Black educator Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915), founder and first principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama from 1881 until his death in 1915, was also the first president of the National Negro Business League, housed for many years at Tuskegee. Washington founded the League in Boston in 1900 "to promote the commercial and financial development of the Negro." He felt that solutions to the problem of racial discrimination were primarily economic, and that the key lay in efforts to bring African Americans into the middle class. (INTRO NOTE African Americans) Washington headed the League until his death in 1915.
Though Washington died five years before the decade on which the Coolidge-Consumerism collection focuses, his papers contain materials that post-date his death, and specifically National Negro Business League materials for 1922-1923. Robert R. Moton was president of the League during these years and much of the material selected from Washington's papers rounds out slimmer League materials in the papers of Moton himself.
In keeping with Washington's commitment to interracial economic solutions, the League had substantial connections, both direct and indirect, with the world of white business. Annual meetings included representatives of both the black and white races. One year, the Philadelphia department store magnate John Wanamaker was a speaker. Tuskegee Institute Board of Trustees member Julius Rosenwald, head of the Sears, Roebuck and Company mail order and chain store dynasty, was a personal friend of Washington. Acting on the belief that education was the best way to improve the difficult economic situation of blacks, Rosenwald established a fund, administered through Tuskegee even after Washington's death, devoted to the erection of modern school buildings ("Rosenwald schools") for African American students living in rural southern communities from Maryland to Texas.
Dr. Washington's last annual address to the League emphasized the economic purpose behind its founding: "At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion itself there must be for our race, as for all races an economic foundation, economic prosperity, economic independence." This practical economic emphasis distinguished Booker T. Washington's goals from those of another principal African-American leader of the period, W.E.B. Du Bois.
To date, relatively little has been published on the subject of the National Negro Business League.