Dotawo/content/article/davies.md

---
title: "Booker T. Washington’s Challenge for Egyptology: African-Centered Research in the Nile Valley"
authors: ["vanessadavies.md"]
abstract:
keywords: ["colonialism"]
---

In her autobiography, Mary Church Terrell recounts an event that filled
her with such pride, she felt as though she "had grown an inch
taller."[^1] In 1902, Prince Henry of Prussia, the grandson of Queen
Victoria, visited the United States. Mary and Booker T. Washington were
among the attendees at a reception held for the prince at the Waldorf
Astoria hotel in New York City. During the event, the Prince asked to
speak with Washington, and by all accounts, the encounter was a great
success. The man who hosted the prince on behalf of US President
Theodore Roosevelt described it in this way: "The ease with which
Washington conducted himself was very striking. \[...\] Indeed, Booker
Washington's manner was easier than that of almost any other man I saw
meet the Prince in this country."[^2] Mary Church Terrell viewed the
meeting similarly.

Terrell was a social activist, working with Ida Wells on anti-lynching
campaigns and collaborating with others to found the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National
Association of Colored Women. What made her feel an inch taller was her
reflection on their morning with the prince and Washington's subsequent
lunch hosted by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. "Thus did an ex-slave
\[Washington\] and one of his friends touch elbows and clasp hands with
royalty, as represented by a monarchical government of Europe, and sit
at the table of royalty, as represented by Republican America."[^3]
Terrell's description of Washington fits well with the events of the
following pages. He regularly interacted with ease with heads of state,
for example, US president Theodore Roosevelt, and with other educational
leaders, such as the first president of the University of Chicago,
William Rainey Harper. In a brief exchange, Washington applied the same
expert communication skills to a conversation about ancient Nubia with
the US Egyptologist, James Henry Breasted.

This article outlines in broad strokes Booker T. Washington's
perspectives on education, which were shaped by his own educational
experiences and the particular needs of the students who attended
Tuskegee Institute, which he ran from 1881 until his death in 1915. His
program of industrial education has often been distinguished from the
liberal arts style of education championed by his contemporary W. E. B.
Du Bois. In the following pages, we will see that their approaches were
complementary, not contradictory, means of adapting and maneuvering
within a system that was riddled with obstacles designed to hinder their
students' success. Washington's awareness of an obstacle-ridden system
is clear in his correspondence with Breasted who explicitly isolates
Washington from the ancient Egyptian culture. But that was of no
significance to Washington who, with his focus on industrial education,
was uninterested in Breasted's esoteric considerations of ancient Nile
Valley cultures and who, in any case, viewed the ancient Egyptians as
unjust persecutors. The research questions that interested Booker T.
Washington were not those that interested most Egyptologists at that
time, although they are increasingly of interest today to scholars,
particularly in fields adjacent to Egyptology.

Washington found no benefit in Egyptological research for African
descended people in the US. Nonetheless, this article points out a
lesson drawn from his approach that is particularly urgent for our
contemporary world. Scientific research has offered great benefits and
also great pain and injustice, as clearly demonstrated in the
decades-long syphilis study centered at Tuskegee that is now recognized
as a textbook case of medical racism. Yet despite such unethical
practices, we do not abandon scientific inquiry. Just as Washington
weighed the benefits of Egyptology, we must interrogate the purposes and
benefits of research questions to recognize when seemingly worthwhile
studies actually result in harm.

# Industrial and Liberal Arts Education

At the turn of the century in the United States, there was discussion in
African American communities as to the best type of education that
should be provided for African Americans. At a very basic level, the two
sides of the dispute advocated either for industrial education or
book-based learning. The two people often positioned as the figureheads
advocating for each perspective were Booker T. Washington and W. E. B.
Du Bois, although their points of view were not as diametrically opposed
to one another as they are sometimes presented.

Booker T. Washington was born in Virginia to an enslaved woman named
Jane who, after emancipation, took him and her other two children to
live with her husband in West Virginia.[^4] They lived in extreme
poverty, and immediately he and his older brother worked in physically
arduous conditions to help their stepfather provide for the family. When
neighboring families chipped in to pay a teacher to instruct members of
the community, he continued to work during the day and completed his
schoolwork at nighttime.[^5] From such inauspicious beginnings,
Washington was able to secure a college education for himself, and by
his mid-twenties, he was appointed to lead a new school that would train
African American teachers, what is today Tuskegee University in Alabama.

Washington framed the particular advantage of industrial education over
so-called book learning in terms of its positive impact on the lives of
White people. As he described it in a 1903 article in *The Atlantic*,
Black professionals, such as lawyers, doctors, and ministers, primarily
served Black communities, but Black people trained in trades and
business pursuits could serve both Black and White communities.

> There was general appreciation of the fact that the industrial
> education of the black people had direct, vital, and practical bearing
> upon the life of each white family in the South; while there was no
> such appreciation of the results of mere literary training. \[...\]
> The minute it was seen that through industrial education the Negro
> youth was not only studying chemistry, but also how to apply the
> knowledge of chemistry to the enrichment of the soil, or to cooking,
> or to dairying, and that the student was being taught not only
> geometry and physics, but their application to blacksmithing,
> brickmaking, farming, and what not, then there began to appear for the
> first time a common bond between the two races and coöperation between
> North and South.[^6]

Du Bois, on the other hand, felt that higher education should not be
focused on teaching the skills necessary to earn a living, but should
shape students into people by teaching them how to think.

> Teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think. \[\...\] And the
> final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a
> brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad,
> pure, and inspiring ends of living,---not sordid money-getting.[^7]

Although it may seem as though differences in educational philosophy
separate these men's views, in fact each also supported the other's
vision. In 1902, Washington wrote about the goal of education in a way
that sounds similar to Du Bois's view, that education makes human
beings: "The end of all education, whether of head or hand or heart, is
to make an individual good, to make him useful, to make him powerful; is
to give him goodness, usefulness and power in order that he may exert a
helpful influence upon his fellows."[^8] In December of the following
year, Du Bois gave a lecture in Baltimore where he expressed his
approval for industrial training as long as it did not threaten
book-based learning: "A propaganda for industrial training is in itself
a splendid and timely thing to which all intelligent men cry God speed.
\[...\] But when it is coupled by sneers at Negro colleges whose work
made industrial schools possible \[...\] then it becomes a movement you
must choke to death or it will choke you."[^9] Washington and Du Bois
appreciated the value in the other's perspective, but their strategies
emphasized a different best path forward.

Washington and Du Bois formulated educational methodologies within
systems that were not set up to benefit their targeted groups of
students: people of color in the racially segregated United States. Each
educator found ways to maneuver within that system, to carve out a space
where their methodology might be successful without threatening the
dominant (White) systems. Washington articulated his position in a
speech he gave in Atlanta in 1906. He knew that people of color
attaining education, wealth, and civil rights were seen by many White
people as a threat to their own wealth and rights. Washington sought to
allay those fears by assuring his audience that people of color had "no
ambition to mingle socially with the white race. \[...\] \[or\] dominate
the white man in political matters."[^10] Washington's separatist vision
was at odds with Du Bois's vision of integration and was less
challenging to White people who were wary of losing their own status in
awarding social gains to people of color.[^11]

Mary Church Terrell took a stance in the middle ground of this debate.
She was born to a couple who had been formerly enslaved but achieved
great financial success through their business ventures and were able to
provide her with elite schooling. As an African American woman with a
master's degree in ancient Greek and Roman cultures from Oberlin
College, she had experienced and benefitted from a liberal arts
education.[^12] She also had great respect for the type of education
that Washington facilitated through Tuskegee. Her concern was that
Washington promoted that education to the exclusion of other types of
education.

> I was known as a disciple of the higher education, but I never failed
> to put myself on record as advocating industrial training also.
>
> After I had seen Tuskegee with my own eyes I had a higher regard and a
> greater admiration for its founder than I had ever entertained before.
> \[...\] From that day forth, whenever these friends tried to engage me
> in conversation about Tuskegee who knew that 'way down deep in my
> heart I was a stickler for the higher education, and that if it came
> to a show down I would always vote on that side, I would simply say,
> "Have you seen Tuskegee? Have you been there? If you have not seen it
> for yourself, I will not discuss it with you till you do."[^13]

Washington saw his system of industrial education as the way to prepare
African Americans to participate in the economic systems in the United
States from which they had been excluded for so long.[^14]

A key to understanding the differing educational views of Du Bois and
Washington rests in their own family situations and educational
experiences, as well as the experiences of the students whom each
envisioned they would be serving. As mentioned earlier, Washington's
schooldays in West Virginia mostly consisted of him doing the schoolwork
at night after a difficult day's work at the salt furnace or in the coal
mines of West Virginia.[^15] With a bit of support from members of his
community, who gave a few cents here and a few cents there, he set out
walking, hitchhiking, and working to pay for food until he reached
Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), where he continued to work
to pay tuition.[^16] After completing that program and more schooling at
Wayland Seminary (now Virginia Union University), Washington was hired
in 1881, at about the age of twenty-five, to be the first leader of
Tuskegee Normal (Teachers') and Industrial Institute in Alabama.

