Both Washington and Obama were not nurtured by their biological fathers. Washington’s father was reportedly a white man who most likely took advantage of his enslaved mother. Obama’s parents divorced when he was a toddler and his Kenyan father, who died when Obama was twenty-one years old, did not play an active role in his son’s life. Psychologists could claim that, as young men, they longed and searched for father figures. Both found surrogates in elder white men when they were young—Hampton Institute’s founder and Civil War veteran S. C. Armstrong in Washington’s case; with Obama, his maternal grandfather and World War II veteran Stanley Armour Dunham.
On average, Washington traveled six months out of every year. Even so, family was an important dimension of his life. He maintained connections with his immediate family, enjoyed spending time with his children, and embraced the companionship that he shared with his three wives—he outlived his first two wives, Fannie Norton Smith and Olivia Davidson. His third wife, who he married in 1893, Margaret James Murray, served as the “First Lady” of Tuskegee until Washington’s death. She was also a leader in her own right, focusing her energies on matters concerning black women in organizations like the Tuskegee Women’s Club and the National Association of Colored Women.
“It just so happens that I’m fortunate enough to be surrounded by women. They’re the most important people in my life,” Obama wrote candidly in an essay in MORE magazine in 2015. “They’re the ones who’ve shaped me the most. In this job, they are my sanctuary.” Obama testified how he makes it his duty to frequently eat dinner with the family and dubbed First Lady Michelle Obama “the rock” of the family who truly sustains him.21 Like other first ladies, Mrs. Obama was her husband’s political partner and, like Margaret Murray Washington, she initiated many programs for African American women and girls.
Washington and Obama were both thrust into realms of leadership quite rapidly, causing onlookers to wonder, “How did that happen?” Relatively unknown on the national scale until more than a decade after he founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in 1881, Washington became black America’s sanctioned-by-whites leader in 1895 following the death of former slave and elder statesman Frederick Douglass and the delivery of his famous “Atlanta Compromise” oration in Atlanta, Georgia. More of a symbolic leader of black America than Washington, Obama rapidly rose through the ranks before officially announcing his candidacy for president on February 10, 2007.
Historians have not had too much trouble identifying black messiah leader(s) in each generation or major historical phase in the African American experience who not only achieved reverence from the black masses, but also the attention and support of white Americans. Washington and Obama were the most powerful black leaders of their respective times. In 1947, historian John Hope Franklin christened the period from 1895 until 1915 (the year of Washington’s death) “The Age of Booker T. Washington.” Analogously, the eight years of Obama’s presidency are routinely called “The Age of Obama.” Those historical personalities who have eras named after them have celebrity status. Washington and Obama both achieved megastar status, something usually reserved for actors, actresses, musicians, and athletes. As historian Michael Bieze has convincingly argued, Washington was truly a celebrity with his own sophisticated branding and propaganda. After he was elected president, “Obamamania”—the state of being a particularly enthusiastic supporter of Obama—swept across the nation.22
That Washington and Obama had their fair share of detractors and critics within the collective black community and among segments of white America is striking. Washington was attacked by major black leaders of the Progressive Era like Du Bois and his colleagues in the short-lived Niagara Movement, Guardian editor William Monroe Trotter, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, and others. Du Bois and company cried out for Washington to publicly denounce multileveled attacks on blacks’ human and civil rights. “The Intellectuals,” as Washington referred to his faultfinders, echoed some of the concerns raised by Obama’s most fervent critics. Similarly, Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, Julianne Malveaux, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Eric Dyson, and at one time Jesse Jackson and other civil rights veterans, among others, summoned Obama to abandon his strategy of race neutrality.
Although Washington’s and Obama’s unique posts as black leaders were dependent upon white patronage, both were caricatured, vilified, and attacked by white supremacists. Washington was demonized as being a black nationalist by The Clansman author Thomas Dixon Jr., was regularly called a “darkey” and “coon” by racist white southerners, was threatened so much that he at one point hired a private patrol to protect him, and was even brutally beaten by a white man in New York City in 1911.
Obama and Jesse Jackson are the only presidential candidates to have received death threats before receiving a nomination from their party.23 From 2007 until 2017, Obama was the target of assassination attempts and purported conspiracies. Moreover, one only need to type Obama into any Internet search engine to uncover countless hateful and racist depictions of him.
The most overriding connection between Washington and Obama is conspicuous, yet largely overlooked: by virtue of being representatives of “the race,” or black leaders whose power-broking capital and abilities were more often than not subject to white approval and backing, they were compelled to master the art of communicating with two primary audiences—black and white America—separately and in some cases simultaneously. As they recounted in their autobiographies, this unique skill was something that they developed in their early years.
When interfacing with predominantly white audiences in the spoken and written word, Washington presented himself as a humble, nonthreatening, and compliant mouthpiece for black America. He personified the quintessential “safe Negro” leader. In Up From Slavery, he rewrote black history by labeling slavery a school for those in bondage, he claimed that the Ku Klux Klan no longer existed in 1901, he pandered to wealthy white philanthropists, he extolled the progress of US race relations since Reconstruction, and he publicized his own Horatio Alger tale as living evidence that all blacks descended from slaves could go on to accomplish great things.
In the multilayered, five-minute speech that he delivered on September 18, 1895, at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, Washington offered temporary solutions to the so-called “Negro Problem” that did not disrupt the white South’s racial hierarchy. He meekly instructed blacks to remain in the South, to accept their positions as agricultural laborers, to obey the South’s convoluted system of racial etiquette in the public sphere, to clinch onto vocational and industrial education, and to place notions of political and social equality on the back burner. Washington reassured southern whites that they would be “surrounded by the most patient, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world had seen” and accepted segregation, famously declaring: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet, one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”24
Be that as it may, when holding court with students in the Tuskegee Chapel during his routine “Sunday Evening Talks” or sermonizing to black Southerners during his whistle-stop speeches or educational tours from 1908 until 1912 that historian David M. Jackson meticulously sifted through, Washington propagated fundamental tenets of black nationalism—self-help, self-determination, economic independence, and perseverance. Like all influential black leaders of his times, he also believed in racial uplift and the politics of respectability.
The founder of Tuskegee Institute was bilingual, a master code-switcher who was well-versed in hamming it up with whites who believed in black inferiority; connecting with politicians (from congressmen to US presidents); keeping it real with poor black southerners; debating with his adversaries; and captivating his supporters abroad.
Linguists H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman are spot on in arguing that Obama’s “ability to style-shift is