Alas, I’m in the higher education gig and am aware of my woeful ignorance within my own field.
I have heard of “Up From Slavery”, but alas, not even at the level where I can come and go and talk of Michelangelo
I wasn’t aware that Brooker T had been forgotten—then again I had no idea who Dwayne Johnson was until it was explained to me this past weekend, and with any luck I will have forgotten who he is three weeks ago (though he is now in my class notes as a possible fall back in an analogy on the importance of St. Augustine to his contemporaries in the event that my students do not know who Michael Jordan was).
When I say he has been forgotten, that is surely true with him as sure as it is with nearly everything.
There is a quote from Michener's "Tales of The South Pacific" that I love. It makes me feel sad and small every time when I read it but the absolute truth, beauty, and sentimentality makes me love it all the more:
"They will live a long time, these men of the South Pacific. They had an American quality. They, like their victories, will be remembered as long as our generation lives. After that, like the men of the Confederacy, they will become strangers. Longer and longer shadows will obscure them, until their Guadalcanal sounds distant on the ear like Shiloh and Valley Forge."
I don't know why, but I find comfort in that.
And so it is with us, each of us, and all we have known. And so it is with the remarkable Booker T. Washington.
He deserves better, but someone like W.E.B. Dubois (a dishonorable man who appealed to the weak side and lazy side of human nature in my eyes) in today's woke society supplants an honorable, true, and hardworking man like Booker T. Washington who appealed to hard work, discipline, self-betterment, and self-control, and it is to our detriment that Dubois eclipses Washington in many influential circles.