Du Bois was born and raised in a predominantly White town in
Massachusetts. His tuition at Fisk University in Nashville was provided
for him through donations from a number of Congregationalist churches,
and scholarships largely paid his way through Harvard University.[^17]
As he later described it, the aid came him almost effortlessly, "I
needed money; scholarships and prizes fell into my lap."[^18] With those
experiences, as well as a stint abroad at the University of Berlin, Du
Bois greatly benefitted from book-based learning, and he believed it
provided the best educational tools for the next generation. He famously
quarreled with Egyptologist Flinders Petrie because Petrie not only did
not see the merits of book-based learning for modern Egyptians, he
inexplicably felt it would harm them.[^19] Du Bois countered Western
colonial attitudes in his engagement with Petrie and in his many
publications that centered the Africanity of ancient Nile Valley
cultures. Like Du Bois, Washington was aware of White and
Western-centric views of antiquity. But he did not devote his energies
to resisting such claims because Egyptology was completely irrelevant to
his educational program.

Because of his educational experiences, Du Bois was familiar with the
types of students who had access to elite educations. As Washington
describes the students at Tuskegee, they were a world away from the
students who attended Fisk and Harvard.

> The students had come from homes where they had had no opportunities
> for lessons which would teach them how to care for their bodies.
> \[\...\] We wanted to teach the students how to bathe; how to care for
> their teeth and clothing. We wanted to teach them what to eat, and how
> to eat it properly, and how to care for their rooms. Aside from this,
> we wanted to give them such a practical knowledge of some one
> industry, together with the spirit of industry, thrift, and economy,
> that they would be sure of knowing how to make a living after they had
> left us. We wanted to teach them to study actual things instead of
> mere books alone.[^20]

Tuskegee had a very different purpose and mission than an institution
like Fisk University that Du Bois attended or Atlanta University where
Du Bois taught because Tuskegee served a different group of students.
The adaptive strategies that Washington and Du Bois developed to
facilitate their students' success reflect the very different
environments in which they operated.

Tuskegee Institute thrived under Washington's leadership and continues
through the present in its educational mission. Du Bois's dream of a
liberal arts style of education widely available to students of color
continues in many institutions, despite the fact that his own
educational trajectory took a different turn. After holding a few
different teaching posts, Du Bois left the ranks of faculty and became
editor of *The Crisis*, the magazine of the NAACP. His program of
education continued through that work and through the many books he
published, arguably reaching a much larger audience than his university
teaching did. Under Du Bois's leadership, *The Crisis* experienced an
exponential growth in circulation, increasing readership by more than
500% in the first year and again by more than 600% in the following
seven years.[^21]

# The Presidents of Tuskegee Institute and the University of Chicago

Although Booker T. Washington's industrial education was far removed
from an elite liberal arts education, Washington nonetheless had a close
association with the president of just such an institution. The
University of Chicago has become famous for its particular style of
instruction that emphasizes honing analytical skills as opposed to
parroting opinions. That educational philosophy is rooted in the
practices of its first president, William Rainey Harper. As a teacher,
Harper was described as instructing his students not in "what to
believe, but how to think."[^22] Despite the clear differences in
curricula, the industrial education offered at Tuskegee Institute found
an ally in the University of Chicago.

William Rainey Harper was appointed president of the University of
Chicago in 1891, a decade after Booker T. Washington took the helm at
Tuskegee Institute. Harper was involved in a wide-range of educational
pursuits from laying the groundwork for today's junior college or
community college to promoting the arts and crafts movement, which
sought to counter the growing role of mechanization.[^23] For example,
the Industrial Art League, a nonprofit formed in 1899, asserted "the
educational value of the handicrafts" and valuing "quality of production
as against mere cheapness."[^24] The five-person executive committee of
the Industrial Art League included Chicago architect Louis Sullivan and
William Rainey Harper.

Washington and Harper became acquainted toward the end of the nineteenth
century. Over the years, they had many opportunities to meet
professionally. In 1895, Harper invited Washington to speak to the
students of the University of Chicago. Washington recounted that he "was
treated with great consideration and kindness by all of the officers of
the University."[^25] In October 1898, a National Peace Jubilee was held
in Chicago following the end of the four-month Spanish-American
War.[^26] Harper, in his role of chair of the committee on invitations
and speakers, invited Washington to participate. The high-profile event
was planned to be held over the course of many days, with intellectuals,
social leaders, and war heroes speaking at various locations around
Chicago. Dignitaries scheduled to attend included diplomats, members of
Congress, and US president William McKinley.

On Sunday, October 16, Washington spoke to a huge crowd, reported to
have numbered sixteen thousand. As he later wrote, it was "the largest
audience that I have ever addressed," including President McKinley.[^27]
Washington gave a historical overview touching on the service of African
Americans to their country and thanked the president, to wild acclaim,
for recognizing their commitment to the United States during the war.
Two days later, Washington spoke again, that time at Chicago's Columbia
Theater, a 600-seat venue, where he shared the stage with two esteemed
veterans.[^28]

In 1902, Harper was again instrumental in bringing Washington to speak
in Chicago. The Industrial Art League, on whose executive committee
Harper served, was building a new studio. US President Theodore
Roosevelt did the honor of laying the cornerstone, and one of the
invited speakers was Booker T. Washington.[^29]

After Harper's untimely death before his fiftieth birthday, in January
1906, Washington maintained his relationship with the University of
Chicago through its next president, Harry Pratt Judson. In 1910, Judson
invited Washington to speak on campus. His address in December of that
year in Mandel Hall was entitled "The Progress of the American
Negro."[^30] A further connection between the University of Chicago and
Tuskegee Institute was Julius Rosenwald, head of Sears, Roebuck and
Company, who served on the Board of Trustees of both institutions.[^31]
In February 1912, Rosenwald, Judson, and James R. Angell, Dean of the
Faculties at Chicago, visited Tuskegee to see firsthand the work that
Washington was doing. The visitors approved, stating that Tuskegee was
"one of the most practicable and successful attempts to solve the Negro
problem in the South."[^32]

In June 1912, six and half years after Harper's death, the University of
Chicago honored their first president by dedicating a library named for
him. A large group of invited guests, including Booker T. Washington and
other leaders in the world of higher education, as well as a crowd of
about four thousand people listened to a series of addresses on topics
such as the university's libraries, its architecture, and the importance
of literature (Fig. 1).[^33] *The University of Chicago Magazine*
reported on Washington's presence at the event in this way:

> The delegates to the dedication to the Library numbered in all sixty.
> Among those to attract the greatest attention was the representative
> of Tuskegee Normal, Principal Booker T. Washington. Arriving late, he
> was the only man on the platform without a gown. This deficiency he
> supplied in the afternoon, however, without seeming to lessen the
> interest of the onlookers in his presence.[^34]

The magazine's remarks were reserved solely for Washington. No comment
is made on the ceremony's other attendees. Washington would surely not
have read the article, which was aimed at a reading audience of
graduates and other donors to the university. Nonetheless, the snide
comments seem designed to embarrass him while simultaneously signaling
the superiority of the other invited guests. The author objectifies
Washington by viewing him as a curiosity.

![Booker T. Washington (far left) in procession to the afternoon Convocation at the University of Chicago, 1912. Credit: University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf1-08583, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library[^35]](../static/images/BTW-Fig1.jpg "Booker T. Washington (far left) in procession to the afternoon Convocation at the University of Chicago, 1912. Credit: University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf1-08583, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library[^35]")
**~~Figure 1. Booker T. Washington (far left) in procession to the afternoon Convocation at the University of Chicago, 1912. Credit: University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf1-08583, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library[^35]~~**


Judson's continuing relationship with Washington is interesting in light
of Judson's poor treatment of an African American student at the
University of Chicago. Georgiana Simpson, who became the first African
American woman to receive a PhD in the United States, was expelled from
her campus dorm by Judson in 1907. Some White students complained about
Simpson's presence in the dorm, but the Dean of Women declared that
Simpson would remain in her lodging. In a shocking display of
micromanagement, Judson intervened in the matter and forced Simpson to
move off campus. Thanks to the recent efforts of some undergraduates, a
bust of Simpson commemorating her accomplishments now resides in the
campus's Reynolds Club opposite a plaque recognizing Judson.[^36]
Judson's treatment of Simpson in light of his relationship with
Washington seems motivated by racism, sexism, and also a status
differential, where Washington, as a fellow institutional head, was a
peer, while Simpson was merely a student. Set against this complex
backdrop, University of Chicago professor of Egyptology James Henry
Breasted inserted himself in Washington's world.

# Ancient Nubia in *The Biblical World*

In December 1908, Breasted published an article in a journal called *The
Biblical World*. In the article, he promoted his epigraphic work on "the
monuments of the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia."[^37] Like most scholars
of that time, Breasted used the term Ethiopia to refer to the ancient
culture of Nubia, not the modern country of Ethiopia. He also discussed
various writing systems in ancient and modern Nubia and the recent
acquisition of some ancient Nubian texts. The texts were written using
Greek letters, but the language that lay underneath the letters was
largely unknown to scholars. The content was Biblical in nature, and
Breasted wrote with excitement about the possibility of deciphering the
ancient language.

