Booker T Washington - self-reliance

American civil rights advocate Booker T. Washington describing his the goals of black self-reliance that he advocated. Washington and other black civil rights advocates organized the National Negro Business League as well as creating schools that would accept black students in them in order to establish the foundations for an upward social mobility of the descendants of black slaves in the Deep South in the aftermath of the end of the American Civil War. In the quote he speaks of the Tuskegee University that he founded in Tuskegee, Alabama to provide both technical education (then called "industrial education") and academic education for black Americans though since then it has become open to students of any racial background. He encouraged collaboration between black and white businesspeople on the provision of education to blacks in the Deep South. Washington was a member of the Republican Party of the United States.

Washington's advocacy of black self-reliance gained significant support among civil rights advocates in the United States including support from American President Theodore Roosevelt who invited Washington and his family to dine with him at the White House that they did in October 1901 making Washington the first black American to be invited to the White House by a President, his attendance there was condemned by whites in the Deep South who supported racial segregation. Washington's ideas of black self-reliance also spread to South Africa through figures such as John Langalibalele Dube and Pixley ka Isaka Seme adopting the cause of black self-reliance for black South Africans with Dube and Seme being the political leaders who founded the African National Congress - a political party advocating for civil rights of black South Africans that went on to become a major party in South African politics, see here for more info on Dube: John L Dube - the awakening of the Natives and on Seme: Pixley Seme - unity of native South Africans. More recently Washington's ideas have gained a significant following among black American conservatives and libertarians, especially the prominent conservative and libertarian thinker Thomas Sowell who commends Washington's principle of black self-reliance and has criticized what he regards as excessively-accommodating social welfare programs and excessive business regulations for starting a business in the United States for having discouraged self-reliance among poor blacks and other poor Americans and instead having the effect of encouraging them to have dependence on a paternalist welfare system especially from the American governments policies from the New Deal in the 1930s onward.