A Chief Lieutenant Of The Tuskegee Machine
David H. Jackson Jr. A Chief Lieutenant of the Tuskegee Machine: Charles Banks of Mississippi. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xv + 282 pp. Tables, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8130-2544-5.
Reviewed by: Robert S. Wolff, Department of History, Central Connecticut State University.
Published by: H-Education (November, 2004)
Charles Banks, Mound Bayou, and the Wider Sphere of Tuskegee
David Jackson has written a fascinating account of the African American struggle to prosper in Jim Crow Mississippi. A Chief Lieutenant is three interwoven stories, each extraordinarily important for delineating the limits to African American agency in an era characterized by white supremacists's "rage for order."[1] The biography of Charles Banks (1873-1923)--businessman, banker, and advocate for African American Opportunity--is the first thread. The struggles of African Americans in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, to maintain their autonomy despite monocultural dependence upon cotton and the predatorial behavior of white businessmen and speculators, forms the second. The final tale is the effort of Booker T. Washington's "Tuskegee machine" to support Banks and Mound Bayou despite many setbacks. Together, these stories offer a compelling, lucid picture of black civic leaders eking resources out of the Mound Bayou community, state and federal government, and white philanthropists, all in an effort to define freedom upon their own terms.
It should be noted at the outset that Jackson's stated goals are as follows: first, to offer a "fresh interpretation and the Tuskegee Machine that mitigates the image of the machine as being conniving, heavy-handed, intolerable, and ruthless;" "an insider's perspective on the workings of the machine;" a discussion of "the benefits received by members of the machine, such as capital, expertise, national exposure, and political power;" and, finally, to...
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