Breasted believed that the ancient language, once understood, would
reveal connections between the scripts of the Nile River Valley's lower
area, most of modern-day Egypt, and its upper area, the southern part of
modern-day Egypt and northern to central Sudan. He describes the ancient
people of the Upper Nile as "neither pure negroes nor Egyptians," with
no explanation as to what either term means in a scientific sense.[^38]
In the future, when their language would be deciphered, Breasted claimed
that:

> For the first time we shall then possess the history of an African
> negro dialect for some two thousand years; for while the Nubians are
> far from being of exclusively negro blood, yet their language is
> closely allied to that of certain tribes in Kordofan \[Kurdufan in
> central Sudan\] at the present day. In the Nubians, therefore, we have
> the link which connects Egypt with the peoples of inner Africa.[^39]

Breasted's racism tinged with colonialism is on full display in this
section of the article. As he saw it, the ancient culture of the Lower
Nile was "civilized" and the ancient culture of the Upper Nile was only
civilized when it adopted Egyptian culture. Otherwise, the Upper Nile
culture was doomed, in his view, to "barbarism." "The Egyptian veneer
slowly wore off as this kingdom of the upper Nile was more and more
isolated from the civilization of the north, and it was thus thrown back
upon the barbarism of inner Africa."[^40]

Breasted used imperialistic race-based language to describe the cultural
influence that may have flowed from south to north, from "inner Africa,"
as he put it, to the Lower Nile. "When, therefore, we are in a position
to read the early Nubian inscriptions, we shall be able to compare the
ancient Nubian with the Egyptian and thus to determine how far, if at
all, the Egyptian language of the Pharaohs was tinctured by negro
speech."[^41] The word "tinctured" is associated with dyeing or
coloring. Breasted drew a color line that separated the people who spoke
the undeciphered language ("an African negro dialect") and those who
spoke the "language of the Pharaohs" (clearly "non-negro" in his view).
When he wrote of the "coloring" influence of the language of the Upper
Nile on the language of the Lower Nile, he revealed his US-American
race-based perspective, drawn from his contemporary world. Then he
incorrectly projected his contemporary Western worldview on to the world
of the ancient Nile cultures that he studied. An increasing number of
scholars are now devoting their publication efforts to correct
colonialist attitudes of this type.[^42]

# Breasted Writes to Washington

Breasted was offered a career as a faculty member when he was still an
undergraduate. Willian Rainey Harper was a professor at Yale when
Breasted studied there. Harper was planning the new University of
Chicago and learned of Breasted's interest in the ancient Egyptian
language. He encouraged Breasted to study it in Germany with the
assurance that a job would be waiting for him in Chicago when he
finished.[^43] By 1894, Breasted had completed his degree and was
teaching Egyptology at the new university, establishing himself as one
of the founders of the discipline in the US system of higher
education.[^44]

In late 1908, when Breasted's article was published in *The Biblical
World*, Washington had been head of Tuskegee Institute for nearly three
decades. He was a leader in the fight for educational and labor rights
for African Americans, an international figure who regularly interacted
with heads of state and whose professional acquaintance was cultivated
by other educational leaders like the presidents of the University of
Chicago.

In April 1909, Breasted sent a copy of his article to Washington. In an
accompanying letter, he wrote about his work on ancient Nile Valley
cultures, and he described the article as being about "a matter
concerning early history of your race."[^45] Breasted once again
demarcated "Nubian" from "Egyptian" and marked the former as belonging
to African Americans, thus excluding them from the realm of ancient
Egyptians.

In his letter to Washington, Breasted explained the importance of the
decipherment of the ancient Nilotic language in this way:

> The importance of all this is chiefly that from these documents when
> deciphered, we shall be able to put together the only surviving
> information on the early history of the dark race. Nowhere else in all
> the world is the early history of a dark race preserved.[^46]

Again, Breasted expresses a segregationist viewpoint, where he imagines
the inhabitants of the Upper Nile are members of a "dark race" as
distinguished from the people whom he imagined in the Lower Nile. In the
letter's closing, he states that he mailed the article to Washington
because "possibly one who has done so much to shape the modern history
of your race will be interested in the recovery of some account of the
only early negro or negroid kingdom of which we know anything."[^47] The
slipperiness of Breasted's argument is clear. His letter declares the
evidence to be of an "early negro or negroid kingdom," "a dark race,"
one that Washington shares, and in the article, he describes the people
of the Upper Nile as "neither pure negroes nor Egyptians."[^48]
Breasted's argument about race was based on unscientific terminology
that lacked precise definitions and resulted in prejudiced and incorrect
conclusions.[^49] The slipperiness of his arguments applies across his
publications because, as we will see below, he expresses different views
in different publications.

# Washington's Response and the Brownsville Affair

At the time that Breasted sent the article, Washington was preoccupied
with something far removed from the arcane world of ancient Nilotic
cultures. He was grappling with the aftermath of an injustice done to
black soldiers stationed in Brownsville, Texas. At the time, the
soldiers were deemed guilty without the benefit of having had their case
heard through regular legal proceedings. US president Theodore Roosevelt
refused to undo the damage to their reputations, careers, and futures.
The US Army launched subsequent inquiry that concluded in 1972 that all
of the accused people were innocent.[^50]

Roosevelt and Washington were closely connected, as Washington advised
Roosevelt on matters related to issues facing African American
communities. Roosevelt became president following the assassination of
President McKinley, two years after Washington had spoken before
McKinley and the largest audience of his career at the peace jubilee in
Chicago. About a month after taking office in 1901, Roosevelt invited
Washington to dinner at the White House. The event, aimed at securing
the support of African Americans for the new president, was also a
recognition of the acceptability in some White circles of Washington's
philosophy of "self-help and accommodation of segregation."[^51]
Nonetheless, the dinner invitation caused an angry backlash among some
White politicians and members of the press who were enraged by the honor
given to Washington.[^52]

Five years after that dinner, in November 1906, President Roosevelt
publicly announced his decision to declare, without due process, that
the African American soldiers at Brownsville were guilty of murder and
conspiracy to hide murderers. Before the public announcement, Roosevelt
relayed his decision to Washington who tried unsuccessfully to change
the president's mind.[^53] Mary Church Terrell was well placed enough to
intercede with the Secretary of War William Howard Taft to get a brief
stay of the president's order.[^54] She saw a connection between the
injustice to the soldiers and the White House dinner. "He \[Roosevelt\]
might have thought by discharging three companies of colored soldiers
without honor he would prove to the South he was not such a negrophile
as he had appeared to be."[^55] In the midst of this crisis, Washington
received Breasted's letter.

Despite the pressing nature of the aftermath of the injustice done to
the Black soldiers, Washington replied to Breasted the following week,
expressing his polite interest in the matter. He noted that although he
had not had time to acquaint himself with the ancient history of the
Nile Valley, he did mention a particular point of interest. He wrote
that "the traditions of most of the peoples whom I have read, point to a
distant place in the direction of ancient Ethiopia as the source from
which they, at one time, received what civilization they still
possess."[^56] Washington wondered if that "distant place" and the
subject matter of Breasted's article could be one and the same. "Could
it be possible that these civilizing influences had their sources in
this ancient Ethiopian kingdom to which your article refers?"[^57]

# Washington and Egyptology

Washington's correspondence with Breasted is a fascinating chapter in
histories of Egyptology and Nubiology, a chapter that needs to be
included in future histories of these disciplines.[^58] The study of
ancient Nile Valley cultures never factored into Washington's work, as
they did in the intellectual work of many other African Americans,
including Du Bois.[^59] There are obvious reasons why the topic would
not resonate deeply with Washington.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Egyptologists had
largely agreed on a historical narrative that connected the northern
Nile Valley---in what is today the country of Egypt---with the Levant,
Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and parts of the northern Mediterranean, while
simultaneously isolating it from Arabia and parts of Africa to the south
and the west.[^60] More than reflecting any historical reality, this
one-sided isolation reflects the research interests of early
Egyptologists, their sources of funding, which were often people or
organizations interested in exploring sites associated with Biblical
stories, and the predetermined worldview that researchers brought to the
material.

In his letter to Breasted, Washington makes connections across Africa,
between the southern Nile Valley and West Africa.[^61] Research
questions like the one he posed ("Could it be possible that these
civilizing influences had their sources in this ancient Ethiopian
kingdom to which your article refers?") continue to be of interest to
scholars, although more so to scholars in fields adjacent to
Egyptology.[^62] Washington does not challenge the divide that Breasted
imagined between the northern and southern Nile Valley. His reticence to
identify with the northern Nile Valley was rooted in an entirely
different set of motivations.

As mentioned earlier, Washington was born into slavery. Because of his
experience, the Biblical story of the Exodus resonated strongly with
him. In one publication, he wrote, "I learned in slavery to compare the
condition of the Negro with that of the Jews in bondage in Egypt, so I
have frequently, since freedom, been compelled to compare the prejudice,
even persecution, which the Jewish people have to face and overcome in
different parts of the world with the disadvantages of the Negro in the
US and elsewhere."[^63] Where Breasted viewed the ancient Egyptian
culture as a "great civilization," Washington saw it as an unjust power
that enslaved other people. Finally, Washington's pedagogical system
focused on industrial education. Undeciphered ancient texts from the
southern Nile and the enslavers of the Jewish people in the northern
Nile Valley had no place in his educational worldview. But although
Washington never incorporated ancient Nile Valley cultures into his
work, Breasted continued to produce incorrect arguments that attempted
to divide the ancient Nile Valley along so-called racial lines.

