Booker T. Washington and Culinary Self-Sufficiency Part 1
Tuskegee Students Canning Produce in 1906. Courtesy of The New York Public Library
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) spent a lot of his time as the president of Tuskegee Institute fund raising. But his efforts in advancing black agency, particularly black culinary self-sufficiency has not received attention outside of the work of Historian Jennifer Jensen Wallach. In addition, neither she nor others have talked about this part of his work as a radical act of a person largely called a conservative in the historiography. Washington set the goal for his Tuskegee, Alabama campus to include a self-sufficient black farm to table operation. We do know that staff and students canned 5000 gallons of produce per year. Washington wanted both self-sufficiency and the sale of surplus as a revenue source for the college.
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