This Day in Labor History: December 30, 1900. Advisors from Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the college run by Booker T. Washington, arrived in Togo to help German colonialists institute a southern-style cotton regime in their African colony. Let's talk about this shameful event!
This moment demonstrates the globalized nature of the American cotton production economy as it developed after the Civil War, as well as the active assistance of the nation’s leading black institution of higher education in propagating it.
In 1895, Booker T. Washington gave his famous Atlanta Compromise speech, when he told a white audience that African-Americans should give up on fighting for political rights and instead just work hard, while whites support that work, especially his own Tuskegee Institute.
The setting for that speech was the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition. In the audience for that gathering of cotton capitalists was Baron Beno von Herman auf Wein, the agricultural attaché to the German embassy in Washington.
The Baron was very interested in learning from American agricultural techniques. He, like many white elites on both sides of the Atlantic, believed that cotton growing was best done by black labor in some sort of forced or semi-coerced manner.