# Breasted on Race

Breasted wrote many books on the ancient cultures of Europe, Asia, and
Africa for a general reading audience and for use in schools. His views
on the ancient people of the Nile Valley are made clear in his 1935
school textbook *Ancient Times*, first published in 1916. In *Ancient
Times* and the accompanying atlases, Breasted connects the ancient
cultures of the Near East, as it was called, and Europe to illustrate
the spread of "western civilization."[^64] In *Ancient Times*, a map
labels Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa as "Great White Race," and
the area to the south of that is labeled "Black Race."[^65] Breasted
does not provide a formal definition of race, and he sometimes treats
race as though it is tied to language or culture (both incorrect
ideas).[^66] His muddled discussion sometimes suggests that race is a
well-defined category with strict boundaries, and other times his
discussion blurs those boundaries.

Breasted's ideas about race are incorrect by the scientific standards of
today and even of his own day. Anthropologist Franz Boas (1858--1942)
offered an alternative anthropological view. "Put simply, Boas---albeit
grudgingly---attempted to extricate race relations theory from *most* of
the racist assumptions of late nineteenth-century social science."[^67]
Repeatedly in his work, Boas discussed variation, arguing that "human
beings possessed enormously varied physiques, so diverse that what at
first appeared to be easily bounded racial types turned out to grade
into each other."[^68] A racializing classification system, with its
attempt to set firm boundaries delineating different groups of people,
ignores the reality of variation in human populations.

> The skeletal concept of "race" depended and depends on arbitrarily
> defined, well-marked anatomical complexes or "types" which had by
> definition little or no variation. However, modern population biology
> has demonstrated that *variation* with *geographically* defined
> breeding populations, or those more related by ancestry, is the rule
> for human groups.[^69]

The confusion arises because variation in physical features became the
basis for "race" and was used to classify humans, but humans defy
classification because of variation.

> Here the phrase "concept of race" refers to the biological idea as
> found in science texts in its most idealized form, namely that
> biological human population variation can be, or is to be partitioned
> into units of individuals who are nearly uniform, and that there is
> greater difference between these units than within them. This concept
> implies or suggests/emphasizes between-group discontinuity in origins,
> ancestral and descendant lineages, and molecular and physical traits,
> implying the opposite for within group variation. The human reality is
> different.[^70]

Two people who may appear to be different based on physical features may
not actually be different when examined at a genomic level. Furthermore,
there are more similarities between human population groups than there
are differences.

No such border (or color line), like the one that Breasted drew on the
map, exists in reality. That becomes quite clear when considering where
such a line would run.

> There seems to be a problem in understanding that human genetic
> variation cannot always be easily described. Genetic origins can cut
> across ethnic (sociocultural or national) lines. At what village along
> the Nile valley today would one describe the "racial" transition
> between "Black" and "White"---assuming momentarily that these
> categories are real? It could not be done.[^71]

Not only does such a line on a map not exist in reality, but the very
idea of separating the Nile River Valley in the way that Breasted
imagined is nowhere reflected in the ancient material. The
"racialization of Nubia and Nubians as 'black' in contrast to Egyptians
\[is incorrect\], implying an essentialized racial divide between Egypt
and Nubia that would not have been acknowledged in antiquity."[^72]
Because the material record does not provide the separation that
Breasted's theory requires, he had to resort to an inaccurate
description of the geography. He argues that the culture in the northern
Nile Valley was isolated from the rest of the landmass. Breasted
incorrectly describes the Nile River Valley in this way:

> It \[his area labeled "Black Race"\] was separated from the Great
> White Race by the broad stretch of the Sahara Desert. The valley of
> the Nile was the only road leading across the Sahara from south to
> north. Sometimes the blacks of inner Africa did wander along this road
> into Egypt, but they came only in small groups. Thus cut off by the
> desert barrier and living by themselves, they remained uninfluenced by
> civilization from the north.[^73]

This incorrect characterization ignores the fact that the area now known
as the Sahara was not always a desert and ignores the existence of oases
that continue in the present to facilitate movement across dry
areas.[^74] Breasted himself makes that point in an earlier publication
when he describes the desert around the Nile River Valley. "Plenteous
rains, now no longer known there, rendered it a fertile and productive
region."[^75] In that case, he used the disciplinary boundaries set up
by the university to separate those ancient people from the ones he
studied. For him, humans living in the Nile Valley area in the
Paleolithic "can not be connected in any way with the historic or
prehistoric civilization of the Egyptians, and they fall exclusively
within the province of the geologist and anthropologist."[^76] With that
comment, Breasted dispenses of any evidence that predates the era he
wants to discuss, namely, predynastic and dynastic Egypt. Having
dismissed that evidence, Breasted then incorrectly contrasts a
"civilized" lower Nile Valley and a "barbaric" upper Nile Valley, a
contrast that reflects more about the world of his day than the ancient
world he imagined he was describing. As Stuart Tyson Smith put it:

> The implied contrast between primitive and barbaric Nubians conquering
> their more sophisticated northern neighbor serves to reproduce and
> perpetuate a colonial and ultimately racist perspective that justified
> the authority of modern Western empires, in this case over "black"
> Africa, whose peoples could not create or maintain "civilized" life
> without help from an external power.[^77]

Breasted's segregation of the Nile Valley based on an nonexistent color
line was founded on the mistaken idea that differences in physical
appearance among humans correspond with differences in language or
culture. That simply is not true, nor is it true that differences in the
human genome correspond to linguistic or cultural differences.[^78]

Breasted's conception of races rested on many incorrect ideas, two of
which I will touch on here. Breasted's discussion intimates that there
is such a thing as a "pure" race, meaning, a group of people who are so
isolated from other people that they have bred only with each other
since the beginning of time.[^79] Knowledge of human migrations easily
disproves such an outdated concept.[^80] At a more local level, evidence
to the contrary is easily seen within families, when certain traits are
expressed or not expressed in various family members.

> Defining a population as a narrow "type" logically leads to procedures
> such as picking out individuals with a given external phenotype and
> seeing them as members of a "pure race" whose members all had the same
> characteristics. This would imply that the blond in a family of
> brunettes was somehow more related to other blonds ("Nordics") than to
> immediate family members.[^81]

Breasted himself evidently realized that point. In his 1905 book *A
History of Egypt*, he describes the ancient Egyptians in a way that
belies the strict border delineated on his map. The book would be
republished in a second edition just two years after the passage cited
above and would be unchanged from the original edition, indicating that
Breasted continued to hold to this view in the late 1930s.

> Again the representations of the early Puntites, or Somali people, on
> the Egyptian monuments, show striking resemblances to the Egyptians
> themselves. \[...\] The conclusion once maintained by some historians,
> that the Egyptian was of African negro origin, is now refuted; and
> evidently indicated that at most he may have been slightly tinctured
> with negro blood, in addition to the other ethnic elements already
> mentioned.[^82]

Breasted's dismissal of an "African negro" origin of Egyptians aligns
with his racializing map in *Ancient Times*. But in the description
above, he allows (again using the word "tinctured") for some "negro
blood" in the Egyptian population. By the standards of the US society in
which Breasted lived, such an allowance would discount Egyptians from
being White.

In his map, Breasted mistakenly depicted race as existing according to
strict geographical boundaries, and in the passage above, he blurred
that strict boundary line. The fuzziness of his racialized dividing line
in the Nile Valley brings to mind Bernasconi's interpretation of race as
"a border concept, a dynamic concept whose core lies not at its center
but at its edges and whose logic is constantly being reworked as the
borders shift."[^83] Bernasconi argues that in the United States, race
should be seen as a "fluid system that never succeeded in maintaining
the borders it tried to establish, but whose resilience came from the
capacity of the dominant class within the system to turn a blind eye to
their inability to police those boundaries effectively."[^84] The idea
of race as a fluid system can be seen in these ideas of Breasted's. One
of the discipline's founders literally drew a color line across the Nile
Valley (the map) even when by his own account (the text quoted above)
people's features blurred that line due to what he called "ethnic
elements" among Egyptians. On a macro scale, the discipline of
Egyptology in the US did the same. Despite the fact that one of the
discipline's founders made these statements, the discipline continues to
"turn a blind eye," having distanced itself from the statement without
formally acknowledging its role in promoting such racist ideas.

Breasted's second incorrect idea is his failure to explain how early
humans who settled in Europe became "White." His narrative makes it seem
as though they simply appeared in Europe, already White.[^85] To account
for Egypt's place in a sphere dominated by "Europe" and described by him
as "White," Breasted produces a convoluted argument that ignores the
very evidence that he has laid before the reader. "In North Africa these
people were dark-skinned, but nevertheless physically they belong to the
Great White Race."[^86] With that illogical statement, Breasted opens
the doors of his "Great White Race" to "dark-skinned" people. What then
closes the doors to other dark-skinned people, such as those who
inhabited the space he labeled "Black Race"? The answer is found in
Breasted's view of "civilization," which for him was very much a White,
Western, male-dominated space, something that he incorrectly felt was
off-limits to other parts of Africa.

