Kenneth B. Morris Jr. is 52. Direct descendant of Frederick Douglass AND Booker T. Washington

[underpants]

Great-great-great-grandson of Frederick Douglass AND great-great-grandson of Booker T. Washington
A co-worker told me about a show she saw on PBS about this. Amazing.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/frederick-douglass-and-booker-t-washington-descendant-finds-his-ancestral-calling/2012/09/06/f92d62b0-f6b4-11e1-8398-0327ab83ab91_story.html



He was 5 before he knew that the man in the painting, Frederick Douglass, was his great-great-great-grandfather and he was grown before he realized the significance of the legacy he had inherited from the great abolitionist and orator. If being a male descendant of one of the most respected men in American history had been be daunting, Morris would have faced twice the challenge. He is also the great-great-grandson of Booker T. Washington, the illustrious black educator and statesman.

Born in Washington in 1962, Morris was the oldest of three children of Nettie Washington Douglass III and Kenneth B. Morris Sr., an insurance broker.

“I just didn’t know that much about it,” he said. “I remember being in high school history classes and we’d get to chapters on Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, and I didn’t know exactly what they had done. I remember those chapters being very short.”

His mother also told him about her parents, descendants of the two great men. Her father, Frederick Douglass III, a surgeon, had met her mother, Nettie Hancock Washington, walking across the campus at then-Tuskegee Institute one day in 1941.

“It was love at first sight,” Nettie Washington Douglass III told Morris and his siblings. “They got married three months later.”

[TheBlackAdder]

1. I side with W. E. B. Du Bois, who does a good job dismantling Booker T. Washington.

TheE. B. Du Bois’s select essays from “The Souls of Black Folk” introduces the concept that African-Americans need to present two faces to survive in America, along with a rebuttal of Booker T. Washington’s claim that the Negro can survive though submission. It was Du Bois position that an African-American needs to present their own image at a person, and another image for white society to see. Additionally, he felt that Washington sold out the black race by sacrificing many of the rights inherent to a human. While white society gladly received Washington’s position, it seemed to lead to the stagnation of the black race in America. Du Bois wrote this collection of essays to highlight the travesty that occurred and to call for these rights to be restored, it blacks were to achieve respect in society.

Although one could second-guess, whether Du Bois’s position could have obtained enough traction to pass in that era, America was in a more receptive state to have made that change. After several decades, since Washington’s paper, the country had solidified its views and radical change would not occur until the late 1960’s, and even then, riots and bloodshed occurred. If Du Bois had lived in that era, perhaps the black race would have thrived, though he probably would not have been Harvard educated either.

[underpants]

2. Well said

[radicalliberal]

3. Booker T. Washington has been reincarnated as Clarence Thomas. n/t