cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/49213641

I gotta say, it hit me way harder than I expected. One of the more inspiring books that I've read.

I first read it as an assignment when I was a student in Lincoln University which is a historically black college in a very rural area. I'm biracial, and knowing that Booker was too, made it a little more personal to me. When I was young, I sorta took everything too personal, so re-reading this book as an adult has been interesting.

On the surface, some people paint him as someone who was too accommodating to white people in power at the time, too willing to work within the system. But honestly? I think there was something pretty radical in what he was doing.

He wasn’t trying to blow the system up. He was trying to outsmart it; which is my favorite way fo doing things. He was teaching Black Americans how to survive it, how to thrive despite it, and how to build something of their own.

The big thing was his emphasis on vocational training and economic self-reliance. A lot of people don't view it as a socialist text, but I think there’s a strong case to be made that it was actually kinda socialist in spirit.

Not in a theoretical, Marx-reading way, but in the real, ground-up, community-empowering way.

He believed in lifting people up by teaching them skills, organizing schools like Tuskegee to be self-sustaining, and creating networks of support that didn’t rely on charity or pity.

That’s a collective spirit. That’s building infrastructure from below. And to me, that feels closer to socialist principles than it does to capitalist bootstrapping myths. Tho some charge Booker with being capitalist, I just don't see it.

Yeah, he had to play nice with powerful white people. I don’t think it was all because he loved doing it, though he did have some genuine friendships and respect with them. I think it was a lot of strategy.

Booker knew that full equality wasn’t going to happen overnight, and that if black folks waited for white America to hand it over, they’d be waiting forever. So he focused on building real independence. The kind where you don't have to ask anymore, because you've already made your own way.

And the man walked to college. Like literally. Crossed multiple states on foot just for the chance to learn! I bitch when I have to drive across town for something.

Sure, in a truly socialist society he shouldn’t have had to do that at all, but he worked with the world he had. And that grit and that drive made this a really great book for me. I'm trying to shop around and find one of the first editions of it to buy for my collection.

It's a free e-book on Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2376