# Breasted on Civilization and Women

Western imperialism is on clear display in Breasted's 1926 book, *The
Conquest of Civilization*. The title of his book signals his
evolutionary view of human sociocultural development. Reflecting on
history, Breasted sees a "*rising* trail" that "culminated in civilized
man," and he repeatedly contrasts that trajectory with "bestial
savagery," the earlier state of humans.[^87] When Breasted referred in
his book title to civilization as conquering, he was not speaking
metaphorically. His narrative romanticizes "great men" carrying weapons.
In his preface, Breasted gazes over the plain in present-day Israel
where his Rockefeller-funded excavations occurred. He glowingly recalls
the Egyptian king Sheshonq who raided Jerusalem in tenth century BCE and
the 1918 victory of the English Lord Allenby over Ottoman forces.[^88]
The types of actions that constituted civilization and civilized people,
in Breasted's view, included acts of violence, theft, invasion, and
subjugation of others. Breasted does not question who comprises
"mankind" or whether the "progress" that some modern humans had achieved
positively impacted others.[^89]

Breasted's worldview was impacted by colonialism, sexism, and racism. In
the first edition of his textbook *Ancient Times*, Breasted paints a
negative picture of the women of early human history. He blames the loss
of an idyllic male hunting fantasy on a physically overwhelmed
"primitive woman." "Agriculture \[...\] exceeded the strength of the
primitive woman, and the primitive man was obliged to give up more and
more of his hunting freedom and devote himself to the field."[^90]

Breasted reveals a similar lack of regard for contemporary women in a
letter to his patron, John D. Rockefeller. In the letter, Breasted
thanked Rockefeller for his "delightful companionship" during the
Rockefeller family's visit to Egypt. The Egyptologist recounted with
jocularity what must have been a spirited discussion one day.

> On the important question of the relative value of men and women to
> human society, Mrs. Rockefeller and Mary were somewhat out-voted when
> it came to a show of hands; but Mrs. Rockefeller never lost a
> scrimmage; she gave as good as she got in a spirit of unfailing good
> humor and amiability that won all hearts.[^91]

Whether Mrs. Rockefeller and Mary actually felt any type of good humor
at being relegated to a place of less value to human society is not
clear from this passage.

Over the course of his career, the Rockefeller family repeatedly
provided funds to enable Breasted's work along the Nile and in the
Middle East. One such notable case was in an ill-fated museum to be
built in Egypt.[^92] Breasted used an imperialistic appeal to stress the
grand implications of his work. He wrote to Mrs. Rockefeller that the
museum was "not really business, but the fate of a great civilization
mission, sent out by a great American possessing both the power of
wealth and the power of vision that discloses and discerns new and
untried possibilities of good."[^93] He composed the letter to Mrs.
Rockefeller partially as an apology for the public uproar over the
ultimately rejected proposal for the new museum.[^94] His imperialistic
narrative takes a decidedly Christian turn when he refers to the plan to
build the museum in Egypt as a "new Crusade to the Orient."[^95]
According to Breasted, the misunderstanding about Rockefeller's
intentions in building the museum were a result of the Egyptian public's
unawareness that the money was to be without any reciprocal return, but
simply for the general good. In fact, a combination of factors doomed
the plan, including a growing dissatisfaction with such imperialist
actions and the fact that under the plan, the Egyptian Antiquities
Service would cede control of the museum's antiquities and all future
antiquities found in Egypt for thirty-three years.[^96] Had the museum
come to pass, Breasted and those involved in the museum would have
defined, on Egyptian soil, what Egyptology would be in terms of its
artifacts, practitioners, and historical narratives.

# Research for Whose Benefit?

The point was made earlier that despite the fascinating exchange of
letters between Booker T. Washington and James Henry Breasted, ancient
Nile Valley cultures did not factor into Washington's work although
other African American intellectuals did write about them. With
Washington, we see the importance of interrogating benefit. Who
constructs the research questions, and whom does research benefit? The
fact that Breasted did not have to ask such questions is evidence of his
privilege. Breasted did not have to be concerned with who benefitted
from his research and from the research of other Egyptologists. He knew
that it benefitted people like him: educated men in the west who were
considered White. (Egyptian men were not included in that category as
evidenced in the story about the failed museum in Cairo that excluded
them.) Booker T. Washington did need to ask that question. In the case
of Tuskegee Institute, how would Egyptology (Nubiology as such did not
exist then nor were academic silos as limiting--e.g., George Reisner's
move from Semitic languages to archaeology) benefit the African American
students whom Washington was educating? His answer: It would not.

In fact, Tuskegee has unfortunately become a central word in making sure
that harm is not done to people through research. The Tuskegee
Experiment is the informal name of a decades-long deception and health
crisis that the United States government foisted on innocent African
American people.[^97] The research began as a health survey in rural
areas where people lacked access to regular medical care. The survey,
which was organized by federal and local public health professionals
with funding from the Rosenwald Fund, tested people for syphilis.
Rosenwald, it will be remembered, was a longtime benefactor of the
University of Chicago and Tuskegee Institute. In 1932, the survey turned
into a four-decade long program that purported to treat syphilis in
African American men but instead purposefully did not do so because it
instead secretly studied the effects of untreated syphilis.[^98]

One outcome of the disastrous Tuskegee Syphilis Study was the creation
of the Belmont Report. Written by the (US) National Commission for the
Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research and
released in 1979, the Belmont Report lays out ethical guidelines that
continue to govern human subjects research in the US.[^99] It provides
three principles that guide ethical questions that arise during
research: respect for persons (including protecting those who are most
vulnerable), beneficence (the obligation to not harm and to maximize
benefits while minimizing harm), and justice (who benefits from the
research and is burdened by it). The commission's task---to revisit the
exploitation of humans as subjects of research and to redress that
history through policy---is an example of the "healing" that has
recently been discussed as a goal within Nubian archaeology.[^100]

Washington was not involved in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. He died in
1915, about fourteen years before the survey began. But this injustice
was done in the county where Tuskegee Institute is located with the
cooperation of many people in that community, including Tuskegee's
then-president.[^101] Whatever the reasons for those people's
cooperation, whether they even knew about the true nature of the
so-called study, the lasting health and psychological impacts of the
study are a grim reminder of the need to ensure the safety of human
subjects in research. One step in that process is to analyze research
questions to determine who will benefit.

Kim TallBear asks a similar question today. Her work shows the urgency
in continuing to interrogate innovation to determine who systems are set
up to benefit and what ramifications may be lying beneath the surface,
unstated. Breasted's theories about a "Great White Race" are thoroughly
discredited. Also discredited are the racial typologies of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that some Egyptologists, like
Breasted, used in their work. But the kernels of those ideas are
beginning to make a comeback in the guise of DNA studies.

On the surface, DNA studies may seem to be of positive benefit to a
community. As TallBear states, "It has become a standard claim of
human-population genetics that this scientific field can save us from
the evils of racism."[^102] But she cautions that it is not that simple.
"The science does not undermine race and thus racism, but it helps
reconfigure both race and indigeneity as genetic categories."[^103] In
terms of ancient Nile Valley cultures, we have seen vast overstatements,
where, for example, the genetic map of one or two individuals has been
wielded as a marker of an entire population group spanning thousands of
years and hundreds of kilometers with no attention paid to cultural
context, human migrations, or variation among humans.[^104] Such overly
broad claims based on a fraction of evidence completely disregard the
complexities of human culture and seem to suggest that culture is
written in human DNA, which is incorrect.[^105]

The threat to people who participate in such studies involves loss of
sovereignty over one's genetic material, one's personal narrative, and
perhaps material assets as well. The worry is that DNA mapping projects
are not concerned with the research subjects' well-being but are solely
done "to satisfy the curiosity of Western scientists."[^106] The alarms
that TallBear sounds are often muffled beneath rhetoric that sounds
positive and promising, such as the idea that all humans originated in
Africa and so are all "related."

> Privileging the idea that 'we are all related' might be antiracist and
> all-inclusive in one context, although that is also complicated,
> because it relies on portraying Africa and Africans as primordial, as
> the source of all of us. 'We are all related' is also inadequate to
> understanding how indigenous peoples reckon relationships in more
> complicated ways, both biologically and culturally, at *group* levels.
> 'We are all related' can also put at risk assertions of indigenous
> identity and indigenous legal rights.[^107]

The cultural identification, what TallBear describes as being "at
*group* levels," is also missing from studies of ancient human remains
in the Nile Valley. As Keita put it:

> It is important to emphasize that, while the biology changed with
> increasing local social complexity, the ethnicity of
> Niloto-Saharo-Sudanese origins did not change. The cultural morays
> \[*sic*\], ritual formulae, and symbols used in writing, as far as can
> be ascertained, remained true to their southern \[i.e., Egyptian\]
> origins.[^108]

In formal Egyptian artistic contexts, phenotype, along with dress and
hairstyle, was used to represent groups of people according to ethnic
stereotypes and then to characterize those ethnic groups in positive or
negative ways, depending on official state ideology.[^109] The
Egyptians' highly stereotyped artistic representations of ethnic groups
tell us only about the Egyptian ideology of ethnic distinctions, not
about actual differences between ethnic groups. But even in the
fantastical scenario that the ancient Egyptian portrayals were accurate,
it would be impossible to map genotypical distinctions onto those ethnic
groups. "One's *known* ethnically identified ancestors and one's genes
ancestors are conceptually two different things."[^110] Genotype, of
course, had no bearing on a person's "insider" or "outsider" status in
ancient Egypt, regardless of whatever ethnic divisions existed among
ancient peoples.[^111] TallBear has spent much time analyzing the impact
and potential threats to Native American communities from research
projects that want to study their genetic map, that claim to be able to
tell them "who they are," as if they did not know. Her grave concern for
whom those studies benefit are a modern-day mirror to the racial
typologies of the ancient Nile Valley that Booker T. Washington ignored.

