native Africans and even lighter than early 1800s photos of slaves in the American South. But, back to Booker…
Booker’s mom later had a Black husband named Washington Ferguson who escaped slavery during the Civil War and lived in West Virginia. She and Booker joined him after the war and the boy enrolled in school for the first time at age 9. When the teacher asked for his name, she didn’t like Taliaferro so suggested he use his stepfather’s first name, Washington, as his surname. But the boy clung to his ‘roots’ and called himself Booker T. Washington.
His education continued in a Virginia school established by a White missionary. There, Booker learned academics as well as manual skills. Eventually, he was chosen to develop a new all-Negro school in Tuskegee, Alabama – a school with teachers but no buildings. Booker had a kiln installed so students could make the bricks to build the school. Tuskegee became the epicenter of Black self-reliance. Scientist George Washington Carver became a faculty member.
Booker’s Black antagonists considered vocational training of young Blacks to be subservient. “He makes men into carpenters, while radicals like W.E.B. DuBois make carpenters into men.”- a dubious assessment. Booker was against the founding of the NAACP, choosing to cultivate White allies – politically and financially. He secured funding from Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, among others. President Teddy Roosevelt honored him at the White House, a controversy at the time.
Pursuing his strategy of a self-reliant Black community Booker founded the National Negro Business League in 1905, funded by Andrew Carnegie, to energize Black business development. In 1966, it became the National Business League and now has 200 chapters in 40 states and 50 nations.
Did Booker have Italian roots? Making his own bricks may be a clue. -JLM
I always wondered about the Taliaferro name and assumed it came from Louisiana, but certainly didn’t know of its Venition connections. It keeps popping up in the strangest places…There was even a DJ in the Bay Area with the surname.
And in this same posting, the were notes regarding AP Giannini….a strange coincidence…I was going through some papers donated to me last night and came across news clippings regarding his death, and clippings about his son, who did not live much longer than AP. AP’s granddaughter was a member of our foundation for years.
One interesting thing in all these articles that go back 60 -70 years was that no one was born with a silver spoon, but likewise, no one felt so deprived that they lost their ability to create some of their destiny. AP’s life had some tragic twists, including a father who was murdered, raised learning a multitude of jobs in the ranches of San Jose, and in many ways was the epitome of the Horatio Alger myth–alla moda Italiana.
Reviewing those news articles, and in a sense probably with Booker too, these sorts of individuals did not spend much time being “victims”, which is in my opinion, has become the greatest obstacle to self-motivation ever created. This is becoming a daily occurrence and an excuse for someone else to play the cards you were dealt . Somehow AP and Booker were able to overcome some of life’s adversities. Sadly that’s not on today’s agenda, it is the “burdens of history” that are in vogue. It is an easy pill to swallow, but the side effects are fewer and fewer Bookers and Giannini’s, and what a loss to our current society.
He was a great man, even without his Italian heritage. It has great interest to those of us who value our Italian heritage. Rape is a terrible thing no matter who does it.
I am sorry to see the Bank of America doesn’t have one Italian American on its Board and doesn’t do more for the Italian American cause. It is very, very disappointing that firms that make money selling Italian products or owned don’t give back to the Italian American community. It helps to explain the poor position our community is in, why it lacks political power and influence.
I have to add to my comments….its becoming a topsy-topsy turvy world….where in plain English another store/business is leaving the Oakland airport area because of daily violence, car theft, break-ins, and other mayhem. I honestly could not follow the city councilperson who tried to explain away the violence, like the criminal element was a constituent that she was afraid to offend. We really are losing our moral compass, and the courageous heroes of old are just that, old and irrelevant, and more’s the tragedy.
To add a comment to Prof DiNovo that we lack political power, the problem is that there is no pride in being Italian, thanks to the media portraying us as gangsters or bimbos. As far as I know, there is no national organization that promotes Italian heritage, culture, and pride.
Getting back to Booker T., he had traveled to Mezzogiorno and commented after his visit, “The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the colored farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States in America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.” (La Storia, J. Mangione & B. Morreale). That says it all for the great migration from Italy to find a better life in America.
Ironically Phil’s comments are almost similar to Fredrick Douglas’s comments on his trip to England for an abolitionist conference in 1850’s as saw the suffering and starvation of the Irish when the boat stopped in Ireland at the height of the potato famine. Their lives were equally horrible, if not worse, His trip was sponsored by an abolitionist society, yet the irony was the same group did not follow the economic politics of slavery in Ireland–caused the British government at the time…….