On Friday, May 22nd the chairman of the Republican Party returns to one of the origin points of its noblest crusade. This year the Grand Old Party elected a black for the first time as leader. A successful businessman from Maryland defeated after several votes a man who himself had attended segregated schools in South Carolina. In choosing Michael Steele as chair, Republicans did not embrace a new direction, but reaffirmed their roots as the party of freedom and liberty for all. Chairman Steele's visit to the Kanawha Valley this week has very symbolic overtones.
Few people remember today that the region surrounding Charleston can lay claim to being a cradle of the Civil Rights Movement. Before the Civil War, Booker T. Washington of Malden (about fifteen miles east of Charleston) lived as a slave. By 1900 he grew into the preeminent spokesman for the advancement of blacks in America.
Washington advocated a stance for the black community controversial in his time and rejected today. He witnessed the horror inflicted upon politically active blacks in the South. Washington relentlessly advocated the education of blacks in a region hostile to them advancing beyond menial labor. Ku Klux Klan terror raids bullied and often killed blacks who pushed into the political world in the 1870s and 80s. As a result, he spoke in Atlanta about separate development. Washington told the black community to embrace education and develop themselves economically in the present. When it attained a certain financial status, it could then use its clout to peacefully obtain civil and political rights. W. E. B. DuBois derided this in terms that we would today call "appeasement" but it is clear that the social and political culture of the South was very violently antagonistic to DuBois' immediate goals. Washington offered a path that families and individuals could follow in the nineteenth century without fearing for their lives.
Regardless of how modern ears regard Washington's message, his staunch advocacy of education and establishment of the Tuskeegee Institute helped to advance his cause considerably. Interestingly enough, Washington himself had engaged in political activism as a young man.
In the 1870s, while working in Kanawha Valley salt furnaces and coal mines, Washington opened his activist career as a political orator. He stumped the region speaking on behalf of the Republican Party and its candidates. This took courage considering that Kanawha County had strong Confederate sentiment during the Civil War. It would only take one ex Rebel with a grudge to have changed history. Luckily Washington remained safe as he preached support for the GOP. From this springboard he traveled to the Hampton Institute in Virginia to formally receive an education.
The ideas Washington spoke about to the Republican faithful in the Kanawha Valley in his youth will likely be similar to Steele's. First and foremost the Republican Party has always embraced expansive freedom for everyone. Washington found limits as a young man in that certain jobs were just not open for him. The GOP today seeks to expand access to opportunity while enhancing the incentives to succeed. Democrats believe that all should end up equal in the end regardless of effort or risk. Ensuring this "equality of outcome" means that freedoms and opportunities for the energetic and industrious will be diminished while handouts for others increase.
Michael Steele's visit to the Kanawha Valley this week is indeed hsitoric and symbolic. He has the opportunity here to reaffirm the traditional principles of freedom while charting a new course of action. Success is essential.
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