TallBear's warning to carefully consider the promises and the purposes
of research is a first step in constructing a critical framework to
examine Egyptological research. It is beyond the scope of this article
to directly address the following issues, but their complexities should
also be kept in mind. As mentioned above, a growing body of work
addresses legacies of colonialism in the discipline of Egyptology.[^112]
Alongside those works should be considered issues such as color
prejudice in modern Egypt, the rights of indigenous people to a land's
history, and the particular challenges faced by African descended people
in the US versus in Africa.[^113]

# Conclusion

Mary Church Terrell recalled with pride the day that Booker T.
Washington met Prince Henry of Prussia in the morning and Mrs.
Vanderbilt in the afternoon. Although some African descended scholars,
such as W. E. B. Du Bois, are much feted in academic circles these days,
Booker T. Washington is too frequently overlooked not only as a pioneer
in education but in teaching students how to recognize what benefits
them. Put in the language of the Harper and Breasted's University of
Chicago, he taught the students of Tuskegee how to think.

Washington felt his method of education could teach "self-help, and
self-reliance," as well as "valuable lessons for the future."[^114] In
the Institute's early days, he had students constructing buildings and
clearing land for agricultural purposes.

> My plan was to have them, while performing this service, taught the
> latest and best methods of labour, so that the school would not only
> get the benefit of their efforts, but the students themselves would be
> taught to see not only utility in labour, but beauty and dignity;
> would be taught, in fact, how to lift labour up from mere drudgery and
> toil, and would learn to love work for its own sake.[^115]

Despite the fact that the Institute and its community were the direct
and visible beneficiaries of this labor, many students were nonetheless
reluctant to do the work. Washington convinced the students at Tuskegee
Institute of the benefit of his style of education by participating in
the educational experiment with them.

> When I explained my plan to the young men, I noticed that they did not
> seem to take to it very kindly. It was hard for them to see the
> connection between clearing land and an education. Besides, many of
> them had been school-teachers, and they questioned whether or not
> clearing land would be in keeping with their dignity. In order to
> relieve them from any embarrassment, each afternoon after school I
> took my axe and led the way to the woods. When they saw that I was not
> afraid or ashamed to work, they began to assist with more enthusiasm.
> We kept at the work each afternoon, until we had cleared about twenty
> acres and had planted a crop.[^116]

Their labor on the grounds of the new Institute benefitted them as an
educational community. As quoted early in this article, Washington also
published an article in *The Atlantic* that framed such work as a
benefit to White society. Why? Because Washington knew how to think from
a position of precarity. He knew that the economic and social success of
African Americans would begin to make White people feel that same
precarity, a precarity usually only felt by people of color and the most
economically disadvantaged White people. His piece in *The Atlantic*
forestalled any such alarm in wealthier White circles by assuring them
that the labor of African Americans benefitted White people too.

Washington found no benefit in Egyptology. Personally, he did not
connect with the ancient culture. As a formerly enslaved person, he saw
the ancient Egyptians through the lens of the Biblical Exodus, as those
who enslaved other people. Systemically, there was nothing in Egyptology
to benefit his educational system. Breasted's "Great White Race" clearly
excluded Tuskegee Institute. But Washington deftly shows us a way to
move past the roadblock of Breasted's Egyptology.

As seen in Washington's interactions with world leaders and other
university leaders, he handled difficult situations with ease. The same
is true in his correspondence with Breasted. In his reply, Washington
showed himself to be an astute reader, able to discern where in
Breasted's narrative he felt the benefit lay for African American
communities. He sidestepped the contradictory narrative of the Nile
Valley based on skin color and instead wrote an empowering narrative. He
turned to the kingdom of the Upper Nile as an ancient source for the
cultures of West Africa, where many African Americans traced their
heritage.

As one of the founders of Egyptology in the US, Breasted's viewpoints
formed the basis of the discipline. His core values, with their
attendant racist, sexist, and colonialist overtones, are clearly spelled
out in public and in private, in the school textbooks and in the
personal correspondence that he authored. To move away from those
viewpoints and the unwelcome baggage they bring with them, Egyptologists
must find alternative directions to the ones set out by early scholars
like Breasted. One alternative path was offered by Booker T. Washington
who considered cultural connections across Africa. Other scholars, in
Africa and elsewhere in the world, have thought similarly. Increasingly,
we see efforts to bring new perspectives to research questions in the
Nile Valley and to make connections between the ancient Nile Valley and
elsewhere in Africa. Washington modeled for his students a connection
between physical labor and school education. In his brief encounter with
Egyptology, he models for us a way to move forward from the discipline's
colonial outlooks.

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[^1]: [Terrell]{.smallcaps}, *A Colored Woman*, p. 191. The author would
    like to thank the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Oriental Institute
    Museum Archives, and the University of Chicago Special Collections
    for permission to publish their materials in this article.

[^2]: [Scott]{.smallcaps} and [Stowe]{.smallcaps}, *Booker T.
    Washington*, p. 153.

[^3]: [Terrell]{.smallcaps}, *A Colored Woman*, pp. 190--191.

[^4]: [Washington]{.smallcaps}, *Up From Slavery*, pp. 1--2.

[^5]: [Washington]{.smallcaps}, *Up From Slavery*, pp. 8--9.

[^6]: [Washington]{.smallcaps}, "The Fruits of Industrial Training."

[^7]: [Du Bois]{.smallcaps}, *The Souls of Black Folk*, p. 67.

[^8]: [Washington]{.smallcaps}, *Character Building*, pp. 97--98.

[^9]: [Du Bois]{.smallcaps}, "Lecture in Baltimore," pp. 76--77.

[^10]: "Seeks No Social Equality" *The Daily Maroon*, December 11, 1906,
    p. 3, available online:
    campub.lib.uchicago.edu/search/?f1-title=Daily%20Maroon. Note that
    the issue is mistakenly catalogued under the date November 12, 1906.

[^11]: On Washington's motives behind his rhetoric, see, for example,
    [Hall]{.smallcaps}, *Black Separatism and Social Reality*, and more
    recently [Bieze]{.smallcaps} and [Gasman]{.smallcaps}, *Booker T.
    Washington Rediscovered*.

[^12]: For more on Terrell's impact in that sphere, see
    [Haley]{.smallcaps}, "Black Feminist Thought and Classics."

[^13]: [Terrell]{.smallcaps}, *A Colored Woman*, pp. 191--193.

[^14]: [Williams]{.smallcaps}, *Rethinking Race*, p. 62.

[^15]: [Washington]{.smallcaps}, *Up From Slavery*, pp. 8--11.

[^16]: [Washington]{.smallcaps}, *Up From Slavery*, pp. 15--19.

[^17]: [Du Bois]{.smallcaps}, *The Autobiography of W. E. B. DuBois*,
    pp. 126--28; [Lewis]{.smallcaps}, *W. E. B. Du Bois*, pp. 45, 69.

[^18]: [Du Bois]{.smallcaps}, *Darkwater*, p. 15.

[^19]: [Davies]{.smallcaps}, "W. E. B. Du Bois."

[^20]: [Washington]{.smallcaps}, *Up From Slavery*, p. 126.

[^21]: For those figures, see Concerning circulation of the Crisis,
    1918. Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868--1963 (MS
    312), Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives
    Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries.

[^22]: [Goodspeed]{.smallcaps}, *William Rainey Harper*, p. 47.

[^23]: [Harper]{.smallcaps}, *The Trend in Higher Education*, pp.
    378--382. Harper was one of the founders of Joliet Junior College,
    the first public community college in the United States.

[^24]: *The Industrial Art League*, \[p. 4\]. See also
    [Triggs]{.smallcaps}, *Chapters in the History*.

[^25]: [Harlan]{.smallcaps}, *The Booker T. Washington Papers, Volume
    1*, p. 84.

[^26]: [Harlan]{.smallcaps}, *The Booker T. Washington Papers, Volume
    4*, pp. 472--473.

[^27]: [Washington]{.smallcaps}, *Up from Slavery*, pp. 253--54.

[^28]: *Official Program of the National Peace Jubilee*.

[^29]: [Bieze]{.smallcaps}, *Booker T. Washington*, pp. 97--98.

[^30]: University of Chicago. Office of the President. Harper, Judson
    and Burton Administrations. Records, 85, 14, Hanna Holborn Gray
    Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

[^31]: Rosenwald's philanthropic fund was dedicated to promoting
    technical education, supporting African American artists and
    intellectuals, and piloting a program for treating syphilis that
    when taken over by the federal government deceitfully harmed the
    African Americans research participants; [Feiler]{.smallcaps}, *A
    Better Life for Their Children*.

