Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), educator, reformer and the most influential black leader of his time preached a philosophy of self-help, racial solidarity and accommodation. He urged blacks to accept discrimination for the time being and concentrate on elevating themselves through hard work and material prosperity. He believed in education of the crafts, industrial and farming skills and the cultivation of the virtues of patience, enterprise and thrift. He said would win the respect of whites and lead to African Americans being fully accepted as citizens and integrated into all strata of society.He criticized W.E.B. DuBois who had a civil rights agenda and for establishing the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). He has been criticized for being too conservative and accommodating to white society in the post-Civil War era. There is evidence, however, that his public work of accommodation differed greatly from his private work, which pushed the envelope more than he let on. He was also the founded the Tuskegee Institute. A more explicit connection to Booker T. Washington in Invisible Man (besides when the narrator quotes him in his speech) comes in Chapter One, when the Narrator writes of his grandparents: "About eighty-five years ago they were told that they were free, united with others of our country in everything pertaining to the common good, and, in everything social, separate like the fingers of the hand" ( ).  This is a direct allusion to Washington's 1895 Atlanta Compromise address, when he said, "In all things purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress".  This is the most conservative approach in the discussion on black America.

References
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAbooker.htm
http://www.biography.com/articles/Booker-T.-Washington-9524663
http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/washington/bio.html