Volume 46, Number 10 · June 10, 1999
The Fall of The Black Empires
By Arthur Kempton
To Be Loved: The Music, the Magic, the Memories of Motown: An Autobiography
by Berry Gordy
Warner Books, 432 pp., (out of print)
Berry, Me, and Motown
by Raynoma Gordy Singleton
Contemporary Books, 320 pp., (out of print)
An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad
by Claude Andrew Clegg III
St. Martin's, 377 pp., $14.95 (paper)
By the time the 'equal opportunity' generation of black Americans started going to college in the Sixties, Booker T. Washington's reputation had washed up on the wrong side of history, beached and moldering like the carcass of a whale. For these newest 'new Negroes' he was as old-fashioned as the country blues. He seemed compromised and unheroic at a time when compromise was disreputable. It isn't surprising that his influence on twentieth-century black America is commonly given short shrift. Ironically, two men of high influence with the generation that scorned Washington, Elijah Muhammad and Berry Gordy Jr., were in many respects his followers in the institutions they built, and that is the reason they are among the most important black Americans of the last half-century.
Review, 10362 words
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