[^32]: "The University Record," *University of Chicago Magazine* 5,5
    (March 1913), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, p. 159. Hanna
    Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of
    Chicago Library.

[^33]: "Events and Discussion," *University of Chicago Magazine* 4,8
    (July 1912), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 293--96. Hanna
    Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of
    Chicago Library.

[^34]: "Events and Discussion," *University of Chicago Magazine* 4,8
    (July 1912), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 297. Hanna
    Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of
    Chicago Library.

[^35]: Note that the description in the University's online photographic
    archive ("procession \[...\] to the dedication of the William Rainey
    Harper Memorial Library") is incorrect. Given the fact that
    Washington is wearing a mortarboard and robe, this must have been
    the afternoon procession to the Convocation. See
    photoarchive.lib.uchicago.edu/db.xqy?show=browse1.xml\|3147.

[^36]: [Witynski]{.smallcaps}, "100 years ago, Georgiana Simpson made
    history."

[^37]: [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, "Recovery and Decipherment," p. 385.

[^38]: [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, "Recovery and Decipherment," p. 376.

[^39]: [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, "Recovery and Decipherment," p. 384.

[^40]: [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, "Recovery and Decipherment," pp. 378--80.

[^41]: [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, "Recovery and Decipherment," pp.
    384--385.

[^42]: Much on this topic has been written by [Reid]{.smallcaps} (e.g.,
    "Indigenous Egyptology") and [Quirke]{.smallcaps} (e.g., "Exclusion
    of Egyptians"), as well as many others, for example,
    [Riggs]{.smallcaps}, "Colonial Visions"; [Doyon]{.smallcaps}, "On
    Archaeological Labor"; [Langer]{.smallcaps}, "Informal Colonialism";
    [Minor]{.smallcaps}, "Decolonizing Reisner"; [Lemos]{.smallcaps},
    "Can We Decolonize." Note too the statement by [Tuck]{.smallcaps}
    and [Yang]{.smallcaps} ("Decolonization," pp. 1): "Decolonization
    brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not
    a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies
    and schools."

[^43]: [Goodspeed]{.smallcaps}, *William Rainey Harper*, pp. 116--17.

[^44]: The other is George Reisner, professor at Harvard. See
    [Davies]{.smallcaps}, "Egypt and Egyptology."

[^45]: Letter from James Henry [Breasted]{.smallcaps} to Booker T.
    Washington, April 29, 1909. Breasted, James Henry. Directors
    Correspondence. Records. Box 013, Folder 033, OI Museum Archives of
    the University of Chicago.

[^46]: Letter from James Henry [Breasted]{.smallcaps} to Booker T.
    Washington, April 29, 1909.

[^47]: Letter from James Henry [Breasted]{.smallcaps} to Booker T.
    Washington, April 29, 1909. For Williams's perspective on Breasted
    and Washington, see [Williams]{.smallcaps}, *Rethinking Race*, pp.
    54, 72.

[^48]: [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, "Recovery and Decipherment," p. 376.

[^49]: Ambridge described his conclusions as "deeply ethnocentric at
    best"; [Ambridge]{.smallcaps}, "Imperialism and Racial Geography,"
    p. 13.

[^50]: The story of the original series of events and the inquiry is
    recounted by the person whose research resulted in a presidential
    pardon: [Baker]{.smallcaps}, *The Brownsville Texas Incident*.

[^51]: [Baker]{.smallcaps}, *The Brownsville Texas Incident*, p. 13.

[^52]: [Baker]{.smallcaps}, *The Brownsville Texas Incident*, p. 219;
    [Lusane]{.smallcaps}, *The Black History of the White House*.

[^53]: [Baker]{.smallcaps}, *The Brownsville Texas Incident*, p. 240.

[^54]: [Terrell]{.smallcaps}, "Secretary Taft and the Negro Soldiers."

[^55]: [Terrell]{.smallcaps}, *A Colored Woman*, p. 278.

[^56]: Letter from Booker T. [Washington]{.smallcaps} to James Henry
    Breasted, May 6, 1909. Directors Correspondence. Records. Box 013,
    Folder 033, OI Museum Archives of the University of Chicago.

[^57]: Letter from Booker T. [Washington]{.smallcaps} to James Henry
    Breasted, May 6, 1909.

[^58]: Histories of Egyptology consistently avoid engaging with the
    scholarship of African descended scholars both in the US and in
    Africa outside of Egypt, for example, [Thomas]{.smallcaps},
    *American Discovery*; [Thompson]{.smallcaps}, *Wonderful Things*;
    [Bednarski, Dodson,]{.smallcaps} and [Ikram]{.smallcaps}, *History
    of World Egyptology*.

[^59]: [Beatty]{.smallcaps} and [Davies]{.smallcaps}, "African
    Americans"; [Davies]{.smallcaps}, "Egypt and Egyptology";
    [Davies]{.smallcaps}, "Pauline Hopkins' Literary Egyptology";
    [Davies]{.smallcaps}, "W. E. B. Du Bois."

[^60]: On the formation of the question of the racial identity of
    ancient Egyptians, which arose among White researchers as "Europeans
    were becoming increasingly invested in the idea of their own
    preeminence," and Morton, Nott, and Gliddon, who popularized the
    idea that the ancient Egyptians were White, see
    [Bernasconi]{.smallcaps}, "Black Skin, White Skulls." Also
    [Smith]{.smallcaps}, "Stranger in a Strange Land." On the work of
    Galton and Pearson, who worked with Egyptologist Flinders Petrie,
    see [Challis]{.smallcaps}, *The Archaeology of Race*. One of
    Breasted's sources for his *Ancient Times* book who aligned with
    these perspectives is [Parsons]{.smallcaps}, cited below.

[^61]: [Mudimbe]{.smallcaps}, *The Invention of Africa*, lays out the
    colonialist view of "Africa." I learned about this work from the
    discussion in [TallBear]{.smallcaps}, *Native American DNA*, p. 147.
    See also [Wengrow]{.smallcaps}, "Landscapes of Knowledge, Idioms of
    Power," p. 134, who notes "The claim that Ancient Egypt arose upon
    'African foundations' constitutes a powerful but vague rhetorical
    statement, which implies a historical relationship between what are,
    in reality, two relatively modern categories ('Africa' and 'Ancient
    Egypt'), both subject to a variety of possible understandings."

[^62]: See n. 112.

[^63]: [Washington]{.smallcaps}, *The Man Farthest Down*, p. 241.

[^64]: The set included an abridged student atlas, an unabridged atlas
    "especially suitable for teachers," and an accompanying teacher's
    manual. See [Breasted]{.smallcaps} and [Huth]{.smallcaps}, *A
    Teacher's Manual*; also *European History Atlas*.

[^65]: [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, *Ancient Times*, 2nd ed, p. 13.

[^66]: See his discussion of now-discredited theories about the
    differing head shapes among so-called races and his discussion of
    the "Semitic race," as if race were linked to language family;
    [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, *Ancient Times*, 2nd ed, pp. 131 note, 160.
    For more on this issue, see [Ambridge]{.smallcaps}, "Imperialism and
    Racial Geography"; [Ambridge]{.smallcaps}, *History and Narrative*.

[^67]: [Williams]{.smallcaps}, *Rethinking Race*, pp. 7--8.

[^68]: [Teslow]{.smallcaps}, *Constructing Race*, p. 68. Note that Boas
    was not without prejudice to Africans, as Teslow outlines.

[^69]: [Keita]{.smallcaps}, "Studies and Comments," p. 130.

[^70]: [Keita]{.smallcaps}, "Ancient Egyptian 'Origins' and 'Identity.'"
    See also [Templeton]{.smallcaps}, "Human Races," p. 646: "Humans
    show only modest levels of differentiation among populations when
    compared to other large-bodied mammals, and this level of
    differentia- tion is well below the usual threshold used to identify
    sub- species (races) in nonhuman species. Hence, human races do not
    exist under the traditional concept of a subspecies as being a
    geographically circumscribed population showing sharp genetic
    differentiation."

[^71]: [Keita]{.smallcaps}, "Studies and Comments," p. 129. For more on
    the mistaken idea of "purity" in this context, see
    [TallBear]{.smallcaps}, "The Emergence, Politics, and Marketplace."

[^72]: [Smith]{.smallcaps}, 'Backwater Puritans'?, p. 4.

[^73]: [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, *Ancient Times*, 2nd ed, p. 133.

[^74]: [Williams]{.smallcaps}, *When the Sahara Was Green*.

[^75]: [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, *A History of Egypt*, p. 25;
    [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, "Recovery and Decipherment," pp. 378--80.

[^76]: [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, *A History of Egypt*, p. 25;
    [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, "Recovery and Decipherment," pp. 378--80.

[^77]: [Smith]{.smallcaps}, 'Backwater Puritans'?, p. 4.

[^78]: "What the archaeological work is bringing to light, though, is
    the irrelevance of the race-based theory, as cultural identities do
    not necessarily match or relate to race"; [Gatto]{.smallcaps}, "The
    Nubian Pastoral Culture," p. 21.

