Raid (1976), Steve Carter’s Nevis Mountain Dew
(1978), Samm-Art Williams’s Home (1979), and
Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play, which won a Pu-
litzer Prize in 1982.
Known for his “great force” and “dedication,”
Ward made an invaluable contribution to the
black theater explosion of the 1960s. His vision of
a theater by and for promising actors, playwrights,
directors, technicians, and administrators was
highly influential in the African-American literary
community. Although he has been unable to write
much since the late 1970s, his short, satiric plays,
along with his publications in the New York Times
and the Negro Digest, helped widen the range and
depth of understanding of the black experience
through the theater.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beauford, Fred. “The Negro Ensemble Company: Five
Years against the Wall.” Black Creation 3 (Winter
1972): 16–18.
Floyd, Gaffney. “Ward, Douglas Turner.” In The Ox-
ford Companion to African American Literature,
edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Fos-
ter, and Trudier Harris, 756–757. New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1997.
Peavy, Charles D. “Satire and Contemporary Black
Drama.” Satire Newsletter 7, no. 1: 40–48.
Peterson, Maurice. “Douglas Turner Ward.” Essence,
June 1973, pp. 44–45, 75.
Ribowsky, Mark. “ ‘Father’ of the Black Theatre
Boom.” Sepia 25 (November 1976): 67–78.
Vallillo, Stephen M. “Douglas Turner Ward.” In
Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 38: Afro-
American Writers after 1955: Dramatists and Prose
Writers, edited by Thadious M. Davis and Trudier
Harris, 264–270. Detroit: Gale, 1985.
Loretta G. Woodard
Washington, Booker T. (1856–1915)
Although born a slave—the son of a white slave-
holding father and a black mother—educator, ad-
ministrator, political leader, and autobiographer
Booker T. Washington was, by the turn of the
20th century, not only the principal of Tuskegee
Normal and Industrial Institute, which he and his
students built with bricks they had made, but also
readily identified, according to W. E. B. DUBOIS,
Washington’s contemporary and nemesis, as one
of the “most notable figures in a nation of seventy
million.” This was in part because, DuBois further
argued, Washington’s economic program and
public contention that demands for black political
and social privileges were secondary—particularly
his willingness to disenfranchise blacks—“practi-
cally accept[ed] the alleged natural inferiority of
the Negro races” (246). Despite his popularity
among blacks and whites, critics including IDA B.
WELLS-BARNETT and Monroe Trotter maintained
that Washington’s program of accommodation
was an acceptance of white domination.
Although Washington is generally credited with
producing two autobiographies, The Story of My
Life and Work (1900) and UP FROM SLAVERY (1901),
both were written with the assistance of various
ghostwriters. Of the two, Up From Slavery, writ-
ten with the assistance of Max Bennett Thrasher,
in which Washington describes his life in slavery,
emancipation, quest for education, validation of
manual labor and Puritan work ethic, and rise to
power, is the better known. First published serially
in The Outlook magazine with advice from Lyman
Abbott, its editor, Up From Slavery, a best seller,
resonated with the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches
stories popular at the beginning of the 20th cen-
tury. Reporting that the “the most trying ordeal of
slavery” for him was “the wearing of a flax shirt”
(34), Washington concluded that, in the end, the
“school of American slavery” fortified blacks, leav-
ing them “in a stronger, more hopeful condition,
materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously”
than blacks anywhere in the world. In fact, Wash-
ington concluded, “notwithstanding the cruel
wrongs inflicted upon us, the black man got nearly
as much out of slavery as the white man did” (37).
Working in the Virginia coal mines during a
brief hiatus from employment in the home of the
Ruffners, young Booker learned about Hampton
Institute, a school for blacks where financially dis-
advantaged students could work in lieu of paying532 Washington, Booker T.