[^79]: See, for example, [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, *Ancient Times*, 2nd
    ed, pp. 767, 770. His division of the continent of Africa repeated
    claims made by earlier writers. Parsons, a source cited in his
    second edition of *Ancient Times*, both mischaracterized Egypt as
    cut off from other population groups ("the most isolated nation of
    the Western world in early times") and mistakenly entertained the
    idea that the culture to because of biological circumstances ("Or
    was there a touch of genius in the ancient Egyptian blood \[the
    result of a fortunate crossing of races or perhaps simply of slow
    evolution within a pure breed\] that lifted the Egyptian mind above
    the other peoples of Africa?") before launching into a rambling
    explanation of how "scientists have scarcely begun to understand the
    conditions which are favorable to greatness," which then leads him
    to essentially give the reader permission to be racist: "The truth
    is that anthropology can help very little as yet in solving the
    great racial problems. Man will have to rely upon his old racial
    instincts." See [Parsons]{.smallcaps}, *The Stream of History*, pp.
    200, 143, 145--46.

[^80]: For example, a recent study dispenses with the rather simplistic
    idea that the predynastic population of the northern Nile Valley was
    essentially replaced by a largescale migration of people from the
    south (Naqada). Instead, the study shows that migration occurred in
    northern and southern directions. See [Keita]{.smallcaps}, "Mass
    Population Migration."

[^81]: [Keita]{.smallcaps}, "Studies and Comments," p. 130.

[^82]: [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, *A History of Egypt*, p. 26.

[^83]: [Bernasconi]{.smallcaps}, "Crossed Lines," p. 227.

[^84]: [Bernasconi]{.smallcaps}, "Crossed Lines," p. 226.

[^85]: "After the Glacial Age, when the ice, which had pushed far south
    across large portions of Europe and Asia, had retreated for the last
    time, it was the men of the Great White Race who moved in and
    occupied these formerly ice-bound regions"; [Breasted]{.smallcaps},
    *Ancient Times*, 2nd ed, p. 12 note.

[^86]: [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, *Ancient Times*, 2nd ed, p. 12 note.

[^87]: [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, *The Conquest of Civilization*, p. 704.

[^88]: [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, *The Conquest of Civilization*, pp.
    xii--xiii.

[^89]: In a biography of Breasted written for the National Academy of
    Sciences, John Wilson of the Oriental Institute falteringly tries to
    defend Breasted's characterization of "an upward line" of "man's
    course" through history, but the effort falls terribly flat.
    [Wilson]{.smallcaps}, "James Henry Breasted," p. 111.

[^90]: [Breasted]{.smallcaps}, *Ancient Times*, p. 25. By the book's
    second edition, his narrative had softened: "After men began
    cultivating food in the field and raising it on the hoof, they
    became for the first time food-producers. Being therefore able to
    produce food at home, they found it less necessary to go out as
    hunters and kill wild animals for food. The wandering life of
    hunting, therefore, gradually changed"; [Breasted]{.smallcaps},
    *Ancient Times*, 2nd ed, p. 29.

[^91]: Letter from James Henry [Breasted]{.smallcaps} to Mr.
    Rockefeller. Office of the Messrs. Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller,
    Jr., Series 2 (FA335), Box 41, Folder 368, Rockefeller Archive
    Center.

[^92]: [Dawood]{.smallcaps}, "Failure to Engage"; [Dawood]{.smallcaps},
    "Building Protestant Modernism."

[^93]: Letter from James Henry [Breasted]{.smallcaps} to Mrs.
    Rockefeller. Office of the Messrs. Rockefeller, Abby Aldrich
    Rockefeller, AA (FA336), Box 2, Folder 23, Rockefeller Archive
    Center.

[^94]: On the issue of the museum as it pertained to contemporary
    Egyptian politics, see [Abt]{.smallcaps}, "Toward a Historian's
    Laboratory"; [Abt]{.smallcaps}, *American Egyptologist*.

[^95]: Letter from James Henry [Breasted]{.smallcaps} to Mrs.
    Rockefeller. Office of the Messrs. Rockefeller, Abby Aldrich
    Rockefeller, AA (FA336), Box 2, Folder 23, Rockefeller Archive
    Center.

[^96]: [Abt]{.smallcaps}, "Toward a Historian's Laboratory," p. 177.

[^97]: [Baker]{.smallcaps}, [Brawley]{.smallcaps}, and
    [Marks]{.smallcaps}, "Effects of Untreated Syphilis."

[^98]: Much has been written about these injustices from the perspective
    of public health and medicine, as well as the social sciences. I
    choose to focus on Mr. Gray's narrative because of his involvement
    with the legal case that resulted in some compensation for the
    victims and the Belmont Report and subsequent laws protecting humans
    as subjects of research; [Gray]{.smallcaps}, *The Tuskegee Syphilis
    Study*, pp. 39--42.

[^99]: Available at
    https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-report/index.html.

[^100]: [Lemos]{.smallcaps}, "Can We Decolonize," p. 13.

[^101]: [Gray]{.smallcaps}, *The Tuskegee Syphilis Study*, pp. 45--46.

[^102]: [TallBear]{.smallcaps}, *Native American DNA*, p. 146.

[^103]: [TallBear]{.smallcaps}, *Native American DNA*, pp. 146--47. In
    assessing the data that DNA testing companies provide to consumers
    about their own genetic material, she writes, "Thus we must ask for
    whom are particular forms of genetic knowledge power (or profit),
    and at whose expense?" [TallBear]{.smallcaps}, "The Emergence,
    Politics, and Marketplace," p. 22.

[^104]: [Schuenemann]{.smallcaps}, "Ancient Egyptian mummy genomes."

[^105]: [Gourdine]{.smallcaps}, [Keita]{.smallcaps},
    [Gourdine]{.smallcaps}, and [Anselin]{.smallcaps}, "Ancient Egyptian
    Genomes."

[^106]: [Asociación ANDES]{.smallcaps}, "ANDES Communiqué." I found this
    source via [TallBear]{.smallcaps}, *Native American DNA*, p. 194.

[^107]: [TallBear]{.smallcaps}, *Native American DNA*, p. 153.

[^108]: [Keita]{.smallcaps}, "Studies and Comments," p. 149.

[^109]: On ethnic stereotypes, see [Smith]{.smallcaps}, *Wretched Kush*,
    pp. 6--7. But note that "there are no texts from the Egyptians or
    Kushites that present an identification scheme of peoples
    *designated by their color*" (emphasis in the original);
    [Keita]{.smallcaps}, "Ideas about 'Race,'" p. 100. On the formal art
    of temple and elite tomb contexts as a vehicle for the expression of
    state ideology, see [Smith]{.smallcaps}, *Wretched Kush*, esp. chap.
    7; [Davies]{.smallcaps}, *Peace in Ancient Egypt*, esp. pp. 12--13.

[^110]: [Keita]{.smallcaps}, "Ideas about 'Race,'" p. 110.

[^111]: [Keita]{.smallcaps}, "Ancient Egyptian 'Origins' and
    'Identity;'" [Keita]{.smallcaps}, "Ideas about 'Race,'" p. 112, 116.

[^112]: See n. 59 for some articles that give examples of scholars doing
    this work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
    Another famous example is the work of the Senegalese scholar Cheikh
    Anta Diop. More recent examples include [Ashby]{.smallcaps} and
    [Adodo]{.smallcaps}, "Nubia as a Place of Refuge";
    [Buzon]{.smallcaps}, [Smith]{.smallcaps}, and
    [Simonetti]{.smallcaps}, "Entanglement"; [Capo Chichi]{.smallcaps},
    "On the Relationship"; [Faraji]{.smallcaps}, *The Roots of Nubian
    Christianity*; [Gatto]{.smallcaps}, "The Nubian Pastoral Culture";
    [Hansberry]{.smallcaps}, *Pillars in Ethiopian History*;
    [Hassan]{.smallcaps}, "Memorabilia"; [Heard]{.smallcaps},
    "Barbarians at the Gate"; [Jaggs]{.smallcaps}, "Maat - Iwa";
    [Keita]{.smallcaps}, "Ancient Egyptian 'Origins' and 'Identity'";
    [Lemos]{.smallcaps}, "Beyond Cultural Entanglements";
    [Malvoisin]{.smallcaps}, "Geometry and Giraffes";
    [Monroe]{.smallcaps}, "Animals in the Kerma Afterlife";
    [Smith]{.smallcaps}, "'Backwater Puritans'?"; [Somet]{.smallcaps},
    *L'Égypte ancienne*; [Wengrow]{.smallcaps}, "Landscapes of
    Knowledge."

[^113]: On these issues, see [Sabry]{.smallcaps}, "Anti-blackness in
    Egypt"; [Abd el-Gawad and Stevenson]{.smallcaps}, "Egypt's Dispersed
    Heritage"; [Hassan]{.smallcaps}, "African Dimension."

[^114]: [Washington]{.smallcaps}, *Up From Slavery*, p. 149.

[^115]: [Washington]{.smallcaps}, *Up From Slavery*, p. 148.

[^116]: [Washington]{.smallcaps}, *Up From Slavery*, pp. 130--31.